Subject:  Barnstone on Reforming the Biblical Text

This is from W. Barnstone's New Covenant, and he points something out
that I have seen in other Bibles also aside from the Jesus Seminar:

"GOOD-HEARTED REFORMING OF THE TEXT

What are the good-hearted reforms?

In recent years, there have been radical changes in both translation
and commentary. In The Five Gospels, translators Robert Funk and
Robert W. Hoover change the wicked "Jews" to the wicked "Judeans."
This is surely done with the intention of softening the blow, yet it
also raises questions. Who are the Judeans? Isn't Judean another name
for Jew? And whoever they are, are not Judeans now the wicked
accusers and the wicked accused, just as the Jews were made to be
both the accusers and the accused in standard versions? And if the
accusers are not Jews, who are they?

Most pitiful is that in their desire not to hurt the Jews, the
translators have eliminated them completely, even in the annotations,
where we read about 11 conflicts between Christians and "Judeans." We
are back to traditional translations of the Old Testament where the
Jews also disappeared in favor of the "Israelites" and the "Hebrews."
The Five Gospels does not resolve the central question of whether the
conflict is to be considered an internal dispute between Jews or, as
in traditional translations, one between good outsiders who
effectively pass as non-Jews and bad rejectionist Jews. To make Jews
into Judeans does not eliminate the "good outsider" versus the "bad
locals" persuasion. What happens when a name changes and a people
disappear is disquieting.

Another solution by the editors of the 1995 Oxford "An Inclusive
Version" is singularly noble and, I am afraid, impossible. The
editors are clearly appalled by the extant scriptures because of the
described disguisements and the intrinsic hatred of the Jews. In
their missionary translation they omit the words "the Jews" when
those words function as an exclusively accusatory epithet. It
distinguishes, on the one hand, between the term "the Jews" as a
straightforward, historical way to refer to the ethnic people, of
whom Yeshua was one, and, on the other, "the Jews" as "the code-word
for religious people ... who miss the reve- (xvii). They call the
Jews "opponents" or "the enemies" or "the religious authorities"
or "the leaders," which they do "in order to minimize what could be
perceived as a warrant for anti-Jewish bias" (xvii). Yet we soon
learn who these opponents are, and they turn out to be "the most
despicable" of the Jews.

Felicitations to the Oxford translators for their goodwill. They have
changed the New Covenant to overcome unpleasantness, but the serious
problems remain. As the Jesus Seminar directs us to hate Judeans
rather than Jews, so the Oxford translators would have us hate Jewish
authorities and Jewish priests and the unidentified "opponents." The
changes are fishy. In making the text more friendly to some of the
Jews, the editors have violated the unfriendly intention of the
scriptures toward the Jews. To bowdlerize the essence of the
scripture as we have it may be thought to be a form of benevolent
book burning.

One solution is to leave the text alone. It is the one followed here.
When the Jews are demonized, let the Jews be called Jews. Then
problems are clear, and through commentary the hatred may be seen in
the context of polemical struggles of a certain time many decades
after Yeshua's life and death and this knowledge alone diminishes the
bite. The slurs appear too often but do not hold dominion and must
not be allowed to do so. They are finite human blunder. They fade
before the huge wonders and sundry messages of the story. And these
wonders are beyond measure.

Holding dominion in the New Covenant are the beauty of the word, the
compassion for the poor and hungry, the blind and the leper, the
crippled and the possessed. The wisdom narration explores physical
and mental suffering and offers earthly and spiritual hope. Preserved
in plain Koine Greek, this supreme telling of roaming and parable is
intrinsically so powerful that it survives translation with
distinction in every tongue. And on each page the reader may
overhear, in a reformation of openness, the solitary mystery of love."