Unmanning the Holy Bible

By Richard N. Ostling

The sexual-textual revolution comes to Scripture

What is a human being that you are mindful of him, and a mortal that you care for him?

Sound familiar but somehow fiat? The more famous rendering of Psalms 8: 4 is rather more ringing: "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?" But Christians in the English-speaking world had better get used to the neutered wording, for it may appear in the new edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible due a decade from now. The reworked RSV will include hundreds of such language changes made in the cause of stripping Scripture of "sexism."

The use of "inclusive language," intended to put women on a textual par with men, has long since been accepted in many areas of U.S. publishing, such as school textbooks and children's fables. But its application to the Bible is already stirring an unholy row. The immediate point of contention is the RSV, now being updated by a committee of 25 scholars and translators. Their efforts will have far-reaching importance. With millions of copies sold worldwide since it first appeared in 1952, the RSV is by far the most broadly used Bible translation in modern English.

Precisely because of its influence, the RSV is now a target of Protestant feminists and other critics who want to purge it of the male chauvinism that they find running all through its pages. Says the Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, a United Methodist mission official: "People are becoming increasingly sensitive to language that renders half the human race invisible." As it happens, such sentiment is strong in the National Council of Churches (N.C.C.), whose education division is overseeing the RSV revision. But the N.C.C.'s leaders have hesitated to alter the RSV radically, partly because the organization gets the royalties. The RSV has been a success largely because of its preservation of much of the evocative language of its antecedent, the King James Bible of 1611. So after the education division decided to prepare a new edition of the RSV, it instructed its translators to get rid of as much "masculine-biased language" as possible while retaining the King James "flavor."

The man in charge of the RSV revision is the Rev. Bruce M. Metzger, 66, a gentlemanly New Testament professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. While Metzger is conservative on matters of doc trine, he is willing to avoid male nouns and pronouns--where the original Hebrew and Greek texts allow it. Thus the reference in Romans 14: 1 to "the man who is weak in faith" will likely become "the one who is weak . . ." In Psalms, the first verse will read "Blessed are those who walk not in the counsel of the wicked," rather than "Blessed is the man who walks not . . ." In Psalms alone, more than 200 male pronouns will be dropped.

Even these limited word changes are too much for many traditionalists, among them the Rev. E. Earle Ellis of New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New

Jersey, who quit Metzger's group in protest. With all the sensitivity over sexism, he complains, the emerging Bible "is taking on the nature of a paraphrase," and the rewrites are sacrificing important nuances in meaning. For instance, Ellis grants that the use of "human being" instead of "man" in the new Psalms 8: 4 is defensible as a perfectly literal translation from the original Hebrew. But he argues that the change is reckless since in the context of the psalm, "man" could also imply Adam, an ideal king, or some other individual. So could the banished phrase "son of man," a New Testament title associated with Jesus as the Messiah. Declares Ellis: "Whatever we think, the text has a right to be heard. You cannot cover over words just because the meaning is an embarrassment to certain modern movements."

For their part, militants on Bible sex ism protest that Metzger's translators are too fastidious in holding to traditional language about God and Christ. An eight-man, five-woman Bible translation "task force" that includes officials and scholars from six N.C.C. denominations has declared that Metzger's committee should "move more boldly." Among suggested changes, they want women to get equal billing in passages where the original text names only males: Sarah should be included along with mentions of Abraham, for example, and Eve ought to appear when Adam does. Moreover, the hard-liners propose that Jesus should be called the "Child of God" instead of the "Son of God." Also, the impersonal pronoun it should replace he in references to the Spirit of God when the original Greek is neuter, notwithstanding Christian teaching that the Spirit is a person. Finally, since God has no gender, use of he, him and his should be minimized; a properly desexed Romans 8: 29, for instance, would say, "Those whom God foreknew, GW also predestined to be conformed to the image of God's child . . ."

During a meeting at the N.C.C.'s New York City headquarters last week, leaders of the education division rejected such radical proposals but did agree to add feminists to Metzger's group as vacancies occur. Discussion of how to tackle alleged "racism, classism and antiSemitism" in the Bible was postponed. Metzger assailed the militants' approach as unscholarly and "intolerable." As for the inclusive-language issue, he said firmly, "I do not find much clamor for this in the churches. Most people find sexist language in regard to persons irrelevant and, concerning God, irreverent."

Nonetheless, the education division did approve a recommendation to work on a different Bible translation that would more fully meet feminist demands. The first step toward what some religious wags are already calling the "Unisex Bible" will be translation of a new lectionary, the series of Bible readings listed for worship each week in many denominations. The N.C.C. expects to show whether a "completely inclusive-language Bible translation" is feasible.

As the skirmishing over Bible bias continues, some church feminists are beginning to voice an argument made by traditionalist foes: at bottom, the ancient texts are what they are. Roman Catholic Sister Ann Patrick Ware, of New York City, a top theology executive at the N.C.C., points out resignedly: "There are parts of Scripture that are sexist, and there is nothing you can do about them." Of course, she adds, "you don't have to read them, either."

--By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by John Kohan/New York

With reporting by John Kohan

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