WE ARE ONE PEOPLE OF GOD

By Maili MuÑoz
Salisbury Post

Not everybody in the Bible was a white man.

At least that’s the argument of some theologians and Bible scholars who believe the white Anglo-Saxon male’s interpretation of the Bible unfairly downplays the existence of and reference to people of color and women in the scriptures.
In response to this translation of the Bible’s Judeo Christian story, Nia Publishing Company of Atlanta has released another study version of the King James Bible.

The “Women of Color Study Bible” is “translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty’s special command, appointed to be read in churches,” according to the book’s foreword. But injected throughout are special notes, features and commentaries by female clergy and Bible scholars of color about people— in particular, women — of color in the Bible who are generally overlooked.

Nia bills itself as an “African- American-owned company … dedicated and committed to the cultural and spiritual growth of people of color as individuals in the community and in the church.” Publisher Mel Banks II allowed editor Marjorie Lawson to pursue the idea of having a study Bible specifically dedicated to the unique history of the African-American presence and African-American women.

The “Women of Color” Bible does not attempt to elevate Africans above others when affirming their presence in the scriptures, the foreward says. Instead, the affirmation attempts to correct what is believed to be the distortion of the African story over the last three or four hundred centuries.

This was accomplished through “deliberate omissions and twisting of history by those who would take credit for everything good in the world,” or “the pictorial portrayal of biblical people as ethnically different from what they were … African-Asian...through the failure of ‘scholars’ and writers to acknowledge the distortions when confronted with the facts.”

But, it continues, not all distortions have been deliberate. Some are a result of “ignorant perpetuation of what has been received from others.” Yet others “stem from the desire, on the part of non-African-Asians, to more closely identify themselves with biblical people.”

However the story became twisted, Lawson called on countless women of color to tell the stories of Bible figures as famous as mother Eve — who the Rev. Portia Williamson says was “the first African woman” — to those as misunderstood as the symbolic woman in Revelation 12.

Lawson called the Rev. Maria-Alma Rainey Copeland of Salisbury to comment on Lot’s daughters and Caleb’s daughter, Achsa.

Copeland, an ordained Lutheran pastor, says she was petitioned to write for the Bible when “I received a letter from a lady in California, whom I’d never met, informing me that my name had been given to her to contact...wanting to know if I would write a couple of the articles.… So, I wrote her back and said, ‘Thanks for asking me, I’d love to do that.’ ”

Copeland is a self-described “history nut who loves to take the time and look through the genealogy of the Bible” and says Old Testament studies are her love, which is why she had no problem writing the commentaries. But, she was most moved to write from the perspective of an African-American female pastor who relates to how misunderstood women and people of color are in the church.

“There are two places in … Corinthians and Titus where Paul addresses Timothy and says, ‘Let your women keep silent in the church.’ It appears only two places in the Bible, and yet the church has been stumbling over those two statements for the last 20 centuries and vestiges of it have trickled down into the 21st,” says Copeland, who was the first African-American female to be ordained in the former American Lutheran Church. “But God didn’t say it and Jesus didn’t say it. So why should I jump over God and Jesus to get to Paul? Paul is human like you and I. But women, even at this late date, are still somewhat of an enigma.”

Women’s presence in the Bible is no myth, she says, as she tells the story of the day of Pentecost.

“We don’t highlight the words that say, ‘The women were there’ and ‘There was the mother of Jesus;’ women were there, too. When the the New Testament church began, every person, male and female, had the same amount of anointing of the Holy Spirit. It was just that Peter was picked to be the spokesman because he had been the big mouth all along when Jesus had seen this leadership quality in him.”
While working on her doctoral degree, Copeland says she wrote a paper claiming “until all of our sisters are welcome at the banquet table, we are not free as pastors.” She was disappointed to know that women in the secular world are being accepted in executive positions more than in the church.

“Perhaps it’s in that last bastion of resistance and that’s where it should not be, because I know some women who are hurting. Right or wrong, this is what I believe.”

One man’s subjective adaptation of the Bible, Copeland says, cannot only be hurtful to gender, but also to race.

“As you know, the first Bible we are aware of was translated by King James... It has been Europeanized. And I can understand that, because you write through your own lenses, not someone else’s. But it’s not accurate as far as the participants in the Bible, not when they come out of the regions of Africa and the near East,” Copeland explains.
“When I was in post-graduate school, I found it most interesting when we studied the story of Joseph and … his Egyptian wife. When Joseph presented his children to Jacob, he said, ‘Whose children are these?’ which tells us they did not look like the others. In our terms, today, we would say he was in a biracial marriage, even though we’re talking about Semitic people. We’re talking about black people even then, but we still belong to the human race. It’s all there, but it’s not highlighted.”

Copeland believes all pastors are “going through particular hell” because of “a set of demonic spirits that the devil has been saving up until now that he’s now released on the clergy.” The separation between the races and the sexes are just a method of continually separating the church. And although it is important to be fair in the Bible’s interpretation, she believes the most important task for Christians now is to understand and appreciate differences, but unite as God’s people, not blacks, whites, males and females.
Publishing the “Women of Color” Bible was a “Herculean task,” the pastor says, “an ambitious endeavor.... I’m grateful to God to be a part of its construction.”

And her desire is to put a Bible in every home, because “I tell people, you do not read ‘male testament’ and ‘female testament,’ but Old Testament and New Testament. The Bible is for the whole people of God, male and female … for humanity, not a select group. And when we come to that understanding, we are far better along the way.”

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