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→‎Real Life Examples in The Bible: some LXX hate is unjustified
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(→‎Real Life Examples in The Bible: NWT kyrios->Jehovah is intended to reverse an editorial choice in the Septuagint. Grouped Septuagint examples together.)
(→‎Real Life Examples in The Bible: some LXX hate is unjustified)
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Some translations of the Bible are considered by some people to have an agenda. This not only makes this trope [[Older Than Print]], it also earns the Bible a section of its own!
 
* The [[wikipedia:Septuagint|Septuagint]] is a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, which was completed in 132 BC. SomeOverall, the Septuagint [http://www.doxa.ws/Messiah/Lxx_mt.html agrees with the Dead Sea Scrolls] more than the Masoretic Text does, but some renderings werenaren't quite exact. For instance, each instance of ''YHWH'' (God's personal name) was replaced with ''kyrios'' (Greek for "lord"), and a Hebrew word meaning "young woman" was translated as a Greek word meaning "virgin". A couple cases of bias in Bible translation can be traced to the Septuagint:
** Some Jewish people accused Christians of doingreinterpreting thisparts toof the Old Testament, translating lines from the original Hebrew to make them sound like prophecies applicable to Jesus. Of particular note is the line "A young woman shall conceive and bear a son" (Isaiah 7:14) where "young woman" was translated as "virgin". (To be fair, theThe Hebrew word could have either meaning, but Jews contend that the "virgin" translation is out of context).
** The New World Translation, produced by Jehovah's Witnesses, changes many instances of ''kyrios'' in the New Testament to "Jehovah", especially where the New Testament quotes the Septuagint.
* [[Conservapedia]], where they try re-translating the King James Bible from English to English. They feel there's too much Liberal bias in the translation made in the 1600s.
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** The difference between "poisoner" and "witch" is that women were more likely to be accused (and executed) for witchcraft than men. Poisoner is a far more gender neutral word today, and in the 1600s it would more commonly be applied to men, as far more men had any knowledge on how to use poisons. With the change of a word, the translator changes the focus of suspicion from primarily men to women.
* Speaking of English translations of the Bible, the [[wikipedia:Geneva Bible|Geneva Bible]] was infamously biased in favor of the type of Calvinism embraced by the vast majority of Puritans. This fact, plus the fact that the [[wikipedia:Bishops' Bible|other, state-sanctioned translation]] was of [[Blind Idiot Translation|less than satisfactory quality]], helped pave the way for the King James Version in the first place.
* A New Testament example is the common practice of translating the Greek word "''doulos"'' as "servant" when it meant "slave". The New Testament has a lot of casual and uncritical references to slaves, but slavery is nowadays considered abhorrent. At the time it was fairly matter-of-fact, though to be fair one of Christianity's main selling points was its insistence that slaves were as equal as anyone else in the eyes of God, and (in the context of their status, anyway) should be treated as such.
* The Temperance Bible [[Frothy Mugs of Water|altered every instance of Jesus drinking wine to drinking grape juice]].
* The ending salutation in Romans 16 references Junia, a female deacon or church leader. Nearly all English Bibles (minus the more scholarly ones, like NRSV) render this name as "Junias" in an attempt to make it masculine and disguise the fact that many early church leaders were women.
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