c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Rev. Luther Weigle, the late dean of Yale Divinity School, had dreamed of a symbol of Christian unity _ a new Bible that could be embraced by all.

But the Revised Standard Version, whose translation committee he chaired in the 1940s, turned out to be the starting point of a battle that led to division among Christians _ and among scriptural translations.

The Bible controversy is the subject of a documentary,”Bible Under Fire: The Story of the RSV Translations,”which will air at 4 p.m. (EST/PST) Sunday (Nov. 21) on the Odyssey cable television network. The one-hour special will be repeated on the network at 1 a.m. (EST/PST) Nov. 29.

The RSV was the first project of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical group of Protestant and Orthodox denominations that began 50 years ago. The documentary was produced for the NCC by Odyssey Productions, a division of the network.

The RSV was published in 1952 after 15 years of work by a committee of scholars. It was the first version to gain popularity since the King James Version, which was released in 1611.

Although its creators dubbed it an”accurate, accessible and distinctly American Bible for the 20th century,”its detractors countered that it was”the most dangerous book of the 20th century.” A single sentence in the book of Isaiah turned out to be the spark of the controversy.

Based on the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the translators decided that Isaiah 7:14 should no longer say”a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”They determined that”virgin”should be replaced with”young woman.””The charge was made that these translators were trying to deny either the prophecy in Isaiah as a reference to Jesus or to deny the virginity of Mary and ultimately the deity of Jesus,”said David J. Lull, director of Bible translation and utilization for the NCC, in an interview in the documentary.

One Rocky Mount, N.C., pastor was so outraged he publicly burned the page of the RSV that included the passage. Another critic delivered the burned ashes of the RSV in a tin can to Weigle’s doorstep.”It was kind of the touchstone, the lightning rod,”said John Wackman, the executive in charge of the documentary’s production, of the Isaiah passage.

But the publishing of the Bible in the midst of the McCarthy era when fears of communism ran high only made matters worse for the new form of Scripture.

Critics claimed the RSV was the work of communists, a claim vehemently denied by the translation committee.”It certainly didn’t help that Thomas Nelson published the early editions of the RSV with a very, very red cover,”said Walter D. Harrelson, professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University Divinity School, also interviewed in the special.”That was not their intention, to be sure, to support the communist cause. They were about as conservative as any of the critics of the translators, but they certainly fed fuel to the flame.” In the end, a promotional campaign _ which featured public presentations of the RSV to President Harry Truman and baseball celebrity Jackie Robinson _ helped advance the RSV’s popularity.

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The Rev. Andrew Young, the former U.S. ambassador who was installed as NCC’s president Nov. 11, said the new version changed his religious life when he read it as he neared his college graduation.”It was the first Bible that I ever opened up that I could read and understand,”he said in the documentary, noting he previously had memorized long passages of Scripture in Sunday school.”It changed my life in more ways than I can imagine because all of a sudden religion began to make sense.” But critics of the RSV discouraged reading of the new Scripture because they believed it represented the translators’ views, rather than God’s inerrant word.”We had public meetings in churches and halls, telling everybody that the RSV was a mistake and that they should stay by the King James,”said Carl J. McIntire, president and founder of the International Council of Churches, in the documentary.

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Although Weigle had hoped the RSV would last for generations, he was soon convinced another translation _ the New Revised Standard Version _ was necessary. As a committee worked on that translation _ which when published in 1989 included more inclusive language than the RSV _ evangelicals began working on the now-popular New International Version of the Bible. The NIV, which was published in 1978, returned the word”virgin”to Isaiah 7:14.

The documentary cites other translations flooding the Bible market, giving readers a plethora of choices in scriptural language. Scholars interviewed predict future translations will address the controversial issues of race, class, gender and homosexuality.”That seems to be just accepted, that the translations will continue,”said Wackman, the special’s producer.”The controversy will always be a part of translation, as it has been for hundreds of years.”

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