Monetizing Religion For Easter 🐣

Lee Greenwood on Newsmax defends selling $60 bibles with Trump: "The reason we have this bible is to make sure more people have it accessible." pic.twitter.com/UVHf27XuJy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 31, 2024

It’s more readily available online, in more accessible translations, than Trump’s social media posts.

But Greenwood and Trump don’t make money that way.

The older I get the more I think that the translations into simple, contemporary English get more of the substance across than the ones in Jacobean English. I wonder how much of the unfaithful conception of Christianity is due to People not being able to understand the Gospel.

I admire the KJV as a piece of literature. Then again, I can make my way through Chaucer in his original Middle English (Sir Gawain, on the other hand, is in a dialect as impenetrable as a Glaswegian accent). 

I think a case can be made that the KJV is revered in some circles because it is impenetrable. It’s ironically the Roman Catholic history of the Vulgate going from the common tongue to the only allowable translation, even though it could only be read by priests trained in a dead tongue. Which, of course, is what led to the KJV.

Early Modern English is not as dead as Middle or Old English; yet. But on top of being a bad translation, it requires translation itself. Which puts the power in the hands of the translator. Just what Wycliffe, and others, wanted to change.

Protestantism really is bound up in culture. Ironically, parts of it are recapitulating the history that gave rise to it.