all person, not just males, are meant. Grant Osborne, a representative for a large number of evangelical biblical scholars, feels gender inclusively, as a translation strategy, actually and more accurate. (Grudem, 1997, p. 27) Others argue that revising the Bible will make it more accurate and consistently gender inclusive. The creation narratives tell us that God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them(Gen. 1:27) The new gender-neutral version reads So God created humankind in his image. And God is suddenly found to give a different name to the race: Male and female he created them, and henamed them Humankind when they were created (Grudem, 1997 p. 27) The problem is that humankind, human beings, and human are not names that can refer to man in distinction from woman, and the translations become less accurate. The words of the Scripture are not ours to change as we please. Elimination of masculine language from thousands of verse of Scripture may distort the meaning of the Word of God.Just like the word man is not generic, neither is the word he. The first grammars of modern English were intended to help boys from upper class families prepare for the study of Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The male authors wrote for male readers, since there were few women who were literate. The masculine-gender pronouns did not refer to both sexes. In this time period there was no indication that masculine pronouns were sex-inclusive when used in general references. These pronouns were a reflection of the time, which were male dominant and a male-centered world. In the 1800s, grammarians started to use He as a generic pronoun. In 1850, an Act of Parliament gave official sanction to the recently invented concept of the generic he. The new law said, words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females. (Jacobson, 1995) Although simi...
