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.
Read more about this topic: Good News Bible
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“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)