Religion: Unmanning the Holy Bible

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The sexual-textual revolution comes to Scripture

What is a human being that you are mindful of him, and a mortal that you care for him?

Sound familiar but somehow fiat? The more famous rendering of Psalms 8: 4 is rather more ringing: "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?" But Christians in the English-speaking world had better get used to the neutered wording, for it may appear in the new edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible due a decade from now. The reworked RSV will include hundreds of such language changes made in the cause of stripping Scripture of "sexism."

The use of "inclusive language," intended to put women on a textual par with men, has long since been accepted in many areas of U.S. publishing, such as school textbooks and children's fables. But its application to the Bible is already stirring an unholy row. The immediate point of contention is the RSV, now being updated by a committee of 25 scholars and translators. Their efforts will have far-reaching importance. With millions of copies sold worldwide since it first appeared in 1952, the RSV is by far the most broadly used Bible translation in modern English.

Precisely because of its influence, the RSV is now a target of Protestant feminists and other critics who want to purge it of the male chauvinism that they find running all through its pages. Says the Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, a United Methodist mission official: "People are becoming increasingly sensitive to language that renders half the human race invisible." As it happens, such sentiment is strong in the National Council of Churches (N.C.C.), whose education division is overseeing the RSV revision. But the N.C.C.'s leaders have hesitated to alter the RSV radically, partly because the organization gets the royalties. The RSV has been a success largely because of its preservation of much of the evocative language of its antecedent, the King James Bible of 1611. So after the education division decided to prepare a new edition of the RSV, it instructed its translators to get rid of as much "masculine-biased language" as possible while retaining the King James "flavor."

The man in charge of the RSV revision is the Rev. Bruce M. Metzger, 66, a gentlemanly New Testament professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. While Metzger is conservative on matters of doc trine, he is willing to avoid male nouns and pronouns—where the original Hebrew and Greek texts allow it. Thus the reference in Romans 14: 1 to "the man who is weak in faith" will likely become "the one who is weak . . ." In Psalms, the first verse will read "Blessed are those who walk not in the counsel of the wicked," rather than "Blessed is the man who walks not . . ." In Psalms alone, more than 200 male pronouns will be dropped.

Even these limited word changes are too much for many traditionalists, among them the Rev. E. Earle Ellis of New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New