I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised that Andy Schlafly’s Conservapedia effort to re-translate the Bible to adhere to their right-wing cultural and political agenda would lead to changes things like this:
Schlafly, the son of national political activist Phyllis Schlafly, says a conservative Bible should be masculine, for example, using the words mankind and man rather than more inclusive language. It also should shun terms like laborer or comrade. It also should put a free market spin on the sayings of Jesus.
Take Mark 10:25, where the King James Version says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Liberals have used that passage to attack the wealthy, Schlafly said. The Conservative Bible substitutes “a man who cares only for money” for rich man.
“I don’t think Jesus is saying, ‘Let’s all be lazy so we can get to heaven.’ That’s not the message. And, if you translate the word rich as simply rich, some people are going to get the message that ‘I am going to be lazy so I can get to heaven easier,’ ” said Schlafly, who graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and from Harvard Law School as an attorney, according to his Web site.
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Schlafly also removed an edit suggesting that liberals conspired to have Jesus killed, by substituting the word liberal for the word Pharisee.
“The possibility that Pharisees, which is a term that’s not familiar to most of us, could be better translated as liberal is intriguing,” Schlafly said. “But we haven’t gone with that yet.”
But that is nothing compared to the fact that they are also removing chapters and verses that they don’t like:
The most radical change in the Conservative Bible might be dumping two passages of familiar Scripture.
One is the long ending of Mark’s Gospel, which includes verses about snake handling and the story of the woman caught in adultery. Neither is found in most of the oldest Greek manuscripts used to translate the Bible. Schlafly says that adultery story, in which Jesus says, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” should be cut because it portrays Jesus as being soft on sin.
“It’s a liberal addition, put in by people who wanted to undermine the reality of hell and judgment,” he said.
Interestingly, the article quotes Jennifer Knust, an actual Bible scholar who teaches the New Testament at Boston University, who explains that the adultery story was accepted universally until the 1800s, when liberal scholars began to question its authenticity, noting that traditionally “it was the liberals who wanted to take the story out and the conservatives who wanted to keep the story.”
