This whetted my appetite for reading the whole bible, and I am following Michael Coley's 52 week bible reading plan, which divides the bible into 7 genres. I prefer reading whole books, and am not following the plan exactly, but find the chart handing for seeing where I'm up to! And what's left.
I began this at the beginning of June and am now 3/4 of the way through. I am using my ESV Reformation Study Bible, edited by R C Sproul, and am reading the book outlines and articles as well, and some of the notes. The ESV is not as easy to read as the TNIV, and is not written in the language people speak, though I'm familiar with the language, having attended church for over 50 years and having read the bible in the KJV, the RSV and the NIV versions during those 50 years.
The translators of the ESV claim that versions such as the TNIV are not using proper English when they use the singular they, seemingly unaware that using a generic plural instead of masculine pronouns has been part of English for hundreds of years.
But it is also used by the article writers in the ESV itself. Here is an extract from the helpful page on The Unpardonable Sin on page 1421 in the edition I'm using:
A person who wants to repent, that is, to reverse the sins they may be guilty of, has not suffered this hardening and has not committed this profound act of hatred that God has determined he will not forgive.
Note the mixing of plural and singular in the one sentence here! We were taught it was wrong in our grammar classes, but it is the way people speak, and it seems, also write.
4 comments:
To each their own!
I wonder what Drs. Poythress and Grudem would say about the sentence you quoted, David.
Hi Wayne
I am finding the ESV to be a little bit pregnant, because many of the things its promoters accuse the TNIV of are also done in the ESV, though not to the same degree.
For example, they say that the TNIV and NIV interpret the text, rather than translating, because they might render a word like SARX, not as the traditional flesh but as human nature.
But the ESV does similar things, over and over. I know, because I've now read more than 75% of it.
Hi David (from another David!):
Sent hither by the Better Bibles Blog entry, just one comment --
You write: "But it is also used by the article writers in the ESV itself". This is a contradiction in terms. Anything the "article writers" of the Reformation Study Bible notes write is by definition not part of "the ESV itself"!
I'm guessing you already know that, but if the form of words makes folks think that the articles of the RefSB are by the ESV translators, then that is quite a confusion. Especially if it leads to accusations of inconsistency on the part of the ESV translation committee!!
Best wishes from sunny Edinburgh,
David Reimer
(Comment copied from Better Bibles Blog)
Poythress and Grudem in fact allow singular "they" in their own works, as I have found in their book The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God's Words, Broadman and Holman 2000, a version I downloaded from CBMW and I think is still available there.
This is from the Foreword by Valerie Becker Makkai:
No one, apparently, paid any attention to the instructions of the grammar teachers and scholars. They just went on saying "what came naturally", which was what they heard other people saying. (p.13)
Then this is from the main text, by P&G themselves; in this paragraph there are no less than nine singular "they"s, all referring back to "each author":
In cases where the human personality and writing style of the author were prominently involved, as seems the case with the major part of Scripture, all that we are able to say is that God's providential oversight and direction of the life of each author was such that their personalities and skills were just what God wanted them to be for the task of writing Scripture. Their backgrounds and training (such as Paul’s rabbinic training, or Moses’ training in Pharaoh’s household, or David’s work as a shepherd), their abilities to evaluate events in the world around them, their access to historical data, their judgment with regard to the accuracy of information, and their individual circumstances when they wrote, were all exactly what God wanted them to be, so that when they actually came to the point of putting pen to paper, the words were fully their own words but also fully the words that God wanted them to write, words which God would also claim as his own. (pp.61-62)
I'm sure there are more examples in the remaining nearly 300 pages of the book, but this is enough to prove my point. So, again, these people should practice what they preach!
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