LONDON, June 24, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has praised a new translation of the bible for its “extraordinary power.” However selections of the text show the translation to be more of a paraphrase with an emphasis on modern vernacular slang. Examples are becoming available online. St. Paul’s warning to the Corinthians against sexual immorality has been ‘updated’ to read, “Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offences. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner.”

The new ‘bible’ called, “Good as New,” was commissioned by a group called One that bills itself as a group of “radical Christians.” The former Baptist minister John Henson who produced the text has produced other works for the group including, The Bad Acts of the Apostles, described on the group’s website as “An unusual approach to the study of Acts.” Henson praised his work calling it “new, fresh and adventurous.”

In an unintentionally apt comparison, Dr. Williams compared the new ‘bible’ to an illness. He said he hoped the new translation would “spread in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike”.

Catholic writer and columnist David Warren said that the ‘translation’ was not a great work of exegesis and would likely find itself shortly confined to the ‘remainder bin’ of literary and exegetical history. “These so-called ‘translations’ have been cropping up since the bible was codified and translated by St. Jerome in the 4th century. Everyone has an agenda and the bible invariably gets used to support whatever a given group happens to endorse,” said Warren, former editor of the Idler Magazine and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen. “Thomas Jefferson made one that totally desacralized the bible and omitted all sorts of references that contradicted his secularist mentality. This Good as New effort will go the same way, a historical footnote illustrating the collapse of secularized and politicized Christianity.”

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