The Queen James Version - Deliberate Mistranslation and a Big, Fabulous Bible

So big. So fabulous. Source

A few days ago, a Facebook friend tagged me in a link he'd posted about the Queen James Bible (hereafter, "the QJV," for Queen James Version), which, in the words of its editors, "seeks to resolve interpretive ambiguity in the Bible as it pertains to homosexuality." I'd never heard of it, so I clicked on the link and read about it. I ended up having more to say than would fit easily into a Facebook comment, so I decided to talk about the QJV in depth here instead.

Before I say anything else, let me state up front that I am an LGBTQ-affirming Christian. I believe that minority sexualities and gender identities are a blessed part of God's good and ordered creation, and they should be affirmed and celebrated in God's church. (I've talked about some of the reasons for this here.) At the same time, I am a thoroughly orthodox Christian: I profess the universal creeds of the church on a weekly basis with profound faith in the truth of what I am saying.* I believe that church teaching should be grounded in a faithful reading of scripture, guided also by reason, tradition, and experience.

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Now that you know my biases, dear reader, let's dig into the QJV.

The QJV is actually just a King James Bible with alterations made to the eight Bible verses that are most commonly used to condemn homosexuals. (The name "Queen James" is an allusion to the fact that King James, the person who commissioned the King James Bible, is thought by some historians to have been gay or bisexual.) It's not a new Bible translation, but an old one that's been altered to serve a particular purpose. In this, it's unlike just about any Bible I'm familiar with, although Bibliotheca, which takes the American Standard Version and updates some of the language for easier comprehension, seems like a distant cousin.

So the QJV is a weird Bible, more like a publicity stunt or a piece of post-modern art than a traditional Bible edition. It's not clear to me that there's much demand for a "big, fabulous," but very slightly modified KJV with a big rainbow cross on the cover. While the KJV is probably the most beautiful, and certainly most influential, English Bible translation, it's also among the least accurate in its renderings of the original texts.** This makes it an odd choice for making the point that an accurate understanding of the original texts shows that they make no direct reference to homosexuality as we think of it today.

As at least one reviewer has pointed out, if you really want a QJV, you can save money by modifying your own KJV: just scratch out the relevant verses and insert the edits proposed on the QJV website.

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What are the merits of the edits themselves? Some are simply rendering individual words differently than the KJV does, for what I see as legitimate reasons, but several of them are what I would call deliberate mistranslations. This is worth discussing in some depth.

When I say "deliberate mistranslation," what I mean is that the translators have intentionally rendered the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek original in English with words that do not accurately convey the strict sense of the original.† So this category includes, for example, the rendering of the Greek splagchnon as "heart" rather than "bowels" or "intestines," because the heart is the metaphorical seat of the emotions in English and the bowels are not; it includes the rendering of Hebrew zera' as "offspring" instead of "seed," because English speakers rarely refer to their children as their seed. It also includes instances where translators add words that are not in the text in order to clarify what they think the text is saying; for example, the NIV adds "the help of" to clarify that Eve is not claiming to have gotten pregnant by the Lord in Genesis 4:1.‡

Pictured: Eve and her kids.
Not pictured: Eve getting jiggy with the Lord.

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In this sense, nearly every English translation of the Bible is going to include some deliberate mistranslations. Looser translations that strive to achieve easy readability in English (the New Living Translation and especially The Message come to mind) are going to do this more than translations that strive to render the exact sense of the original language as strictly as possible (Young's Literal Translation or the New American Standard Bible, for example). The KJV is somewhere between; it tends to render individual words fairly literally, but often adds words for clarity. (It's worth mentioning that most printings of the KJV render added words in italics, which is a cool feature if you're trying to suss out what precisely the underlying text says, and annoying feature if you're trying to read the book out loud without sounding crazy).

Deliberate mistranslation is fine; what's important is that translators acknowledge that they are doing it and point it out when possible, so that readers can see it and investigate for themselves whether the text actually means something different. (An example of extreme deliberate mistranslation done well: The Inclusive Bible, which goes out of its way to interpret the Bible in non-sexist terms, including a refusal to use male pronouns for God. The translators lay out in detail what they're doing and make a good case for why it's worthwhile.) As far as I'm concerned, the QJV's editors are in the clear, since they're completely up front about what they're doing and include detailed explanations of each of their edits on the website. What I actually find more problematic is when translators make claims of high accuracy and then obscure their deliberate mistranslations and the ideology behind them. This is a particular problem with the NIV, for example; I've also discussed it with regard to the ESV. 

The deliberate mistranslations in the QJV are mostly added words; for example, the editors render Leviticus 20:13 with the addition "in the house of Molech" to indicate that they think the verse is about temple prostitution rather than consensual relationships. Romans 1:26-27 gets some more extensive additions and changes, but for essentially the same reason: this text is about paganism rather than homosexuality, the editors believe. The editors change "know" (in the sexual sense) in Genesis 19:5 to "rape and humiliate" to clarify that Sodom is condemned for the sin of not being hospitable to strangers, rather than for being a big ol' pile of gay (as tradition would have it).

But Lot's wife looked back at the big ol' burning pile of gay, and lo, she became a pillar of salt. Source

An exception to the rule is Jude 1:7, which does not add words, but changes "they went after strange flesh" to "they went after nonhuman flesh" to clarify that the sin of Sodom involves trying to rape angels, rather than dudes having sex with dudes. While these are not literal renderings of the exact wording of the original texts, they render interpretations of the texts that are widely, though not universally, accepted in Bible scholarship. Again, since the editors are up front about doing this, I don't see a particular problem.

The rest of the edits simply re-translate the individual Greek words arsenokenotai and malakoi, which are often rendered as if they referred to consensual gay sex between adults, though it is far from clear that that is the case for either. (The former, which means something like "male beds" or "male bedders," appears to have been coined by Paul, and it's unknown what exactly it refers to; the latter means, literally, "soft," and Paul uses it in a way that his contemporaries don't, so again, we're in the dark about what exactly it means.) I think the changes the editors make in translating these word are adequate, though they're not what I would have chosen. These edits are not deliberate mistranslations at all, but simply different interpretations of the exact meaning of the underlying word.

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So, is the QJV worth buying? Certainly not, except to prove a point, or if your church has some really specific and slightly bizarre liturgical needs. Do I have a problem with what its editors are doing? Certainly not, though I wouldn't personally have made all the changes they did.

What's important when considering the QJV is acknowledging the continuity between the QJV and other Bible translations. "Every translation is a betrayal" is a cliche among translators, but it's true: no translator can faithfully, completely render a text in another language. There will always be wordplay, connotation, allusions, and other elements that get lost in the new language, and the text in the new language will tend to generate (however unintentionally) its own wordplay, connotations, and allusions. In addition to this, every translator has some kind of agenda: at the very least, they must have some answer to the question, Why do we need (another) translation? The fact is that the QJV's editors have found an answer to that question, one that no one else came up with, and however odd its actual implementation, their answer is worth pondering.

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*Note that in declaring myself an orthodox Christian, I make a distinction between affirming the dogmas of the church and the doctrines of the church(es). The dogmas of the church are the ideas that the whole church has, at some point, come together and agreed upon in a church council, such as the Council of Nicea. These ideas are affirmed in the creeds, like the Nicene Creed; they're things like the virgin birth of Jesus, his death and resurrection, God's creation of the world, and so forth. Human sexuality and gender identity are not topics that the whole church has ever come to an agreement on in a churchwide council, and given the fractured state of modern Christianity, it is unlikely that such a council will be convened any time soon. While many church denominations have different doctrines regarding human sexuality and gender identity, none of them has been affirmed by the whole church, and none can be a measure of Christian orthodoxy. I've written at length on the subject of who can and cannot be considered a Christian in an essay called The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be.
**Not primarily because of what I'm calling "deliberate mistranslation," but because the 17th-century translators did not have a completely firm grasp of Hebrew, and they didn't have access to the vast library of manuscripts of the texts that modern archaeology has provided us with.
†Deliberate mistranslation, then, is related closely to what Robert Alter calls the "heresy of translation by explanation," which I've discussed at some length here. Alter's category is essentially a subset of the larger category of deliberate mistranslation.
‡The NIV reads “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Young’s Literal Translation more accurately renders this, “I have gotten a man by Jehovah.”