[Evangelical]

There is now one glaring contradiction in what Jane wrote and what John has stated on this forum about the reasons why the lemon verses exist or how they came into being.

John wrote "the point being made in this post is that male gender bias is in the translation, not in the sexual makeup of the committee.".

I think that is a fair and accurate statement, as my previous analysis showed little correlation between gender and how a verse is translated.

If there are females with "male gender bias" on the committee, then clearly this bias cannot be "innate", which was the terminology Jane used. A known female with natural/inborn male bias does not make much sense.

Now for the contradiction. Jane in her book clearly said that the gender of the committee was a problem and a reason why the lemon verses exist:

Quoting from Chapter 2 of A Woman of Chayil: Far Above Rubies she wrote:

There were no female members on early Bible translation committees, so it was easy for Satan to use innate male bias to influence the translations of verses that pertained to women’s roles.

Regardless of the reason why women were absent from translation committees, the simple fact remains: The female voice and perspective were not present in Bible translation efforts. Females would have been able to point out and challenge any translations pertaining to women that displayed male bias, something men would not be able to recognize easily. The absence of female input provides a rational explanation for why seven somewhat difficult to translate and interpret Bible passages in the New Testament stand out as anomalies among the more numerous grape passages.

In contradiction to what John wrote, it seems that Jane's reasoning is all about the gender of the translation committee, and that if they had female input these lemon verses would likely not have occurred.

What she writes here actually makes logical sense, until we look at the evidence - in a previous post I showed how the gender of a translation committee does not seem to correlate with how a verse is translated. It seems that John agrees, it is not about gender of the translation committee.

In summary we can see that:

1) a contradiction exists between what Jane wrote and how John has explained it here.
2) If nothing to do with gender of the committee ,then "innate male bias" in men is NOT to blame for lemon translations.
3) Awareness's view that the drinking habits of the translators are to blame, now seems more plausible than male bias.


If it is not about the gender of the committee, and if females cannot have "innate male bias" because they are female, then I think we can re-state the reasons for any bias in a way without referring to gender, such as:
Satan used whoever was translating at the time when it was translated (male or female) to mis-translate parts of the bible. Or we could just call them innocent human mistakes? Bushnell says no - Satan had a "grand scheme", an "economy" if you will (to use LC terminology), to do something sinister by mistranslating all and any verses which could be used to prove Bushnell wrong.