Dr. Palmer, frequent contributor to THE OUTLOOK, is Executive Secretary of the New International Version of the Bible which has just been published in its entirety. He headed a large number of evangelical scholars who have worked for a dozen years to produce this careful translation in modern English which is now getting a wide and warm reception.
Station WGBH complains that it had a tight budget because it could and only $2,250,000 to produce a TV show The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter is a great novel by Nathaniel Hawthome. I am glad it is on TV. We need more of these high quality programs—programs not interrupted by those abominable commercials.
But where are American values when we can spend as much on a one–shot TV program as on the eternal Word of God, which will be read and reread by countless millions decade after decade? For the New International Version also had a tight budget—too tight considering the subject matter and the scope of the project. It cost the New York International Bible Society over two million dollars to produce this translation over a ten–year period. Here is a translation of a book written by God Himself, with answers to all of today‘s problems, personal, international, social, economic, cultural –answers that are eternally true today as the day they were penned. Yet the public considers The Scarlet Letter as more worthwhile!
What a topsy-turvy world! A Yankee baseball player earning more than the leader of the most influential nation in the world. A TV star, whose chief assets are acting ability and sexual charm, receiving (I deliberately avoided the term “earning” thirty times as much pay as a college professor with forty years of experience. A plumber with a high-school education earning twice as much as a Bible translator who has had twenty-three years of formal education, plus innumerable years of experience. A punch drunk boxer earning in one night three times as much as the annual giving of a large church.
Believe it or not, for Americans the greatest translation of the Bible since the King James Version is not worth as much as The Scarlet Letter.
