Let’s read the Bible for the first time
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Bible, Books, Christianity, Feminism, Sex

Let’s read the Bible for the first time

On Ann Nyland, translator

For me, it was a period of theological distress. The world I’d grew up in, Evangelical Christianity, seemed loveless, attack-oriented, and I couldn’t stay in it anymore. I was interested in the Bible. But I only seemed to see “adultery” and “fornication” on every page—and, in my mind, the image of a man with a gray, cruel face staring back at me.

Looking up Bible commentary one night, I noticed a mention of a Bible translator in Australia who’d said to Christianity: You got everything wrong.

I said to myself: Yes, that’s what happened.

In a 2005 interview, she speaks of her youth.

I was born into a Christian family so was brought up with the Bible and accepted the Lord as my Savior when I was 6. My father was a Greek scholar (as was his uncle) and from an early age I can remember him talking about what the Greek really meant and how it was a shame it wasn’t brought out in English translation. He had a collection of English translations. He was also a preacher and used to go on at length about how the King James said this, the other versions said this and that, but the Greek said something else.

Christendom had an open secret? The scriptures were not translated very well. She went to school to become a classical Greek scholar, but the Bible is what she was interested in—just different, unusual corners of it. Her dissertation was on a Hittite method of horse training, and continues to be cited. (In 1992, she wrote a published paper from it.)

She got a job at the University of New England, in Australia, and says she published papers on “Greek lexicography from Homeric to Hellenistic times.” But dealing with sexist translation of the Bible was the job that called out to her. In the 1990s, the Christians vs. the Feminists was the regular media event. Dr. Nyland’s stance was neither, or both? As she comments in a blog post: “I used to teach ancient Greek language at university, and then when I translated the New Testament from the Greek, I attracted all sorts of charges of feminist agenda simply for translating correctly.”

Bible publishing, she’d realized, is a bit of a racket, controlled by vast corporations and overseen by, as she calls them, “the lobbyists.” Well-known Christian leaders, she writes, “have misrepresented lexicons, presented new meanings for common Greek terms, and displayed clear errors about elementary Greek grammar.”

Her initial efforts to push back weren’t warmly received. She recalls in a 2007 interview: “A scholarly article I wrote in a peer-reviewed academic journal led to me be being described as ‘a shrill feminist author from Australia’, rather than a Greek scholar commenting on the blatant mistranslation of a common Greek word by a group of lobbyists.”

It seemed there was a commercial opportunity to update the translation of the Bible with new information. The scholarly literature was full of finds by archaeologists. For example, as she notes, Paul’s phrase translated “husband of one wife” — is found on the tombstones of women.

There were new readings by scholars, adjusting the meaning of many poorly-understood words. To translate and market a Bible was a taunting task, but for six years she worked on her New Testament, naming it after the Greek word kephalē. Does it mean ‘head’, or ‘source’. Ever industrious, she seems to have set up her own publishing company to release it.

Her Source translation of the New Testament was published in Australia in 2004. How was it different? She explains in the introduction:

For centuries, the meaning of numerous New Testament words remained unknown, thus translators were left to guess. In the late 1880s and again in the mid 1970s, large amounts of papyri and inscriptions were discovered. These impacted our knowledge of word meaning in the New Testament to such a degree that scholars labeled the finds “sensational” and “dramatic” . . . Yet nearly every New Testament translation of today follows the traditional translations of the earlier versions, which were published centuries before . . . .

The Christian world had gotten locked into meanings created by translations. And when the translations were proven false, it created the problem she’d face. Do Christians get the message, or shoot the messenger?