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Satire is accounted in the Holy Scriptures an honorable thing and to be considered worthy in the sight of all men (and women), if I may paraphrase a familiar wedding liturgy. Second Isaiah's lampoon of Babylonian idolatry in Isaiah chapter 44, Proverbs's burlesque of the drunkard in chapter 23, verses 29-35, Matthew's parody of people who act pious in public for the sake of applause (Matthew 6:2, 5, 16) are still side-splitting as we read them today! My favorite biblical humorist has got to be Luke, the author of Acts. Get this: in chapter 12, Peter is on Death Row, his execution imminent. The faithful are gathered at Mark's mom's house, praying for his release. In fact, Peter is miraculously released and shows up at the door to tell them so. But when they hear the news, it does not so much as occur to them that their prayers might have been answered with success: no, Peter must have been killed already, and it must be his guardian angel, i.e., his ghost at the door! What a riot! What a picture of an utter lack of faith, of prayer reduced to a pathetic charade! And Luke's got a million of them! Ask Eutychus!

This book is a little different: it is a parody of scripture. Or is it? Maybe not, despite appearances. Let me explain how it came about, what motivated it. I had been a fundamentalist, then an evangelical, and I believed very strongly in biblical authority. I knew the danger of citing verses out of context and of reading into the text what you wanted to find there, though I guess I was not yet aware of how often or easily we do that. It was important to avoid such abuses as far as you could, since the goal was to find out what the Bible really said and do it, or believe it. I didn't yet realize the difficulties attached to that aim either. But I thought I knew cheating when I saw it. My fundamentalist pals and I used to deride the way Jehovah's Witnesses would mistranslate (we thought) John 1:1 in order to fit their Christology, to make Jesus merely "a god." I thought that was about as low as you could sink. That was just making the Bible into a ventriloquist dummy. That was just writing your own Bible. Little did I suspect that what I thought was an exception would soon prove instead to be the rule! For here came various Bible versions that were wholesale ideological rewrites!

For the fundamentalists, here was the Living Bible, not even a translation from the original languages, just an admitted paraphrase of the American Standard Version of 1901. Paraphraser Kenneth Taylor admitted that he had used evangelical theology (and devotionalism) as his "theological lodestar." I watched in disbelief as Pat Robertson and many, many other fundamentalists embraced and promoted this book (under various catchy new titles, including just The Book) as their favorite Bible. Wait just a second! Weren't these the very people who made biblical accuracy and inerrancy into a fetish? Who engineered seminary purges to protect inerrantism? Now that they had that settled, what next? Well, let's just throw the real Bible out the window and replace it with this phony Bible that we like better!

But maybe the theological liberals were captive to a greater irony, since for them, the Bible was ostensibly not literally authoritative. They professed to allow more elbow room for modern thought in understanding and applying the Bible. This implied they felt freer admitting it when the Bible was reprehensible or backwards from the viewpoint of modern readers. And then, what do you know? They came out with the New Revised Standard Version and subsequent, even more radical retranslations. The goal of these was to purge the Bible of those retrograde passages that aided and abetted sexism, racism, etc. The goal was to make the Bible politically correct. It is part of a theo-political agenda that seeks to recover, or if need be, to fabricate what is openly called a "usable past." So to manipulate the ancient text presupposes that one does not believe it to be the authoritative word of God. And yet it simultaneously presupposes that many readers do believe it to be the divine authority. And the whole enterprise is a patronizing (or shall we say matronizing) attempt by the liberal Grand Inquisitor to manipulate a faith for the masses that he/she does not personally share. I think of Orwell's brilliant 1984. The operating assumption of the Ministry of Truth was that the past is infinitely malleable precisely because it can never be changed. This meant that one might get away with changing it since one could never overthrow the commonsense supposition that what is written down in black and white is eternally true. But all one need do is to write it down again and throw out the old version. Then no one will think to question the new any more than they questioned the old, since they will continue to believe the past cannot be changed. And this will stop them from recognizing that it has been. The politically correct Bible is a cynical propaganda device, even if some of its creators and proponents have been taken in by their own ruse.

Basically, the idea for this book arose from the realization that even such extensive retooling as the Bible received at the hands of its politically correct censors must represent only the beginning of a Newspeak Bible, since the 1990 New RSV still fell far short of total political correctness. If the goal was to create a Bible that would embody and so reinforce liberal PC orthodoxy, much more work, more extensive retooling must lie ahead. Not that it will, mind you. It's just that it would have to. I mean to poke fun at the whole enterprise by depicting the Bible as it would have to look to satisfy liberal ideologues. And of course not even they will ever dare to go so far. Why? Just because it would look as ridiculous as it does in this book! Or very nearly so. The NRSV is already pretty hilarious.

I am grateful to my colleagues at the Jesus Seminar for their knee-slapping reception of portions of this book as I read them to the Saturday evening banquet audience twice a year. A few fragments of the text have appeared before in The Door, First Things, and elsewhere, sometimes without my knowledge or permission! But that's okay: to me it just meant some folks liked it enough that they could not wait to share it. Finally, don't get me wrong, and, my conservative friends, don't take too much comfort from these pages. I have plenty of ideas for a companion volume: The Fundamentalist Bible.

Robert M. Price

February 18, 2002