CHAPEL HILL — Robert
Bratcher, the New Testament translator for the Good News Bible, died July 11 at
the Carol
Woods retirement community in Chapel Hill. He was 90.
Born in Brazil the son of L.
M. Bratcher, a Southern Baptist missionary for 35 years, Bob Bratcher taught at
Baptist Theological Seminary in Rio de Janeiro from 1949 until 1956, when he
resigned from the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in a dispute over his
teaching.
Since he had worked with the
American
Bible Society in revising a Brazilian Bible, Bratcher asked Eugene Nida,
executive secretary of the ABS Translations Department, to recommend him for a
teaching position in the United States. Nida invited Bratcher to work with him
at the Bible society “in the meantime,” which turned out to be until Bratcher’s
retirement in 1995.
In the early 1960s, the
secretary of special ministries for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board
asked the Bible society to recommend the best translation for people who speak
English as a second language. Looking over the modern translations available at
the time, ABS leaders decided that no single version really fit that need, so
Nida asked Bratcher to do an English translation “for Southern Baptists.”
Released with the title Good
News for Modern Man, the New Testament was first issued in 1966. The complete
Bible was published in 1976 as the Good News Bible, also known as Today’s
English Version.
For a time the best-selling
Bible in America, the Good News Bible touched millions of lives, the vast
majority of whom never heard of its chief translator. In a radio interview in
2003, Bratcher said that’s the way it should be.
“A translator — especially a
translator of the Scriptures — should not be known, because the important things
are the words and the message that come through those books and not the person
who did the translation,” he said.
Bratcher’s name did appear
in early versions of the translation, prompting a question at one conference of
why he was identified contrary to standard policy. The ABS official, Bratcher
said, answered frankly, “Well if it didn’t go well, we’d have someone to blame.”
Bratcher caught plenty of
blame in 1981, when he made comments at a national seminar in Dallas sponsored
by the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention criticizing
fundamentalist views of the Bible
“Only willful ignorance or
intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant
and infallible,” Bratcher said.
“No truth-loving, God-respecting, Christ-honoring believer should be guilty of
such heresy. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and
infallibility is to idolatrize it, to transform it into a false god.”
Bratcher’s comments made it
into the New York Times, setting off a controversy that prompted many
conservatives to stop giving to the American Bible Society and led to a
financial crisis.
Determining him to be a
liability, ABS officials decided Bratcher should be dismissed, but overseas
colleagues in the United
Bible Societies, the umbrella fellowship of 145 individual Bible
societies including ABS, supported him. Eventually Bratcher agreed to resign
from the ABS but continued to do the same job as a consultant for the United
Bible Societies. After retiring he continued to work with the Brazilian Bible
Society.
Bratcher was a longtime
active member and Bible teacher at
Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill. A memorial service for
him is scheduled at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 24, in the church sanctuary, with a
reception immediately following in the Fellowship Hall.
Dale Osborne, associate
minister at Binkley Baptist Church, said Bratcher retired only recently after
teaching adult Sunday school classes for more than 25 years. “Anyone who spent
time in one of his classes came away with a greater understanding of the
scriptures,” Osborne said.
Osborne said most recently
Bratcher spearheaded an effort to establish a relationship with a church in his
native Brazil. “Even at 90 he was going strong in his attempts to make
connections with God’s children,” Osborne said. ”I loved Bob
Bratcher. Binkley Baptist church will miss him to no end.”
The Good News Bible used a
theory of translation termed “dynamic equivalence,” where the meaning of the
Hebrew and Greek are expressed in a translation “thought for thought.” It
contrasted with the “formal equivalence” method evident in old standard
translations like the King James Version and Revised Standard Version, which
resulted in a more wooden word-for-word translation.
“They felt that way that
faithfulness was being preserved, but that is not necessarily true,” Bratcher
explained in the 2003 interview
with Robert Seymour, his former pastor, on WCHL radio in Chapel Hill.
“We’re trying to make the
translation match the original, not in form, but in the way the reader will
understand and react to it,” he said. “The ideal is that the reader of the
translation understands the text as well as the reader of the original and
reacts to it in the same way. Of course it’s an impossible goal, but that’s
what you try to do.”
The method was never popular
with some biblical conservatives, and it became even less so when some of
Bratcher’s own views became public. Alleging that Bratcher’s disdain for
fundamentalism influenced his translation, critics noted choices like replacing
the “blood” of Jesus in passages like Romans 5:9 with references to Christ’s
atoning death.
The Good News Bible also
passed what had become a litmus test for so-called “liberal” translations —
translating Isaiah 7:14 to refer to a pregnant ”young woman” instead of
the traditional rendering of “virgin.”
Bratcher said the Hebrew
word used by Isaiah means a young woman of marriageable age, though not
necessarily a virgin. When the passage is quoted in Matthew 1:23 as prophesying
the birth of Jesus, the word is “virgin,” implying the New Testament author
used a Greek translation of the Old Testament made 500 years after Isaiah.
The Isaiah verse sparked
controversy in the mid-20th century when the Revised Standard Version used “woman,”
earning accusations from fundamentalists and some evangelicals of deliberately
tampering with the Scripture to deny the doctrine of the Virgin Birth.