The Conservative Bible Project

Looking for the right Bible to carry to your Tea Party tax protest, gun show or Tuesday Morning Businessmen's Bible Study? Well, this may be just the thing. This morning, while on my second cup of coffee and working my way through the Dallas Morning News, I came across the following editorial:

Getting 'right' with Jesus is wrong

A conservative Web site is leading an effort to rewrite the Bible to remove all the icky liberal parts. Conservapedia.com's Conservative Bible Project invites readers to help scrub Scripture of "liberal bias." Among other revisions, Conservapedia proposes emphasizing "free market" principles in the Bible, and excluding "later-inserted liberal passages." We've heard of liberals and conservatives both interpreting the Bible to suit their own agendas, but editing Scripture itself to fit a secular ideology takes real chutzpah. Conservative? Hardly; it's radically anti-traditional. It's far more faithful to the conservative tradition to heed the example of a good Republican named Abraham Lincoln, who once said he wasn't worried about God being on his side, but rather "that both myself and this nation should be on the Lord's side." We're no theologians, but it seems to us that serious Bible readers would see their task as getting right with Jesus rather than getting Jesus on the right.

My first thought was that this had to be some kind of spoof. Apparently not. It seems that no one has ever interpreted the Bible just exactly right, a deficiency the Conservative Bible Project seeks to rectify. Members of Conservapedia will translate the Bible on a verse by verse basis, in accordance with the following principles:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias...

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity...

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity...

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop...

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"...

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil....

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning...

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story...

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open- mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels...

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

It will be interesting to see what they do, exactly, with Matthew 19:16+ (Jesus and the rich young ruler). I am most interested to learn the "free market meaning" of this story.

Finally, all this reminded of a scene from Greater Tuna, the first in a trio of farcical comedies chronicling the "third-smallest town in Texas." My wife and I have followed these plays for nearly 25 years now, and we know all the lines. There is one scene that involves Rev. Spikes, Vera Carp and Bertha Bumiller at the monthly meeting of the Smut Snatchers of the New Order as they worked on their project of expunging "objectionable" words from the Webster's Dictionary. Members were encouraged to bring any objectionable words to the meeting, where they would be considered on a "word by word basis."

Of course that is farce, and the Conservative Bible Project is supposedly real life. So, I guess truth is stranger than fiction.

(Apparently, I am a little late on this story. Rod Dreher blogged about it over a week ago, here. I suspect he had something to do with the editorial cited, as well.)