Peter Wolfgang, Executive Director of the Connecticut Family Institute, joins me to discuss the theory that the latest edition of the New Revised Standard Version (Revised Edition, Catholic Edition) is a gay wash Bible, and that Catholics should be worried about it.
00:01:41.000And the version we're talking about now is the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, Catholic Edition.
00:01:53.000Right. OK. That's a bit of a, that's a bit of a breath full.
00:01:57.000Well, however, the importance of this, first of all, the somewhat dodgy translations here have been highlighted really by the Protestants.
00:02:09.000But the interest to Catholics is that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the USCCB, has now authorised this version.
00:02:19.000That's where it becomes important, because authorised for home use and presumably further down the line for liturgical use as well.
00:02:28.000So, Peter, why don't we start off and discuss the term that's capturing our interest for the next 20 minutes, which is used, I think, both in 1 Corinthians, but also in a letter to Timothy.
00:03:43.000And the word, the Greek word, is arsenokoite, arsenokoite.
00:03:48.000And what that word has always been understood to mean until the most recent translation of the New Revised Standard Version Bible, the updated edition, is men who have sex with men.
00:04:03.000It's one of St. Paul's two condemnations of homosexual practice that appears in the New Testament.
00:04:11.000And the reason I use the word gaywash, that phrase, it does not originate with me.
00:04:16.000I am quoting a Protestant scholar by the name of Robert A.J. Gagnon.
00:04:21.000He is one of the foremost scholars on the Bible and homosexuality.
00:04:26.000And he was the one who sounded the alarm three years ago when the New Revised Standard Version updated edition.
00:04:34.000I'm going to refer to it as the NRSVUE for short.
00:04:42.000But he was the one who first sounded the alarm when the NRSVUE came out three years ago that for the first time ever, in a major way, that a major respected Bible translation had essentially taken out St. Paul's condemnation of homosexual activity, at least in these two verses.
00:05:08.000Now, it does still appear in other parts of the Bible, but it's in the NRSVUE, the NRSV updated edition.
00:05:16.000But it's important to back up and explain why that's still a problem going forward.
00:05:21.000Let's just recapitulate that point, OK?
00:05:26.000This is the first time, or certainly within the authoritative translations, this is the first time this word has been translated out of its traditional context, right?
00:05:41.000To have a translation rendered into English that is explicitly nothing to do with homosexual practice.
00:05:48.000Yes, the NRSVUE, I'm quoting someone else here, is the first major English Bible to suddenly find arsenokoite, impossible to translate.
00:06:00.000And this person argued, as other people did, that that's not an accident.
00:06:05.000And we need to back up and talk about that.
00:06:09.000Why was this word, which has always been understood, you know, the Greek was never that uncertain.
00:06:15.000I mean, if you want to, you can say almost every word when you're translating the Bible is uncertain.
00:06:20.000But for most of the history of the English translation of the Bible, people understood what that word meant until historically speaking the day before yesterday or about three years ago when the NRSV updated edition came out.
00:06:34.000And I don't think it's an accident that it was the mainline Protestant churches that this is their flagship Bible, the NRSV now updated edition, that ended up doing this.
00:06:48.000And the reason you and I are having this discussion right now is because three years later in 2025, just this week, the Catholic bishops have given their imprimatur to it.
00:06:59.000And I think we need to back up and discuss that.
00:07:01.000If I can, I want to start with something that you started with, actually, the Ignatius Study Bible.
00:07:18.000It's something that we owe largely to Ignatius Press.
00:07:22.000In the year 2006, it was Ignatius Press that worked with the Vatican at that time to get approval of that translation for those Catholics,
00:07:33.000those tiny number of Catholics who belong to the Anglican Ordinariate, which is something that Pope Benedict founded for Anglicans who convert to Catholicism.
00:07:42.000If you, the mass that you go to, the liturgy you go to, that's the translation that you hear.
00:07:49.000And it's something that goes all the way back to the King James Version of the Bible.
00:07:53.000That's right. The point about the beauty behind the New Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition is that the underlying NRSV text was done really in collaboration between Protestants and Catholics,
00:08:11.000with the idea that both Protestants and Catholics can use it and can have faith in it.
00:08:16.000There is, of course, the Catholic version, which where there are some contentious renderings, historical, traditional renderings in both ways.
00:08:27.000It's been based mainly on the King James Version, of course.
00:08:31.000But so there is that Catholic version that irons out some of the things to make it to make some of these nuances more acceptable in light of Catholic tradition.
00:08:39.000But the underlying text here, and this is the important thing, is that it was designed, I think, what, 20 or 30 years ago when they first produced the core text as an ecumenical project without selling out either side.
00:08:53.000And that's important. And it is an absolutely excellent rendering.
00:08:57.000Yeah. So there's three different Bibles that we're talking about here.
00:09:01.000There's the RSV from the mid-20th century, the Revised Standard Version.
00:09:06.000Then there's the New Revised Standard Version, the NRSV.
00:09:10.000And then there's the Bible that brings us to our conversation today, which is the NRSV updated edition.
00:09:17.000So the RSV, what happened was the King James Version is a beautiful Bible, sunk deep roots into English language and culture, goes back to the early 17th century.
00:09:28.000It was a Protestant Bible. The Catholics had the Douay Reims, the Protestants had the King James Bible.
00:09:33.000A landmark event in religious history in the 20th century in the English speaking world was the creation of the Revised Standard Version, RSV, which is an ecumenical Bible.
00:09:44.000There's a Protestant version and there's a Catholic version.
00:09:47.000And for the first time you had a Catholic, you had a Bible in common for both Catholics and Protestants.
00:09:54.000The Catholic Bible was slightly different. But for the first time you had a Catholic Bible that was in the lineage of the beautiful King James Version Bible.
00:10:03.000Then what happened was in 1989, the RSV was updated by the National Council of Churches, Mainline Protestants, and you got the NRSV.
00:10:14.000Now that was controversial. The Bible that Ignatius Press has now is not an NRSV.
00:10:21.000It specifically calls itself the RSV Catholic Edition or Second Catholic Edition for a reason.
00:10:28.000In the late 1980s, early 1990s, there was a lot of fight over so-called inclusive language.
00:10:34.000Historically, words like man or mankind in the English language meant both men and women.
00:10:41.000But in the late 1980s, feminism was all the rage.
00:10:44.000So they had so-called inclusive language where they actually took out male pronouns from the NRSV.
00:10:51.000And it was very controversial at the time.
00:10:54.000It spilled over into the Catholic Church's fight over the English edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the early 90s.
00:11:02.000And as a result, in the English-speaking world, we did not get an English catechism until 94, two years after everyone else got theirs.
00:11:11.000Because Father Joseph Fessio, the founder of Ignatius Press, who was a student of Cardinal Ratzinger's, who was still a cardinal at the time, worked with him to make sure that the catechism did not follow the NRSV, followed the RSV Catholic Edition.
00:11:26.000And that that more standard English language, man and mankind, rather than being watered down, was kept in that Bible.
00:11:35.000Now, what does that have to do with what's happening right now?
00:11:38.000It's interesting that the mainline Bible translation, the NRSV, it seems to go, Ben, with whatever happens to be the fad at the time.
00:11:48.000So in the late 1980s, feminism was all the rage.
00:11:51.000Taking out the male pronouns to refer to mankind was all the rage.
00:11:55.000A lot of times it kind of messed up the translation of the NRSV, which is why Ignatius Press brought back the RSV.
00:12:02.000And then we got a second RSV, which is what you see in the study Bible, because Ignatius was working with the Vatican to get a liturgical edition.
00:12:10.000That's how we got the RSV, second Catholic edition.
00:12:13.000But what happens is the mainline Protestants, they update their flagship Bible about every 30 years or so.
00:12:19.000So then we get the NRSV updated edition with homosexuality taken out in those two verses, now that that's all the rage.
00:12:28.000So let me ask you, is this version that's just been authorized by the US Catholic bishops, will that eventually have approval to be used in a liturgical context?
00:12:46.000We've got a different story going on in the USA, but it's one that overlaps with this story.
00:12:51.000So here in the United States for the last 55 years, we have used for the mass, for the mainstream Novus Ordo mass, we have used something called the New American Bible.
00:13:02.000And it's gone through several revisions.
00:13:19.000They get copyright revenue out of it and so forth.
00:13:23.000And they also understandably want everyone to be on the same page reading the same translation at mass.
00:13:30.000That is now going through a revision that will be, there will be yet another revision of the NAB, the New American Bible, that we'll be reading at mass.
00:13:43.000Like the same people that gave the imprimatur for this NRSV updated edition where they gay-washed those two verses in the New Testament,
00:13:51.000presumably are the same people that are going to be signing off on the New American Bible.
00:13:56.000We know the names of some of those scholars, and they're very solid people.
00:14:00.000But it does raise a question, like, what can we expect from that edition of the New American Bible that we will be hearing at mass?
00:14:10.000If they signed off on the NRSV updated edition, and I was hoping they'd require the translators to fix that one word.
00:14:17.000If they did not require that, what are we going to be getting in the translation at mass in a couple of years?
00:14:22.000Look, that's a point here that you've been, you've been on this really since 2022, right?
00:14:29.000This, this, you've been writing about this for the last three years following every single development.
00:14:35.000This is nothing that's just come out of the blue.
00:14:41.000The director of the NRSV UE is Catholic.
00:14:48.000And yet it was the Protestants, Robert Gagnon, as you were saying, who was, who did most of the work on social media, trying to get the, to get the, the authentic, the traditional, at least something pertaining to the traditional sense of the word continued.
00:15:06.000How, how will this, does this have ecumenical implications, the, the pushing through of this between Catholics and Protestants with regards to scriptural analysis going forward?
00:15:21.000So I'm, I'm concerned that it does, and it's hard to qualify, to quantify it this early on, but the RSV in the mid 20th century, the NRSV in the late 20th century, and now the NRSV updated edition at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century is the flagship Bible of the academy and of scholarship.
00:15:46.640It's the Bible that everybody in that world sort of looks to.
00:15:51.140And actually, I must say, I'd love to see the Catholics in, in our world that are, are famous for enlightening all of us as to the Bible.
00:16:00.740I'm talking about faithful, good Catholic groups like Ascension Press and, and, you know, the famous Father Mike Schmitz with his Bible in a year and Jeff Cavins and Scott Hahn and St. Paul's Center for Biblical Theology and Augustan Institute.
00:16:26.240I'm going to come back to you now about the actual practical implications in daily life arising out of this translation just in two minutes.
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00:17:42.480Okay, so, Peter, my question to you here, listening to this debate, is there are, it's not just dry theoretical stuff, right?
00:17:53.340Um, the question to ask here is, does the Bible make moral distinctions, therefore, between different types of homosexual relationships?
00:18:06.200That's really, I think, you'll agree with me here, that's the subtext of how, um, of the importance of changing this arsenokoite, um, correctly.
00:18:23.880Um, does the Bible make moral distinctions between different types of homosexual relations?
00:18:30.380Because, taking that word in the wrong way would suggest that it does, right?
00:18:38.840Oh, it has tremendous implications, particularly those two verses in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians, where it has been changed.
00:18:47.980And the way you described it, by the way, that is, that comes straight from a Washington Times article in 2022 that covered the whole gay-washing controversy.
00:18:57.160And both they and the translators of the NRSV updated edition, they frame the issue that way.
00:19:04.620Does that word, that Greek word, does it, does it condemn all, uh, homosexual relationships or just illicit ones?
00:19:12.580Which is to suggest that the Bible makes a moral distinction between different kinds of, uh, same-sex, uh, sexual activity.
00:19:23.360That's the way they're sneaking this sort of stuff in.
00:19:26.400And I know the translators have defended themselves and said they're just doing objective scholarship.
00:19:31.520But I think it's reasonable to wonder if that, if that's really the case.
00:19:35.120Uh, especially when you consider, and it has huge, it has eternal, um, implications.
00:19:39.940Because what those two verses are saying, St. Paul is listing, um, a bunch of different categories of, of, uh, people, activities that they're engaged in, that if unrepentant, they will not inherit the kingdom of God.
00:19:54.620So when you change that to suggest that, uh, you know, when St. Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, says, look, unrepentant, uh, homo, people engaged in male homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of God.
00:20:10.060Um, when the NRSV updated edition says something different than St. Paul under the Holy Spirit says that in that two verses, that is not an act of love to our neighbors who may be engaged in that sort of activity.
00:20:23.460We want them to inherit the kingdom of God, too.
00:20:26.340And we're not doing them any, uh, favors.
00:20:28.880We're doing them in eternal disfavor, a disservice, uh, with horrifying consequences to fudge up those two verses, to fuzz them up and make them unclear.
00:20:39.160They've been clear throughout centuries until this, this edition of the Bible.
00:20:52.820In fact, preaching the truth, of course, I mean, there are different ways that you can go about it, but preaching the truth is actually a charitable act in and of itself.
00:21:02.140Um, tell me something here, because this is, on, on this show, on, on the evening show, often, um,
00:21:10.860Um, on the war room, we touch on issues that are important.
00:21:17.680Listen, our audience is, our audience is largely evangelical, but we do touch on issues pertaining to traditional Catholicism.
00:21:26.020Um, and in addition to the debate over how we should live, there's the question, the question here of Episcopal authority, right?
00:21:41.540I've always, my understanding is that the, um, that the bishops of the Catholic Church, when they authorize translations, they're doing that in some way under the Holy Spirit.
00:21:54.800Um, you know, I think, you know, I think, I think the church has said that explicitly with regards to the Vulgate translation, um, into Latin.
00:22:02.360Um, but this here, seeing as that the, the, the, the United States Catholic bishops have just authorized this, is it legitimate to ask, what is the bishop's authority here, uh, on authorizing translations?
00:22:20.520Um, and does it throw up questions about, about, um, the authority of bishops in general when it comes to teaching for faith and morals?
00:22:32.360Well, I, I think it would be good, and this probably won't happen, but I think we ought to ask anyway.
00:22:37.960I think it would be good if the bishops themselves, uh, here in the United States clarified, uh, this question as it relates to their approval of the NRSV updated edition.
00:22:50.620The way that the public found out about this was Friendship Press, which is the publishing arm of the National Council of Churches, the Protestant mainline body.
00:22:59.060They're the ones who put out this information that the USCCB, the US, um, Catholic bishops' conference, had approved of this translation of the Bible, and that approval now does appear on the USCCB's website.
00:23:13.620But, you know, the USCCB is a bureaucracy, and, you know, it would be worth asking, like, who, who gave that imprimatur?
00:23:22.480Was it, was it some staff person? Was it some subcommittee? Was it the bishops themselves?
00:23:28.200The bishops are the successors to the apostles, and they do have legitimate authority, and, I mean, it's worth asking, how, how was it exercised, uh, in this instance?
00:23:39.260Was it their authority? Was it some subcommittee, and why?
00:23:42.580And they ought to justify and explain, this is why we didn't want that word changed.
00:23:45.740This is a tapestry, where, when you start pulling on the threads, it can unravel far more than what you, what, what, what you expected when you set out.
00:23:54.740I think the Catholic Church here, not, not for the first time, really, since the Second Vatican Council onwards, is, is in very dangerous territory here, when it comes to its own authority.
00:24:05.020And questions will inevitably be raised.
00:24:07.480Okay, so that's, that's pretty, um, that's pretty damning, I think.
00:24:15.460Just tell me one thing, because you've got, like, about a minute and a half left.
00:24:21.040When we say that the Word of God is divinely inspired and inerrant, we're talking about the original version in Greek, right?
00:24:30.140Well, the original version, to what, to what, to what, to what extent can we make that assumption when it comes to translations in general?
00:24:41.620Yeah, so the, the original version of the Bible, the, the Old Testament was in Hebrew, and the New Testament, um, was in Greek.
00:24:49.960And my understanding is that the Church considers both the, the original versions, uh, inspired, as well as the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew.
00:25:00.380And your question is, to what extent can we accept, um, English translations as inspired?
00:25:06.640They're not inspired, uh, certainly, and the, the translators are not inspired in the way that St. Paul and Moses and all the original authors of the Bible were inspired.
00:25:15.960You need to read it through the, through the Church's tradition, the interpretation, the, again, you, we've referenced the Ignatius Study Bible.
00:25:23.240It doesn't get any better than that, uh, but it, it's not inspired in the same way that the, the original is, um, it, it really is a work of scholarship.
00:25:31.940Where the Church's authority comes in is when the Church gives imprimators to these translations.
00:25:36.680So it's not the same thing as saying it's inspired the way the original is, but that the Church has looked at this and they don't see anything here that contradicts Catholic teaching on faith and morals.
00:25:46.100And I think the translation of that one word does.
00:25:50.700Okay, you're going to give me, I have to give me a yes or no on this one.
00:25:53.360Can we, as faithful believers, have confidence that the translations that we're reading, if they have the imprimators, are accurate and faithful and will not lead us astray?
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00:31:06.160Well, one of the news stories that's been dominating German conversation over recent weeks is to do with the murder of a young girl, a young 16-year-old Ukrainian refugee in Germany called Liana.
00:31:18.700And she was pushed on the train tracks by an Iraqi immigrant.
00:31:26.020This is similar to the situation that's occupied American attention over recent months as well.
00:31:35.760So my next guest, Vadim Dirksen, a senior editor at Younger Freiheit News portal that's been right at the center of drawing attention to this.
00:31:45.340Vadim, welcome on to Steve Bannon's war room.
00:31:47.820What can you tell us about this case, first of all?
00:31:50.260What are the facts before we go into how this has captivated German attention?
00:32:00.560The thing is, Liana was murdered brutally on a daylight standing at the train station and she was pushed on the rails when the freight train rushed in.
00:32:15.680I mean, I was there at the site, the train come in very fast with 100 kilometers per hour.
00:32:23.280It's about approximately like 60, 70 miles per hour.
00:32:27.080So they passed quite fast and she was pushed in front of this train by an Iraqi asylum seeker who was illegal in this country, who needed to be deported.
00:32:41.700But he stayed in the country and this young little girl, she never met this guy before.
00:32:50.920She didn't know him as a, she was not related.
00:33:58.380So there, there was nothing what could tell, okay, this girl was pushed there.
00:34:03.280There was only one thing, one little hint what brought, um, this all to light.
00:34:10.760This girl was, was on the phone with her grandfather and he just heard her scream in the last second.
00:34:19.340And, and he was in, uh, in Ukraine, by the way, he's in Ukraine.
00:34:24.820Um, yeah, they were WhatsAppping and then, uh, he heard that incident happening.
00:34:29.660So, so, so if it hadn't been for that fact that she'd been on the phone at the time, this would have just been, uh, entered, a pursuit, sort of consumed into the, into suicide statistics.
00:34:43.160Vadim, I'd, I'd like to, um, to point this out to our largely American audience here.
00:34:48.680And these kinds of stories are happening every day.
00:34:52.040I know this is the one that's really captured German attention right now, but these kinds of stories are happening, a violent crime, especially against young girls, uh, but, but not exclusively girls, um, also against young boys.
00:35:06.080But these kinds of things are happening every day, not only in Germany, but right across the European continent right now because of the, the third world illegal invasion.
00:35:15.960How has the response to this, obviously, because it is a lot in the news, what, what has been the response of the various political parties to this brutal murder?
00:35:26.920So, so there was a, a different response from different parties.
00:35:31.140The first thing, what the mother did, she, she wanted to have justice and she wanted to know what happened to her, uh, girl.
00:36:16.080They asked for help for, uh, people who might have seen something.
00:36:20.500And this, all of the sudden brought some, started to, to, to change, um, and, and bring some public publicity to this, uh, case.
00:36:29.520But till now, uh, we have, uh, in the local parliament, uh, the, the leftists are ruling there.
00:36:37.160They don't want to, to have a, uh, even the, the, the, the, let's say the, the, the centrist, uh, right wing, uh, centrist right, like the CDU, uh, they, they wanted to have like kind of, uh, what's called the, um, um, um, I'm sorry, the, the, the, the kind of commission there to, to, to, to, to find out what happened there.
00:36:56.740And they had to vote, uh, if they want to start this commission and they, uh, they voted all against it, except for the AFD.
00:37:05.780And the AFD, um, before you tell me, before you tell me about how the AFD are doing right now, because I think they're sort of number one in the polls.
00:37:13.420What was the, tell me more about the AFD response, the alternative for Deutschland?