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Hi, Karen —
The NRSV contains politically-motivated
translations. Rather than being concerned
with accurately translating the text,
the translators were worried about
being politically correct. They caved
into feminists and, in the process,
they did violence to the meaning
of the text.
Now when it comes to other aspects
of the Bible, the translation is
very accurate, but there are enough
serious, politically-motivated mistranslations
that I would stay away from it.
Here's an example:
John 6:10 reads:
10 Jesus said, "Make the people sit
down." Now
there was much grass in the place;
so the men sat
down, in number, about five thousand.
Some translators might be tempted
to translate the word men as
people but it's not the Greek
word Anthropoi which
can mean people or men.
That word (Anthropoi)
is used earlier in the verse and
the translator translates it people:
Make
the people sit
down but
now John uses another specific Greek
word for men. It is the word andres,
which specifically means male or
masculine human beings.
Well for starters, we
want to be accurate.
For another,
there is a reason why John used two
different words. Back then when you
counted a crowd, you only counted
the men. Now that might be sexist
but that's the way it was. They
didn't count the women or children.
They just counted the men. So the
first century person, reading or
hearing this text, would have understood
that far more than 5,000 people were
fed, because they would have known
what John meant when he said the men (andres),
verses men (anthropoi),
sat down, in number, about five thousand.
By changing the translation to be
politically correct, we underestimate
the number of people that were fed
plus we are translating
the text wrong!
I don't know if the NRSV mistranslates
that specific text but it's a
classic example of the kind of thing
the NRSV does. They do all kinds
of violence to doctrine, just to avoid
using the words like:
It's just
sick; they do these verbal gymnastics
with the text, (changing
the person who the text is written
for), just to avoid
using a male pronoun. It's just silly.
- Now,
about your Catechism; what color
is it?
If it's the cream
colored one, you should get
the second addition which is green.
The cream
color one is not totally horrible
but being the first revision, it had:
- some typos
- some errors in the
translation, and
- some missing
data.
John
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