MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚
Despite my disinterest in her work, author Naomi Wolf is popular enough that I find her impossible to avoid from time to time. Recently, she’s been discussing her study of the New Testament. So much of it, she says, “has been mistranslated, or, shall I say, creatively translated. . . .” But has it? Or is Wolf simply out of her depth? She’s not conversant in the original language, nor the first-century context required to critique existing translations of it.
Wolf’s foray into biblical studies reminded me of her previous romp through Victorian criminal records. She fatally misread evidence for claims in her book Outrages—which a BBC interviewer exposed on air. Honestly, I felt terrible for her. It’s every author’s worst nightmare. Every publisher’s, too. The UK edition was already out, but her American publisher canceled the book before release; a second U.S. publisher later picked up the fraught project and released it.
In the aftermath, people wondered where Wolf went wrong and how to prevent similar blunders. “When is a writer erudite,” asked Philip Cohen in the New Republic, “a renaissance person, a polymath—and when are they merely trespassing superficially into areas of knowledge they haven’t mastered, imposing their own prejudices or yanking cherry-picked tidbits out of context?”
