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.

Source

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.”

The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.

Talking Past Each Other

by Major Philip Davisson

As anyone who has learned a second language can likely tell you, words are larger than their definitions. Words and their meanings also reflect the culture and experiences that gave birth to those words. You don’t get anywhere near fluency in a second language until you can begin to think in that language.

And when you begin to think in another language, you make another discovery: that the people born into this language-cultural milieu actually think differently than you do.* These differences are a big part of what is being reflected in the difference in vocabulary and grammar.

I reflect on this reality when I come to another observation: that even people using the same language and using the same words can sometimes mean very different things when they speak. These differences, too, reflect differences in experiences, and they can reveal a reality beyond surface similarities within a common culture. It is this hiddenness of meaning that I want to apply the subject about Christians opening doors to conversations with people who identify as part of the LGBTQ spectrum.

In particular, I am finding that our use of the phrase, “love the sinner but hate the sin,” is fraught with all sorts of misunderstanding due to experientially-derived differences in vocabulary.

“Love” seems to be a universally including word, while “hate” seems to be a universally excluding kind of word. We welcome those whom we love, and we try to love those whom we welcome. What we hate, we seek to eliminate or exclude, reject or otherwise usher out the door.

There is much more to say about that, but for now let me continue with what may be the real problem area: sinner and sin. Not the definitions of those words, which actually have rather universal agreement. When many of us in the Church use the word "sinner," we refer to a person. And with "sin," we refer to a behavior, action, and attitudes. We identify certain behaviors as sinful, and those who embrace such sins as sinners. Fair enough.

But I sense that the way we are using these words isn’t shared by the people we're trying to start conversations and build bridges with. When we say to the gay or lesbian person, for example, that we love you but hate what you’re doing, we are missing an incredibly important element.

That element is the interrelatedness between identity and sexuality. We are speaking words that draw a distinction between identity and activity, but the experiences of the other side in our dialogue draw the lines differently. The lines are drawn differently because of how each side in this stillborn dialogue has heard from the Church what is good and right about one significant aspect of identity, human sexuality.

While there is growing acknowledgement that human sexuality is an integral part of our existence as human beings, there remains an obstacle to a common vocabulary, a barrier that is related to whose existential experiences may be classified as good and right.

If we are to overcome this obstacle, the simple but difficult next step is to listen and really try to hear, to listen to the other person and to hear  how their experiences have shaped the meanings of the words that we use. It’s a bit like trying to learn another language, where we need to begin to think in another language, which requires a level of attempting to experience reality from another perspective that is perhaps altogether alien from our own.

I suspect that if we were to make a regular practice of this task, then we who would seek to truly love LGBTQ persons would discover that our attempts at sending out love are not being received as love, words of welcome, and invitations to be included—but instead as messages of hate, words that exclude and prevent entrance into the place where we say God may be found.

We might find that what we describe as an optional or conditioned behavior that we label as sinful (and therefore to be eliminated) is really an integral part of our potential dialogue partner’s existential reality: there simply is no separation between who the person is and how their sexuality is realized; both are part of human existence, of fundamental identity.

When we say we will accept the homosexual person but not the same-sex sex, the experience of the other person in this instance is that the two elements are—as in every human being—so intertwined that they hear us saying we will simply not accept them. To reject their sexuality is to reject their personhood, their status as acceptable human beings.

If we succeed in opening this conversation beyond this kind of language, the benefit to our dialogue partners might be for them to come to appreciate some fears and anxieties some of us have about redrawing the lines sin and acceptability. Where or how does this redrawing project end? Are there any standards of morality we can agree upon? Is there no danger in letting go of what the Church has understood and taught for centuries?

We can't and shouldn’t minimize these real concerns; they need to be heard and understood. But we can and should come to the point where we are prepared to learn a new language and a new way of listening: with respect and the determination to find a shared reality and a way forward together.

Entire groups of people in Jesus’ time were excluded because of existential identity reasons. Most all of these revolved around issues of the body, and the prevailing religious authorities pronounced these people unclean. It was not that their activity or behavior was wrong—although inevitably by virtue of the outgrowth of their body “issues” their activities also were denounced—but that they, as people, were declared unclean and out-of-bounds and so excluded from the realm of good and right.

When we see how Jesus interacted with these excluded people, we observe something rather remarkable. He touched them. He ate with them. He included them. And without reservation; it wasn’t as if he healed them all and then declared them acceptable. It was as if he was redrawing the lines of acceptability, and drawing all people in with him.

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Major Philip Davisson is James Davisson's dad. He's an officer (clergy) in the Salvation Army, and he is in charge of distance learning at Booth University in Winnipeg, Canada.

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*Note from James: what my dad is talking about is part of a linguistic idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically states that what language you speak can have an effect on how you think. The strongest version of the hypothesis states that your language can actually limit your ability to think about certain things. An example of this hypothesis in action: Spanish and German speakers are asked in a survey to come up with adjectives to describe the word "bridge." The word "bridge" in Spanish (el puente) is grammatically masculine (it uses the same grammatical categories as male animals and people), and in German (die Brücke), it's grammatically feminine. In the survey results, Spanish speakers tended to use stereotypically masculine language to describe the bridge, while German speakers used stereotypically feminine language. Thus, it seems that the grammar of the language has a subtle impact on speakers' perceptions.

Photo source: 
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/kasia_jot/50839702/