Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation

Wow, I'm amazed. A friend pointed me to Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation, an article on MSNBC.com. Christian Conservatives feel all the versions of the Bible have been co-opted by Liberals. So they are going to do their own translation. And since they believe all Bible scholars are notoriously liberal, they are going to do a wiki project, with everyone (except scholars and other liberals, I guess) saying what they think a passage means. The driving force behind this is Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com.

One of the things Schlafly complains about is that modern translators translate the word anthropos as person instead of man. Of course person or human being is actually more accurate. Greek has a word for man as opposed to woman. It is andros (root, aner). Anthropos refers to the human race.

I find this both a little scary and a lot sad, and I wonder what it's like to live so far to the right that everything else looks left. We all have our biases, of course. When I read virtually any translation f the Bible, I see the hand of orthodoxy choosing the safe English word, rather than anything more controversial.

Speaking of orthodoxy, I don't suppose most conservatives have any idea why certain things are considered orthodox and others not. I'm sure they are unaware that for its first three centuries Christianity was in a fluid state. People had widely differing views of what it was, and which books and letters were canonical. And how the church leadership should be organized. If Constantine hadn't needed the Roman bishops on his side, a different kind of Christianity might have been declared orthodox, and today we might be condemning those who declare Jesus to be God, for example.

This reminds me of people who declare that the media have a liberal bias. They don't seem to realize that the media express the view of the owners, who are more than likely to be rich white men with a vested interest in keeping the world safe for their kind. Similarly, the doctrines that won out in Christianity had less to do with true theology and more to do with establishing the church's authority and power.

I guess what bothers me most is that those behind the scenes with a very particular agenda are manipulating regular folks. I'm sure this is as true on the left as it is on the right, but right now it is so easy to see that many on the conservative side are frightened. They're convinced their way of life is being attacked, and are in a circle-the-wagons mode. I sympathize with them as much as I blame the behind the scenes people who are manipulating those fears. Too bad we can't all step out from our strongholds and really listen to each other. Then we might be able to lose our paranoia and things like this wiki conservative Bible might never even come up.