So, I'm watching the Colbert Report, and he mentions that Conservapedia has started a project to Retranslate the Bible using only proper Conservative buzz words. While investigating this, I came across the article for Feminist Bible. In which, they complain that feminist ideas have permeated a number of newer Bible translations. And, well, yeah, Today's New International Version certainly has imposed some Gender-Neutral dialog and terminology.
Here's the problem though, they start talking about James 2:15-16, talking about how English translations make an "ungrammatical" (their words, not mine... I'm a linguist, if it sounds right it's grammatical, it may not be "proper", but it's still grammatical) rendering of a phrase in order to make it sounds more Gender-Neutral. Sure, I totally bet that the TNIV translation has done this, and guess what? It does use the plural personal pronoun to refer to an antecedent of "brother or sister". So, I'm like, "ok, I'll give you that."
But then in the footnotes, I note that they claim that this grammatical error is even in the KJV version, and in most English versions in fact. Ok, now things smell fishy, because KJV translation was done WELL BEFORE any liberal 1984-paranoid feminists could have gotten their hands on it for Gender-Neutral language. So... what's going on here?
I know of a site called BibleServer.com, which is an awesome webpage, because they provide multiple different translations, all easy to access. Ok, first up, the NIV translation. Nope, NIV uses the "grammatical" non-specifically-gendered personal pronoun "him". But, sure enough, KJV does as well. Well, this is really weird, right? Because as I noted before, KJV was well before any potential feminist influence. Well, ok, well, what about trying a different language?
German doesn't normally use their plural pronoun for non-specified or mixed gender, as they have a very DEFINED gender system. In fact, girls are given the pronoun "it", as well as "Omachen" (grandma with a dimunitive). This is because grammatical gender REQUIRES it to be used... it's not anti-feminine, it's not misogynistic, it's just the way the language works. Yet in the Luther 1984 translation, something weird is going on here... they use the 3rd-person singular subjunctive of "haben" => "haette", but they then refer to the singular antecedent with a plural pronoun. What's going on here?
So, let's look up a Spanish translation, "Version La Biblia de Dia". Spanish is a good choice for this, because they only have masculine and feminine, and even if there were a feminist rally, and there were 100 women, and one man in the crowd, the speaker would grammatically and naturally refer to the crowd as "hombres" (men). In Spanish, all non-specific singular pronouns are male, but any and all MIXED gender PLURAL pronouns are male. So, what happens here? Well, here the plural conjugation of "tener" is used: "tienen", and a plural pronoun is used to refer to this "singular" antecedent again. ("les") Ok, now I'm thoroughly confused...
Ok, wait, I know... let's stop all this work, and start walking back in the documents. Let's start with LATIN... good ol' Latin, when I want to know what misogynistic anti-feminists said about a Bible verse, I go to LATIN. Well, here they use the plural conjugation "sunt", and use a plural referent to the a "singular" antecedent again. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!
Ok, that's it... what language was the Epistle of James originally written in? Uh... Greek. Ok, let's go to the ancient greek. James 2, English and Ancient Greek side-by-side. Alright, here we go, we can go looking though this and.... brother... sister... plural conjugation... plural pronoun...
Ok, so, the reason why KJV and "most English translations" have this plural usage here is because the original freaking GREEK had this "grammatical error", not because of an error of the translators.
And Conservapedia rips on NIV all the time for being liberal biased and all, but they're the only people who, BECAUSE of a liberal attitude to update the language, altered the original meaning of the text in order to conform to proper English grammar of the time.
Ok, seriously, these are the same people who are vouching that the KJV meanings have skewed, and that "logos" should be translated with "truth" rather than "word" anymore, etc. And they're talking about how the original meaning is being lost by the modern liberal jerkwads... yet... some of the liberal jerkwads are actually ensuring that the language conforms to modern day grammar, rather than just blithely repeating the same grammatical errors made in the original Greek.
It reminds me of an amusing quote I once read, but cannot find again, so I shall paraphrase: "How fortuitous it was that God learned Greek to write the New Testament... it's however unfortunate that he had not learned the grammar better."
God can't properly agree a pronoun with a singular complex antecedent... isn't this book supposed to be infallible?