For my daily Bible reading this year, I've been using the ESV study Bible instead of my standard NASB. The ESV has been getting raves from believers, including from a few I know who are as extreme fundamentalist (no dancing, no skin showing, no drums in church, etc.) as they come. I don't mind the ESV so much except for two things. First, just like why I hate the NIV and think it's from the devil, it screws up the translation of John3:16 and leaves out the word "begotten".Second, and what bugs me more, is that just like the weak NIV, they refuse to capitalize the letter "H" when it begins a pronoun that refers to Jesus or God. Now I understand the intent of the translators. It's not grammatically correct since only proper nouns are capitalized and not pronouns. And I understand that the original translations don't include deferential capitalizations, and that it was a western convention to do so. Here's the thing: those are the same arguments that atheists make on why we shouldn't capitalize the word "God".
Do you know that Jews don't say or write out the word Yahweh? Some Muslims won't write the name Allah either. And some people write G-d instead of God as a symbol of respect. That's how much faith means to those people. Who cares about linguistics when you're dealing with the Creator of All Things? The Bible tells us that "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." We have lost our holy fear, we have lost our ability to be reverent when we decide to drop letters for the sake of being grammatically correct. Prots can have their Jesus-as-best-friend concept if that means I also have to sacrifice the reverence instilled by Latin mass and enormous cathedrals.
2 comments:
You have not left the liturgy quite yet, have you.
You can take the boy out of the liturgy, but you can't....
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