Tuesday, July 13, 2004 AD
Got Religion, it's Good as New
Couple of good items from the excellent Get Religion site:
"What is the name that al Qaeda leaders most frequently use to describe the enemies that their movement seeks to destroy?..." (read)
"In my experience, the warmest gestures of inclusion usually come from people who spend little time talking about how inclusive they are. When a person flashes inclusivity like a badge, especially in comparison to those noninclusive extremists over there, it's a safe bet an ideological mugging is imminent..." (read)
And don't miss this slightly older piece from Doug LeBlanc on Rescuing St Paul from himself, which provides an "improved" rendering of 1 Corinthians 7, in the spirit of the recent "Good as New" Bible "translation".
I've held off from commenting on the "Good as New" translation until now, largely because - well, it would have ended up calling to mind my primary school headteacher's comment to my parents: "Do you ever find you ask John a question and then wish you hadn't bothered?". However, I will mention Christopher Howse's excellent piece in last Saturday's Telegraph, "Cultivating Prize Tares". Howse is unimpressed by the venture ("Don't buy it, unless money means nothing to you") and writes:
"What is the name that al Qaeda leaders most frequently use to describe the enemies that their movement seeks to destroy?..." (read)
"In my experience, the warmest gestures of inclusion usually come from people who spend little time talking about how inclusive they are. When a person flashes inclusivity like a badge, especially in comparison to those noninclusive extremists over there, it's a safe bet an ideological mugging is imminent..." (read)
And don't miss this slightly older piece from Doug LeBlanc on Rescuing St Paul from himself, which provides an "improved" rendering of 1 Corinthians 7, in the spirit of the recent "Good as New" Bible "translation".
I've held off from commenting on the "Good as New" translation until now, largely because - well, it would have ended up calling to mind my primary school headteacher's comment to my parents: "Do you ever find you ask John a question and then wish you hadn't bothered?". However, I will mention Christopher Howse's excellent piece in last Saturday's Telegraph, "Cultivating Prize Tares". Howse is unimpressed by the venture ("Don't buy it, unless money means nothing to you") and writes:
The embarrassing silliness is not my complaint. Nor is [the] habit of calling the Holy Spirit "she", like some camp ordinand at St Stephen's House. Nor even the absurd falsification of St Paul, to make him advise Christians "not to go without sex for too long".Rather, the main problem is the inclusion of the Gnostic "Gospel" of Thomas, one of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. The translator (John Henson, though really one wonders if the late Jim Henson wouldn't have been a better choice) predicts this will one day be recognised as part of the canon of Scripture, along with "the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr", and in place of outworn stuff like Revelation (which he omits altogether). This makes the Archbishop of Canterbury's support for Mr Henson's book particularly puzzling:
...the Archbishop has written before learnedly and appreciatively of St Irenaeus, whose great work was to show why the Gnostics - the people who left the cache at Nag Hammadi - were so damaging to the message of Jesus.
Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who had known John (the Beloved Disciple). Irenaeus was two steps from Jesus. He knew why it was important to sift out the rubbish from the Gospel. Now it is being shovelled back in.
