And it’s just an incidence of mistranslation / vocabulary changes / translator bias that it happens to say “money” instead of “capital”, like how other parts of the bible mean different things when read literally from their modern translation and when read in the possible contexts of their time.
Change my view.
ETA: When you read the passage following it (Christ I’m really about to do this), it mentions their god being the “only Sovereign One, the King of kings and Lord of lords”, doesn’t that make more sense as a rebuff towards those seeking to be land owners / lords than towards, like, thieves?
There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:
1: lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
2: lack of precision in modern language
3: translation bias, mainly of the liberal kind, in converting the original language to the modern one
I think my favorite distillation of the uniquely blinkered epistemology of the project is #4:
" Utilize Terms which better capture original intent : using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;"
A commitment to ‘originalism’ so strong that the ‘intent’(apparently still readily visible despite the sinister liberal linguistic conspiracy) of a maybe 3rd century text can only be preserved by drawing on the divine inspiration of Reagan’s speechwriters. Makes Scalia look like a paragon of seriousness and intellectual honesty.
I also must confess a fondness for the phrase “Express Free Market Parables”. Yes, it’s a phrase that really ought to be on the loading screen of a dystopian cyberpunk roguelike; but it’s still a good phrase.
I haven’t applied the cortical electrodes, so I’m not sure how lively they are these days.
Clearly not at the ‘GoDaddy domain parking page oozing sleaze’ level of death; but it doesn’t exactly cost big money to keep a moribund website on life support these days; so their mere existence could mean anything from one guy still writing the occasional check to pretty much the same level of interest as back when they were a punchline, except that we’ve gotten bored of them.
Some stats munging on wiki revision history could probably provide more detail; but I’m not sure how I’d clean my hands after dealing with that sort of dataset.
They do less wriggling than might be expected; but they appear to be working under the theory that that outbreak of apostolic communism was really just a period of charitable giving by the wealthy.
“Nor was anyone impoverished, for those who owned property and houses sold them, and were generous with the money they made, presenting them to the apostles so they might be distributed among those who were needy.”
without the implication of the KJV’s “Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.” that the entire sale value was presented to the apostles, rather than an providing some amount that would qualify as ‘generous’ out of the ‘money they made’(nobody was feeling gutsy enough to go outright for the theory that only the capital gains from the sales were involved; but it’s much less clear on the point than ‘the prices of the things that were sold’).
This makes the whole Aanias and Sapphira episode way weirder; since everyone in chapter 4 is just being ‘generous’; then in chapter 5 those two get divine-justiced for failure to provide 100%; with Peter doing some rudimentary forensic accounting.
The king of kings and lord of lords translation is more about trying to hide christianity’s polytheistic roots. The bible borrows heavily from the egyptian polyheistic traditions, and descriptions of Yahweh would be translated god of gods, except since by the time English was a thing the old testament was considered strictly monotheistic that wasn’t an option.
Not disagreeing with you on the money/capital point, just that the lord of lords probably didn’t have any ownership connotations originally
We can certainly agree about the dangers of the love of capital (and apparently I have to say that or otherwise be violently accused of believing the exact opposite for some reason).
But that said, is there actually debate here that the original Greek manuscripts used language that could be interpreted as referring to “capital”? I will agree that modern “economics” still employs some highly questionable assumptions, but wasn’t economic theory at the time so poorly-developed that the Romans were completely blindsided by inflation?
That’s a fair point, it would be hard for the author(s) to have the concept of capital at hand much less in mind when writing that when we only formalized the concept in the last couple centuries.
However as I read that passage what comes to mind was lords and nobility, areas where money and power and institution all intersect. You don’t need to have a concept of inflation or capital to see the depravity and cruelty of moneyed people who leverage their money as power instead of just using it to buy goods. There are stories much older than our concept of capital of wicked rich people getting away and good people becoming corrupted when they suddenly acquire enough money to have power over others. So I think it’s possible they were thinking of the love of “money as power” instead of just money.
@Scientist brought up a good point that the king of kings / lord of lords passage would also make sense as a way to set their god out as the only god / higher power and sweep talk of polytheism under the carpet. However its occurrence right after this line suggests an association between the two statements, right? Kings and lords are both strongly associated with money as power, and hey it’s not uncommon for rich fucks to get god complexes.
I suppose one could regard “love of money” as referring to the fondness of people that have money for their own money. But the following phrase is “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” That would seem to indicate that “love of money” refers to pursuit of money among both those who lack money and those who seek even more money.
My religious studies teacher would be incredibly saddened at the thought of any bible translation project that started from the King James Bible.
I note from a quick poke around that they don’t seem to have a consensus on whether there is really a need for a further translation or whether the King James is the one true text.
I do like this bit at least:
liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds
Fair enough. If you’re a religious evangelical person, anything that encourages others to read your holy text has to be a good thing and getting people to read it so they can criticise it is good.
Especially since translating the Bible made Isaac Newton a genius apparently…
Do we have any new scientific discoveries from participants in the Conservapedia Bible translation project?
Because so many people who were/are religious enough to want to create a fresh translation of the Bible and had/have the appropriate education and access to do so are notorious ‘liberals’?
So, conservatives will win because they invent more and better new words?
This is a new and exciting variant on conservatism…
