Changes to the Bible
An update to the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible—with 20,000 changes—was released digitally in December and is to be in print next May. It represents more than four years of work of the National Council of Churches and a large group of scholars in the Society of Biblical Literature.
Like all biblical translations and updates over the past millennium, including the King James Version, this brings new meanings to biblical texts. Each iteration of the Bible addresses some need in the culture at that moment. I hope the updated edition (known as NRSVue) fuels a wider public discussion about what the Bible is becoming in our era.
This update is revised with multiple nuanced goals by a joint working group including Jewish, Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic scholars, producing expansion of the Bible’s range.
Here’s an example using Mark 14:69 in NRSV: And the servant-girl, on seeing him, began again to say to the bystanders, “This man is one of them.” In NRSVue: And the female servant, on seeing him, began again to say to the bystanders, “This man is one of them.”
This revision brings feminist consciousness to take away a demeaning translation that calls a woman a girl. So the “female servant” quickly becomes someone with more agency and character. The revision makes her a bigger person, and the readers of the Bible today themselves have more room to be engaged.
Each change illuminates how the old and new language speak to us and how we filter and frame texts we consume. As this edition attempts to modernize and improve historical accuracy, we need to notice some of the cross-purposes in play within the Bible in any particular era.
To consider these revisions, and to observe how our own understanding changes is to see why many scholars refer to “living” biblical texts. The real character of such material develops and is alive in new ways for each different time and situation.
Over the past 10 years I have been part of a project considering a fecund moment almost 2,000 years ago in the formation of texts that eventually became Christian canon. Our findings, presented in “After Jesus Before Christianity,” portray a living and often shifting “word.” One sees that ancient meaning-making, even among the early authors and audiences in the original languages, was strikingly similar to today’s expanding territory for Bible engagement through conversations, translations, revisions and interpretations.
Texts from the first few centuries of multiple Jesus groups were full of creativity from a time of great diversity. The word “christian” certainly did not mean a member of a religion in the early centuries. The word hardly existed at all in the first century and varied widely in meanings among the second and third century users of the term. These authors’ concept of gender was full of fluidity, which manifested in word choice and practice.
Modern audiences might squirm over these ambiguities, but they are intrinsic to texts that come to be called scripture. Biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush has coined a term for the process: “scripturalizing,” which acknowledges the aliveness of texts and how they become present through modifications in words and meanings, particularly in the ways the Bible belongs to African Americans throughout the last 400 years.
Integrating earlier scholarship in cultural studies while challenging white domination of biblical study, Wimbush writes: “This means seeing scripture as reflective of the basic ‘play-element’ in culture, as rites, performances, and their varied veiling and unveiling operations and effects.”
Don’t look to the latest biblical revision to settle theological questions, but to raise important new ones, urging us to look deeper and wider into the texts as well as into ourselves. The updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version is its own act of unveiling.