Congratulations and Seriously?

Congratulations to our latest Word Conference contest winner, Keyana J. from Williamsburg, VA. In response to our “tell us about a news story featuring the Bible” contest, Keyana sent us a news article about the new Gay Bible from Pink Cross Publishing: http://www.deadseriousnews.com/?p=237. Is this for real? Read on…

I’m actually quite skeptical that this is the real deal. 

Evidence #1 – I can’t find any information about the publisher, Pink Cross Publishing.  
Evidence #2 – Amazon doesn’t carry this “version” of the Bible
Evidence #3 – Every news article I can find about this thing has exactly the same sentences, meaning that they’re all getting their info from one posted article which, I strongly suspect, was a spoof.

So why did we pick this as the winner?  There are a couple of reasons:

First, the fact that so many Christians have picked up on this “news” and believed it is evidence that they’ve come to expect such revisionist nonesense from the academic and publishing industries.  Why?  Because this is precisely the kind of thing that happens all the time:  the Bible get’s re-worked by some fringe group or scholar and the media promotes their pseudo-scholarship as a “fresh new perspective.”  This “Gay Bible” may not be real, but there are real books out there that do very similar things; that is, they distort the text of the Bible to make it fit personal agendas.  The point is simply that, while this particular news article is fake, it caught people’s attention in a big way (there are thousands of blogs addressing this thing) because it taps into a trend that is really going on.  

Second, we picked this article because it illustrates the need for Christians to be savvy about what they read.  In this case, Christians need to do a little research and realize that the whole thing’s probably a fake. In other cases, as when a news article comes out claiming that a scholar has “disproved” the Bible or found “new evidence” that undermines the historical accuracy of the Bible, Christians need to dig into the facts.  In most cases, what they’ll find is that the “facts” have been wildly distorted by the popular media.  But more importantly, digging into these claims puts Christians in a position to be able to respond intelligently to their friends, neighbors and co-workers who hear about these “new developments” and are genuinely curious about whether the Bible can be trusted.  

C.A. Smith, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Shepherd Project Ministries