Criticism
The GNB has been challenged as to the degree of accuracy one of the translators maintained to the Greek texts. Concern was raised in the USA after Robert Bratcher made public statements questioning the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture in March 1981, as well as deriding those who hold such views as dishonest or wilfully ignorant. Some people think that Bratcher's viewpoints unduly influenced what was written into the GNB. His speech so outraged many churches that they withheld monetary donations to the American Bible Society, a move that nearly bankrupted the ABS. The ABS requested Bratcher's resignation later that year.
Further statements from Bratcher and subsequent investigation of the GNB cause some to believe that it weakens or undermines other key doctrines, such as the virgin birth of Christ; it failed the "Isaiah 7:14 litmus test"—i.e. translated the passage with "young woman" instead of "virgin"—that had been used by conservative Christians since the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952 (see Revised Standard Version#Reception and controversy). Others emphasize that Bratcher was only part of a committee of translators, and that this attack is simply an attempt to support the view held by some that "literal translations, especially the King James Version, are God's word, and all dynamic translations are evil", typified by the King-James-Only Movement.
The GNB has also come under heavy criticism from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for substituting the designation "Sudan" (originally referring to Western Africa) in place of the original word Kush in Hebrew, Aethiopia in the Septuagint.. This is because in the Bible the term Ethiopia refers mainly to the Upper Nile regions south of Egypt, including what are now Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Sudan, whereas the name Sudan was never applied in Biblical times and only denotes a modern day political entity.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)