Introducing Felton’s Dictum, or, The Drunk College Boys Test
It hasn’t drawn much media attention in this dismal season of waiting to see what stupid and repellent thing Donald Trump will say next, but Crossway has just announced a new edition of the English Standard Version Bible. What is more, after more than 1800-years of fine-tuning, it is the last translation.
Yes! Previous versions were of course inerrant and totally true and trustworthy, but this edition is r-e-e-e-a-l-l-y inerrant and totally true and trustworthy! It is s-o-o-o inerrant and totally true and trustworthy that the business of translation is closed. Forever. There is no longer a need. There will be no more translations.
Beginning in the summer of 2016, the text of the ESV Bible will remain unchanged in all future editions printed and published by Crossway—in much the same way that the King James Version (KJV) has remained unchanged ever since the final KJV text was established almost 250 years ago (in 1769). This decision was made unanimously by the Crossway Board of Directors and the ESV Translation Oversight Committee. All future Crossway editions of the ESV, therefore, will contain the Permanent Text of the ESV Bible—unchanged throughout the life of the copyright, in perpetuity.
Y’all will not be surprised to learn that this interests me.
In 1670, an (already-)excommunicated Dutch Jew named Baruch Spinoza published a book entitled Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which set out the principles of interpreting ancient texts. Basically, Spinoza said, the ancient texts should be understood as they would have been understood in the time and place they were written. This seems commonsensical today, but the idea was novel then and drew the wrath of the Roman Church. Though he clearly was one of the greatest intellects of his day, the idea died aborning and Spinoza died in obscurity.
Critical scholarship was revived in Germany in the 1850s and, as everybody knows, library shelves now groan with catalogs of blinking-neon contradictions and historical errors, and the answers of theologians anxious that the Bible continue to be received as ‘inerrant’ and their own authority as guides to the headache-inducing ‘mysteries’ (e.g., boo-boos) preserved.
Critical scholarship has stimulated a great deal of Bible-translation work, too. After all, if ongoing scholarship reveals that everybody knew that X was too-friendly with Z‘s wife, then there are grounds for wondering whether verse such-and-such means this or means that. And so on. As angry as they were when he introduced the idea, Spinoza’s Tractatus could justly be re-titled The Case for Eternal Busywork for Theologians.
And that’s before we get to the problem that the accepted meaning of words change over time. We have all had the experience of encountering something in the KJV of 1611 and wondering, “What the hell does that mean?” So too, inevitably, the ESV of 2016; the day unavoidably will arrive when its language will be obscure to readers.
Honestly, it is such a bizarre announcement, an announcement so wildly out-of-step with the established norms of Biblical scholarship, that I wonder if it constitutes a de facto concession that their schtick is failing so fast that there is unlikely to be any interest in a new translation 20-years from now. I mean, hell — not even many Christians actually read that ridiculous old book today.
But I am, as is well-known, extremely wicked, et cetera, et cetera, so take that idle speculation for what it’s worth.
No matter, we have at last the t-r-u-u-u-l-y inerrant version of the Bible — whatever that means. After all, the inerrant version isn’t the texts we actually possess. No. The inerrant version is the ‘original autographs’ of the texts we possess, the texts produced by the author’s very own personal hand. Those copies are long gone, and there is no reasonable expectation that they will ever be encountered. (And I call ‘bullshit’ on the claim that the copies we have are good enough, that the important stuff was magically preserved. After all, the oldest copy of Mark famously does not include the ending of Chapter 16, where the stuff about snake-handling is found. The oldest extant copy of Luke does not contain verse 23:34. “Father, forgive them …” And there are, oh, thousands of like, but less well-known, other examples.)
Nor does anybody know who wrote the canonical Gospels, or anything about their authors except what the authors themselves tell us. Mark, for instance, might have been a traveling companion of Peter, as the text seems to claim, but we know so little about Mark that he might actually have been a committee of drunk college boys who just wanted to see what they could get away with. I am not saying that’s the case, but that there is no — NO. — justification for claiming Mark is inerrant if you can’t show even that much about its provenance.
Therefore, Felton’s Dictum, and don’t bother me with jabbering about inerrancy and the expectations of Our Invisible Friend unless you can overcome it.
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IF you possess a known-to-be mangled, umpteenth-generation copy of an ancient text …
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OF unknown provenance, and …
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THAT text makes all sorts of fantastic, wildly implausible claims, and …
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YOU can’t even prove it wasn’t written by a bunch of drunk college boys out to excite the rubes, and …
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YOU claim it is inerrant, or without error, and …
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PROPOSE to rely upon it to justify constricting your neighbor’s life, then …
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YOU are …
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AN odious fool, and …
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NOT entitled to expect educated, decent-minded grown-ups to take you seriously.
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CASE closed.
Bah.