only a paraphrase

A lifetime ago when I was connected to a certain Anglican church, the minister confidently pronounced that the ESV was the most accurate translation of the Bible and therefore the one we should all be reading. I remember The Message Bible being denigrated as a paraphrase rather than a translation and the Good News - which I had grown up reading - was clearly just for children. For my confirmation I recieved a NIV study Bible and it is to this one that I often come back to becuase it’s phrasing is so familiar (although it is falling apart from years of use, a thing that I was told many times was a mark of faithfulness becuase the worst thing you could own was a Bible that sat unused on your shelf).These days I know that the ESV was deliberately masculinised to fit an anti-feminist agenda and has since been updated to more accurately reflect some scholarly understandings of what the text might mean.

As I work with the text, specifically the Hebrew Bible, I am so aware that accuracy depends on our best guesses about what the language might mean. Some things seem relatively clear, but our sense of clarity might be a false confidence in our capacity to transcend time and culture. Other times it can seem like a bit of a word salad that eludes most everyone’s best guess as to the meaning.

I have been reading a bit about the Samaritan Pentateuch, and Israel and Judah in the Second Temple period and even way back then the text was being edited for clarity and understanding. The Masoretes developed the qere/ketiv or spoken/written distinctions to help them make sense of it. Jesus says “you have heard it said…..but I say….”.

With such clear ambiguities, I wonder how contemporary people have become so fixated on inerrancy and infallibility as attributes of the text, and what such a fixation might tell us about human nature and the need for certainty.