A new Bible that conforms with modern beliefs!

Clark Coleman writes:

I was reading about an abominable translation of the Bible, complete with dropping half a dozen canonical New Testament books, adding in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, and altering all condemnations of homosexual sex, when I noticed that the foreward to the translation was written by Archbishop Rowan Williams, who expressed the hope that it would be widely read. What can be said about such a man as leader of a church?

LA replies:

I started reading the article you sent about Good As New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures. I wonder if it’s even worth criticizing something like this or getting upset about it. This is not a translation of the Bible; it is a re-writing of the Bible to fit it with current liberal orthodoxy. Thus the condemnation of homosexual acts in Romans 1 (“men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error”) becomes a condemnation of “exploitation” (“Men, instead of being friends, ruthlessly exploit one another”), i.e., it becomes a condemnation of inequality!

Which of course is the essence of modern liberalism: to eliminate (God-given) morality as man’s guide and replace it with (man-ordained) equality.

When things get this far out, when people start actually re-writing the Bible to make it a liberal/leftist book, they’re not worth arguing against in my opinion. Way-out liberals will like this book, others will ignore it.

It’s like what I realized about right-wing anti-Semitism in 2010: the anti-Semites are so self-discrediting and self-marginalizing that only people who share their mania and sickness will agree with them and in the process marginalize themselves. Which means that one doesn’t need to argue against them. One can happily ignore them and let them continue in their little world.

As I’ve often said, it’s not the most extreme aspects of liberalism that threaten us the most, but mainstream liberalism, which in reality is very, very extreme. By itself, mainstream liberalism, which people don’t think is extreme but regard as moderate, is enough to destroy our civilization and is destroying it (see this and this). Therefore we should focus our efforts on opposing mainstream liberalism, rather than the conspicuous liberal extremes, such as this risible “Bible.”

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November 15

Timothy A. writes:

The temptation to rewrite the Bible to conform to one’s prejudices is not, of course, a new one. Thomas Jefferson famously excised all miracles from the Gospels in order to portray Jesus as merely a moral philosopher. Martin Luther wanted to remove James (as well as Jude, Hebrews and Revelations) from the New Testament since he thought it contradicted the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but was talked out of it. As a Catholic, I might mention the absence of the deuterocanonicals (the so-called apocrypha) from the Bible versions of our separated Protestant brethren, but perhaps, in the spirit of ecumenicism, it is best to pass over that example!

LA replies:

Yes, and how much authority does Jefferson’s “Bible” have in the world?

The other two examples aren’t quite apropos. Luther didn’t change the Bible, and the Apocrypha are, well, the Apocrypha.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 14, 2011 08:42 PM | Send