Creating Gender-Accurate Bible Translations

For centuries, Christians have relied on flawed Bible translations that reinforce patriarchy, devalue girls and women, and fuel abuse. These distortions are used to portray females as easily deceived; temptresses; spiritually, morally, and intellectually inferior; and requiring male guidance or discipline.

Many Christian leaders, churches, and seminaries leverage these mistranslations to oppose women’s equality and leadership not only in the church but also in the home. These influential gatekeepers uphold male-female power imbalances in their communities, subverting God’s original plan for mutuality.

Thus, CBE launched an initiative to examine the biblical passages most often distorted to demean women. We recruited an international team of women and men to work on translating 500+ Bible verses (nearly seventy different passages). Their work will provide exegetically-sound, gender-accurate, and accessible English translations from the original languages.

This team is in the final stages of a rigorous six-step translation process of these verses. When this six-step process is finished, we will publish these translations together in a book that will serve as a gender-accurate supplement to the reader’s Bible translation of choice. After the book is published, we plan to bring together a team of scholars to translate the entire Bible as the next step toward a producing a more gender-accurate full English Bible translation.

Providing exegetically-sound and gender-accurate translations will show that women, like men, are created in God’s image for shared governance and ministry—the core of CBE’s mission.