The hyperinflation of Scripture

Yet more Bible versions - the Common English Bible(New) and the NIV 2011(New) take up their position in a crowded market place with aggressive marketing ($3M marketing budgets). This secular newspaper article entitled "How many versions of the Bible do we need?" lifts the lid on the hypocrisy. (I didn't believe that there was a "Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition" until I googled it).

“Bibles are in many ways a cash cow,” said Phyllis Tickle, a former longtime religion editor at Publishers Weekly. “The Bible is the mainstay of many a publishing program.”

“I think we are drifting more and more to a diverse Babel of translations,” said David Lyle Jeffrey, former provost of Baylor University and an expert on biblical translations. Jeffrey thinks Americans need a “common Bible” — a role the King James version played for centuries — to communicate the grandeur of Scripture without reducing it to “shopping-center-level” discourse.

“When we have so much diversity, we lose our common voice,” he said. “It is in effect moving away from a common membership in the body of Christ into disparate, confusing misrepresentations of the rich wisdom of Scripture, which ought to unify us.”

These comments make the implicit claim of the Common English Bible publishers ludicrous.

Leland Ryken, an English professor at Wheaton College, was more blunt.

“When there is wide divergence among Bible translations, readers have no way of knowing what the original text really says,” Ryken said. “It’s like being given four different scores for the same football game or three contradictory directions for getting to a town in the middle of the state.”

In the process “the Bible loses its identity as the authoritative word of God and becomes something trivial, on par with shoes for hikers or luggage for the international set.”

What has happened? Hyperinflation. This vicious circle occurs in an economy when the currency plummets in value while more and more inflation is created with each iteration of the ever increasing money printing cycle. Wikipedia tells us that it "Hyperinflation becomes visible when there is an unchecked increase in the money supply usually accompanied by a widespread unwillingness on the part of the local population to hold the hypebecomes visible when there is an unchecked increase in the money supply usually accompanied by a widespread unwillingness on the part of the local population to hold the hyperinflationary money for more than the time needed to trade it for something non-monetary to avoid further loss of real value". "The main cause of hyperinflation is a massive and rapid increase in the amount of money that is not supported by a corresponding growth in the output of goods and services. This results in an imbalance between the supply and demand for the money (including currency and bank deposits), accompanied by a complete loss of confidence in the money, similar to a bank run".

This is what is happening with the overprinting of versions of the Bible resulting in a loss of confidence in the value of Scripture.