(This is part 3 of 3. For part 2, in which I tell the first part of this story, see: The 1 John 4:20 Test, Part 2: How Did We Get Here?)

Inspired by my experience with Kenzie, I set out to explore how other translations approached this challenge.

Spoiler: I was not impressed.

A few mainstream translations “pass” what I started calling “the 1 John 4:20 Test”:

The New Revised Standard Version, published in 1989, simply makes all the references plural: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters”.
The 2011 update to the New International Version has: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.”
The New Living Translation uses a similar technique: “If someone says, "I love God," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar”. The 2015 update has “a fellow believer”. (Does the writer of 1 John mean to refer only Christian siblings? That’s where paraphrases can get tricky.)
The Contemporary English Version now has “each other” and the Common English Bible has “their brothers or sisters”.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. All of the other mainstream, readily-available translations are still using generic “he”, often while claiming that they are translating accurately, literally, and/or at a lower reading level.

There is a bright side in the form of several newer, less well-known translations that do much better (although some of these fail in other verses). There is also, alas, a corresponding resurgence of brand-new or newly-updated translations that add male-exclusive language.

Some of the text from 1 John 4, tiled confusingly into a sort of cross shape, which is about the only thing you can clearly make out — Some of these translations communicate the meaning of original text as well as this annoying image I made using the “kaleidoscope” filter.

Aside: Why this verse works

Kenzie’s trouble started with the single word “his”. The Greek word is “autou”, and it simply does not have an exact equivalent in English. In the years since I met Kenzie, singular "their" has been gaining ground, but it still doesn't cover the exact same range of meaning, since “autou” cannot be plural.

Disingenuous modern translators sometimes claim that the masculine form is the only correct, literal translation, which they must use in order to be faithful to the original text. But this claim is simply, demonstrably, false. At the most generous interpretation, using “his” in a generic sense is now debatable, and is considered old-fashioned. Using “autou” in a generic sense, though, was simply standard. So even if the translation is legitimate (arguable), it cannot be automatic.

As I mentioned in part 1, this is a completely normal problem in translation! Translators have to make choices, constantly. That’s what the work of translation is.

In the world of Bible translation, though, the original text is so important to us that we don’t always want to admit how much our own choices, and therefore our own biases, can affect the results. We can be tempted to hide behind the original text, to insist that our choices are not choices at all.

1 John 4:20 makes a good test case because you can’t do that here! In order to translate this verse, you have to make a choice. You can’t pretend that it’s not a choice. You can’t pretend that your choices don’t matter.

It doesn’t get better.

Intrigued, I started to make a chart. Charts can solve everything, right? I came up with other test verses and looked them up in other translations.

Some of my test cases involved words like “adelphoi” where it isn’t necessarily just male siblings who are meant, or “anthropoi” where it isn’t just men. I also looked at “uiou” as “children” or just “sons”, and for good measure I made sure Junia got her proper name. Later, I started adding the Hebrew words, too, although that hasn’t changed the results.

The Chart, which definitely deserves the capital letter, is a perpetual work in progress. (And I will attach it here just as soon as I figure out how to make it readable in HTML.) The trends, though, have been pretty clear from the beginning.

Here’s what I concluded: Not one mainstream modern translation is as consistent as NRSV, which was published in 1989.

The closest runners-up to NRSV are probably the 2011 NIV update, NLT, and CEB (2011), all of which occasionally fail in ways that NRSV does not.

No discussion of the topic would be complete without mentioning the ESV, which was created specifically in order to preserve and promote gender bias. (That’s not the way they tell it, but it’s true.) Its translators consistently add masculine-exclusive language, even in cases where women are explicitly included in the text.

Why is this okay? Why are pastors, scholars, and educators not talking about this?

These translation choices matter. Kenzie taught me that.

By failing to update our Bible translations to reflect modern English usage (in which the masculine form is not universally understood as generic), we are actively inserting gender-exclusive language into the Bible text.

We are mistranslating. We are doing it on purpose.

Do we want to teach students like Kenzie that men are more central to the Bible’s message than women? Do we want Kenzie to conclude that 1 John 4:20 is not talking about how she treats her siblings?

Is retaining a previous generation’s grammar really more important to us than passing on the faith accurately to the next generation?

Our Bible translations say that it is.

Addendum: Where do we go from here?

The continued popularity of the ESV does not make me optimistic, but I am seeing more people talking about that, at least. It has taken a while, but at least some people have noticed.

One bright spot is that there are now a number of alternative translations, not yet popular enough to call really “mainstream”, which do better. One of these, The Inclusive Bible, is as consistent as NRSV! The NRSV itself has also been updated, and I’m pleased to report that the NRSV-UE maintains its consistent approach to accurately translating language that is gender-neutral in the original Greek and Hebrew. (Still no “siblings”, though. That one is still just me.)

There is an opportunity whenever clergy, Sunday School teachers, or parents bemoan the lack of biblical literacy. Instead of only focusing on reading level (which may or may not even be a helpful metric for Bibles), what if we also discussed the accuracy of the translation? Should we really settle for a translation that is easy to read, even if what people are more easily reading is teaching them that boys and men matter more than girls and women?