INSIDE AMERICA

THE "WORDS" OF GOD
THE TWO NEWLY RELEASED BIBLE VERSIONS GIVE US PAUSE TO CONSIDER THE "GESTALT" OF JESUS, WHICH CONSTITUTES THE INTERNAL UNITY AND MEANING OF THE BIBLE AND THAT CLARIFIES OUR INNATE RELIGIOUS SENSE.

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

ACCORDING TO MICHELLE BOORSTEIN, THE WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER (MARCH 8, 2011), ON ASH WEDNESDAY, AMERICAN PUBLISHERS RELEASED NEW TRANSLATIONS OF TWO OF THE MOST WIDELY READ ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BIBLES–THE CATHOLIC NEW AMERICAN BIBLE (NAB) AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV), the one more popular with evangelicals.
Although most of the changes in the new versions are subtle language tweaks meant to make it more readable, writes Boorstein, "the books reflect stepped-up debate about how to understand Christianity's holy scriptures."
Boorstein explains: "The most controversial part of the new NIV is its removal of some of the gender-neutral language that publishers inserted in a version that was half-released in 2005, but then quashed because of criticism by conservatives. The new version, for example, replaces in Genesis God's call to make 'human beings in our image' with 'mankind.'"
The new NIV also tries to make wording less rigid. For example, it replaces the ban on women "exercising" authority over men in church from the 1984 version–the last official NIV–with the potentially softer "assuming" of authority.
"Whether that referred to all forms of authority over men in church or only certain forms in certain contexts is up to the individual interpreter to decide," read translation notes for the new version. It replaces multiple uses of "sinful nature" with "flesh," leaving it to the reader to understand sin as a core human element or as one of many outside forces to which we yield.
The new NAB retools only the Old Testament. The first new version since 1970, it is meant to sound more poetic and more contemporary, with "spoils" replacing "booty" and "burnt offering" supplanting "holocaust."
It could stir controversy, however, with decisions such as the one meant to be truer to the Hebrew–translating Isaiah 7:14 to say a "young woman" shall conceive, and bear a son, instead of a "virgin," which is how the previous Catholic Old Testament and most evangelical Bibles read.
In a splendid article on "Reading Scripture in the Body of Christ" in the Fall 2010 issue of the International Catholic Review Communio, Adrian J. Walker provides us with a very good summary of the Catholic approach to different interpretations of scriptural words, expressions, and passages using the book Jesus of Nazareth (Vol. 1) by Pope Benedict XVI.
The key to this method of interpretation is what the Pope calls a "canonical exegesis," a way that perceives Scripture as an organic whole, and acknowledges this wholeness as the first principle of its own rationality. It is a matter of faith allowing us to recognize the figure (in German, the Gestalt) of Jesus of Nazareth as the key to our grasp of all of Reality, and because of this, the "canon" or rule of measure of the being and meaning of the Bible.
The Pope speaks of it as a "Christological Hermeneutics." The Gestalt of Jesus is much more than His "figure": it includes the originality of His character and personality, the total consistency and complete coherence of His identity no matter the different perspectives and circumstances from which He is presented, an originality that breaks all existing categories by which we would like to describe the experience of an encounter with Him–a coherence bathed in the "light" of what John the Evangelist calls the "glory" of Jesus.
Jesus is Himself effortlessly free indeed, and without having to struggle to say "Yes" to His mission and be Who He is. We are the ones who must struggle to become what we are meant to be.
This Gestalt of Jesus could not have been constructed by the imagination of His original disciples or by anyone else since. It so explodes all existing categories that it can only be understood in the light of the Mystery of God. Only in this light, experienced within the communion being now created by the Holy Spirit as the fruit of His Death and Resurrection, can the internal unity and meaning of the Bible be grasped. Only this way can we see how biblical revelation purifies but does not destroy man's innate, God-given religious sense that allows all to grasp a "faint glimmer of truth" in which the cosmos itself becomes inherently symbolic of God, being in the nature of a "sign."
Finally, the Holy Father underlines how, in this method of interpretation, it is the real bodily Jesus who is the focal point of the Bible and the cosmos. The word "spiritual" means "according to the Holy Spirit," and has nothing to do with the watering down of the bodily existence of Jesus and His bloody death.
As 1 John­ summarizes, there are three witnesses–the Spirit, the Body and the Blood–and these three are one. It is because of our faith experience of the oneness of these three witnesses that we recognize the Bible as the Word of God.