The story of Suzanne McCarthy’s book, as told to James McGrath by her sister, Ruth Hayhoe

James McGrath:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the religion prof podcast. I’m really happy to have as my guest on the podcast today, professor Ruth Hayhoe from the University of Toronto. I talk with professors at universities fairly often, but usually they’re in biblical studies. And what’s interesting about my guest today is that she is a professor for a long time of comparative education, specializing in particular on comparative education between the United States and China. And yet she’s a guest on the show today to talk about a book in biblical studies that she’s been directly involved in. And one that I’m just really excited is now out and I’m happy to help spread the word about. We’ll say a bit more about that as the show unfolds, but for now, let me just say thank you for listening to us. And Ruth, it’s a wonderful opportunity to have you on the show. Thank you so much for doing this.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Thank you also, James. I’m delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you about my sister’s book.

James McGrath:

Yeah, so the book that we’re talking about today is by Suzanne McCarthy. And for those of you who, like me, have been long standing, either bloggers in what sometimes has been called the “biblio blogosphere,” Bible bloggers, people who blog about biblical studies, at least engaging with, if not directly from an academic perspective, will probably recognize Suzanne’s name. She was a very early biblio blogger. In fact, I looked back to see. I could hardly remember a time when I didn’t know her as part of the blogosphere, as we call it. And she started in 2005. I was one of the earliest ones, and I started in 2003. So she was in the Bible blogosphere very, very early. And very sadly, passed away. I knew she’d been working on a book; I kept hearing snippets and tidbits that the book might still appear.

James McGrath:

So I’m happy to say that now available in print is Suzanne McCarthy’s book, Valiant or Virtuous?: Gender Bias in Bible Translation. And this is really an important volume. Ruth, why don’t I just ask you, since you were involved in taking what was a manuscript that was, I understand, quite near completion, but still as yet unfinished and ensuring that this actually had the chance to be read by people who need to hear about this important topic. Why don’t you just tell listeners a little bit about the process and how this has unfolded?

Ruth Hayhoe:

Thanks James. I’m really happy to do that. My sister passed away in June of 2015. And her husband, Jay Frankel, who’s one of the editors on the book, kept in very close touch with me. And we decided that we must find a way to bring the 15 chapters that she had written in the last two years of her life out to publication. That was January of 2016. I knew that it had been done under very difficult circumstances. She was very fragile in the last two years with breast cancer. But Jay supported her, and she managed to draft out these 15 chapters. So I thought, “How do I begin?” And the first step was to organize a set of focus groups in my church where I spend the winters in Delray Beach, Florida, to read through the chapters and give us feedback.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So we had about six sessions discussing each of the chapters. And then I invited both Jay Frankel, her husband, and also my niece, Christy Hayhoe, who is a professional editor, to come down and meet the group and get some feedback and get some ideas. And at that point we determined now we need to edit these 15 chapters. Jay offered to write an introduction – I think you’ll find it quite lovely – in which he described the situation where Suzanne was writing from a very fragile but very determined position to get all the topics she had blogged on for years into a coherent set of chapters.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So that’s how we began. And then from there we began to look for publishers, we looked at various possibilities. And within a year or so we decided Wipf and Stock would be a good one to try, through a couple of suggestions from good colleagues who had worked with them. Then it meant preparing a solid proposal, finding endorsers who knew the subject, and you’ll see there are four on the cover of the book who were very helpful in doing the endorsements. And it was actually not until June of 2019 that the book actually came off press. That was a great moment for all of us. I was having a family reunion of my large family. Suzanne had five sisters and two brothers, they all came together from different parts of the world in June of 2019. And I was able to get a copy of the book for each of them.

James McGrath:

Wow. Well, we want to make sure that the book reaches a much wider audience. I sometimes wonder whether the academic things that I write, whether even my family is reading them, even if I give them a copy in their hand and hand it to them. Fortunately, in addition to biblical studies, I’ve dabbled in things like the intersection of religion and science fiction and have a sister who is a fan, as I am. So that helps. But this book is engaging with some important academic material, but is doing so in a way that is aimed at a general audience. Is that correct? And is aimed at being accessible to a general audience. I certainly found it, as an academic on the one hand, I found it really stimulating. And it was addressing some things that really had essentially flown under my radar to a large extent.

James McGrath:

But on the other hand, it really does a remarkable job of mediating that kind of information that academics sometimes talk about to a general audience. So who is the intended readership of this book? There’s a lot of discussion of Bible translation in academic circles that work in this field. There isn’t always a lot of awareness of some of the processes and some of the issues related to Bible translation if we think about a general audience. So who is the intended audience of Suzanne’s book? I mean, is this for people who work in Bible translation or is this for a general audience?

Ruth Hayhoe:

Thanks for asking this question. It’s actually the first question that we sat down and considered when we decided we were going to publish her book. Who did she write it for? And we got two answers to that. The first answer was she was very concerned about young women, particularly in the more fundamentalist or evangelical churches, who were being really drawn back into an environment in which women are supposed to keep silent, be subordinate to men. And using really rather traditional interpretations of the Bible. And I think Suzanne, having a daughter, who at the time was in her early twenties, she was very, very concerned at how this young generation were experiencing repression of various kinds.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So the book, as you said, is written in a very engaging manner and has a lot of lovely stories in it. But it also gives very, very clear evidence of women being leaders, being defenders of others, being responsible for families, being peacemakers. All different roles that are very, very clear in the Old Testament and in some cases also in the New Testament. Like the case of Phoebe, for example, who was seen as a pro stasis, a deacon. So it was very, very clear that women had leading roles in both the Old and New Testament. And she wanted to make that clear to young women so they would not be subordinated.

Ruth Hayhoe:

The second audience were the translators, particularly of a version of the Bible which has now become very widespread, it’s called the English Standard Version. It’s put out by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which systematically changed the translation to ensure women’s subordination. So instead of children of God, “Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be children of God.” That’s changed back to sons of God. I wouldn’t say back, she shows from a history of translations it had been children of God back to the time of Luther. She looks at French and German translations as well as English ones.

Ruth Hayhoe:

She was very, very concerned about that organization and the tremendous influence that it had, including her own church in Vancouver where the decision was made we’re going to now adopt that as the pew Bible, the English Standard Version. And she left the church for that reason. Because she felt that was simply a misinterpretation of the Bible that was very deleterious to women and to their opportunities for leadership and full participation on an equal basis. So I would say both of those. So on the one hand, there’s some lovely stories in the book that make it more engaging for young people. On the other hand, there’s some very, very serious interpretation of not only Greek, but also Hebrew, Latin and ancient Syriac showing how originally the translations reflected the social prejudices of the time, but not necessarily purposely put women back in their place. Whereas the ESV has a very purposeful intention of ensuring that women subordinate themselves to men.

Ruth Hayhoe:

If you look at their website and you look at their board of directors, the women on the board of directors are all listed first as housewives. Many of them don’t have other roles. The men are professors and leaders. And she’s able to show that their knowledge of these original biblical languages is actually very limited. So what’s happened is they’ve twisted, for example, the word chayil in Hebrew, and this is what we have in the title of the book. For all men it’s translated “valiant.” For all women, “virtuous.” That’s why we put it into the title. That’s the same word in Hebrew. And she has many, many other examples of this intentional distortion of translation of particular words in Hebrew and Greek into English, in such a way as to subordinate women to men.

James McGrath:

Yeah, thank you. And I really do have to say as somebody who, as a blogger as well as an author, tries to reach a general audience, I’m sure I don’t do nearly as good a job as a Suzanne’s book does. I mean, it really is an engaging read and yet one which I feel can be shared with anyone in my church, for instance, and not just drawn to the attention of other academics. And yet, as somebody who works in biblical studies, I will put as a proviso, I am mostly a New Testament. So I may have an excuse for not knowing some of the same things that happened in the realm of the Hebrew Bible as well as I know some of the New Testament ones. But some things were familiar to me.

James McGrath:

The fact that there is no separate term deaconess, and so no distinctive roles, that there are deacons. And clearly women as well as men were in those roles. That it’s not brothers or sons, it’s children. That these terms, even if they were masculine nouns because the language has nouns that are gendered, it does not imply that women are excluded in the way that modern English sometimes does. And yet the term “woman of valor” has become much more familiar, I think, through the writing of people like Rachel Held Evans, who also sadly we lost, has contributed so much to elevating women both through careful study of the biblical text but also as an advocate in the present day. And not … as a New Testament person was not aware that the same word, had not noticed that the same word was being used in different contexts and sometimes being translated in different ways depending on who it referred to.

James McGrath:

And so the book really does draw attention to something that is really pernicious and can really have a detrimental effect on anything from the self-esteem and self-understanding of women who are involved in Christian communities and are reading the Bible, to how churches engage with social issues, to even how effective those who are trying to advocate for women equality can do so. Because if people turn to an English translation and think, “Oh, the Bible says this,” it can close down the argument from their perspective. When in fact, what they’re reading is a translation that might be twisted intentionally to have that very effect.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Yeah. I think that the intentional piece in this ESV is the most disturbing piece. I think over history it kind of reflected women’s tendency to be in lower positions and so on. But this is clearly intentional. And she has many, many quotations that show that. And one of the things I feel that’s very beautiful about the book, although Suzanne herself suffered from a really quite abusive [first] marriage over a very long period of time, maybe 20 years, there’s no bitterness in the book. I really feel she’s turning her own suffering into something that will be a blessing for young women. By liberating them, by letting them see the scriptures for itself, by sharing her incredible linguistic scholarship. Because really her knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin and even ancient Syriac, were quite remarkable. She studied them in the university, and then she built them up as she worked on this blogging and really looked very carefully at these different passages.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So the spirit of the book is quite lovely. If you read the introduction and her husband Jay’s description of her life and how she interacted with people, she really was a person of love and generosity who, I think like the story of Joseph, took her own suffering to turn into a blessing for others, particularly young women in the church. While at the same time having a very solid academic basis for her argument against those who were using a biased translation to re-subordinate women, particularly in the more evangelical fundamentalist churches that are widely adopting this English Standard Version of the Bible.

James McGrath:

Yeah. That really comes … that approach of hers, her whole ethos and outlook really does come across. It’s quite common for those who are engaged in both academic study of the Bible and church contexts to move back and forth between the ancient and modern. One of the things that I think is really valuable in the book that goes beyond that typical jumping back and forth, is that she engages, Suzanne engages in such interesting ways, both with the history of interpretation and of translation across multiple centuries. And then also weaves in Bible translations from the past made by women.

Ruth Hayhoe:

That’s right.

James McGrath:

Weaves in stories about women’s leadership roles and the role of the Bible translated in different ways than the ESV does, in inspiring them and fostering them and being part of their lives. There’s such a wealth of the in between history that sometimes, particularly among Protestant Bible scholars and church goers, there’s a tendency to go to the Bible and to today and miss out some of the in between pieces. And yet they’re so important and I really valued that those were included in there.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Yeah. She goes back to the Septuagint, the early Greek translation. The Vulgate, the Latin. And then Pagninus, a later Dominican friar who did a Latin translation. She digs up some very interesting European translations. Olivétan, whom I had not heard of, who did an early French translation at the time of Calvin and used the word L’Éternel as a term for God that doesn’t really include any gender role, neither mother or father. So it is quite remarkable, the history of translation.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Also the history of women’s leadership. I’ve just been rereading the lovely story of the women medical doctors who first were able to get qualified here in Toronto and then went as leaders in mission societies in India to bring medical service to women. In one case, supported by her missionary husband who himself was not a doctor, but saw himself as her helper or supporter. And I think one of her key points is the interpretation that, “Oh, the woman is helper, that means she’s subordinate to the man.” Actually the term is help mate, which is also used for God in his support for human activity. So it just revolutionizes the understanding of some of these words that have been kind of used to suggest a lower or more subordinate role for women, rather than a real partnership and sharing between men and women in the Christian endeavor and message.

James McGrath:

Yeah. I first encountered Suzanne’s work and her passion for these areas and these subjects through her blog, which I’m glad that not just one place that she blogged, but more than one is still online and accessible to people. I’ve sometimes been asked as an academic who blogs with some regularity, whether this is a complete waste of time or something that actually helps in the process of being a writer and of formulating one’s thoughts and engaging with the general audience and things like that. Did Suzanne talk about, or did you see as she was working on the book, did blogging actually play a useful role in helping bring about this book?

Ruth Hayhoe:

I think blogging was the essential foundation of the book. Because she started in 2005 and that’s when she was going through quite some difficulties in her marriage. She found she could go to a quiet place and communicate through blogging and develop her scholarship quietly at home. So I think all that blogging over the years helped her to bring a kind of depth and richness into the chapters of the book. I don’t think she could have written these chapters in the brief year and a half, two years when she was struggling with breast cancer, if she had not had this rich set of materials that she developed over many years, both through her own research and blogging and also all her interactions. Both with those who opposed her position and she was prepared to challenge them, and also with those who engaged positively.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So one of the individuals, Professor Kurk Gayle at Texas Christian University, has been very, very helpful. And he had followed her blogging and has given some background on the blog now and this whole process that she went through. So definitely the blogging was the basis on which she was able to pull together relatively coherent chapters around the different themes. She has some gender terms, gender roles, she has a number of different themes in the book where she brings different elements of women’s role in the Bible together. And finally the last beautiful section unfinished, is Mother God.

James McGrath:

Yeah. I do want to talk about the decision you made to allow the book to end rather abruptly as her manuscript did. Also your decision to include the remarkable thing that you opened the front of the book or you turn to the end of the book, and what we have are poems of Suzanne’s where presumably she would’ve written a much longer introduction and conclusion and things like that. So on the one hand I’m interested to hear more about her as poet and your decision in editing to start it and end it the way that you did. But also what you think she might’ve said beyond what’s in these pages. Whether it’s speculative or based on things she actually said to you, beyond what she actually had an opportunity to write.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Well, it’s really a good question. We have about 25 of her poems and they’re quite lovely. And we just originally thought maybe we could include several and then we thought maybe it makes best sense to use them as bookends. So one about how she sees the writing process and it’s very a lively kind of depiction of moving stones around. Right? And then how they turn into water and start to flow. And then her Fully Adam poem, which her husband Jay particularly appreciated, and she does have the chapter with that title on it. And Adam as humus, as a person of the soil. So referring to both men and women coming out of the soil.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So yes, we couldn’t have her write an introduction. I think Jay captured many of her thoughts very well in the introduction he wrote. I think she would have probably made it very clear her concern for young women and her hope that they would be able to fully participate on an equal basis in their Christian communities and feel free to take up leadership when God called them in that way. She probably would have put that in. She might well have also wanted to engage a little bit with her bloggers that were trying to put women down. She names many of them, she quotes extensively from them. And I think that was clearly also her concern, that their agenda should be somehow opened up and people would see how intentional was the effort to subordinate women through translations that were really biased and not reflecting the actual or Hebrew in the cases where she was able to expose that. And there’s quite a lot of that in different parts of the book. Not in a contentious way, but just in a very clear way with many quotations.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So I think that’s probably what she would have wanted to focus on. As I said, we thought about what were her intentions. Of course, we can’t know. When we came to the Mother God, the final about the ancient Syriac and how the Holy Spirit was originally feminine, she has wonderful stories about very early women who traveled to the Middle East and discovered ancient texts and so on. Including this ancient Syriac text where the Holy Spirit was female. We just felt none of us had the expertise to be able to add anything to that. So the best way is just let it end as she … The last moments she was able to work with that rather short final chapter in the book, which is entitled Mother God. And she’s one of the remarkable people who actually did do some research on early Syriac in order to be able to write what she did.

Ruth Hayhoe:

She loved languages, obviously. Her first degree was linguistics. And she studied both Greek and Hebrew at University of Toronto. I did also, so I did Greek and Latin, but no Hebrew. So I have some sense, she was very close, 10 years younger than me. In my family of eight, my mother’s philosophy was the top half brings up the bottom half. So Suzanne was almost like a child to me in the years that she was growing up. I was quite close. And then I moved out to Asia, but I visited her often in Vancouver and felt very close to her.

James McGrath:

Yeah. Wow. I didn’t know you had a background in … I knew you had a background in languages, I didn’t know that they included some that overlap with the ones that Suzanne focused on in her own academic work.

Ruth Hayhoe:

I did. I did, yeah.

James McGrath:

Yeah. I’d be interested, and I think people listening to this podcast would be interested to hear more on what it’s like to be somebody whose focus is in a very different field. And I’m not sure, I’m sure there are controversies in the field of education, certainly within the realm of Christian education, some issues related to gender come up there as well. But as far as working on a book, moving into a different field to work on a book project, I’m not sure I can even imagine it. I’m not even sure I know what questions to ask. So I’ll just ask you, what was it like to be an academic focused in one field and yet to move into a realm that is covered by different publishers and perhaps different processes?

Ruth Hayhoe:

Yeah, thanks for asking that question. And it was somewhat daunting. I did study Greek and Latin in the same place that Suzanne did as an undergraduate. But then I moved to Hong Kong as a young person. I learned Cantonese and Mandarin and I became a Sinologist and did all my research on Chinese education and its relations with the Western world. I’ve published many books and articles and had to work with university presses and so on. So I know all about the challenges of academic publishing, but Suzanne’s book is different. It’s not purely an academic book. So it was quite challenging for me. First, to understand who she wanted to address, and then, to find a publisher who would be suited to that kind of book.

Ruth Hayhoe:

And really I depended upon friends that kind of overlapped. So I had a lovely friend, Carol Hamrin, who’s a very senior American academic, who had published a lovely book called Salt and Light about Christians in China’s education. Leaders, particularly in the Republican period, both men and women. And a really beautiful book that really demonstrated, although the percentage in the Chinese population was not that high, the Christian men and women who had grown up in China. Most of them were Chinese, some were missionaries, contributed a great deal to China’s development. Particularly before the Revolution of 1949. So through the connection with Carol Hamrin, I got connected to Wipf and Stock. Because her book, Salt and Light, which gives biographies, it’s a three-volume set, of leaders in Chinese education who had a Christian background and how that contributed to their work.

Ruth Hayhoe:

That really kind of guided me and she gave me the name of the chief editor at Wipf and Stock, I got in touch with him. We had also published a book on a famous China missionary whose death 100 years ago, his name was Timothy Richard, he died in 1919, is now being celebrated in Wales. So that was my connection. But I immediately realized that it wasn’t quite the same process as submitting to a university press. We needed to prepare a very careful detailed proposal and we needed to propose endorsers who knew the field. And I was very fortunate to have colleagues, one at Tyndale Christian University in Toronto, Professor Kurk Gayle at Texas Christian University, and two or three others, who were able to link me to individuals who I could propose as endorsers for the book.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So as you can see, in the end we were able to get four quite strong endorses, including a professor at Wycliffe College of the University of Toronto whose work has been on women in the Old Testament. So that … it was a learning process, but it was … and it took a lot of determination. It took us actually almost four years from when we first sorted out the manuscript to when we actually got the book. But it was a really wonderful journey in which we walked together, the three of us. My brother-in-law Jay, who is really a close brother now, my niece Christy, who is a professional editor and did much of the editing work, and myself. And then this group that I had managed to connect with who helped me work with Wipf and Stock. So I learned a lot and I knew that the book needed to reach not the same audience as a very academic university press book, but nevertheless an audience that would appreciate both the academic quality of the work and also the engaging nature of the discourse and presentation of the stories I found in the book.

James McGrath:

Yeah. Well I do want to include a recommendation of the book for academics, simply because we often work in the original languages. And then whether through church involvement or just because it’s often faster to skim a translation in English, we work with the translation at least some of the time. Work with it in the classroom. And it’s almost like the two, unless you’re actually engaged in the act of Bible translation, you may not realize that, “Oh, in that passage, that’s the same word, but it’s being translated differently.” Unless you have the two side by side. So the book really does highlight some instances of that and make us aware as a discipline, as an area of the academy, to really give much more thought to that.

James McGrath:

And I think particularly with the technology we have now, where can go to a manuscript, can look through it for particular keywords and can check what we’ve done against original language terminology and things like that and see whether we’ve been consistent, whether inconsistencies are there. That at the very least those of us who are adamantly in support of women’s equality and recognize that that’s there in the biblical tradition and in the history of the church, not inadvertently provide things that will run counter to that by maybe just following an earlier translation custom or doing something like that. So I think this is an important book for academics to read.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Yeah. And I would strongly encourage those who are seeing the English Standard Version widely adopted in churches across North America, to raise some questions about it. This book really focuses on the intentional distortions of the translation of that particular version. That’s much more the case with this than any of the earlier versions. So I think that’s a key point that Suzanne was very concerned about. It actually led her to leave her own church in Vancouver because she just felt so uncomfortable with this being adopted as the pew Bible. And it’s happening very widely in North America, in particularly in the more evangelical and fundamentalist circles.

Ruth Hayhoe:

So I think this book is very important for women in those kinds of circumstance. Or men who are really concerned about women’s ability and respect in terms of equal participation in Christian community. To really draw attention to that particular translation and the kind of subordination of women that has been intentionally put in many, many different texts, which she’s able to expose quite clearly in this book.

James McGrath:

Yeah. And I think she does a wonderful job of that. One thing that I know from my experience of a variety of church contexts as well as studying in different places and now reading and writing academic as well as books for a popular audience that are on the fields that I teach and research in, is that as far as church publishers, Christian publishers are concerned, very often they align themselves in ways that are associated either with denominations or with major streams. There are publishers that would readily publish something like this. But then those in churches that are using the ESV and are ignoring the issues with it are unlikely to read things from those publishers. And then the publishers that are most read in those churches that most need to hear this message oftentimes will not publish something that is critical of this outlook.

James McGrath:

So I hope that through Wipf and Stock, which really does have this breadth of material that it publishes. It publishes just so much, including having branches that publish out of print books from a range of theological perspectives and a range of traditions, as well as authors from all across different spectrums. I do hope that this will actually manage to get not just to the people who will appreciate it from the outset and be on board with it, but also those who might not know what is behind the translation they’re using. And find a way to get into their hands.

James McGrath:

I know that with Wipf and Stock, publishing as much as they do oftentimes it’s crucial that the author, having published with one of their imprints myself, it’s crucial for an author to do some of the publicity. They do less of that than some of the big trade publishers, certainly, and things like that. So really do want to do what I can to help spread the word about this really, really important book. But also this really, really readable, just delightful book and try to spread the word about it. And I’m hoping that people who remember Suzanne fondly from the biblio blogosphere, as we used to call ourselves from among Bible bloggers, will actually take the time to read the book and to help do some of the spreading of the word, that so sadly Suzanne can’t do herself.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Thank you so much, James. This has been just wonderful to have this opportunity to share Suzanne’s story with you. And I can’t express enough gratitude for your effort to try and make the book a little bit more widely known in the circles of those who are concerned about the issues of Me Too and of women’s participation in Christian communities in North America and around the world.

James McGrath:

Yeah. It’s an incredibly timely book, I almost want to say unfortunately. I hope that it continues to be read for as long as it’s needed. But I long for a time when its message won’t be quite as needed because people are choosing other translations and are affirming the equality of women, both in general and within a church context.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Thank you.

James McGrath:

Yeah. Ruth, thank you so much for taking the time to be a guest on my podcast today. But thank you in particular for the labor of love that went into bringing this book to the point of being published and now for taking the time to talk with me so that can help spread the word and connect it with readers that need to read it.

Ruth Hayhoe:

Well, thank you, also. It’s been truly a joy both getting the book out and also now sharing it with those who will appreciate and treasure Suzanne’s contribution. To me, it’s the most beautiful expression. Take your own suffering, turn it into something that is a blessing to others. I think that’s a fundamental Christian value.

James McGrath:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for all you’ve shared on the show as well as through your work on the book. And to everyone who’s been listening, thank you for listening to this podcast. Do go get a copy of the book. It’s Suzanne McCarthy, Valiant or Virtuous?: Gender Bias in Bible Translation, published by Wipf and Stock. Recommend it for your public library so that those who won’t happen across it in their own church context might see it in their public library. Recommend it for purchase by them. Do what you can to spread the word about this book as well as reading it yourself. And for now, I’ll just say goodbye and thank you for listening, once again. Bye for now.