In 'How to render gender in Scripture' (August EN) Wayne Grudem reported on a proposed set of 'guidelines for translation of gender-related language in Scripture'.
Although some of the guidelines from the Colorado Springs meeting seem eminently sensible, I believe, as an academic linguist, that others are flawed. I do not wish to defend the withdrawn 'inclusive language' NIV (NIVI). Though I believe that some parts of it are an improvement on the NIV, some passages trouble me (e.g. its apparent embarrassment with the maleness of Jesus, as in John 10:33).
In my judgement, the Colorado Springs group fails to take account of the genuine difficulty associated with the use of masculine terminology in today's English to convey mixed sex meanings. Consider the word 'brother', for example. Guideline B.1 states that: 'Brother' (adelphos) and 'brothers' (adelphoi) should not be changed to 'brother(s) and sister(s)'. There can be no doubt that English 'brother(s)' and words like it, did operate in this way in the past. But do they still?
A roomful of men
Picture a room full of men before the start of a meeting. To call the meeting to order, the chairman says "Gentlemen!". Though the meaning of the word includes maleness, the absence of any non-males around the table indicates that the male reference is not contrastive, i.e. its differentiating function has been neutralised. Now suppose that a woman joins the committee. The chairman brings the meeting to order in the usual way. Where once there was only one way to interpret his utterance, now we have a choice. (1) He may not have noticed the presence of the woman. (2) He may be singling out the men for some special reason. (3) He may wish to be deliberately rude to the woman. (4) He may be so set in his linguistic ways that he has forgotten that the word 'gentlemen' has a contrastive meaning. Linguistic problems have arisen in this case, not because of the lobbying of feminist campaigners, but because there is now a woman sitting at the table who, by her very presence, injects the possibility that the once neutral term is being used contrastively.
Society in the English speaking world has undergone a dramatic social change which has seen women sitting around an increasing number of tables, and this has led to genuine confusion in usage of gender-marked language.
Public discourse
When public discourse was overwhelmingly among and about men, it was possible to maintain a consensus that male terms served a generic function, even when women where included in the referential scope. As women started to become more visible, speakers began to change their behaviour, but they did so in inconsistent ways. Once neutrally descriptive terms (like 'policeman') were suddenly found to be contrastive, so feminine or generic terms (such as 'policewoman' or 'police officer') had to be coined. In this process, some traditional terms which had never been explicitly marked for gender (such as 'manager') were assumed to be masculine because they had always referred to men, and so new feminine forms were needlessly coined (e.g. 'manageress').
Another response was to broaden out the meaning of male-reference terms to include women. For example, an academic 'fellow' may nowadays be a woman as readily as a man. The cases of generic reference which seem to work best are those for which no obvious contrasting lexical item exists. Where there is a paired word (e.g. gentleman/lady, brother/sister), generic reference is much less reliably accessed from the masculine.
Because our language is rooted in a context in which the visibility of women is significantly different from that of Biblical or even early 20th-century times, use of masculine terms with generic reference will tend to communicate meanings which are significantly different from those intended by the inspired writers of Scripture. An apparently conservative translation of adelphoi as 'brothers' in a context which suggests a generic reading, will, for many readers, set up a series of problems not associated with the original text. It is surely preferable to find some less ambiguous way of communicating the intended meaning (e.g. 'brothers and sisters', 'fellow Christians', or whatever). I do not claim that all problems can be eliminated by the avoidance of masculine terms to convey generic meaning, but I do believe that the problems can be reduced.
He, him, his, himself
Now consider guideline A.1, which states that: The generic use of 'he', 'him', 'his', 'himself' should be employed to translate generic 3rd person masculine singular pronouns. There is no doubt that the 'he' forms have served a generic function in English over several centuries, but do they still serve that function today? Almost certainly they do for erudite professional scholars, but what about ordinary Bible readers? Empirical evidence suggests not. Analysis of very large text corpora reveals that masculine pronouns with non-generic reference occur with much higher frequency than feminine pronouns. In other words, it is still a fact of our society that far more gets written about men than about women. How does this frequency distribution affect the interpretation of generic forms? Professor Greville Corbett, the leading authority on grammatical gender, observes that 'even when reference could be to a male or to a female, the pattern of the other (non-generic) pronouns would lead the hearer to conclude that the actual person involved is more likely to be male' (Gender, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 221).
This hypothesis has been borne out in numerous experiments (conducted by academic linguists rather than ideologically committed feminists) which have shown that instances of generic 'he' tend to lead to a male referent interpretation of antecedents such as 'student', 'dancer' and 'musician'. Corbett concludes that 'the use of generic 'he' seems not to work in English' (ibid.).
In his EN article, Wayne Grudem counsels that 'our response to women who say they do not feel included by such language should be to teach them that such usage does not in fact exclude women.' Who says? Apparently not the subjects in the experiments mentioned above. Just saying it's so won't make it so. We might as well try to hold back the entire tide of language change and teach people that 'thou' is the correct singular form of 'you'! (Note, in passing, that guideline A.2 given below seems to require this!) It will always be easier to fix the translation than to fix the language.
One way around the generic 'he' problem is to use an evasive 'they' form instead. The drafters of the translation guidelines worry that such evasive forms obscure the personal application of Scripture. For this reason they propose guideline A.2: Person and number should be retained in translation so that singulars are not changed to plurals and third person statements are not changed to second person or first person statements, with only rare exceptions required in unusual cases.
Standing at the door
It is true that changes of person and number may obscure the personal application of scripture, but it is important to acknowledge that failure to change them may have a similar or worse effect. "I will come in and eat with him" (Rev 3:20) can be read as personal if the reader is any man or a woman who is convinced that this is an instance of generic 'him'. The woman who takes 'him' to have exclusively male reference believes that the Scripture has personal application, but not for her.
Now consider the NIVI version: 'I will come in and eat with them'. Grudem glosses this as 'Jesus eating with a whole church, not just an individual' and points to the existence of many other verses involving 'loss of teaching about personal fellowship between God and an individual Christian." He neglects to cite the first part of the verse which disambiguates the pronoun: "If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them." The presence of the universal quantifier 'anyone' makes it clear that 'them' is not a normal plural but rather an evasive singular. There is no loss of teaching on personal fellowship.
I concede that some readers may misinterpret the evasive pronoun. But notice that misinterpretation of the 'them' translation always includes the correct meaning (every individual Christian is included among 'them'), unlike misinterpretation of the 'him' version (where the masculine reading excludes women).
The rise of evasive 'they' is often blamed on secular feminism, but this is wildly mistaken. Evasive pronouns have been used in this way for hundreds of years. For example, John Fisher writing in 1535 says of God: 'He never forsaketh any creature unless they before have forsaken themselves' (spelling modernised). The pre-feminist Oxford English Dictionary lists the second major entry for 'they' as follows: 'Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= 'he or she').' So important is evasive 'they' in English that it is hard to form some constructions without it: 'If either of my parents comes, they (but not 'he') will bring a friend'.
Who'd be a man in Dyirbal?
Grudem refers to 'at least one linguist who knew of no human language that lacked a singular pronoun that was used generically.' Dyirbal is such a language. He continues: 'In some languages, it is the masculine singular pronoun; in others, a neuter singular pronoun.' Neuter is very rare (I know of only a limited range of constructions in Polish and Archi in which a neuter works generically). But why no reference to the more common incidence of feminine generic pronouns (e.g. in Dama, Goajiro, Maasai, and Seneca)? In these languages, a faithful translation of the meaning of the text would require Revelation 3:20 to read 'I will come in and eat with her, and she with me.'
The participants in this debate agree that the Bible is God's word and that those who translate it should strive to render the original meaning as faithfully as possible in the target languages. But how shall we judge the quality of the translations? The linguistic judgements of scholars must be handled with care. They have cut their teeth on etymology and hermeneutics and bring interpretive resources to the text which ordinary Bible readers do not share. These readers must be assisted to access the original meaning as directly as possible.
Simply the best
We need to find the best English words to express the meaning of the original text, and this is open to investigation in ways not usually considered in Biblical studies. Why not conduct some empirical trials to find out which words actually, rather than theoretically, communicate the desired meaning? Ask subjects to explain what they understand by different translations of key passages. If it is found that one translation leads people to the interpretation judged correct by the translators significantly more often than the other then, in all conscience before God, we would have better grounds to recognise and support the more helpful translation. I suggest that such an exercise be regarded as an essential prerequisite for any serious guidelines for translation of gender-related language in Scripture.
Dr. Norman Fraser in a university lecturer in linguistics with a track record of published research on grammatical gender. He has recently taken up the post of Assistant Head of Student Ministries at UCCF.
