Given that it is a day of the week ending with “Y’, we can be sure that there has been or will be a mass shooting or two somewhere in the US today. So common is the slaughter now that the media only registers it when there number of human sacrificed to the GOP Gun Cult or their extreme youth are notable enough to attract attention. When the horror reaches a pitch that it still manages to penetrate the MAGA Gun Cult-induced numbness for a moment, I take advantage of the moment in the dim and flickering hope that our deadened hearts may yet be moved to action to crush the Gun Cult.
Accordingly, I post this on such occasions in an attempt to get a population held hostage by the MAGA “Prolife” Gun Cult of Death to overthrow their captors and destroy their regime for good and all:
Bring no more vain offerings;
GOP prayer breakfasts are an abomination to me.
Press conferences and the NRA rallies—
I cannot endure iniquity and CPAC assembly.
Your thoughts and prayers
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread forth your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
defend the fatherless,
plead for the widow. (Is 1:13–17, Revised Shea paraphrase)
A while back I did this and one of the Righteous in the Cult responded in high dudgeon:
“Mark Shea’s “idea” here is blasphemous. The Bible is not a clever book of sayings that we get to mess with or represent publicly however we want, even in the most heartfelt of causes (much less to score political points). It says what it says and means what it means, but you (and Mark) are extrapolating based on how you feel. If you have a point to make, then make it, but don’t enlist and then twist the word of God to say it for you. Especially don’t do so in a way that implies divine condemnation on three actual, specific souls.”
It is tempting, of course, to reply to such objections with, “How do you feel about ‘Woe to you, MAGA liars and Gun Cult pettifoggers, hypocrites! for you devour elementary schoolkids in mass slaughters and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive the greater condemnation. Woe to you, MAGA liars and Gun Cultists, hypocrites! for you obsess over trivialities like paraphrasing scripture, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!’ Does that paraphase of Matthew 23 offend their precious piety? I sure as hell hope so.”
But that would be impolite, so I won’t do that.
Instead I will simply point out that Christians and Jews have been paraphrasing the word of God right from the start. That’s why we have these four accounts of the words of Institution of the Eucharist and none of them are the same:
“Take, eat; this is my body.” (Matthew 26:26–27)
“Take; this is my body.” (Mark 14:22)
“This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19).
“This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24).
And small wonder, given that Jesus paraphrases Scripture too:
“On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John 7:37-39)
There is no passage in the Old Testament that says, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water”. But there are any number of images and ideas in the Old Testament that convey this idea, (for instance: Exodus 17:6; Numbers 20:11; Psalm 114:8; Isaiah 44:3; Isaiah 55:1; Isaiah 58:11; Joel 2:23; Joel 3:18; Ezekiel 47:1; Ezekiel 47:12; Zechariah 13:1; Zechariah 14:8). Jesus, handling Scripture like a poet and not a lawyer or bibliographer, paraphrases its meaning.
So, for that matter, does Paul, as do the Jewish translators of the Septuagint, as do Christian translators of The Living Bible. As does Abraham Lincoln in warning that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Paraphrasing Scripture in order to find its applicability in the present hour has been done by Christians for 2000 years. Apparently it only becomes “blasphemous” when apologists for mass gun slaughter need to gin up a standard Right Wing Panic du Jour to protect that steel phallus they worship as their new technological Baal.
This fake panic about “putting words in our Lord’s mouth” never panics them when they need to ventriloquize about their supposed “God-given Second Amendment rights” (which do not exist at all). Given that Jesus said not one single solitary word about gun rights, the cocksure declarations from these defenders of slaughter about “putting words in our Lord’s mouth” are a particularly infelicitous way for these people to proceed. If they can extrapolate from things Jesus never once said, I can certainly extrapolate from things he definitely said, such as “Peter, put up your sword.”
Not that every paraphrase of quotation of Scripture is thereby legitimized, of course. If the Inquisitor worried about my paraphrase of Isaiah is really interested in smoking out blasphemous misapplications of Scripture, he should direct his pitiless gaze at Daniel Defense, which posted this God-damned distortion of the word of God (and I mean that with exacting theological precision) on May 16, 2022:
Eight days later, Salvador Ramos, armed with the AR-15 Daniel Defense manufactures, walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and massacred 19 children and two teachers, as well as wounding 17 more children and traumatizing every child in that school forever, as well as an entire nation.
Here’s a passage for the Scripture scholars of the MAGA Antichrist Gun Cult, so eagle-eyed for “blasphemy” where none exists and so stone blind to blasphemous blood on their filthy hands and the blasphemous lies on their filthy lips. It is 100% free of paraphrase, and yet 100% applicable to their evil exaltation of the human tradition called the Second Amendment over the word of God called the Fifth Commandment:
And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men.” (Mark 7:6-8)
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5 Responses
Please, keep on paraphrasing
Minor quibble that “Daniel Defense” is not actual “paraphrasing” the Bible but actually quoting it, literally – but out of context. This is probably even more dangerous. It is, in fact, the method we are told Satan used to tempt Jesus in the wilderness – using verbatim citations in isolation. Let’s face it, “o Lucifer star of the morning” and “the voice of a god, not a man!” are direct copy-and-pastes direct from Scripture.
Indeed, an outright paraphrase (“If you have two televisions, give one away”), being more obvious, would make an author more accountable for what they are trying to say, rather than hiding behind “Hey, take it up with Jesus, not me”).
TFW when you see a professed Christian who really would fit better bowing before Bakkalon, the Pale Child, than before “the god who called himself a lamb…
wait, on closer reading I see Mark said DD was doing a “misapplication” rather than a wrongful paraphrasing — ie a different fork around the tree in the oath, that ends up in the same place on the other side. Quibble retracted.
25-30 years ago, Dr Rowland Croucher, a moderately liberal Baptist minister in Australia, wrote an “Interview with Jesus” essay which made the point that, yes, while God is concerned about people restraining their sexual appetities, greed and cruelty attract just as much much divine displeasure. (ie, a standard Pope Francis-style position).
A number of conservative Christians attacked Croucher, of course, and while some disputed his conclusions on their merits (“greed is good, God ordained capitalism to make us wealthy, and ‘coveting thy neighbours goods’ means seeking redistribution of wealth so that no one starves, not wanting a second yacht while others are starving”), quite a few seemed offended by the very idea that a mere mortal would invent his own words to put into the mouth of the Son of God. As if Croucher had tried to trick them with a social-gospellish Book of Mormon or Donation of Constantine.
(Do wonder if this cohort had any objections to the “LEFT BEHIND” series, or to Frank Peretti’s novels…).
The real issue is not whether you’re quoting the words verbatim – and anything you quote will be a translation, anyway, from Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Vulgate Latin – but whether you are conveying the idea accurately. Indeed, quoting verbatim can be used for humorous effect – calling someone a “Nimrod” is not a compliment, and so many Biblical words are now car model names so you can make dad-jokes like “the disciples left in one [Honda] Accord.”
On the other hand, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” comes not from the Bible, nor David Bowie, but [lowers voice] from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. Yet no one objects to the phrase as un-Biblical (or un-enscripturated-Traditional), because it neatly summarise what the canon does include, eg Genesis 3:18 or “son of dust” in Ezekiel. (In a way that “the Authority was merely the first angel, formed out of Dust” certainly does not summarise. (-:)
… or “the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt”… “How was their airline food”? etc etc
And of course, “thy neighbour’s ass” (groan).
On a darker note – one friend of mine, who’d learned English as a second language, was intrigued that every second news report about abuse of children was titled “Suffer the little children”… and then appalled to learn that the saying was attributed to Jesus.
Of course in the original context it mean “permit” or “allow”, second-person imperative… Jesus certainly did not mean it as a third-person imperative commanding that little children should suffer.
A direct quotation of the original words (as translated into then-accurate King James English 300 years ago) would be highly misleading today.