It is good to see the work of a frankly unrepentant liberal gracing the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and S. MacLean Gilmour is to be congratulated for his unhyphenated forthrightness (“A New ‘Textus Receptus’?” Sept. 26 issue, pp. 6–10). It was high time that a responsible attack be launched on the Revised Standard Version. And as far as it goes, Professor Gilmour’s attack is a responsible one, but it leaves some problems unsolved.
I take it that two points irritate Professor Gilmour. 1. The National Council of Churches permits the making of exaggerated claims for the success of the RSV. 2. The RSV does not deserve to be what the National Council says it is. On the first point, we may agree. But the second point is hard to sort out of the first in Professor Gilmour’s argument, and it is much the more important point.
Let me comment on Professor Gilmour’s seven objections to “the claim that the RSV is (or ought to be) the English Bible of Protestant Christians.”
1. It is true that in the past new revisions or translations of the Bible have taken time to make their way. Professor Gilmour’s objection, then, seems to say that the RSV is not the Bible of Protestant Christianity because it has not had time to be. This is not an objection; it is a statement of purported fact. Professor Gilmour assumes that new revisions of the Bible ought to be slow to overcome previous versions. But this is something else again. If the RSV is, on the whole, an improvement, should we not rejoice if it makes its way quickly?
2. “The RSV is admittedly a provisional version.” Surely. What version is not? I am disposed to doubt that we will ever have a “definitive translation.” Professor Gilmour seems to think a definitive translation possible if we accomplish “the preparation of a really adequate Greek text of the New Testament” and (in parenthesis) “reconstructing a really adequate Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament.” But these are staggering tasks! And if we must await the time when biblical scholars happen to come with all the right guesses in them, what will we do in the meantime on Sunday morning? Every translation is provisional. Between now and the time when (presumably in Heaven) all Christians can read Greek and Hebrew, we must be satisfied with the best English version we have.
3. Is the fact that the RSV is a product exclusively of North America really an objection? The real question is, what is the intrinsic worth of the translation? Perhaps a more adequate version will be possible only when an international committee of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic scholars can be convened. But that probably will be in Heaven!
4. No one with any literary sense would deny that the language of the RSV does not have the stature of the KJV. I recoil particularly at that terribly uneuphonious “steadfast love.” But the complaint here simply alleges, does it not, that the RSV committee did not go far enough in contemporizing the English. The force of this objection is really that the RSV is not the final translation. And, as I observed just now, no one has said that it is.
5. The KJV certainly has, as Professor Gilmour says, become an integral part of the English language. This does not render it sacrosanct. The KJV revisers intended that the Bible be available in the language of the people. Whether we like it or not, the language of the people today is not seventeenth century English. We simply do not “go unto our friends,” saying, “Hast thou been even unto the ice-cream joint which is over against Main Street?” The perpetuation of that kind of diction as the distinctive language of Protestant Christianity when it is at its distinctive activity of worship goes only to wall off the life of faith from the street and the market place.
Furthermore, the fact that the hearing of the KJV produces an “atmosphere of worship” is totally irrelevant. If worship were simply a matter of atmosphere—and I am certain that it is not—there might be force to the argument. But I have seen too many “atmospheres of worship” generated by the KJV in which the understanding of the scriptural message was totally absent, and the worship no more profound than the calling up of conditioned spiritual reflexes in response to that for which we have “affection.” I am not sure that we are supposed to have “affection” for the Bible at all. A sweet old lady accosted me one time at Union Seminary. “What are you working on?” she wanted to know. When I told her that I was working on Habakkuk, she said, “Oh, I’m very fond of Habakkuk.” And the tone of her voice gave me to understand that she was precisely “fond” of him. Well, I’m not. He shakes me to my roots.
6. Here Professor Gilmour returns to the first point. Says he, the KJV outsells the RSV, and therefore the RSV is not the Bible of Protestantism. I happily accept that. But I keep recalling his earlier statement that the RSV “should not and hopefully will not become the Bible of the English-speaking world” (italics his). He really wants to say, then, that it will be a black day if the RSV ever outsells the KJV. I object to this. Surely the Greek text behind the RSV New Testament, eclectic though it may be, is a better text than that lying behind the KJV. We should not be satisfied with a lesser product if a better one is at hand.
7. I feel that Professor Gilmour’s last objection is no different from the sixth. Again we say “Amen” to the assertion that official preference for the RSV does not mean grass-roots adoption of it. But again we must disagree with the reason why the statement is made.
I hope it is clear that I do not argue that the RSV is the best translation we could have. I am willing to grant many criticisms of it from all kinds of sources.
But I will not grant that because the RSV is not the perfect translation, it should not be used as it is being used. I hope it will be used even more. Why? I have already suggested some of the reasons. The RSV rests on a better reconstruction of the text than does the KJV. It is closer to an idiom “understanded of the people” than is the KJV. It is the work of a group of scholars representing a wide variety of denominations. Therefore it has a far greater claim to use in public worship than the Moffatt translation, referred to by Professor Gilmour. Moffatt’s one-man job is a good and competent translation. But a translation is always also an interpretation. The one-man translations represent the honest convictions of a single scholar regarding the interpretation of the text. The committee translation, on the other hand, with all its faults (someone said that a camel is “a horse designed by a committee”), represents that submission of the individual scholar’s convictions to the scrutiny of the Church which is the hallmark of genuine Christian scholarship. As the KJV in its day represented a consensus of Christian scholarship as to the meaning of the biblical text, the RSV in our day represents a consensus of Christian scholarship, a scholarship technically better equipped than the scholarship of the early seventeenth century.
The RSV is not, emphatically, the best possible translation. We may hope for a better one. But let us not expect too much; no translation of the Bible into English will ever be more than a provisional translation. The question we must ask of any translation is whether it is a good one. The RSV is a good one, in many ways demonstrably better than the KJV. The KJV may in some sense be “the noblest monument of English prose.” To that we say: 1. that many monuments belong in graveyards; 2. that the English prose of the seventeenth century is not alive in the twentieth; 3. that we may be sure that the revisers of the KJV committee fully expected, indeed hoped, that their work would be superseded.
Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.
