Or the better question is, "What DID Jesus say?"
The answer is that he didn't say a lot of the things we always thought he did, or didn't mean them in the way we've always thought -- or at least that's what it says in the gospel according to Conservapedia in an emerging online translation that is lighting up the blogosphere.
Conservapedia is a Wikipedia-style online encyclopedia founded in 2006 by Andy Schlafly, son of the longtime religious right leader Phyllis Schlafly, because, as Wikipedia puts it, "he felt that Wikipedia had a liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias."
The new Bible translation, called the Conservative Bible Project, is certainly not liberal, though whether it is pro-Christian is another argument altogether, and one that is really heating up.
That's because Schlafly is inviting collaborators to help him write a "fully conservative translation of the Bible" that would counteract liberal translations, which he says are "the single biggest distortion" of the Scriptures today.
According to the Conservapedia parameters, translators must use language that is "not emasculated"-- in other words, God is male and no gender inclusive stuff -- and "utilize powerful conservative terms." The neocon (or is it "theocon"?) translation should also "accept the logic of Hell" and "express free market parables."]
The guidelines have already led to some interesting choices, to say the least.
For example, Conservapedia says it would be more appropriate and culturally relevant to say Jesus "home schooled" his disciples; where the Ten Commandments warn against worshiping "false idols" we should substitute "media" because that is a better analogy between today's Americans and the Israelites of yesteryear.
The new neocon Bible also says words like "laborer" and "comrade" and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") are used in "liberal" translations like the English Standard Version, and that this "socialistic" terminology "improperly encourages the 'social justice' movement among Christians."
Another "liberal falsehood," it claims, is the famous plea by Christ on the cross, when he looks at those crucifying him and says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Conservapedia argues that the phrase appears only in Luke, and is a later interpolation. It says "the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible."
The Conservative Bible Project also rejects the inclusion of another well-known story of forgiveness, that of the woman caught in adultery. As the Gospel of John has it, the woman was about to be stoned when Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The crowd dispersed, and he told her to go and sin no more. Conservapedia says the story was a later addition, which is likely true, though most scholars say that does not undermine the historical or moral truth of the story.
Yet Conservapedia cites liberal Bible scholars to bolster its case here and elsewhere -- and that points to the larger irony of this story, namely that in supposedly countering the sins of "liberal" Bible translators, the conservatives are committing many of the same transgressions.
Bible translation has always been fraught with controversy and sometimes marred by violence, even before Guttenberg invented moveable type and Luther and others began translating scripture into the local, or "vulgar" languages. Yes, there are many translations today, and many, such as the introduction of the TNIV, or "Today's New International Version" of the Bible, have sparked huge disputes.
The explosion of "niche" Bibles (as I wrote here back in June) like the eco-themed Green Bible or the James Bond study Bible or even the American Patriot's Bible tend to be fairly standard Bibles with commentaries on the text that try to stress themes the editors want to highlight.
As for wholesale rewrites of the Bible, liberals have been more famous, or infamous, for actually changing or even deleting sections, from the "Jefferson Bible," in which Thomas Jefferson took scissors and glue to the gospels to remove all the unbelievable miracle stuff, to the Jesus Seminar and its highly unorthodox method of voting, using colored beads, about what scholars thought Jesus would really have said. (A lot got cut.)
The Conservative Bible Project is starting with the New Testament, which it hopes to finish in about a year. That would be a re-translation of just four verses a day by five "good retranslators."
But Schlafly may not get the cooperation he hoped for. In fact, many of Schlafly's would-be allies in the conservative quest are rolling their eyes, to say the least. (Others, right and left, still can't believe it's not a hoax.)
Rod "the Crunchy Con" Dreher says "the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind...These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology." Mark Shea says the project " has a grain of sense to it, as ideological madness always does." But the upshot, he concludes, is this: "Right wing dementia marches on apace."
At First Things, Elizabeth "The Anchoress" Scalia rounds up the right wing blowback, and announces, "This is where I get off the boat." She also uses an interesting analogy to make her point:
"You know, I don't buy tampons that are designed 'by women, for women' because I do not believe that a tampon is intrinsically better because of exclusivity. To create a Bible 'by conservatives, for conservatives' seems to me to be just as needlessly parochial, and not a little proud and arrogant."
The Italians have a saying about the perils of translating faithfully from one language to another: "Traduttore, traditore." In other words, "the translator is a traitor" to the original text and meaning.
That pitfall is perhaps inevitable given the complexity of such tasks and the changing meanings of words. But this time, conservative translators may be betraying their own.
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