A NEW new revised standard version

Samuel is on my lap, reading Curious George. My bible is in another room. I reach for my portable electronic device and open a tab to access the Bible Gateway.

Halfway through today’s Numbers passage, it dawns on me: this is not the NRSV.

Where, oh where, is the NRSV? I scroll up and down the menu. It’s gone. In its place is the New Revised Standard Updated Edition (NRSVue).

Apparently, this change took place on May 1.

Here is the announcement, from the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, posted in the Bible Gateway.

And here is a report from the Religious News Service, which highlights the new version’s “consideration for ‘modern sensibilities’” (the term “enslaved woman” is preferred to “slave woman,” etc.).

All right. As Miss Brodie says, for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. These changes may even be good. But I am in the middle of reading through the NRSV, and it is annoying not to have it in the Bible Gateway.

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I am making too much of this. The Bible Gateway still maintains these editions:

• New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised (NRSVA) (note the “s” in “anglicised” 😇);
• New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition (NRSVACE);
• New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (NRSVCE).

So, if I want to, I can just read from one of them, if I am not reading from a paper bible. I can read from one of the “anglicised” editions if I want to pretend I’m a character in Midsomer Murders.

(When reading the Bible, as when doing other things, it is tempting to pretend.)

Of course, in Midsomer Murders, charcters always use the Authorized Edition.

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Thinking about it more, I am not sure the “modern sensibilities” are defensible – at least, not in certain cases. The Religious News Service tells us that in the new edition, various updates

reflect a decision to avoid identifying people based on their disabilities.

A verse in Matthew that previously referred to “demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics,” now reads “people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted with paralysis.”

That demon possession is a medical disability, in the way that epilepsy and paralysis are medical disabilities – that it is not, in fact, a mark of spiritual identity – is too hefty an assumption for a translator to make.

Of course, the NRSVue doesn’t say that demon possession is a “disability.” Its language is neutral about that. (I haven’t tried to find out if the new phrasing is any more, or any less, faithful to the Greek.)

Again, what troubles me is the bluntness of the apparent motive for this change. The change itself – in this passage – may be all right.

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

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Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.