by Timothy Beal
God blesses those people
who refuse evil advice
and won’t follow sinners
or join in sneering at God.
Here everything is transformed. Whereas the previous two form-driven translations (mine and the King James Version) remain faithful to the Hebrew text’s metaphorical language, which offers a series of images that evoke feelings as much as ideas, this functional-equivalence translation removes them. Whereas the previous two translations begin correctly with an adjective, “happy” or “blessed,” this translation changes the adjective into an active verb and supplies it with a subject, God, thereby removing the inherent ambiguity in the Hebrew. Whereas the first two translations refer in the end to scornful or mean-spirited people—people who might be that way to other people, to God, or even to themselves—this one gives the scorn an object, God, thereby once again reducing the possible interpretations that were allowed by the Hebrew. And whereas the first two are both faithful to the poetic parallelism of the verse, this one disregards it altogether, opting instead to have each line make a slightly different moral point.
Kenneth Taylor, the father of The Living Bible, said that the idea of a “thought for thought” paraphrase of the Bible came from his frustration during dinner-table devotionals with his children. His recollections reveal both the felt need that leads to such disambiguating, simplifying versions and the reality of biblical ambiguity that they try to erase. “All too often,” he explained, “I would ask questions to be sure the children understood, and they would shrug their shoulders—they didn’t know what the passage was talking about. So I would explain it. I would paraphrase it for them and give them the thought.” Once, one of them responded, “Well Daddy, if that’s what it means, why doesn’t it say so?” He began to rewrite biblical passages in preparation for those Bible studies, “so that it would be clearer to the children, and actually to myself too.”
Functional-equivalence proponents will argue that readers of form-driven translations risk not getting the right meaning from the text. They operate on the belief that a biblical passage like Psalm 1:1 has a singular, intended meaning. The goal, therefore, is to reduce ambiguity and preclude the possibility of seeing multiple meanings. To be sure, all translation is interpretation. As biblical scholar Tod Linafelt puts it, translation is a kind of survival. To survive means to live over, or beyond, something (sur = “over” + vive = “live”). A translation is an over-living, a living-beyond the original. A translation is something new, a new life for a text. So it is with all Bible translations. Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it’s not.
Manga Bibles
As the Biblezine phenomenon demonstrates, one successful way to reinvent the Bible and create new consumer markets is to graft it onto other, less-bookish media that are selling well. Behold one of the latest trends: manga Bibles.
Mangas are Japanese graphic novels or comic-book-style serial publications (man = “involuntary” or “cartoon”; ga = “brush stroke” or “picture”). In Japan, about 40 percent of all print publications are mangas, including a very wide range of styles and subjects. Over the past two decades, their popularity has become a worldwide phenomenon. In recent years the market for English-language mangas in the United States has grown rapidly, especially among teens and young adults. Annual sales in the United States grew from about $60 million in 2002 to $220 million in 2007, with 1,468 titles published. Although sales dropped in 2008 along with most other kinds of books, the future of this market looks bright.
Bibles and mangas, a match made in heaven? Several Christian publishers seem to believe so, and are scrambling to gain the high ground in this new market niche. Tyndale House, for example, has partnered with NEXT, a nonprofit evangelical company of Japanese manga artists and media-savvy professionals committed to creating high-quality, innovative Christian mangas for teens and young adults in many languages. Tyndale purchased exclusive English-language rights for all mangas produced by NEXT. So far it has published two biblical mangas: Manga Messiah and Manga Bible. The former is a full-color graphic-novel version of the story of Jesus, based on particular passages selected from the four Gospels of the New Testament. Not surprisingly, the editorial selections streamline the narrative to encourage readers to accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior who died for their sins.
Note that this biblical manga is called Manga Messiah, not Manga Bible, and its back-cover blurb takes care to describe it as “adapted from the ancient texts” rather than as “the Bible.” Tyndale and NEXT’s Manga Bible, on the other hand, is far less of a Bible genre bender: it is basically comprised of Tyndale’s complete Slimline Reference edition of its New Living Translation Bible with a modestly manga-ish cover and three thirty-two-page glossy inserts of manga illustrations of select biblical narratives.
A manga offers far more than simple illustrations of literary texts. Its visual images are by no means supplementary to the word, but interactive with it and with one another. Its layout invites the eye to move back and forth between frames on the page in nonlinear fashion. That is very different from the linear, left-to-right and top-to-bottom way we read the text of a typical Bible book. In its titles, Tyndale implicitly recognizes this difference and takes a more conservative approach to publishing manga Bibles, reserving the title of “Bible” for that which more closely resembles its traditional Bibles.
Zondervan has taken a far bolder approach, publishing what it calls its Manga Bible in a series of smaller volumes, each covering a selection of biblical narrative. Its target audience is clearly younger readers. The simple black-and-white scenes are loaded with cute talking animals, childlike biblical characters (Adam and Eve look to be about seven years old), and lots of lighthearted humor (“Excuse me!” interrupts a whale just after being created on day five, “Have you seen my son Nemo?”).
Very little of the text that appears in Zondervan’s Manga Bible is direct quotation from biblical literature. But much of it does reinforce popular biblical stereotypes. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden, for example, draws heavily from sexist caricatures of Eve that have been part of popular culture for centuries but are not explicitly part of the biblical narrative itself. In the biblical story, Eve partakes of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because, the text says, she sees that it’s beautiful, that it tastes good, and that it will bring her wisdom. In this manga Bible, however, the cute but not too bright Eve is confused into partaking. In the biblical text, Adam says nothing but simply eats what Eve hands him. In this account, however, Adam resists her urgings until she pouts, “You’ve changed.” He then gives in, against his better judgment, and Eve winks at the reader and says, “Hee hee . . . girls can make guys do anything.” You get the picture: God and Adam are buddies. Seeing that Adam needed love, God set him up with Eve, who is as beautiful and well-meaning as she is manipulative and morally weak. Here, then, is an adorable, cartoonish rendition of the millennia-long practice of misinterpreting this biblical story in order to blame women for everything that’s wrong with the world and to keep them in their place. It looks progressive, maybe even a little edgy, but as biblical interpretation it’s downright backward.
Frame from volume 1 of Zondervan’s Manga Bible, subtitled Names, Games, and the Long Road Trip (covering Genesis and Exodus). Eve has just convinced Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Her representation here reinforces sexist caricatures and the long-standing tradition of blaming Eve for the “Fall of Man.”
I’m sometimes invited to lead discussions on the Bible and Bible publishing in local churches. I always bring examples of manga Bibles, Biblezines, and so on. I offer my analysis and critique. Most parishioners concur. Some, outraged by wha
t they see as a cheapening of Holy Scriptures, want to push the critique a lot harder.
After one recent discussion, an older woman stayed after to talk more about manga Bibles. She said she’d like to buy one for her grandson and wondered which I’d recommend. I admit I was a bit taken aback. I wondered to myself if she’d heard anything I’d said about them except that they’re popular with kids. As we talked, it became clear that she had. She understood all that. She didn’t agree with the theology in the examples we looked at, and she didn’t buy the promotional shtick that they were simply the Word of God in a novel form. Still, she was wondering if some manga Bibles were better than others. In so many words, she was expressing all three of the most commonly felt needs among Bible shoppers: to buy a Bible as a gift that the recipient will find “readable” and thus gain some degree of familiarity with biblical literature. These manga Bibles spoke to those needs right over the top of me.
What did I do? I wasn’t about to deny the legitimacy of those felt needs. As a father of a fourteen-year-old boy who rarely shows interest in reading what I’ve devoted my vocation to studying, I can sympathize. So I made a recommendation: Manga Messiah, published by Tyndale for NEXT. Three reasons. First, it’s a nonprofit venture. Second, the graphics and design are far superior to competitors and more like the style of other popular Japanese mangas (in fact, it was originally done in Japanese). Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t pretend to be the Bible, but rather admits that it’s a creative adaptation of select stories from the New Testament. It is openly and self-consciously interpretive, and doesn’t pretend to be other than that. And by footnoting the biblical passages it is interpreting on each page, it enables readers to judge its interpretations for themselves. Which might provoke some interesting conversations.
A Different Cookie
The point here is not to condemn the particular values, moral and theological, that are being added in these Bibles. In fact, although they are fewer and far less financially successful, there are also values-added Bibles that lean hard in theologically and politically liberal or progressive directions. A good example is the recently completed Inclusive Bible, created by a grass-roots group of clergy and laypeople called Priests for Equality. This Bible often literally rewrites passages that are especially problematic for those who strive for gender and class equality in church and society, remaking it according to the gospel of love and justice that they proclaim to be the heart of Christian faith. In this Bible, patriarchal passages about how husbands should relate to their wives (often treating them as little more than property) become recommendations for how any person of any orientation should relate to her or his “spouse or partner” in a loving, respectful way. As for the infamous passage in First Corinthians that instructs women to remain silent in church and subordinate to their husbands, this Bible revises, “Only one spouse has permission to speak. The other is to remain silent, to keep in the background” out of respect, and to wait his or her turn (1 Corinthians 14). Although we might wish it were not so, such rewritings push well beyond anything that could be argued as the original intention of these Hebrew and Greek texts.
The point is that these values, whether conservative or liberal, are not simply “there” in the Bible itself. They are interpretational add-ins meant to make the Bible closer to what people expect from it. These value-added, values-added products are not simply Bibles but biblical interpretations.
By the time you read this, there will no doubt be new Bibles in new forms and formats that I can’t even imagine as I write. Indeed, this chapter is far from a comprehensive discussion of Bibles available today. There’s so much out there, an overwhelming variety of items being published as “the Bible”: magazines, graphic novels, full-metal-jacketed, furry, duct-taped, waterproof, not to mention digital media, on the Internet, CDs, DVDs, iPods, e-books, et cetera. And all these combined in so many different ways with so many different words: dozens of translations, the most successful ones being highly interpretive, resiftings of the passages into chronological order, visual representations, and of course extras and “helps” of all kinds, both pictorial and textual, purportedly supplemental to the biblical words but in fact supplanting them.
“If you put chocolate coating on an Oreo, it’s a different cookie, and you ought to be able to charge more,” says Paul J. Caminiti, a vice president at Zondervan. “The packaging has to scream that this is something really new: First time! Fudge-dipped! Chocolate coated!” If I follow this metaphor correctly, the Bible is the Oreo, and the fudge dip is the extra stuff that the publisher adds. As we’ve seen, there’s at least as much double-stuffing as there is fudge-dipping. In any case, as he himself says, “it’s a different cookie.” Is it still an Oreo?
4
Twilight of the Idol
The Evangelical Dilemma
Evangelicalism faces a fundamental dilemma: popularization versus preservation; getting the Word out by whatever means necessary versus protecting and preserving the sanctity of the tradition. On the one hand, to what extent should the Bible be adapted and altered, in form or content, in order to make it more available and accessible? On the other hand, to what extent should its holiness or sanctity be preserved and maintained, at the expense of easy availability and popularity?
Taking as its motto the apostle Paul’s declaration, “I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some,” American evangelicalism since the 1950s has leaned harder and harder in the direction of popularization and away from preservation. These days we’re accustomed to thinking of evangelicalism as conservative in every way. But when it comes to this dilemma, it tends to be the most liberal of Christianities in its willingness to adapt its Scriptures and traditions to new contexts in order to make them more appealing to popular audiences. Recall that it was the neo-evangelical movement Youth for Christ that was the first to adopt entertainment-industry strategies in rallies during the mid-twentieth century. A couple decades later, evangelicals were the first to bring rock music into even bigger rallies, and later into church worship services. Evangelicals have been among the quickest to use new media, be it radio in the 1940s, television in the 1960s, or the Internet today. And let’s not forget Oreo-and-milk Communion services, birthday cakes for Jesus on Christmas, and clown ministry (I once saw a clowning troupe do a version of the Passion play). A hallmark of evangelicalism in America is its disposition to adapt traditional Christian practices and canons to popular interests and consumer demands in order to make them more readily available and attractive. As we saw in the introduction, evangelicalism’s openness to cultural adaptation is what has distinguished it most sharply from the more culturally conservative, often sectarian orientation of its sterner parent movement, fundamentalism, which continues to disapprove.
Marshall McLuhan famously declared that the “medium is the message,” that there is no separating content from form or meaning from technology, and that the electronic age is bringing an end to the age of print. Evangelicalism often seems to be pronouncing a counterdeclaration to the McLuhanian one. The medium is by no means the message. The message is entirely independent of the medium. Indeed, as the Word of God, it transcends whatever form we use to mediate it.
The collaboration between the editors of Campus Life magazine and Tyndale House that culminated in The Way Bible staked its faith on popularizing the message by whatever media means necessary. The magazine editors, whose offices were next door to Tyndale’s, were especially ambitious in reaching to fit in with the popular youth culture of the ’60s and early ’70s. It was a time of cultural revolution, and any Bible trying to speak to that ethos would inevitably be pushing against traditional boundaries. They designed the layout, wrote all the introductory essays, and provided the images, but nothing went forward until it was approved by Tyndale House. In most cases, the two editorial teams were simpatico. Occasionally, however, Tyndale would ask for something a bit less edgy.
Given that this collaboration was betwe
en a Bible publisher and a magazine publisher, it was no accident that The Way turned out to be something of a hybrid of the two print formats. Its floppy cover, trendy fonts, varied layouts, contemporary photomontages, and upbeat, engaging introductory essays gave it a magazine feel. At the same time, it’s clear that Tyndale was concerned to preserve a sense of the publication as “the Bible” as well. This concern is most clear on the pages of the biblical text itself, which offer a strong visual contrast to the introductory parts. The biblical text is very plain, laid out in the traditional two-column style, with traditional fonts and no pictures.
In the hybrid mix of Bible and magazine that is The Way, and in the creative tension between the Bible publisher and magazine publisher that brought it to market, we may recognize the desire to hang on to both horns of the evangelical dilemma, popularization and preservation.
Selling Out
Not that The Way and its parent version, The Living Bible, were without critics. The neo-evangelical movement of the mid-twentieth century had brought fundamentalist Christianity back into the mainstream of American culture, but it had not brought all fundamentalists with it. Many more sectarian-leaning Christians remained critical of the new movement for its desire to reengage popular youth culture by adapting the Bible and Christian values to mainstream-entertainment media forms. And so, although many influential evangelical leaders like Billy Graham and organizations like Youth for Christ supported The Way, many other fundamentalists did not. Implicitly agreeing with McLuhan that medium and message are inseparable, they condemned its paraphrasing, incorporation of contemporary photos, trendy fonts, magazine-like page layouts, and social-minded essays, as at best a dilution of the Word and at worst a seductive diversion from it.
