I am making it sound as if the author has definitively settled these issues, which are surely still going to be debated till Doomsday. But I don’t mind leaving such an impression, for BeDuhn’s arguments seem refreshingly cogent, clear, and comprehensive. He puts out to pasture various bogus grammatical rules that almost seem, like the grammar of Koranic Arabic, to have been fashioned to protect the text from heresy. He is forthright in expressing the obvious but ecumenically correct explanation: most Protestant translators work under the gun, pressured to make the alleged source of their doctrines reflect those (post-biblical) doctrines after the fact. The two most neutral, Greek-faithful translations turn out to be the Roman Catholic New American Bible and the Jehovah’s Witnesses New World Translation, a reworking of the American Standard Bible. BeDuhn speculates that Catholics can be freer with the details of the text because they don’t have to pretend to find their theology in it in full-blown form. He suspects that the Witnesses had similar freedom because they had cast off the baggage of orthodoxy and approached the text with fresh eyes. That certainly seems to be true of Charles Taze Russell, their founder. On the other hand, BeDuhn turns right around and shows the arbitrariness of the New World Translation’s importation of the name Jehovah into the New Testament, and the theological bias implied in their refusing to do so in the case of Old Testament quotes where using “Jehovah” in a passage applied to Jesus would imply a higher Christology than they accept. BeDuhn confesses that he, too, has a bias, and that is to try to let the ancient texts speak for themselves, stripping away biased theological mistranslations. Bravo! May we all be so “biased”!
