So, why are we using the New American Bible, anyway?

I walked into the local Catholic bookstore yesterday, and was asked by the proprietor what to expect when the corrected translation is put into full-scale use next Advent.  "Someone said the Scripture readings would be different."  "Unfortunately," said I, "we are stuck with the New American Bible."

Unless we are using the Vulgate or the Duoay-Rheims (I'd even say the KJV, but that is decidedly anti-Catholic, so that won't do either), each modern translation has its ups and downs.  More literal texts, like the Revised Standard (or Duoay-Rheims), in their attempts at maintaining integrity to the original, have sequences that are hard to follow, and thus turn people off.  More dynamic texts, the the Good News, or the Word, take liberties with the original in an effort to make the text sound "fresh" and "relevent".  In these texts, it is hard to seriously determine what the Sacred Authors said, and much is actually the translators' interpretations (not necessarily what the Holy Spirit intended the human authors to record).  In addition, many contemporary versions have kowtowed to feminazis and communists by gender-neutralizing language and dumbing-down certain sections that deal with sexual morality.  The NAB fits in here. 

Now, certainly, the NAB has its qualities.  Often it reads smoothly, and when compared to other versions, you can tell the translators tried to keep with the original over "improving" what the Holy Spirit inspired the authors to write.  However, in terms of sexual morality, the NAB gets a big, fat "F".  For starters, it has completely and totally removed the term "fornication", common in all translations prior to the 1960s, which means pre-marital sexual activity.  Now, one could substitute "pre-maritial sexual activity" for "fornication", but not for "enlightened" translators after the 1960s!  No, such prudish ideas must be purged from our out-moded mindset.  Nevermind that the originals still include fornication, or never mind that the Vulgate still includes fornication. 

That is one major failing of the NAB.  Another major failing is the translations of the Psalms.  Using the Grail Psalmody for the Liturgy of the Hours is so marvelous!  You can actually feel the emotion behind the psalmists words, and that helps you pray them.  You can't really do that with the NAB.

But there is another, more compelling reason to abandon the NAB completely: its editors contradict defined Catholic teaching in more than a few places and undermine the Bible as the Word of God.  One glaring example is in the Genesis account of the Great Deluge.  Unlike other translations, which offer study points and clarifications in "Study Bible" versions, every single NAB I have ever seen has the same exact footnotes for the same exact verses.  Here is what the footnote says about the Deluge: "Both biblical sources go back ultimately to an ancient Mesopotamian story of a great flood, preserved in the Gilgamesh epic.    The latter account, in some respects remarkably similar to the biblical account, is in others very different from it." 

So, according to the Know-it-alls who translated the NAB, the Flood never really happened, but the writers of Genesis heard about it from the Gilgamesh epic and thought it cool, so they included it.  Just like the account of the Tower of Babel.  Of that account, the editors opine, "This story, based on traditions about the temple towers, or ziggurats, or Babylonia...".  This account, too, is not based on, you know, the Inspiration of the Third Person of the Godhead, but on some stories about Babylonia. 

What is assumed here is assumed in the New Testament when these note-makers refer to "Q" and other such nonsense: rather than use the text as it is as a reference point, we make up reference points with which to compare the Bible.  No longer do we say "Wow!  The Gilgamesh epic mentions a flood, just like the Bible.  A flood must have happened, then!"  Now we say, "Early Mesopotamian extant literary forms, of which the Gilgamesh epic is predominant, include a reference to a mythological 'flood'.  The authors of the stories in Genesis obviously used that tale to give credibility to their own mythologies."  This sort of thinking is to be expected from secular humanists like Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams.  But from EDITORS OF BIBLES?!?! 

It is true that Fathers like Augustine have quite clearly warned us that not everything in Genesis is to be taken to have happened exactly the way it is written.  Clearly, the order of the Creation seems to show something of a thematic as opposed to chronological element to it.  But that doesn't mean we automatically assume that these accounts are simply mythological stories that sound cute.  Could it possibly be that the flood actually did happen (and the Gilgamesh epic recorded Mesopotamia's take on it)?  Could it possibly be that the Tower of Babel account isn't drawn from the ziggurats, but the ziggurats are a left-over from that ill-fated attempt?  Why is the default setting that the Bible is wrong?