THE PULPIT: Conservative bible hits cyberspace

Editing the Bible to fit one’s personal beliefs is nothing new.

Thomas Jefferson did it in the 1820s when he literally cut out the New Testament’s supernatural passages to create his personal bible. The Jesus Seminar, made up of a handful of scholars, did it in the 1990s by voting on the authenticity of biblical passages; the Bible they eventually published deleted many of Jesus’ most famous sayings.
Now a new Web site continues the tradition.

In August, New Jersey attorney Andy Schlafly, son of renowned conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, launched the Conservative Bible Project at Conservapedia.com, a site he founded in 2006 to counteract what he saw as liberal bias in Wikipedia.

The site is similar to Wikipedia in that its wiki format lets the public write and change entries. With the Conservative Bible Project now on the site, people can change the Bible’s King James Version to suit their fancy — though, unlike Wikipedia’s operation, Schlafly and his chief administrative officer, Terry Hurlbut, moderate the site by posting entries they like.

Schlafly, Hurlbut and a handful of other conservative Christians with no real academic training in biblical scholarship and translation are the primary contributors.

“The Bible was not written by scholars,” Schlafly told me, “and professors (who translate the Bible) don’t have a monopoly on knowledge. We’ve got people who know Greek or Hebrew better than the professors do.”

So far, the Conservative Bible Project, which is funded out-of-pocket by Schlafly, has completed about a third of the New Testament and Genesis. The most controversial changes are the elimination of the New Testament stories of Jesus forgiving the adulteress and forgiving his persecutors from the cross.

“The basic error (of the passages) is that it teaches people they can do what they want and they will be forgiven, even if they don’t repent,” Schlafly said.

Schlafly points out — correctly — that both scenes are not in the earliest Bible manuscripts. For him, that’s proof they never happened.

“Liberals love (the stoning scene) because they can use it to argue against capital punishment,” Schlafly said. “But they didn’t stone women (then). They strangled them.”

He also blames liberal scholars for making 20th-century Bible translations, such as the New International Version, seem to promote socialism, anti-Americanism and feminism, while toning back God’s judgment and the horrors of hell.

It would be easy to dismiss Schlafly as fringe material if not for the fact that his Conservapedia.com has racked up tens of millions of page views and is one of the top 50 conservative Web sites in America, according to RightWingNews.com.

“I hope to help educate the public and gain new insight into the Bible that the professors are not providing to us,” Shlafly said.

For more of my interviews with Schlafly and Hurlbut, go to my blog, The Pulpit, at www.thepulpit.freedomblogging.com.
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