Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 12:4 (Fall 1998)
Article: What’s The Difference?
Author: Gerry Glasenapp

PP 12:4 Fall 1998) p. 18

What’s The Difference?

A Review Of Gender Language In Modern Formal
And Dynamic Formal Equivalence Translations Of The Bible

Gerry Glasenapp

For twenty years, Gerry Glasenapp served as a missionary nurse-midwife in Cameroon, and then for two years worked for World Relief as director of the medical program in a refugee camp in The Philippines. She is an active member of the Greater Chicago Chapter of CBE.

When was the last time you went into a bookstore to buy a new Bible for yourself? I mean, really buy a new Bible; not just one with a new cover and intact pages—a new version of the Bible. Were you amazed and confused at the plethora of versions, formats, sizes, bindings, colors, and sizes of print available? Did you struggle to understand some of the versions? Or did you delight in the clarity and readability of others? Did you notice the changes in gender language? Or did you wonder if you can trust this different way the Bible speaks to you? For evangelicals these are important questions.

New Testament and Greek scholar, D.A. Carson, states:

The sixty-six books that make up the canonical Scriptures stand at the heart of Christian faith and practice. Christians everywhere recognize that discussion which touches these Scriptures touches a vital part of their faith; . . . Evangelicals have therefore been sensitized to any deviation from an orthodox doctrine of Scripture; but some in their zeal have erected a fence around Christian Torah and see deviations even where there are none....”1 Some “fences” and “deviations” that evangelicals have erected around the scriptures concern methods of Bible translation and gender language. Professor of New Testament, Aida Besancon Spencer, writing in Priscilla Papers, would agree that fences have been erected around the Bible by a self-appointed committee which set “Guidelines for Translation.”2 She argues that the “Guidelines” represent a “gender matter”; they “do not appear to achieve accuracy. . . .”3

Author Ruth Barton, confronted with four masculine references in Psalm 1 as she read the first three verses to her young daughters, realized her girls could not identify themselves in this passage.4 Eugene Nida, eminent linguist, reckons that “no Scripture is regarded as fully effective for more than fifty years, so rapid is the change which takes place in languages.”5 David Leigh, Baptist pastor in Illinois, ...