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“Should Bible translations use gender-inclusive language?”

It’s axiomatic that God has poured out his love to both sexes. He sent his Son into the world to die for men and women alike. Women were prominent in serving and caring for the Lord Jesus. They were prominent at the cross, when many of the Lord’s male disciples ran away. They were certainly visible and active at the tomb of the Lord Jesus, and were first to declare he had risen from the dead.

Still, the Bible is written in the language of its time, and the pronouns and nouns in our English translations do not always reflect the theological realities behind them.

Sons of God

What I mean is this: When John writes, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God” (KJV), it was perfectly obvious to the first century recipients of his letter that the apostle intended to include women as well. They understood this without argument or explanation. Nobody in the first century church would ever have claimed the Father had bestowed his love only on the males in the congregation. They recognized the sisters were just as much children of God as the brothers. Likewise, when Paul addresses the “brothers” here or there in his letters, he is not intending to bypass the sisters. In 90% or more of those usages, we should understand that the sisters are included as well, though there are certainly instances in his letters where gendered terms like “men” and “brothers” mean exactly that.

The implicit inclusivity of the Greek and Hebrew languages, well understood in their day, does not seem so obvious to woman today, and many clamor for translations that explicitly note the inclusion of both sexes.

Why not? It’s a legitimate question.

A Job Well Underway

To be fair, modern English translators have already done much of this work for us. In my first example, the ESV of 1 John 3:1 reads “children of God”, not “sons”, as do well over 90% of modern translations. Only the KJV, Webster’s and a couple of Catholic translations are holdouts. That’s true not just of this verse, but also of many others where there is no argument to be made for excluding women from a statement that, in the Greek New Testament, looks to us like it is addressed only to males. In addition, the ESV footnotes the word “brothers” hundreds of times to assure its readers understand that sisters in Christ are also included in the writer’s intended audience.

That’s not enough for Christian feminists and the white knights who take up their cause. They want more than a bunch of footnotes. They’d like translators to change the text itself.

Search and Replace

There are good reasons to be cautious about doing what amounts to a quick and dirty search-and-replace of the word “brothers” with “brothers and sisters”, as some modern translations have recently done. That’s because not every instance in which the word “brothers” is used can legitimately be construed as “brothers and sisters”. Each case needs individual attention, and interpreters may disagree in their conclusions.

For example, translating 2 Peter 1:10 as “Therefore, brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election” correctly communicates Peter’s intention. He is addressing fellow believers in a way that Paul’s doctrinal writings have already established is thoroughly appropriate. However, when the CSB addresses Peter’s Pentecostal sermon in Acts 2:29 to “Brothers and sisters” or changes “Men of Israel” to “Fellow Israelites”, I suspect their translation team is no longer translating. They are rewriting history. At Pentecost, Peter is not addressing the crowd at a Martin Luther King memorial, but rather an impromptu gathering of patriarchal Jews in a historical context in which Luke still keeps track of the converts by counting the men [anēr]. One thing Peter’s not likely to have done in addressing such a crowd is to have put unnecessary barriers in the way of their salvation, especially barriers related to a subject the newborn Church had yet to work through. If we add to his words, we are doing an injustice to the text.

The Dubious Imputation of Guilt

Moreover, when Peter calls the “men of Israel” to account for the murder of the Lord Jesus, translations like the TNIV do a tremendous disservice to the Jewish women present by implicitly including them in Peter’s accusation. In that cultural setting, it is not possible for Jewish wives and unmarried daughters to have been responsible for the national rejection of Christ in the same immediate sense as their husbands and fathers. Just as the apostles never accuse Gentiles of being responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, and just as God did not hold Eve responsible for the fall of mankind in the same way as Adam, so the women of Jerusalem did not crucify Christ. We are better to leave well enough alone.

This is the problem with imposing modern notions of equality on ancient texts: invariably some translation teams will get some of these emendations wrong. In my judgment, it is preferable to make only the changes for which there is no possible chance of error, those that NT theology explicitly commends such as the example cited above, and leave questionable cases and quotations from the historical accounts as they stand.