New Bible Promotes Dipping

Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband."

(1 Corinthians 7:1-2, The King James Version)

Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offenses. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner.

(1 Corinthians 7:1-2, The One Translation )

The Anglican church refuses to die a slow death; instead she now stabs at her body to bring more rapidly the end. Relativist cowards, hateful of judgement and tradition are the hands that grip the blade.

The end will be unannounced. Radicals, despite their loathing for her, will in the most despicable act of all don her splendor, take her name, and besmirch its goodness spouting heresy to the masses. They will, in a classic fallacy, assume the world to be as weak as themselves and thereby able to justify the crime. In this assumption, for all their victories up to the present, the apostates are wrong. It will not require guidance from the ethereal, to see through this modern day Claudius. The corruption is as plain as the transformation of meaning and soiling of language in the second translation above.

The verse comes from The One Translation of the Bible by a former Baptist minister, John Henson. Rowen Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury has called it, revealingly, a book of "extraordinary power". It is, according to the ONE For Christian Renewal website, "what Christian language would sound like, if we really tried to screen out the stale, the technical, the unconsciously exclusive words and policies, and to hear for the first time what the Christian Scriptures were saying". The word "baptism" is changed to "dip", Saint Peter becomes "Rocky" and parables are now "riddles". To read it as a serious tome must take great faith. Another example shows how trying the task:

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

(Mark 1:4, Revised Standard Version)

John, nicknamed ‘The Dipper’, was ‘The Voice’. He was in the desert, inviting people to be dipped, to show they were determined to change their ways and wanted to be forgiven.”

(Mark 1:4, The One Translation)

If a move towards the vernacular is designed to make the text more clear, --to say nothing of the death to the poetry of King James­-- I believe that The One Translation fails. The choice of "dip" instead of "baptize" doesn't revise the meaning, it beclouds it making one think more of baseball players and chewing tobacco than of the locust-eating recluse John the Baptist. Many linguistic changes are similarly humor inducing and strange. The attempts to modernize the words fall flat more often than they succeed.

The translations true crime can be found in its creation of new biblical meaning. Returning to the first example, the shift in the message in Paul's words, from "let every man have his own wife, and every woman have her own husband" to "everyone to have a regular partner" is a blatantly political bastardization. In King James, a man should have a wife, a woman a husband. In TOT, all that is advised is "a regular partner". Does the Archbishop think that by rewriting the Bible with a politically correct hand is for the good of The Church? This Bible and its promoters, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury, must be rebuked and their agenda stopped.

In the late 1970's the Episcopalian church decided to rewrite the Lord's Prayer. William F. Buckley's words on that stupidity read as apropos today:

Perhaps it was ordained that the Episcopalians, like their brothers the Catholics, should suffer. It is a time for weeping, and a time for rage. Do not go kindly into the night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. That would be the advice of this outsider to my brothers in the Anglican Church. They must rage against those who bring upon Christianity not only indifference, but contempt.

(Speical thanks to Slothrop's Dream reader Christine for the scoop)

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