The votes from the election have barely been counted before it is time for the launch of the new translation of the New Testament. In a DN report (18/9) attention is paid to the event with some emphasis on the culture war. Will the manosphere go to the roof because the disciple Junia finally got her feminine suffix? Is the sacred Swedishness in earlier translations threatened by the not so solemn Koine Greek? Will an entire cultural world implode when Judas no longer means traitor?
In a way, I was raised on culture war biblical. When my friends were drinking home brandy and lying with their boyfriends in the back seat of some Volvo, I sat in the church basement and crossed out with a red pen. Reading the marginal notes in my Bible from that time is a wash of shame on a par with other writers' old diaries. My lover was Jesus, but his figure was oddly modeled on any male leader who strutted back and forth on the stage during the revival meetings. Gaping, frustrated and impatient. He demanded my virginity until marriage and somewhere in the twisting of the texts during the thousands of Bible studies the idea of my gender and my position was formed.
Not that I mourn the absent volvorags, rather penetrated by the word so that I could become a writer, but it is clear that the Bible has and will be used for political purposes. For a long time it was believed that Sweden was vaccinated against the evangelical interpretation of the Bible from the United States. Now the revival preachers are on the teenagers' tiktok and they are sexy persuaders with diabolical charisma. The biblical culture war is in full swing.
My lover was Jesus, but his figure was strangely modeled on any male leader who strutted back and forth on the stage during the revival meetings
Nevertheless, I could wish for a less trend-sensitive discussion about the Bible translation. If you study the underlines and notes in my old Bible, you see the same thing as when you look at an embarrassing diary with tenderness: hunger and dizziness. A person who has not learned to mask his desire for love and who does not understand how to get what he needs. An impossible equation and an adolescent primal condition, but actually a universal human predicament. The biblical texts know that. From the banishment from paradise to the hallucinatory dream scenes of Revelation, renunciation and desire. The lifeblood of literature.
The translation's target group is everyone, says the Bible Society's Mikael Winninge, which likely means that not everyone will be satisfied. His colleague Anders Göranzon points out that Bible users in different contexts already have a relationship with the text. That is to say: it can be physically anchored in an imagery or create ritual resonance in the repetition of the prayer. It feels predictable as a writer to defend the Bible as literature, but the effect of language is a stylistic thing. Therefore, it is unnerving that the stylists in the project had less time at their disposal than the exegetes (DN 13/3). Why shouldn't their work be just as important?
This is what I read in the sample translation: "Blessed are those who make peace, they shall be called children of God". Sons of God are now children, quite simply. "Our father, you who are in heaven" has, according to DN, become a holy "Our father in heaven!" For a Jesus bride, it doesn't feel so threatening, but quite good.
