User:JET/Jewish Musings about the World English Bible

Jewish Musings about the World English Bible

Committed Jews and Evangelical Christians
When I chose to use the World English Bible as my raw base text for preparing Jewish translations of various sections in the Bible, it made me think quite a lot about what what it means to use that kind of a translation from a Jewish point of view. I've already explained my generally positive opinion about Jewish use of the English literary tradition for translating the Bible, as well as my overall evaluation of the WEB as a translation, in the general introduction to the JET. But here I'd like to explain my personal thoughts about a further aspect of the WEB. This is because there is something that is especially troubling and even duplicitous about the WEB from a Jewish point of view, namely that its author publicizes a special version of his WEB translation designed for missionaries who target Jews.

In this sense, the WEB is a not just a Christian translation of the Bible, but also perfect example of what makes the relationship between committed Jews and evangelical Christians very complicated. It is a relationship that can be both deeply moving and severely troubling at the very same time.

Maimonides on Christianity and Islam
My personal approach to this issue is shaped by a powerful Maimonidean passage (from the uncensored version of Laws of Kings and their Wars, chapter 11). Here is the quotation:


 * Can there be a greater stumbling block than this? For all the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel and their savior, gathering their dispersed and strengthening them in their commandments. But this one [i.e. Jesus of Nazareth] caused Israel to be slain by the sword, their remnants to be scattered and humiliated, and the Torah to be replaced, misleading most of the world into serving a god other than the Lord!


 * But the intent of the Creator of the world is not within the power of man to comprehend, for “His ways are not our ways, nor are His thoughts our thoughts" (cf. Isaiah 55:8). Rather, the purpose of all these matters concerning Jesus of Nazareth, and of that Ishmaelite who arose after him, is to straighten out the way for the coming of the Messiah, and to mend the entire world to serve the Lord together as one, as it is written, "For then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that they may all call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him shoulder to shoulder” (Zephaniah 3:9).


 * How will this come about? The entire world has already become filled with talk of the Messiah, and talk of the Torah and talk of the commandments. These matters have spread to distant islands and among many peoples of uncircumcised hearts. They discuss these matters as well as the commandments of the Torah. Some of them [i.e. of the Christians] say: "These commandments were true, but are not in force in the present age; they were not meant to apply for all time." Others [of the Christians] say: "Implied in the commandments are hidden concepts, and they cannot be understood plainly, for the Messiah has come and revealed their hidden meaning.”


 * When the true Messianic King arises and is exalted and glorified through his successes, then they will all return, realizing that their ancestors endowed them with a false heritage, that their prophets and their fathers caused them to err.

Maimonides' main point here is that God's hand in history works towards fulfilling His promises, even when in the eyes of men it seems to be doing exactly the opposite. The case in point is the role of Judaism's two great daughter religions, the universalistic faiths of Christianity and Islam. Maimonides points out how easy it is to say that Christianity slaughtered and subjugated the people of Israel, replaced the Torah with another covenant, and instituted an idolatrous form of worship for much of humanity. With the exception of the last point, it is easy to say similar things about the religion of Mohammed (“that Ishmaelite who arose after him”). But all of these things are the opposite of what God promised through his prophets in the Bible!

This is exactly why Maimonides reminds his Jewish readers that God's promises through the prophets were not just about Israel, but also about the perfection of all mankind. The two universalistic daughter religions of Israel are His tool to slowly spread knowledge of the one God, and of the Torah, and of the commandments, and of the messianic promise throughout the entire world. The two religions spread that knowledge imperfectly, but they spread it nonetheless. The Christians in particular misunderstand the commandments in crude ways according to Maimonides, alternatively claiming that they were not meant to be for all time (and were therefore replaced by new ones later), or else that their true, deeper meaning is as metaphor and not as law. These two claims that Maimonides mentions were in fact the two classic explanations given for the Torah's commandments by the medieval Church. But all of this is just a temporary stage, according to Maimonides. In the end, the role of Islam in spreading pure monotheism, and the role of Christianity in spreading the Bible, will together lead the entire world to realize the truth of the Torah of Israel.

What is important for us to stress here is that, for Maimonides, the dedicated work of Christian missionaries who spread the Bible throughout the world is the very hand of God working in history. They interpret the Bible imperfectly, and they teach certain things that are quite wrong, but their vast zeal to spread God's word “to distant islands and among many peoples of uncircumcised hearts” is rooted in a very holy purpose. This idea is striking from a Jewish perspective: The positive implications of Maimonides' suggestion stand out vividly not only against the general background of the Middle Ages, but they are probably shocking to a great many Jews today. That is why this important and amazing point cannot be stressed enough: The Christian mission to spread the Bible is a holy one, not just from a Christian perspective but also from a Jewish one.

It must be pointed out that for Maimonides, this holy purpose is one that Israel need not, and probably cannot, engage in. Israel's job as one small nation is to keep its commitment to God and His Torah. Spreading monotheism and the Torah throughout mankind is not a job for Jews but for universalistic faiths such as Christianity and Islam, and that is exactly how God uses them according to Maimonides.

The Bible and Enlightenment
A great many people in general, and a great many Jews in particular, are unaware that the Christian effort to spread the Bible had an extraordinary impact of on the history of modern times. The Protestant Reformation led to the translation of the Bible into the spoken languages of Europe, and this in turn led directly to mass literacy and to the mass production of all kinds of books on a scale unheard of before in human history. Ever since the Reformation, missionaries around the globe have devoted their lives to make the Bible available in the many native languages that they encountered, leading to Bible translations in hundreds of different languages as well as to ever spreading literacy in general, plus the written preservation of precious local literatures from around the globe.

For these very same reasons, Christians today are at the forefront of documenting small languages around the world and providing for their technical support in the digital age. The fact that today's internet supports such a vast range of languages is in no small part due to their efforts. Among evangelical Christians today, Bible translation has become both an academic field and a major industry. They are represented in the field of linguistics out of proportion to their numbers. Maimonides, who was famously of the opinion that the messianic age would be a time of widespread knowledge and universal enlightenment, would surely have been amazed and pleased to see the extent to which his idea that God's hand in history works through the Christian effort to spread the Bible has been borne out not just in spreading the Bible itself, but in spreading human knowledge in general.

It is my view that we, as Jews, should appreciate all of this better than we do. It is true that Jews too contribute to the advancement of human knowledge well out of proportion to our numbers (including the fields of language, linguistics, and digital knowledge). But we should nevertheless acknowledge it when others do the same and express our gratitude.

On that note I turn to the World English Bible, which is a very special implementation of the Christian goal to spread the Bible, a goal whose roots are holy according to Maimonides. Its author seems to have been the very first to realize not just that the internet is the most powerful tool ever created for spreading the Bible, but to further understand that its full power is realized only by letting knowledge and information spread virally, unrestricted by copyright, in a way that lets others make use of an expression of knowledge (such as a Bible translation) and further improve it, add to it, and continue to spread it on their own. For the author of the WEB this realization was clearly related to his conviction, as a dedicated Christian missionary, that the word of God is rightly the property of all mankind, and not the “intellectual property” of some commercial publisher. He also realized that even the small contribution of a single good online Bible translation to the public domain could have a dramatic positive effect on the availability of many other translations.

Light and Darkness Mixed
However, despite the positive role in the history of the world that Maimonides attributed to Christianity and Islam, he had no illusions about their harsh impact on Israel in the meantime. The evils that he described are very real:


 * All the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel and their savior, gathering their dispersed and strengthening them in their commandments. But this one [i.e. Jesus of Nazareth] caused Israel to be slain by the sword, their remnants to be scattered and humiliated, and the Torah to be replaced, misleading most of the world into serving a god other than the Lord!

Since the Middle Ages many things have changed, but not everything. Christianity today has abandoned conversion by the sword and the physical persecution of Jews (though Islam has not). Today the “scattered and humiliated” remnants of Israel have built a strong, independent state (though it is under assault by powerful forces dedicated to genocide).

But one thing has remained the same in essence, even though it is advertised very differently today than it once was: Today there are still a great many Christians who are deeply dedicated to convincing Jews of the need to leave Israel's Torah, whether they ask them to “replace” the Torah or to “fulfill” it or to “complete” it though acceptance of the Christian faith. That has not changed, and remains essentially as it was during the time of Maimonides.

Let me state clearly that even though I don't like the fact that Christians try to convert Jews, I still generally respect them for it, simply because they are doing what they truly believe in. I have no problem with Christians who think that I need to accept Jesus, as long as they are honest and respectful about it, because we can agree to disagree and yet still respect each other and work together.

However, there is often a subversive element to this effort that myself and other committed Jews can neither accept nor respect. That is when, rather than asking Jews to be Christians, missionaries tell them that they can be both at the same time. This is usually accomplished by marketing a kind of Christianity that has a supposedly Jewish ethnic flavor to it. The idea is that the New Testament can be “Jewish” if the Gospel of John is turned into the Gospel of “Yochanan” and Jesus Christ into “Yeshua the Messiah.”

In one sense, the missionaries who do this are really just treating Jews the same way they treat everyone else. Since Christianity is a universal religion, accepting Jesus does not mean that you have to change your language or your culture or your national allegiance. And so if you are a dedicated missionary in Papua New Guinea, as was the author of the WEB, then you can honestly offer Jesus and the Bible to your neighbors, sincerely and lovingly, without asking them to compromise their identity or their values in any way. In this sense, offering “Yeshua” to the Jews would seem to be a simple variation of the same thing: It is a way of saying that you can keep your Jewish culture and still accept Jesus. In this sense, there seems to be nothing dishonest about it.

But in another sense it deeply dishonest, and it is not the same thing at all. An obvious indication of this is the fact that the culture of most English-speaking Jews today is the culture of the English-speaking world, and that while all of them are deeply familiar with the names “Jesus” and “John,” most of them have never even heard of “Yeshua” and “Yochanan.” This reality is of course the result of assimilation and of the widespread ignorance most Jews have about their own religion and culture. But let us consider the missionary technique: If the Jews are really being treated the same way that a universalistic Christianity treats everyone else, then why are they being offered a Bible with unfamiliar Hebrew names, instead of a regular English-language Bible in their own language? Why make a special effort to win them over with a “Hebrew Names Version” alongside the regular “World English Bible”?

The crux of the matter is, of course, that when Christian missionaries offer the Gospel to Jews it is really not the same as when they offer it to everyone else. What makes it different is that unlike any other culture or religion, the Jews have what Christians call the “Old Testament.” In other words, the Jews already have a covenant with God. And it is a covenant that in its very essence is everlasting and complete, one that never needs to be supplemented by anything else. The very idea that Israel's covenant with God through Moses needs to be “supplemented” or “completed” or “fulfilled” through Jesus undermines the original covenant. Furthermore, since Israel accepted God's covenant as a nation, the idea of a “New Testament” violates not only the original covenant itself, but Israel's national identity. It is the original covenant that makes the Jews so different from the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea for Christian missionaries.

Of course, this exact point has been the classic, fundamental disagreement between Judaism and Christianity for the past two thousand years: Is the Torah indeed everlasting and complete on its own (the Jewish position), or does the “Old Testament” require a “New Testament” to “complete” or “fulfill” it (the Christian position)? Only when this very real and important question is completely out in the open, rather than disguised in disingenuous ways, can Jews and Christians debate it honestly with mutual respect, and perhaps agree to disagree about it.

But the attempt to make the New Testament look “kosher” to Jews by putting Hebrew names into a special, dedicated version of an otherwise English translation is both subversive and dishonest, as are the various churches that take pains to offer certain trappings of supposed Jewish ethnicity. This kind of marketing is not something that committed Jews can view with respect.

For Christian missionaries who naturally view ethnicity and nationality as local phenomena, while seeing religion as a universal phenomenon, it may be very hard to understand why committed Jews see this as so terribly wrong. But remember that those are western, Christian definitions of nationality and religion, not Jewish ones! In Jewish eyes it is the nation of Israel, not the individual believer, who sealed a covenant with God. Missionaries who deal with Jews should at least honor these classic Jewish definitions of who we are.

For most Jews, had the WEB been offered to the world as a nothing more or less than a public domain Christian translation of the Holy Bible into English, then there would have been nothing at all to criticize and only a wonderful project to praise. But unfortunately it wasn’t. I think it is important for dedicated, sincere and wonderful Christians to understand why creating a “Hebrew Names Version” alongside the World English Bible is dishonest and demeaning to Jews. For Jews, the “Hebrew Names Version” is an ugly stain on what is otherwise a selfless project and a beautiful gift to the world.

From a Jewish perspective, the author of the World English Bible, along with his family, represent the very best of what Christian missionaries can be. They exhibit dedication and sacrifice, love and sincerity. They selflessly dedicate their lives towards spreading the word of God “to distant islands and among many peoples.” From Jewish and Christian perspectives alike, their work serves “to mend the entire world to serve the Lord together as one.” As a Jew, I am grateful for their gift to the world in the form of the World English Bible, and admire their work as truly great Christians. But I also hope they will consider honoring the nation of Israel by removing a version of the WEB that specifically targets Jews in a less than honest way.