Dave, I certainly wasn’t intending to be inflammatory. I wasn’t addressing correct exegesis or not, I’m not sure it even makes much sense to when we are comparing those camps since there views on what is correct also different. Just simply addressing the level of woman’s participation and how the inerrancy litmus test effected that.

@Dave: I agree that poor exegesis and interpretation seems to be a universal flaw, not limited to specific doctrinal or theological viewpoints.

That’s kind of inflammatory, IMO. I’m an inerrantist, and am certainly not anti-women. Wrong exegesis runs strong with people who come from both the inerrant and errant camps.

Personally, I’d rather have a good translation (not a word list) and use study helps for references.

I agree completely.

I tried to make a point to shift the preponderance of the blame to interpreters. But at the same time…it’s like giving a loaded weapon to children. Now, that’s much more dramatic than I actually feel about it – I’m not going to say that I’ve heard any AMP-based damnable heresies or anything. And I certainly don’t want Ms. Siewart picking up the full tab. But my misgiving with the Amplified Bible as with study Bibles in general is that they often give a false impression of adequate study: anyone reading a bare-bones translation should be aware that they’re not doing research, but many who have study Bibles will not feel the urge to go consult a dedicated resource or two because, well, their study Bible’s notes say this-or-that. Here again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have study Bibles, but that’s definitely a pitfall with them, and the Amplified fosters this false assumption, even among those who have better hermeneutics than what I criticized in my earlier comment. Personally, I’d rather have a good translation (not a word list) and use study helps for references. But that’s just me…

Nice reference! I understand your point and probably agree, though in one sense all Mrs. Siewert has done is move alternative renderings from footnotes to inline with the text itself. Granted, she proposes many more alternatives than most translations would footnote.

In a sense she is shifting the authority of translation away from the translator back to the text itself. Where the translator normally makes the decision on what a word means in context and how it should be translated, she leaves that decision decidedly unfinished. To CD’s point, “it keeps the reader profoundly aware they are reading a translation“, perhaps even to the point of making the reader part of the translation process inasmuch as they are exposed to multiple possible meanings.

So all that said, if the original Greek carries multiple nuances of meaning that might actually be captured by the Amplified’s proposed “amplifications”, shouldn’t the criticism be aimed at those who misuse the translation rather than the translation effort itself?

As far as women… back at the turn of the century missionaries were women 2:1. So in the missions field, women were heavily involved in bible translation and exposition. But the inerrantists were also anti-women so once a belief inerrancy became a litmus test for being on a translation committee women’s participation dropped off. Also with the collapse of the Asian missions program during the 1930s that venue disappeared and so women’s involvement in that sort of work disappeared.

I kind of cover this from a different angle in my piece on Machen.