Diana Butler Bass writes of her surprise, nearly 30 years ago, at the strange way that a famous passage in Ephesians was rendered by the translators of the New International Version (NIV) Bible:
When reading Ephesians, my friends thought it would be funny to have me — the only woman with a theological degree — lead the study on chapter 5: "Wives, submit to your husbands." Preparing for that night, I looked up Ephesians 5:21-33, a text that had long riled me, in my new [NRSV, New Revised Standard Version] Bible.
What I saw stunned me: The version in the NIV was different from the NRSV!
The editors of the NIV had separated Ephesians 5:21, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ," from the rest of the passage, disconnecting the call for mutual submission from the rest of the instructions. To further distance verses 21 and 22, the NIV inserted a heading, "Wives and Husbands," that breaks the flow of the text.
Thus, the NIV makes it appear that the teaching begins with the line, "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord."
The NRSV surprised me because no division existed. The text moves smoothly from verse 21 to 22, reframing wifely submission as part of a whole teaching on servanthood as discipleship. It also translated "submit" as "be subject to," a rendering closer to the Greek.
For more than a decade, I had struggled with that teaching in Ephesians — only to discover that my struggles were not with Scripture. Rather, I was struggling with an interpretation of Scripture provided by the editors of the NIV.
I put that Bible away, never to trust it again. …
(Extra paragraphing added; hat tip: TitusOneNine.)
The comments at T19 make for informative reading, and not just because some of its traditionalist worthies, true to form, seized the opportunity to dump on the NRSV.
(In one case, this was almost a literal dumping on the NRSV, by a commenter writing that "I’d wipe my rear with the pages of that book, except that Charmin is better." I’m sure that nonbelievers and doubters shake their heads in bemusement at that kind of behavior.)
(The rear-wiper’s comment did not sit well with another reader, while still another one pointed out that the rear-wiper didn’t seem to know what he was talking about on another point.)
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