Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] My backstage work for the new revised standard version translation, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch.
[00:00:11] Here I continue some of my discussion of my involvement with the new revised standard translation. Not as one of the translators, I was still a graduate student, but as a behind the scenes helper and research it. I start this post with a bit of autobiography and end with issues of translation.
[00:00:31] I have mentioned that I started out as a secretary for the committee when they were meeting twice a year to make decisions for the new translation, recording the decisions they made for changing the older revised standard version translation. I did that for several years until they had finished their translation. I graduated from my PhD program in 1985, and I was already at that point teaching at Rutgers University. My position at Rutgers was a rather precarious one, professionally, in the language almost universally used today. I was an adjunct instructor, that is, a temporary faculty member without full or much of any benefits, and paid as part time, even though I was teaching the full load of courses with larger classes than most of my colleagues. Rutgers had a special title for me. I was called a co adjutant, casual. I never did know what that meant. The position didn't pay much, and I had to do other part time jobs to make ends meet with a wife who had gone back to school and two toddlers in hand. One of the jobs was not, well, typical. It involved digitizing greek inscriptions for the Princeton epigraphy project out of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. The other was delivering the New York Times.
[00:01:50] Among the virtues of that one was that it taught me how an early morning start can make a big difference in a day.
[00:01:57] Then, in 1987, my doctoral advisor, Bruce Metzger, asked me if I would be interested in taking over as the full time research assistant to the new revised Standard Translation committee, working out of the Spear library at Princeton Theological Seminary. This was a 40 hours a week, full time job. I leapt at it. But this was not instead of teaching at Rutgers, I continued to teach two courses a semester, which was a two thirds load. But I put in my hours and more for the NRSV committee. At that point, all the initial translation work, based on the twice a year meetings of the committee that had been going on for many years, had ended. What remained were numerous other tasks, all of which were completely essential for the translation. I was involved with these before spelling out what most of my duties were in my position, let me indicate what was happening with the committee itself. In essence, I suppose one could say, the committee, now that its work of translation was finished, more or less dispersed, and ceased to function as a committee, but there was still substantial work to be done. Most basic and important was this. As I have indicated, there were several subcommittees, each of whom was assigned different portions of the Bible to translate. The problem is that different subcommittees were either more or less interventionist in their decisions to change the older revised standard Version, verse by verse, word by word, or to leave it, as is. Some subcommittees tended to change it, others to leave it. But that means that if the committee simply published the work of each subcommittee as it was, some portions of the Bible would be more thoroughly revised than others, in some cases radically more revised. That would mean an uneven and arguably confusing translation. Moreover, there are some verses that appear in more than one book of the Bible, same verse, different locations. If different subcommittees translated different ones of these books, then the same wording in Hebrew could be translated differently in different places. That can't be good, and various individual words can be translated in various ways. What if one committee working on Leviticus translated a word one way, but another committee working on deuteronomy translated the very same word with a different english word in another way? Also, some translators and subcommittees had a better or worse literary sense than others, a better or worse facility with pleasing and rhetorically effective English. That means some parts of the Bible would be more rhetorically pleasing than others, not because the Hebrew or Greek was more elegant, but because the translators were that too, can't be good. Furthermore, as the years of translation had gone by, certain decisions were made, both about how to translate certain words, phrases, and ideas, and about how to implement the committee's views toward english style and usage, including issues related to inclusive language. But that would mean that the portions of the Bible translated early in the process would look different from those translated later, again shy of good. And so, to deal with all such problems, out of the entire committee, there were probably about 30 members or so. Altogether, three persons were selected to go over the entire translation verse by verse, starting with Genesis one one to even out the translation, make consistent the literary style, implement final policies determined after years of work, standardize the degree of alteration from the RSV as much as possible, and so on. The three person committee had two old Testament scholars from the larger committee, Robert Denton and Walter Harrelson, and one from the New Testament, Bruce Metzger.
[00:05:53] I became the research grunt for this three person final committee. I'll explain what I did in the next post or two. For now, I should say that these were three very fine scholars and superb masters of the english language. They had to make many decisions. And many, many of those decisions did not sit well with other members of the committee. That was for a fairly obvious reason. The subcommittees had worked for years to study, analyze, argue for, and vote on translations of the Bible's words, phrases, verses, passages, and books. In one fell swoop, everything a scholar had argued for over years of committee meetings could be swept away by this subcommittee. To some, this seemed inappropriate and just wrong. For others, there was no other way to do it, because not doing so would lead to a completely uneven, inconsistent, and, in places, inelegant translation. So this subcommittee had the authority and power to reverse decisions that had been years in the making.
[00:06:55] I worked closely with this committee, doing their beck and call. What I ended up having to do turned out to be a boatload. I'll explain in subsequent posts.
