Now that’s a Florida Man I endorse

@apocrypals this is real

EXTREME TEEN BIBLE… REAL

Y'all are NOT READY for their shirt merch

I’d buy the “yeet pray love” shirt if it came in black tbh

“Pick up your sword bruh”

There are two possible explanations for this. Either no one involved in this project has spoken firsthand to a teenager in over twelve years and their only sources are op-eds written by other baby boomers. Or they did consult actual teenagers, who succeeded in trolling the living hell out of them.

six of one, half dozen of the other

so, I looked into this, because as an ex-church-kid, this delights me to no end. and, my friends? we have only just begun to pull the thread on this sweater!

this book was originally published on August 14th 2020. as you can see above, Matt Walsh’s tweets were from August 21st - but he wasn’t the only one to notice this garbage, and he wasn’t even the first.

by August 20th, multiple Christian news websites had already taken issue with the book, as you can tell by these hilarious headlines:

and by the end of the 20th (at 5:35pm to be exact) Lifeway issued an apology:

lol, guess they realized they fucked up baaad.

(a day later, Sunday Cool also jumped on board the apology train, with this cringe-worthy nonsense.)

so, both companies apologized, assured people that they weren’t trying to translate the whole bible into this “Gen-Z lingo” (gross), and said that people could still buy the book if they wanted to.

but here’s the deal. the book they’re selling? it’s not the original book.

Exhibit A:

^ that’s the original cover of the book. “The Word According to Gen Z - A 30-Day Devo Challenge.”

but the book they’re selling now? well, see for yourself. Exhibit B:

“The Word According to Gen Z - A 30-Day Devo Challenge Using a Made-Up Language for a Real Generation.”

“Using a Made-Up Language for a Real Generation”

these nerds don’t want to admit that they actually thought Gen Z talked like that! what a lack of commitment. they disappoint me.

and the free sample pdf on their website is edited as well! no longer does it say “Cap G” (short for Capital G, by the way - like how Christians spell “God” with a capital G) and “Big J” - now, it just says “God” and “Jesus.”

…good thing I’m a veritable internet detective, because I found the original sample pdf, which is just as cringey as it looked! I recommend skimming it if you want, because it’s a disaster.

but, now that we know that they edited the book, how will we find out what the rest of the verses were? how ever can we know just how bad it truly was before Christian news sites yelled “blasphemy!” and Lifeway had a collective panic attack?

well, guess what! this devo book came with video lesson tie-ins, and they left their whole website up, for anyone to stumble across!

it’s right here, and it’s…jesus fuck. it’s painful.

here are a few of the other “translations,” next to the original verses, so that you can compare:

Isaiah 40:8, NIV Bible:

The “Gen-Z” version:

what the fuck? what the actual fuck? here, have another:

Matthew 4:4, NIV Bible:

The “Gen-Z” version:

“sammie blanks”?? sammie blanks?

Ephesians 6:17, NIV Bible:

The “Gen-Z” version:

ah, of course. that big ol’ knife.

one last one, and then I’m done with this.

Galatians 6:2, NIV Bible:

The “Gen-Z” version:

I…I’ve got nothing. this broke me. I give up!

final notes:

1. don’t go following Matt Walsh on twitter. like, I’m glad he brought this to our attention, but he’s marked red on shinigami eyes, and from his tweets, he looks like a shitty person.

2. all of these translations are actually blasphemy, and I’m pretty sure a few of them count as straight-up heresy. so, there’s a fun thought!

3. I’m pretty sure this is also racist? like, some of these verses seem like mangled AAVE, and that’s not okay! that’s fucking terrible!

4. when you click on any of the video tie-ins, you’ll find out that the guy in the devo videos looks like this:

yes, he’s wearing sunglasses in a dimly-lit room. and yes, he’s wearing a shirt with a picture of praying hands and the word “Yeet” on it. and on that note…

5. what the fuck do they think “yeet” means? I mean, that “yeet pray love” shirt is a work of art, but this begs the question…what do they actually think it means?

what are we supposed to be yeeting?

anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk.

This whole thing is hilarious.

i’m assuming this is some sort of list for dicey twitter people with terms inspired by death note but in the context of this post it just reads as another attempt at translating something otherwise normal into ludicrous Gen Z terms

Shigami eyes

My friend just sent this to me and said "you will appreciate this" and she was VERY correct

So, this is fine and all, but wasn't most of written Hebrew lost and someone just, rebuilt it and we're fairly sure it's not the same?

That has actually already been addressed on this very post! ^_^

Oral transmission is not the same as it being "lost." Also, Hebrew manuscripts that predate the Greek translations HAVE been found ^_^.

In Israel. In Hebrew. Because Jews wrote them.

@infinitywithoutparallel oh hang on - I misunderstood your comment. My bad!

You're asking whether we can accurately read ancient Hebrew, because the Hebrew language died and was reconstructed, and so, can we REALLY read ancient texts in Hebrew accurately if our modern Hebrew is a reconstruction. Which is a good and interesting question.

So, Hebrew is a language, and languages evolve over time. As a speaker of modern day English, you wouldn't be able to read Chauscer in Middle English, and you wouldn't be able to read Beowulf in Old English. It's changed too much, because of all the invasions (viking invasions, norman invasion, etc) and because of the influence of Latin as the language of science. However, Hebrew did NOT change that much, in part BECAUSE it "died."

When we say a language is dead, that doesn't mean no one can speak, read, or write that language. It means no new words are being added to it, and it has no more native speakers for whom it is their first language. We actually can fluently speak and write many "dead" languages today, most notably Latin, with total accuracy. Hebrew stopped being spoken by everyday people, but it was maintained as a language people had to learn because Jews have always kept the Tanakh in Hebrew and prayed in Hebrew. A language "dying" doesn't make it lost, it's more like it crystallizing. Dead languages preserve BETTER because they aren't changing constantly.

When Hebrew was revived as a living language, it DID undergo some small changes.

Those are pretty much all the differences in grammar. As you can imagine, it's very easy for modern Hebrews speakers to read older writings with those more formal grammar styles! Easier than for us to read Shakespeare, actually.

There's a few other considerations though.

So, TL;DR - Hebrew HAS changed some over the years, but actually comparatively very slightly. A modern Hebrew speaker can read and understand ancient Hebrew with no difficulty. It is the same language, with less differences between Ancient and Modern Hebrew over a span of 5,000 years, than between sixteen and twenty-first century English, a mere 500.

Also worth noting that, even aside from the issue of whether Hebrew is still Hebrew, Jews also just have older, better translations of the Tanakh as well. The Vulgate is a really bad translation. So is the King James Bible. And to be clear, I’m not just talking “some of the nuance is lost” levels bad — I’m talking “I don’t know what this idiom means, so I’m just going to say it means ‘had horns growing out of his head’ because that sounds like a thing that’s probably true about Jews” levels of bad.

If your Hebrew isn’t up to snuff and you absolutely have to use a translation, the Targum Onkelos, which is in Aramaic (the former lingua franca of the region) is a far superior translation, and predates the vulgate by a whooping two centuries. You want to bet that 2nd century translators from the region who were still themselves speaking Biblical Hebrew on the regular knew a little more about it than some rando named Jerome who lived in Croatia a couple hundred years later?

To be clear, this is a symptom of a much larger cultural problem, and that’s the routine dismissal of non-Christian cultural authorities on their own texts and traditions by Christians. It doesn’t always look like white colonizers telling First Nations that they don’t know how to farm or do medicine — sometimes it looks like online cultural Christians telling Jews that “they’re fairly sure” that Jews don’t have the linguistic background to properly understand their own holy texts. But fundamentally, it’s the same phenomenon, and it’s bad for the same reasons.