Conservative Bible Project – Conservapedia

I have discovered, after a visit to Conservapedia.com’s Bible project, that a chunk of the Church in the Benighted States seems to think that the Christian virtues of inclusiveness, charity and forgiveness that radiate from the New Testament I read may be no more than mistranslations, induced by liberal bias, of the capitalist free-market scriptures they consider authentic.

As for authenticity, for its authority this project looks to what used to be called the Authorised Version (AV), or the King James Bible, which they call the King James Version (presumably, the Authorised Bible). Here is what the Conservapedia Bible Project has to say of it:

In the United States and much of the world, the immensely popular and respected King James Version (KJV) is freely available and in the public domain. It could be used as the baseline for developing a conservative translation without requiring a license or any fees. Where the KJV is known to be deficient due to discovery of more authentic sources, exceptions can be made that use either more modern public domain translations as a baseline, or by using the original Greek or Hebrew.

Nuff said. If they had suggested the Vulgate, it might have made more sense, but why base your English translation on another English translation? Possibly because those composing it are unskilled in Greek and Hebrew, in which case how can they judge what is ‘more authentic’.

They have asked that participant translators in the project be well versed in Scripture and able to write good English. In the few passages I have looked at I have found a number of silly errors (since when has ‘he was the father of’ been considered the passive voice?), and some more serious ones. Perhaps the most egregious error of all, once we have disposed of the myriad of problems associated with basing any modern translation on the KJV and the Septuagint, is the arrogance — hubris, really — in believing that they know what was in the original Greek or Hebrew biblical texts. The whole project inclines one to doubt the scholarship of those involved. In truth, it has not been proved to my satisfaction that the whole conservapedia.com website is not a huge lark. If it isn’t, then I am immensely saddened, yet somehow not surprised.

Let’s produce a liberapedia.com Bible project. Oh, sorry, we already have one. Apparently it’s called the New International Version.