I STILL REMEMBER how frustrated I was. At our church, I led Wednesday night youth group, but because of the pastoral stance on male headship, I could only teach teenage girls. Usually, my husband and I avoided teaching directly on women’s roles in the church. We worked hard to not publicly contradict the pastoral position.
Tonight one of the teenage girls was leading. Part of our philosophy was to teach the youth the skills they would need to become leaders in the church, which included teaching the Bible. So we worked with them on how to prepare lessons, find resources, and actually lead a lesson. This student taught on what it meant to be a Christian wife. Because of the complementarian stance of the church, I couldn’t refuse her choice. I also couldn’t contradict her. I could only listen.
I sat staring at the Bible in front of me. It was my Today’s New International Version (TNIV), which my husband had given me early in our marriage. I listened as she read from the ESV. I listened as she argued from Scripture that women’s primary calling was to be a wife and a mother. I listened as she said that men were called to lead, because only men were mentioned in the Bible in leadership positions, while women were called to follow.
When it was over, I got in my car and sat there. Many of the verses the girl had read were shaped by the translation she was using. The picture of submissive wives and mothers, who sat under the leadership of their husbands and male leaders in the church, may have seemed crystal clear. But her translation, her very modern English Bible translation, made her believe that what she was teaching was a plain reading of Scripture, whereas as a historian, I know that all biblical translations are shaped by human hands.
Translations matter. And for women, translations of the English Bible have mattered more than most modern evangelicals realize.1
The Gender-Inclusive Bible Debate
It was the 1996–97 academic year when I graduated from Baylor University with a bachelor’s in history. This was also the year I got married to an ordained Baptist pastor and started a graduate program in medieval history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was a big year for me.
The year 1997 was also a big year in the world of Bible translation. It was the year World magazine published the article “Femme Fatale: The Feminist Seduction of the Evangelical Church.” Writer Susan Olasky told readers that the New International Version (NIV) was “quietly going ‘gender neutral.’”2 The result, she wrote, could be catastrophic—a gender-neutral Bible could “cloud the uniqueness of men and women” and hamper the “uphill” struggle of complementarians for a return to biblical gender roles. The catalyst for the change, argued Olasky, was not “new discoveries about the Bible” but rather “social changes occurring in culture.” One month later, Olasky published a second article, “The Battle for the Bible.” In it, she accused Zondervan of being more committed to “unisex language” than to faithfulness to the biblical text. Because Zondervan authors were supposed to avoid using masculine pronouns as “generic placemarkers” and instead use gender-inclusive terms like humanity and people, because Zondervan already published other gender-inclusive Bible translations (such as the NRSV), and because Zondervan was contractually bound to support the International Bible Society’s Committee on Biblical Translations (which had been promoting gender-inclusive language since 1992), Olasky painted Zondervan as letting culture change the Word of God.3
The uproar among evangelicals was instantaneous. Gender-inclusive language was no longer just an argument over proper translation; it was the slippery slope of feminism destroying biblical truth. “I do not think this is an issue that should be swept under the rug,” wrote Wayne Grudem, then professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. “The accuracy and integrity of many words of Scripture are at stake, and these are the very words of God.”4
One month after Olasky’s second article was published, twelve men met in Colorado Springs. Led by James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and including Grudem and Piper, the group produced guidelines for “Gender-Related Language in Scripture.”5 Sometimes, they conceded, gender-inclusive language could improve the accuracy of translations, but most gender-inclusive language, they concluded, was not biblically accurate. Shortly after the Colorado Springs meeting, the SBC met in Dallas. In June 1997, the nearly sixteen-million-member denomination unequivocally condemned gender-inclusive language in biblical translations. Their resolution proclaimed that such translations resulted from “those who do not hold a high view of Scripture” and those who gave in “to accommodate contemporary cultural pressures.”6 By fall 1997, the battle lines were drawn. Secular culture, especially the feminist movement, was changing Scripture in a dangerous way, and it was time for Christians to fight back.
When Zondervan released their gender-inclusive translation (TNIV) in 2002, Grudem wrote a scathing review. According to him, “The heart of the controversy is this: The TNIV people have decided to translate the general idea of a passage and to erase the male-oriented details.”7 The website for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, of which Grudem was president, listed more than one hundred challenges to the textual renderings of the TNIV. The same article reports Dobson’s prepared statement about the TNIV: “Like most evangelical Christians, I want my Bible to contain an accurate translation of the canonical Hebrew and Greek texts. Accordingly, I will continue to speak out against any effort that alters God’s Word or toys with translation methodology for the sake of ‘political correctness.’”8
Before the TNIV was even released, the Colorado Springs group had begun working on their own translation. Directly after Dobson’s meeting in May 1997, Grudem entered translation negotiations with Crossway and the National Council of Churches; in 1998, permission was secured to revise the 1971 RSV and release a new translation that would get rid of “de-Christianing translation choices.”9 In 2001, a year before Zondervan published the TNIV, Crossway released the ESV, along with a slew of endorsements from evangelical megachurch pastors, musicians, and authors.10
The ESV was a direct response to the gender-inclusive language debate. It was born to secure readings of Scripture that preserved male headship. It was born to fight against liberal feminism and secular culture challenging the Word of God.
As a medieval historian who specializes in English sermons, the debate over gender-inclusive translations amuses me. It amuses me because the accusers depict gender-inclusive Bible translations as a modern, secular trend fueled by the feminist movement. Yet, as a medieval historian, I know that Christians translated Scripture in gender-inclusive ways long before the feminist movement.
I’ll admit that the debate also scares me. It scares me for the same reason that it amuses me: because gender-inclusive language has a long history in the church, the debate shows how much modern evangelical Christians have forgotten church history. Indeed, the debate underscores how dangerous many evangelicals’ lack of understanding about the past affects women in the present. While it is certainly true that second-wave feminism in the 1960s contributed to greater concern for gender-inclusive language in American culture, it is also true that concern for gender-inclusive language in the biblical text existed long before modern feminism.
So let me tell you what I know as a historian about the translation of the English Bible—what I wish I had told those girls long ago at Wednesday night youth group.
The English Bible before the Reformation
I was recently given the Baylor Annotated Study Bible. The gold-trimmed pages shine between the dark green leather cover. It is beautiful. It is easy to carry around. It has an attached green ribbon so I won’t lose my place. It has study notes by some of my favorite biblical scholars, including Scot McKnight, Todd Still, and Mikeal Parsons. When we think of a Bible, we visualize a bound book like this.
Historically speaking, the Bible as a bound book is new. A single bound volume that can be purchased and carried around by ordinary people was birthed more than fifteen hundred years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The ingenuity of a fifteenth-century German blacksmith launched the printing revolution in early modern Europe, including mass-market distribution of the Bible. The production of what we now know as the Gutenberg Bible marks a significant turning point in history. The Word of God, from Genesis to Revelation, became readily available to the people of God for the first time.
One of my favorite churches in London enshrines the English Bible as born in 1535. The church, St. Magnus the Martyr, stands steps from Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse on Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of London began in 1666. Dedicated to Saint Magnus the Martyr, this church was the second church destroyed by the fire and the most expensive church restored under the direction of Christopher Wren. The pricey steeple is now nearly obscured by surrounding buildings, including the monument to the Great Fire itself.
But if you duck inside St. Magnus the Martyr, on the east wall near the altar you will find a nineteenth-century plaque marking the remains of Miles Coverdale. Coverdale is best known for his English Bible translation, printed in 1535. The plaque inscription reads, “To the memory of Miles Coverdale: . . . With the view of affording the means of reading and hearing, in their own tongue the wonderful works of God, not only to his own countreymen, but to the nations that sit in darkness. . . . The first complete English printed version of the Bible was published under his direction.”11
In one sense, the plaque is correct. The Coverdale Bible was the first complete printed Bible in English (from Old Testament to New Testament) in the sense of our modern understanding—a complete text bound in a single volume. (Of course, William Tyndale had printed an English translation of the New Testament in 1525. Because Tyndale was executed before he could finish translating the Old Testament, the designation “first complete English Bible” went to the Coverdale Bible, printed ten years after Tyndale’s New Testament.)
In another sense though, the plaque is wrong. The Coverdale inscription proclaims that the English Bible is a result of the Reformation. It suggests that medieval people before Coverdale did not have access to the biblical text in English. They sat in (biblical) darkness—as the nineteenth-century inscription reads. This isn’t true.
Medieval historian Beryl Smalley opens her classic The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages with this sentence: “The Bible was the most studied book of the middle ages.”12 The Protestant Reformation changed how the Bible was used by Christians, but it didn’t introduce the Bible to Christians. English translations of biblical text existed long before the Reformation. By the eleventh century, English translations had been made of the Psalms, the first six books of the Old Testament (the Old English Hexateuch), and the Gospels (the West Saxon Gospels). Although this biblical text circulated in clerical circles, scholars argue that they were also intended for use by “literate laymen.” Frans van Liere, a medieval historian who authored my favorite book on the medieval Bible, notes that Matthew Parker (archbishop of Canterbury from 1559–75) used the existence of Middle English biblical manuscripts to argue for his right to publish an English Bible (a 1568 translation known as the Bishops’ Bible). Because the Bible had a long history of being translated into English, Parker argued, it was appropriate for the Church of England to continue translating the Bible into English.13
While complete translations of the English Bible were uncommon, they did exist in the medieval era. A fifteenth-century sermon collection that I work with frequently, known as the Longleat Sunday Gospels, contains a provocative claim that “since it is lawful to preach the Gospel in English, it is lawful to write it in English, both to the teacher and to the hearer, if he knows how to write.”14 The preacher (probably a Franciscan friar) admits that he personally has been told not to write the Gospel in English, but that shouldn’t keep anyone else from creating vernacular translations. We know that by the late fourteenth century, followers of John Wycliffe had translated the entire Bible into English. Modern Protestants often think of this as a “heretical” Bible that was used only by those dissatisfied with English Catholicism. But more than 250 extant copies of the Wycliffe Bible exist today (the copies range from just New Testaments to complete Bibles), showing that the Wycliffe Bible was in common use.15 Catholic sermons from the fifteenth century confirm this as they preach.16 That Catholic clergy used this “heretical” Bible shows a broad approval for English Bibles. Indeed, Henry Ansgar Kelly writes that the regular use of the Wycliffe Bible in late medieval English church services “is one of the strongest indications for the widespread acceptance of the translations by the general populace.”17
Before the printing press made books more widely available, it was difficult to own complete versions of the Bible. Copies of the Bible took a long time to create and were thus costly and rare. Yet for most medieval people, the proliferation of Scripture in literature, sermons, and excerpts of the Bible like the Psalms (Psalters) gave them plentiful access to the Word of God. James H. Morey, in his Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature, shows how rapidly English translations of Scripture proliferated in late medieval culture.18 Book and Verse includes six appendixes, composed of 264 printed pages, which list every instance of biblical text that he could find in Middle English literature—including Gospel accounts, Psalters, biblical overviews, commentaries, poems, religious treatises, and even two complete Middle English translations of Revelation. Ordinary Christians in late medieval England were not strangers to the Bible in their own tongue.
I had a student one semester who had a hard time staying awake during lectures. I imagine he would be asleep by now. So let me get to the point: the Bible existed in English before the Reformation, despite what the plaque at St. Magnus the Martyr claims. Certainly, the Reformation ushered in broader use of the vernacular Bible through its emphasis on sola scriptura and encouragement of printed Bibles. But the Reformation’s emphasis on biblical access was preceded by the access medieval Christians already had to biblical text.
The English Bible in Medieval Sermons
Sermons provided the most consistent access to the Bible for medieval people. Now, I know what you are thinking—medieval people heard sermons? Anti-Catholic rhetoric combined with Protestant glorification of the Reformation combined with poor methods of measuring medieval church attendance by modern scholars have warped our understanding of medieval Christianity. To this day I grind my teeth over the church history series used by Capitol Hill Baptist Church. It paints a grim picture of a sordid, corrupt medieval church in which few people, except for a remnant of “scattered monks and nuns,” found salvation. For the sake of my sleepy student, I will save Protestant myths about medieval Christianity as material for a future book and will point out only this sentence from the online curriculum: medieval Christianity “reminds us what happens when people are illiterate of our Bibles—we drift from knowing what constitutes acceptance with God.”19 Medieval people did not know their Bible, this Protestant church history curriculum states, and consequently most of them were eternally damned. (I had to take a deep breath after writing that sentence.)
Evangelicals should know that medieval people knew Scripture at least as well, if not better, than we do today. Frans van Liere reminds us that biblical knowledge was not confined to the clergy. The Bible revolution wrought by the Reformation among ordinary Christians began with ordinary Christians in the medieval world (and not just with the three men listed by the Capitol Hill Baptist Church curriculum).20 As van Liere writes, the medieval church had a “long tradition of lay access to biblical texts.”21
Take, for example, Margery Kempe. Along with the help of Lynneth Miller Renberg, I have counted about fifty Scripture references, direct and indirect, in The Book of Margery Kempe. Her fifteenth-century life story overflows with English Scripture. From her retelling of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke (chap. 6, book 1 of Margery’s book) to her cry that she loves God with all her heart and with all her strength (chap. 13, book 1; echoing Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30–33; Luke 10:27) to her reflection on the encounter between Jesus and the woman accused of adultery in John 8 (chap. 27, book 1), Margery Kempe knew her Bible. Her life testifies that she, a fifteenth-century woman, had access to “Holy Writ” (as medieval folk described it). Instead of carrying a Bible in her hands, she carried biblical text inscribed on her heart and spoken through her words. Instead of learning Scripture by reading it during her daily quiet time and memorizing verses at Awana, she learned it from going to church: talking with clergy, listening to them read religious texts, memorizing her prayers, and—most importantly—listening to sermons.
Late medieval people listened to sermons. A boom in the production of sermon manuscripts and changes to the physical space of churches testify to the popularity of late medieval preaching. Historian Larissa Taylor describes sermons as the “mass medium” of the Middle Ages, and Beverly Kienzle calls them the “central literary genre” for medieval Christians.22 Margery Kempe describes how people ran to hear popular preachers, and records from some medieval cities reveal that thousands went to hear them. Crowds like these were often too large to fit inside local churches, and so—long before the Great Awakening and Baptist tent revivals—medieval preachers had already mastered the outdoor arena.23
Scripture flows through medieval sermons, with the Latin text translated so that ordinary Christians would understand the Word of God. Notable for our purposes is the fact that this biblical text often includes gender-inclusive language. Long before either the TNIV or the ESV—or even the King James Version (KJV), for that matter—priests in late medieval England were already erasing “the male-oriented details” from Scripture as they preached to the men and women crowding the naves of their churches.24
Gender-Inclusive Language before the TNIV
In the Latin Vulgate (Jerome’s fourth-century translation and the primary Bible used throughout the medieval world), Genesis 1:27 reads, “Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam ad imaginem Dei creavit illum masculum et feminam creavit eos.” Or, as the Wycliffe Bible (an English translation directly from the Vulgate) reads, “And God made out of nothing a man in his image and likeness; God made out of nothing a man in the image of God; yea, God made them out of nothing, male and female.” Or as the KJV renders it, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Or, as the modern NIV renders it, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
In 2012, Vern S. Poythress of Westminster Theological Seminary expressed great concern that the TNIV had altered Genesis 1:27.25 Instead of following the NIV translation, “God created mankind in his own image,” the TNIV rendered “mankind” as “human beings.” As Poythress wrote, “The change to a plural obscures the unity of the human race.” For Poythress, “human beings” was not an acceptable substitution for “mankind.”26
Except that it is. The Hebrew word ’adam is a gender-inclusive word for “human.” Indeed, the text of Genesis 1:27 explains this for us: God created humans in his image, both men and women. The Vulgate picks up on the gender inclusivity of the Hebrew word, rendering it with a gender-inclusive Latin word: homo or hominem. While the word homo can apply to a single male, it is not a gender-specific term. Instead, vir is the word used exclusively for “man.” The word homo, by contrast, applies to humanity. So the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word ’adam (human) as hominem (human).27
Many late medieval English sermons do the same. The fifteenth-century author of a collection of sermons found in the archives of Salisbury Cathedral includes a more succinct English translation of Genesis 1:27. In a passage comparing how a person’s face reflects the bright morning sun with how a clean soul reflects the likeness of God, the author underscores that humanity was created for this purpose: to reflect the image of God. The sermon quotes Genesis 1:27 to emphasize this point: “For God made man and woman in his likeness.”28
To make sure the medieval audience understood that all people were included, the sermon author omitted translating the first part of the verse and translated only the words masculum et feminam: man and woman. Those who heard this sermon would have found no difference between the text read in the sermon, “for God made man and woman in his likeness,” and the words of the Wycliffe Bible itself, “God made them out of nothing, male and female.” For medieval people, Genesis 1:27 proclaimed how each man and each woman was made in the image of God.
Middle English sermons so frequently translate biblical text in gender-specific ways that I suspect many medieval people perceived gender-inclusive language as commonplace in the Bible. John 6:44 provides another example. The Wycliffe New Testament renders it like this: “No man may come to me, but if the father that sent me, draw him.” But a fifteenth-century sermon from the Bodleian Library archives in Oxford adds the phrase “nor woman” into the verse—that is to say, “no man nor woman comes to me, but my Father that sent me, draw him.”29 This is significantly more gender inclusive than the KJV’s “no man can come” and is even one step further than the modern gender-attentive translations, like the NIV (and, interestingly, the ESV also), which has “no one can come.”
Another fifteenth-century sermon, from a Dominican compilation, also writes women into biblical text. The sermon recites Luke 14:11: “For every man that exalts himself, he shall be lowered, and he that humbles himself, he shall be raised.” The sermon then addresses the “male-oriented details” of the text and rewrites the verse: “For every man and woman that exalts himself in this sin of pride, he shall be made low.”30 Piper and Grudem accused the translators of the TNIV of intentionally “obscuring” biblical text to make it more gender inclusive; authors of Middle English sermons apparently thought that writing women into the biblical text made the translation more accurate.
These changes were made in late medieval manuscripts, for accuracy. The inclusion of “woman” and “every man and woman” had nothing to do with political correctness or a feminist agenda. Preachers were concerned that Scripture teachings be taken to heart by all church members, so they changed and sometimes even “obscured” the “male-oriented details” for the benefit of women. That way, both men and women could better hear the Word of God. And for medieval women, they heard Scripture speak directly to them.
Certainly not all preachers did this, but enough did that it is easy to find examples. I discovered the rendition of Genesis 1:27 during an impromptu lesson with one of my graduate students. I had purchased a digital copy of the Salisbury Cathedral manuscript and was looking at it for the first time. I pulled up the sermon in question as an example to show her what a medieval sermon looked like, as well as to show her how to understand medieval pagination. I almost immediately zeroed in on the gender-inclusive rendition of Genesis 1:27.
On the one hand, this is just another example of how Middle English sermons translated biblical text in gender-inclusive ways. On the other hand, it is a striking example of how modern the concept of biblical womanhood really is. The medieval world was far from promoting equality for women in everyday life. Yet medieval English clergy, charged with communicating the Bible to ordinary Christians, seemed more concerned about including women in biblical text than about emphasizing masculine authority.
Modern evangelicals denounce gender-inclusive language as a dangerous product of feminism.
Medieval clergy used gender-inclusive language to better care for their parishioners.
Leaving Women Out
So what happened? Why didn’t the gender inclusive renditions used by some medieval clergy continue into full-text translations of the Bible itself?
The answer is easy: because the world that produced the English Bible was not the same as the world that produced middle English sermons. The English Bible is a historical artifact as much as it is the Word of God. It tells the timeless and divinely inspired story of God’s plan to rescue humanity; it tells that story through the timebound hands of human translators. Grudem may complain that the TNIV capitulates to non-Christian culture (feminism), but the ESV also capitulates to non-Christian culture (patriarchy). People are products of the world in which they live, and translators are no exception. What any translator or interpreter brings to the Bible influences how we understand the Bible.
As a historian who studies manuscript transmission, the miracle of the Bible is the consistency of its message (and its text) throughout history. Even Bart Ehrman, an agnostic and a serious critic of the New Testament, acknowledges that most of the textual variations in early Christian New Testament manuscripts “have nothing to do with theology or ideology.” As he explains, “Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.”31 It always amazes me how little human translators have affected God’s story of salvation, despite centuries of us messing about with it. As much as I disagree with Ehrman on other points, I do agree with his assessment of textual changes. When words are changed in biblical text, whether by accident or by translation decisions, it changes how we understand that text. Even if these changes do not affect the big story of Christianity (as Ehrman affirms), they do affect little stories—like if Junia is a prominent apostle in the early church or simply a noteworthy woman.
The early modern English Bible was translated in a context that politically, legally, economically, and socially obscured women behind the identities of their husbands and fathers. The world of early modern England treated women as dependent on men, and this cultural attitude was translated into the English Bible.
Let me show you what I mean.
English Bible translations multiplied during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—from Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s versions to the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible (complete by 1560), the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, and the KJV of 1611. The most influential of these versions were the Geneva Bible (which has three main editions) and the KJV.
The KJV, in fact, was a direct response to the Geneva Bible—sort of like the ESV was a direct response to the TNIV. King James, the successor to the throne of Elizabeth I, declared in 1604 that it was time for a new authorized version of the English Bible. He was irritated with the Geneva Bible, which was then the most popular translation in Elizabethan England. Radical Puritan translators like John Calvin and John Knox had influenced the study notes of the Geneva Bible with their more extreme views, especially concerning the nature of the church and the role of government. For example, the third and most extreme edition of the Geneva Bible (1608) contains an explanatory note for Romans 13:5. This verse urges Christians to be subject to authority for conscience’s sake. The study notes, however, counter that this is true as long as the authorities are lawful; otherwise, “we must answer as Peter teacheth us, It is better to obey God, than men.”32 Just as the twentieth-century Scofield Study Bible normalized an obscure theory about the end times (dispensationalism), the Geneva Bible normalized dissenters who were critical of royal authority and Anglican theology.
And King James was tired of it, even before the extreme 1608 edition.33
He said that the Geneva Bible was “partial, untrue, seditious, and favouring too much of dangerous and trayterous conceits.”34 So he charged fifty-four learned men throughout England to create a new translation. The rules were straightforward: create an accurate English translation using language accessible to ordinary people and with no marginal notes. The KJV was born. It not only surpassed the Geneva Bible in popularity but also became the most popular Bible translation of all time.
As the popularity of both the Geneva Bible and the KJV soared, early modern English people absorbed the language therein into everyday life, speaking and writing in Scripture phrase.35 From a “fly in the ointment” to “the salt of the earth” to the “Land of Nod” to even “giving up the ghost,” the KJV helped create the language used by early modern (and even modern) people. As linguist David Crystal notes, the KJV popularized at least 257 phrases still in use today.36 How the English Bible was translated in early modern England changed the English language for us today.
And this had repercussions for women. One goal of the KJV translators was to use everyday language to make the Bible more readable. Anyone who has read Shakespeare knows that everyday English in early modern England overflowed with male generic language. Hilda Smith calls it “false universal language.” Early modern English pretended to include women through male generic words (like the universal “man”) but excluded women by gendering examples, metaphors, and experiences in masculine ways. Dorothy L. Sayers explains it this way: “Vir is male and Femina is female; but Homo is male and female.” The problem is that “Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but Woman only as Femina.”37
This is false universal language. It pretends to include women, but really doesn’t.38 Words for men were used interchangeably in reference to kings, politicians, preachers, household heads, philosophers, and even to represent all “mankind,” while specific words for women were used exclusively for women and mostly regarding the domestic sphere. “Man” in early modern English could represent humanity, but the humans it described were political citizens, decision-makers, leaders, household heads, theologians, preachers, factory owners, members of Parliament, and so on. In other words, “man” could include both men and women, but it mostly didn’t. It mostly just included men.
Let me give you an example of the false universal in action. The seventeenth-century preacher William Gouge upset his female church members with his new sermon series, “Domesticall Duties.” They were especially upset over him accusing women of stealing money from their husbands when they gave to charity without asking permission first, so Gouge clarified for them what he meant. Gouge also found it important to clarify why he excluded women in some of his language. In a section directed to the masters and mistresses of a house, he referred only to the masters. “I have according to the Scripture phrase comprised Mistresses under Masters,” he wrote.39 Gouge sanctified his false universal language by quoting Ephesians 6. He claimed that the masculine language “masters” referred to women. But for Gouge, it was okay to use language that excluded women, because the Bible translators did it too.40
This is a relatively innocuous example. It may have upset the women in Gouge’s congregation, but the ramifications were small. Let me give you a more significant example of how the false universal language of early modern England continues to influence English Bible translations today.
A few months ago, I rewatched Steve Lipscomb’s documentary Battle for the Minds, which is about the conservative takeover of the SBC. I was struck by how SBC leaders harped on 1 Timothy 3:2 and 3:12 that overseers should be husband of one wife. They used this as ironclad proof that senior pastors had to be men. Yet Lucy Peppiatt shows us how 1 Timothy 3, the chapter so often cited by the male leaders of the conservative resurgence as articulating why only men can preach, was shaped by English-language translations to look more masculine than it actually is.41 We assume 1 Timothy 3:1–13 is referencing men in leadership roles (overseer/bishop and deacon). But is this because of how our English Bibles translate the text? Whereas the Greek text uses the words whoever and anyone, with the only specific reference to man appearing in verse 12 (a literal Greek translation of the phrase is “one woman man,” referencing the married state of deacons), modern English Bibles have introduced eight to ten male pronouns within the verses. None of those male pronouns in our English Bibles are in the Greek text. Peppiatt concludes that the problem with female leadership is not actually the biblical text; it is the “relentless and dominant narrative of male bias” in translations.42
The KJV may have been free of the study notes that King James despised, but that didn’t make it any freer from cultural influences than the Geneva Bible was. As Rodney Stark reminds us, the main reason we have forgotten that women served as deacons in the early church is that “the translators of the King James Version chose to refer to Phoebe as merely a ‘servant’ of the church, not as a deacon, and to transfer Paul’s words in 1 Timothy into a comment directed towards the wives of deacons.”43 The context in which all the early modern English Bibles arose championed a language that excluded women. The emphasis on masculine language continued throughout English Bibles until Zondervan’s attempt to restore gender-inclusive language to the text. From this perspective, gender-inclusive language isn’t distorting Scripture. Gender-inclusive language is restoring Scripture from the influence of certain English Bible translations.
Translating Marriage in the Bible
Leaving women out of the biblical text wasn’t the only way that English Bible translations affected women. They also affected women by changing how we understand marriage in the Bible.
The culture that created the KJV championed marriage as the ideal state decreed by God. The holy (male-headed) household formed the center of English society, from the household of the urban merchant to the lordly estates of the members of Parliament. Law codes favored husbands and male heirs by excluding women from inheritance, reducing married women to the legal status of children, and elevating marriage as key for securing masculine social rank and authority.
Yet early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God. Historian Naomi Tadmor explains that the primary word for woman in the Old Testament was complex, applying to both an adult woman and a woman “belonging” to a man—as a wife, a concubine, a wife within a polygamous relationship, and even a slave. Although certainly aware of these complexities, translators of the English Bible simplified matters by reducing the Hebrew word to two English words: woman (used 259 times in the KJV) and wife (used 312 times in the KJV). Hence Rebekah became Isaac’s “wife,” and Laban’s daughters, Rachel and Leah, became Jacob’s “wives.” Even the raped woman in Deuteronomy 21 became a “wife.”44 Tadmor writes, “The polygamous social universe of the Hebrew Bible was rendered in terms of a monogamous English marital discourse.”45 Women became wives in the early modern English Bible, mirroring the marital arrangements in early modern English society.
What does this mean?
It means that early English Bible translations did not accurately reflect Hebrew words or relationship but instead reflected early modern English sensibilities. Women became “wives” in English Bible translations, even when they would not have been considered wives in the biblical world. The word marriage never appears in the Hebrew text. But it appears fifty times in the Geneva Bible and nineteen times in the KJV.46 According to Tadmor, Genesis 2:22–24 provides perhaps the most striking example of how the English Bible translated Hebrew culture through a contemporary lens. As the KJV translates the verses, “And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
The word translated as “wife” in verse 24 is the same word translated as “woman” in verses 22 and 23. The reason the word is translated as “wife” in verse 24, argues Tadmor, is to emphasize a woman’s “status within a social framework of marriage.”47 The 1611 KJV even places these verses under the subheading “Institution of Marriage.” The English Bible makes it clear that Genesis 2:22–24 sanctifies marriage. Yet neither the word marriage nor the word wife appear in the Hebrew text. The KJV was not the first translation to infer marriage from verses 22–24, but the normalcy of these words for early modern readers made marriage in the Old Testament world seem very similar to marriage in seventeenth-century England.
The English Bible translated more than Hebrew text; it also translated early modern English ideas about marriage into biblical text, as well as a “falsely universal language” that excluded women. The translators of early modern English Bibles thus added one more layer to the growing idea of biblical womanhood. Because women were written out of the early English Bible, modern evangelicals have more easily written women out of church leadership.