I wrote:

There’s one dimension of ‘political correctness’ with which I concur…

Let’s not buy into patriarchial/sexist uses of language.

If we mean ‘men and women’ (and not all biblical occurrences of the generic ‘men’ includes women, of course) let’s use inclusive language…

Ken replied:

Not all, but most of them do. In the NT the generic “anthropos” occurs about 500 times, while the female and male specific words occur about 200 times each (from memory). So it’s a pretty safe bet that if you come across “man” in the King James version or the NIV (that will get me into trouble) it probably means “men and women”.

The major problem I have with versions which are not “gender accurate” as I like to call them, is that you can become confused about when men are specifically meant and women are (most likely) excluded. A good chapter to detect gender inaccuracy in translation is I Timothy chapter 2. It starts by saying that we should pray for authorities, then goes on to say (in KJV or NIV) that God wants all men to be saved. Clearly God wants everyone to be saved, not just males, so having made that mental correction we continue reading and find “men are to pray …” and, having got into the right mindset we say “Oh, that’s all right, women pray as well as men”. But if you read the NRSV or the New Jerusalem Bible or the revised Good News Bible or … these say that men are to pray. The reason is that in this verse the Greek word is the male specific one.

I haven’t checked on all 200 odd occurrences, but I’m sure that there are others wherer erroneous interpretations could arise.

As far as i know there is only one place where the male specific word is used where a different one from “man” is appropriate. In I Corinthians 13 Paul writes “when I became a man I put away childish things” which would be better expressed “when I became an adult …”

Me again:

It’s a mark of respect for women and a commitment to justice.

Ken:

Agreed.

Salaam Ken Smith

– Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `Religious faith and science have no quarrel. Both are ways of trying to understand the universe and our place in it. Should either faith or science masquerade as the other the result is confusion.’ D.R. Selkirk, F.J. Burrows

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