A MOUSY QUIET PRINTER I met at a meal last week texted me a strange note earlier this week.
In it, he refused to print a Bible I never asked him to print.
“Good morning Steve, I have decided to not move forward with you on the Casual Bible paraphrase. I have discussed with a man I trust. He is encouraging me not to be involved based on Matthew 5:17-18.
‘For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them’” (Matthew 5:17-18, English Standard Version).
To which I said “huh?”
I didn’t see the connection.
So I asked him to explain what Matthew 5 has to do with The Casual English Bible® (TCEB), which—as I said—we hadn’t asked him to print.
He said, “Fair question. I am in the middle of something but will respond.”
Steve the Pharisee
Later he wrote, “Matthew 5:17-20 is an introduction of Jesus correcting the Pharisees in making changes to Scripture.”
I didn’t tell him he had the wrong chapter. Jesus corrected the Pharisees in Matthew 20. Matthew 5:20 is where Jesus tells Pharisees (and where the printer seems to tell me) to go to hell:
“If you want to get into the kingdom of heaven, make sure that you’re a better human being and more acceptable to God than the scribes or the Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20, The Casual English Bible® TCEB).
So the printer says I’m going against Jesus when I try to help bring newcomers into the Bible through easy-reading English. And it’s because I’ve changed the Scripture.
I said, “You do know that the only Bible Jesus knew was the Old Testament.” That was the Jewish Bible. Jesus’ Bible.
The printer was quoting from a Bible that had added 27 entire books to the Holy Scripture—the New Testament. In fact, the words he quoted from Jesus were added to the Jewish Bible more than 300 years after Jesus.
With peanut butter on his pointer he was fingering me for finishing the jar of peanut butter. That’s a variation of “the pot calling the kettle black.” Both were black.
Jealous Jesus
But he said, “Jesus is jealous for his word, even the smallest one and the punctuation because he wants no innocent alteration to cause confusion.”
Jesus never said any such thing.
Jesus spent almost all his ministry on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, teaching and healing fishermen, farmers, and herders. He spoke in the language of common people. From what we can tell from his quotes, he didn’t talk in a scholarly language comparable to the English Standard Version or the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Those are both Bibles I find helpful, but I’ve been researching and writing about the Bible for over 40 years. My readers have not, with a few exceptions I’d guess.
Those Bibles are sedatives to my target readership. The theological jargon and beloved churchy phrases are confusing to newcomers and outsiders.
I said, “I write for them and paraphrase for them and try as best I can to put the truth that the ancient writers were trying to convey into the kind of English words and phrases we speak today.”
Yet the printer seemed to see me as a hell-bound Pharisee.
Steve, a son of God
How ironic, since people in my camp would associate the printer with the Pharisee. They would see the printer’s intolerance toward someone else’s way of teaching a truthful message about God as a parallel to the Pharisees. They, too, rejected a different way of delivering the same message they were taught in their sacred writings.
You see, in my version, he’s the bitterly evil Pharisee and I’m a son of God.
That’s the dilemma. It’s a war. I want peace. But there is no peace.
Go write a book I hate
I said, “Honestly, it hurts not to be perceived as a brother who is trying to take the story of Jesus to people who have never heard of him.”
He said, “You could write a book like The Shack which took a lot of liberties and ‘helped’ many people.”
I added the quotes around “helped” because that’s how I read it, as a jab and not a compliment—since he hadn’t complimented me anywhere else in our short history, and his camp hated The Shack. God was a woman in that book.
This is going in a blog
I told him I was going to write a blog article about this.
He said, “This must have really upset you. I am glad, as I hope you take to heart what we discussed in a positive way and not just dismiss it as someone who is not interested in people coming to God. I disagree with you about rewriting Scripture but do not hold a grudge or animosity.”
I said, “You say there is no animosity, but there certainly is. Reread what you’ve written, and you should be able to see the tone and tenor of your voice…And you say you are glad I am upset. Actually, I didn’t get upset until I read that. What a demeaning and hateful thing to say. But it is an interesting quote, from a journalistic point of view. I think we’re done.”
There are no winners in that debate. Just two people talking past each other, each one incapable of understanding why the other one can’t see a Pharisee in the mirror.
The back story
I had met the printer a couple weeks earlier at a lunch set up by another Bible translator. The two men are lunch buddies.
The Bible translator who arranged the lunch is an elderly gent and a former pastor I had met only a few days earlier. I had arranged the meeting at a church to pick his brain about the kind of paper to use in the TCEB. “Bible paper” is a thin specialty paper that few printers carry.
He arrived exuberant, and talking about how much alike we are and that we’re doing the same kind of thing. He began brainstorming about ways he could help me promote TCEB, going on church tours, introducing me to printers and publishers. I asked why he would do all that since we came from opposite camps theologically and, as we discovered, politically.
He said it was obvious God put us together to work together. Well, okay.
Then he talked about the resources he got for free in putting together his Bible translation, which leans into the literal meaning and away from the more readable approach of a paraphrase. He and the printer got along well.
The Bible translator said he liked the maps I’ve made and said they would work great in his Bible. So he asked if he could use them.
I declined because I haven’t even printed them in TCEB. And they’re branded TCEB maps. Those maps are the main cash product to support our work.
He said he knew there might need to be some monetary contribution.
“Some”? That’s when I started to feel manipulated and used.
Why not just say what you want without the salesmanship hype about crazy ideas that would never work anyhow?
The woke and the nappers
The translator and printer casually chatted about how superior their preferred approach to Bible translation is over the approach I use, as though I wasn’t there with my designer—two woke Wesleyans, from their point of view, with two Calvinist nappers, some might suggest.
I took as much as I could. Then I just told the other translator to pick out a section of his Bible and we would read the verses side-by-side.
It was a Bible version shootout at the OK Carrabba’s Italian Grill.
As the smoke settled and my remaining eggplant parmesan cooled, he sat quietly stunned for a second. Then, leaning into his Bible he said of one phrase, “Is that in there?”
No, I added it.
I should not have enjoyed it as much as I did. But I do have to confess that I’m not sorry.
Frustrated at the end of the meal we shared, he said, “Everything I’m doing is because I want to get those maps.”
I thought, “Well you manipulative son of a gun.”
Still, God bless us every one. Two Pharisees in particular. No, three.
My designer is innocent and later wrote, “That was awkward.”
An afterthought
As you can imagine, I hesitated sharing this story. It’s too real, and it paints no one in a good light but my designer who mostly kept quiet during the meal.
“Smart people say little.
People with good sense keep their cool.
Even a fool looks smart when his mouth is shut.
If he doesn’t say anything, he could actually look intelligent” (Proverbs 17 27-28 Casual English Bible).
For the record, our designer is no fool. She looks smart and is smart.
People who work on literal Hebrew-to-English and Greek-to-English Bible translations or ancient-idea to modern-idea paraphrases know that we humans bring a human touch to Bible translating. We politely debate, we argue and raise our voice, and we stomp out of meetings over how to translate words like “holiness.”
We bring to the work our best and sometimes our worst. Our compassion and our pride. Our joy and our outrage. Our mission and the mess we sometimes make of it.
Yet in the end, the final word belongs to God. He says what he wants to say in printed words and with his embedded Spirit.
Signup to the new Casual English Bible® blog
Steve’s Bible-background YouTube Channel
Steve’s song from the words of prophet Habakkuk
Bible map search engine
Help support The Casual English Bible®
Become a Patron
Bible Gateway
This is a fine Casual English Bible mess