In a world where Israelis and Palestinians are slaughtering each other (again) – to the delight of some evangelical Christians who desire a nuclear war in the Middle East, which they believe to be prerequisite to the Second Coming – and where actual, dangerous anti-Semitism rubs shoulders with kneejerk accusations of anti-Semitism against anyone who dares to criticize the Netanyahu government, it’s a comfort to know that some folks are working hard to smother the flames of religious hatred. Such efforts often go on quietly for years, behind the scenes, with deep academic focus on the work itself and little regard for publicity.
One such project has been in progress for nearly a decade now, spearheaded locally by the reverend Susan Auchincloss, a retired Episcopal pastor who lives in Woodstock and serves as priest associate at St. Gregory’s, and Bruce Chilton, a world-renowned Biblical scholar who directs the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College. Called Readings from the Roots, its mission is ambitious indeed: to create a new, culturally sensitive, more historically accurate modern translation of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) that doesn’t depict “the Jews” as “those bad people who killed Jesus.” According to Auchincloss, “It’s also going to avoid sexist language. God is never going to be He.”
First widely released in 1994, the RCL is the collection of biblical texts currently used by most mainstream Christian churches in the English-speaking world as their authoritative source for Sunday readings, drawing on both the Old and New Testaments. The 20th-century model for such a guide, keeping pastors and congregations all over the world thinking about the same Bible passages during the same week of the liturgical year, was the so-called Roman Lectionary, issued as Ordo Lectionum Missae in 1969 by the Second Vatican Council. Seen as “radical” at the time by conservative Catholic theologians, Vatican II didn’t mandate a particular translation, but urged each country to adopt or create its own and conduct church services in the local language instead of Latin, for the first time.
The unifying structure that the Roman Lectionary provided was a list of Biblical passages organized around the seasons of Christian festivals, beginning with Advent and Christmas. There’s a three-year cycle, each year of which is devoted to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark or Luke respectively, with passages for certain feasts drawn from the Gospel of John. If you go to church anywhere in the world on Palm Sunday, for example, you can be reasonably sure that you will hear the story of Christ’s Passion, from the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem up until his entombment, with the Resurrection part of the story saved for Easter itself. This seasonal structure has been so widely embraced that it’s difficult to imagine a time when Sunday readings were chosen by preachers at random.
Panels of scholars in different countries quickly busied themselves with producing vernacular translations of the passages recommended in the Roman Lectionary. Commonly adopted English versions included the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) Lectionary of 1974 and the Common Lectionary of 1983. The current standard, the Revised Common Lectionary, was a collaborative effort of the International English Language Liturgical Consultation and the North American Consultation on Common Texts, whose members included representatives of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and many American and Canadian Protestant churches, including Lutheran, North American Anglican (Episcopal), Presbyterian and Methodist.
Each of these new translations made efforts to tweak awkward, unclear, biased or otherwise objectionable language found in its predecessors. But Auchincloss found herself increasingly troubled by some of the usage in the RCL – especially those passages in the New Testament that rely on “the Jews” as a convenient catchall term for specific groups who in the original Hebrew or Aramaic might have been identified as Judeans, Galileans, a particular social caste, religious or political faction of the day. For example, she cites John 7.1 as one of these “toxic texts”: “After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him.” Here the original reference is to a faction of first-century Judeans rather than Jews in general – as is the famous reference in John 19:13-16, in which a mob demands that Pontius Pilate order Jesus’ crucifixion. Revisions by the Readings from the Roots team repair these harmful mistranslations.
“I read a book called Constantine’s Sword, and it kind of radicalized me. It’s all about the Christian persecution of Jews going back to the earliest days. I’m committed to my faith, and it bothered me so much,” Auchincloss says of what initially sparked the project. “The Bible that we read in church every day, in almost every Christian denomination – those translations of the Bible have fueled anti-Semitic activity by hammering away at the idea that ‘the Jews’ were Jesus’ enemies. How can that not have inflamed people, especially in the West, against Jews and Judaism?”
That consciousness-raising process motivated Auchincloss to reach out to other progressive clergy in America who “really wanted to defend Christianity from the continuation of this practice.” She became involved with an ecumenical think tank called the Council of Centers for Jewish-Christian Relations, which brings together academics from colleges across the country, and met many colleagues who were “on the same wavelength,” expressing similar concerns about the often-anti-Semitic wording of the common liturgy. They also shared her distaste for “supersessionism”: the doctrine espoused by some denominations that Christianity had taken over the role of God’s Chosen People from the Hebrews, and that Judaism existed only to pave the way for the coming of Christ and is no longer spiritually relevant.
While it was Auchincloss who initiated the Readings from the Roots project, and still serves as its executive director, she knew she wasn’t enough of a professional linguist to do the translations herself. It’s a formidable task even for experts, considering how many different times different books of the Bible have been translated into various languages and back again over the millennia since the Septuagint established the first authoritative Greek version of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew in the third century BCE.
Although she earned a Master’s in Divinity at the Episcopal Seminary in Berkeley, California, “I am absolutely no scholar,” she says. “Luckily I found two other people, Bruce [Chilton] and Peter [Pettit, teaching pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa and founder of the Council of Centers for Jewish-Christian Relations], who are deeply at home in all those ancient languages and equally at home in the cultures of the time.” Also on the translation team are Alan J. Avery-Peck of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and Delio DelRio of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The undertaking is conceived in two phases: first, to produce a modern lectionary that’s handily available for any and all Protestant and Catholic congregations to use for readings in their weekly services, and eventually, to retranslate the entire Bible. The panel of scholars assembled for the project has already made considerable progress toward the first goal, and their output can be found online at https://readingsfromtheroots.bard.edu. “We’ll sometimes spend an hour on one word,” says Auchincloss. “We have a long way to go. We could hire more translators if we could get a grant of some kind.”
When Phase One is completed, it will be published in book form. While Auchincloss herself takes a low profile as an administrator, she’s not unaware that, if widely adopted by individual congregations or even entire church organizations, Readings from the Roots could end up becoming a historic watershed in the way that Christians in American think about their religious heritage and how it flows directly out of Judaism. She’s adamant, therefore, that the scholarship must be impeccable – that this new lectionary must be grounded rigorously in the original texts and represent “what they meant to be saying… We’re trying to replicate the consciousness of the time that it was written.”
Speaking as a committed Christian who wants her church to be the best it can be, Auchincloss says, “If things went really well, we would be really appreciative of Jewish tradition. We can use it to enrich our worship. They are not a threat to us. I would love for that to be the attitude amongst Christians: a deep gratitude and appreciation.”
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