conservapedia

The Conservative Bible Project

PZ already posted on this, which is where I read it. But holy crap, this deserves some serious pointing and laughing so I'm happy to pile on. Some of the folks at Conservapedia have gotten together and launched the conservative bible project, which is quite ridiculous even for this gang of halfwits. It starts with this amusing declaration:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

* lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts of Christianity
* lack of precision in modern language
* translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

Now here's where it starts to get funny. Even after identifying these three as the only sources of error, their very first example involves none of them. This is listed under the title "First example: Liberal falsehood":

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:[7]

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

But this has nothing to do with any of those "three sources of error." They aren't arguing that the original language or modern language lacks precision or that there was bias on the part of a translator, they're arguing that the author of the Gospel of Luke simply made this up, offering no real argument for why it's made up other than, allegedly, liberals like it.

Third Example - Socialism

Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.

For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word "comrade" is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times.

Okay, this is so stupid that it seems like it must be a joke. Then again, this is Conservapedia we're talking about here. Stupid seems to be their strong suit.