Opinion – Darwin and God: Bill against Bible changes ignores ancient texts

Some colleagues from this Sheet have recently addressed the strange bill by Deputy Pastor Sargento Isidório (Avante-BA), which prohibits “any alteration, edition or addition to the texts of the Holy Bible, composed of the Old and New Testaments in their chapters or verses, being guaranteed the preaching of its content throughout the national territory”.

I don’t understand how a project like this ended up being approved almost unanimously by the Chamber of Deputies, considering the enormous diversity of translations and editions of the Scriptures that exist out there. Not to mention the different canons (set of books included in the Bible) that are accepted by Protestant denominations, by Roman Catholics and Orthodox and even by Judaism. Incidentally, at no time does the deputy’s brutally generic text propose to define which would be the “right” Bible.

The least worst thing that can be said about the project for now is that it does not establish any penalty for those who “break the law” in this regard. Many people have rightly pointed out that the variety of Bible translations existing today would alone make the proposal completely impractical. But I would like to take this opportunity to draw attention to an even more basic and complex problem.

Even if the “canonized” Bible of the pastor and sergeant from Bahia were the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek originals of the New Testament, we would be facing a dilemma that, in practice, is insoluble: what, after all, are “the originals”? “?

The point is that underneath are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of variant versions of Scripture, like the scroll containing the book of the prophet Isaiah that appears in the photo above and came from the caves of the Dead Sea. The debate over which would be the “correct version” to serve as the basis for Bible translations IS NOT OVER YET.

And any self-respecting edition of biblical texts today makes this very clear through a critical apparatus with introductions, notes, explanations of verse variants, etc. I just consulted my Jerusalem Bible about a passage at the very end of the Gospel of Mark, for example. Everything indicates that the passage that speaks of the appearances of the risen Jesus in Mark’s narrative was added later, by another author, and the edition in my hands makes this clear, separating it from the main body of the text. Would Bibles that follow this pattern be prohibited by the project?

It makes no sense.