A thousand times this! I sometimes think there was a contest for most banal rendering. Note how more effective one word like “witnessed” would have been. Additionally, and I don’t care what language anyone was speaking, no one, outside of academia or the police in official reports, would ever use the formation “have observed”, especially when what was “observed” was Satan falling from the sky like lightning. The goal seems to have been to beat the life out of a passage and to make it as meaningful when read as a manufacturer’s warranty.
Lost in Translation
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
This is why the Catholic NABRE (and to a lesser extent the Protestant NIV) are such horrid translations (not to mention the heterodox study footnotes in the Catholic NABRE). The men who provide the NABRE translation do NOT believe that the Bible is the written Word of God. It’s obvious as all heck. And until those men are removed from Church authority, we will continue to have lackluster liturgy because liturgy and Scripture are intricately linked together.
I wish every copy of the NABRE were burned and replaced with the RSV2CE or the ESVCE or even the NRSVCE. And while I am not a fan of the Douay-Rheims because it’s a translation of a translation, I’d be happy with that too. But the NABRE with its liberal progressive footnotes is heretical.
PS, I have a solution! Let’s go back to the Latin Vulgate translation and the Mass in Latin again! Oh yeah, I forgot: Traditionis Custodes. Silly me.
More truth from Anthony Esolen. With every edition the New American Bible gets worse.
Yes. I loathe the NAB translation, but for a number of years I was told I had to use it in the classroom, with the excuse being it was the proper liturgical translation. I finally got fed up and will be teaching with the RSV-CE this year, and I’m ready for the pushback.
A couple of years ago my daughter and I established a habit of reading a chapter a day (roughly) of the Bible together. Each of us reads from very dog eared paperback copies of the NAB, which my husband and I have had for many years. One is from the 1980s with the “Revised New Testament” and the other is from the 1990s with the “Revised New Testament and Psalms”. These have sentimental value to us for reasons I won’t go into here.
We got to the Book of Psalms several months ago and that’s when I noticed that, for lack of a better term, the revised Psalms were much more “flat” that the previous version due to having been purged of non-inclusive language — for example, Psalm 127 was changed from “Behold, sons are a gift from the Lord” and “Happy the man whose quiver is filled with them” to “Children too are a gift from the Lord” and “Blessed are they whose quivers are full”. That’s just one particularly obvious example but there were other instances, too numerous to mention, in which the revised version just didn’t have the poetry of the original.
Because modernists and liberals hate beauty and don’t believe in the transcendent. They are banal people who speak a banal tongue.
In politics, I often describe myself as a Willam F. Buckley conservative. In matters of religion, I will now describe myself as an Anthony Esolen Catholic! The man is amazing , , ,
Yes, the NABRE is truly terrible, and it seems every five years the USCCB “revises” the translation for mass, and despite this, it continues to be the worst translation, and when you hear read out loud, the cringe factor is great. It’s too bad that the USCCB makes money off the NABRE because they own the copyrights to the translation, it’s a sorry situation.
Thankfully Catholic publishers are starting to serve the people of God with other translations. Tan Book recently published a Lectio Divina version of the gospel of John using the Douay-Rheims Bible, it’s excellent. The new Catholic Study Bible using the RSVCE, and there’s even an ESV Catholic Edition. Thankfully, despite the awfulness of the USCCB’s official NABRE version, Catholics can bypass that atrocity and read good translations.
Prof. Esolen has written often, and always well, about the pathetic USCCB-endorsed NAB. He calls the style “Nabbish” and lacerates it without mercy. Do a quick search on his name plus the term “Nabbish” and you will enjoy the results.
Frank,
I did the search and had a rip-roaring good time reading his poetic criticism of the NAB and the fools who translated it, er, “translated” it.
I’ve seen a lot of Bible translations over the years. I would never say it is the worst. But I would say it’s probably the lamest. The words that come to mind most often when I read it or hear it read are vapid and sterile. If I summed it up with one, single word, it would be uninspiring.
It could be worse. Back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s there was a push from the more “progressive” USCCB apparatchiks to rewrite the scripture mandated for Masses to be “gender-neutral” or in the parlance of the time, “inclusive”.
The push failed here in the States, but a similar campaign in Canada succeeded. So the USCCB bureaucrats craftily ordered the publication of booklets for the Mass readings with US readings on one page, and the bowlderized Canadian readings on the facing page. I was a lector at my college parish, and I remember Sister Pantsuit, the liturgist there, helpfully suggesting we use the Canadian versions when we lectored. “They’re the same, so it’s OK”, she would say— which made me wonder, if they’re the same, why suggest the one over the other? I’m sure her misuse of those books was the exact reason they were created.
Is there anything the USCCB touches that doesn’t turn into something pitiful?
[…] Synod Office Postpones Reports On Controversial Issues – National Catholic RegisterThe Horrible USCCB New American Bible Translation – Anthony M. Esolen, Ph.D., via […]
Presentism makes us believe that we will get the current translation more righter than our benighted forefathers.
Language is gettin not gooder ech dae
Not only did they push for the “inclusive” language then, it made its way into the OCP and other hymnal publications. Even the banal ditties of the era had to dispense with masculine language, thus becoming grammatically torturous.
And then there was the sneaking in of the neutered language into the liturgy itself…even the 8-10 year old me realized how stupid it sounded to say “for the praise and the glory of God’s name, for the good of God’s holy church.”
Ice pick in my ears!
Here is a good article on Bible translations:
https://stannbb.org/our-faith/the-bible/bible-translations/
I use a wide variety of translation, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox. I also use the Latin Vulgate, but that’s a translation too.
Translations can be formal equivalent (literal), dynamic equivalent (thought for thought), or paraphrase.
Each style has its uses and its disadvantages, so unless you can read Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, you’re stuck with a translation. Or you can cheat like me and use an interlinear with Strong’s Concordance.
For liturgy, I generally recommend a formal equivalent translation; the RSV2CE or ESVCE or even NRSVCE would be far better than the NABRE.
I would NOT use the Catholic NLT, or Catholic GNT, or even the Revised New Jerusalem Bible for liturgy. The first two are too paraphrastic and the last one has too many liberal progressive gender inclusivisms.
As for Protestant ones, though they lack the Deuterocanonicals, I like the LSB, NASB and NKJV (all formal equivalent).
Conclusion: use a good formal equivalent and a good dynamic equivalent for your private studies and devotionals. Most paraphrases (except the NLT which I think is pretty good) have limited uses, and some like the Message should be burned along with the NABRE. And don’t use the NIV (a Protestant favorite). It’s almost as bad as the NABRE.
I am glad to read the sentiments on the NABR expressed here. I thought it was just me. Language? Clunky at best. Study notes? Words fail.