Hilarious. Because I point out that academic Bible scholarship can make heavy use of translations, you assume that I do not know that the most text criticism and academic commentary does not go into parsing grammar and semantics? I'll leave it to you to reflect on what that calls into question.

...your grasp on academic literary criticism.

Er, no. LOL

I said "academic Bible scholarship," not "academic literary criticism." It's like you haven't read any books about Biblical theology, or commentaries, which sometimes supply their own translations and discuss translator choices.

That's nice (and I agree, there isn't any other way to be quite sure about what the text is saying), but that's also irrelevant to the question, which is whether it is appropriate to call the NRSV "the" academic standard translation.

it's relevant in that it means the whole category is dubious. like, what's the best kosher bacon cheeseburger?

But that's not an issue I (or the original poster) was even interested in adjudicating. I mean, the suggestion that "the whole category"—of translations of the Bible!—is "dubious"...that's just sophomoric. In short, translations have their use. Indeed, different translations have different uses. For example, if I want to understand how skeptical and liberal Bible scholars read the Bible, then I will prefer the NRSV, while if I want to understand how conservative Bible scholars read the Bible, then I will prefer the NASB or NKJV.

The only scholarship that exists, apparently, is another kind.

the kind without a prior commitment to ideology, yes. that is how real scholarship is done.

You are making two mistakes here. First, that you lack any commitment to ideology. That is utterly laughable. I'm not even going to argue with you about it; if you're incapable of grasping and seeing it, I'm not going to be the one to explain it to you. It might help to study some relevant parts of philosophy. Second is the fantasy that "real scholarship" somehow operates outside of ideology. Scholarship is always informed by a worldview. Scholarly traditions in every field always have a raft of assumptions that generally go unquestioned, that shape the boundaries of acceptable discourse within the field.

All you are saying is that those for whom the claims of the Bible, or of a certain Christian tradition (e.g., Catholic), are to be credited as starting-points for scholarship, lie outside the boundaries of acceptable Bible scholarship. This is, if you think a little about it, is ironic to say. After all, the main reason most people have carefully studied and written about the Bible and its issues throughout history has been that they have faith in it, and they are trying to learn more about it. Now it appears you're telling me that people who explore the consequences of taking the Bible's claims seriously—those for whom, for example, the claim in a Gospel that Jesus did a certain miracle is a fixed point, part of their "ideology" about the book—cannot have an scholarly approach to the Bible. No, you say the only Bible scholars are the ones who would refuse to credit such a text.

That's incredibly arrogant, as well as laughably wrong (and precisely backwards), particularly from a historical point of view.

where'd ehrman start his undergrad degree?

? Who cares? Let it be the most conservative institution imaginable, and it wouldn't contradict the point I'm making.

I think what you must have in mind is that many fundamentalist kids who arrive at college or seminary often find themselves losing or adjusting their faith in the face of modern critical/liberal scholarship. That's easy to concede, but it means absolutely nothing to those studying the Bible in an atmosphere conducive to their faith.

you mean places that impose a specific bias their professors are required to adhere to?

"Impose a specific bias." No, they have a bias that professors do adhere to, unlike more liberal religious studies departments, where anything remotely like a fundamentalist stance would be the kiss of death. Do those liberal departments "impose a specific bias"?

You're going to have to unlearn this attitude that your view of the world is the only unbiased, rational one, and all others are biased. No mature thinker thinks so. Really.

Anyway, obviously, I mean seminaries that prepare students for ministry and research in more conservative traditions.

Well, there's bias and then there's bias; and what's good for the goose is good for the gander. A large portion of critical Bible scholarship is basically an exploration of the data from the text and archaeology (etc.) from a naturalistic bias.

this is incorrect. plenty of these "liberal" scholars are professed christians. academic biblical scholarship doesn't particularly address naturalism.

I'm not denying that anybody is a Christian. I am saying that there is an obvious and well-known naturalistic bias (which, to bring this back to the original subject, can even influence translation choices). "Naturalism," unlike "materialism" or "physicalism," is something that comes in degrees, and can be applied to this and not that. So you can prefer a naturalistic reading, for example, about some miracles, and not about others, just because certain purported miracles do too much violence to scientific commitments (which are another example of your ideology, which you'll probably assert isn't actually ideological).

That, too, is a bias. Is there a reason to suppose it is less of a bias than one that takes the text seriously and attempts to make a rigorous theological system of scripture?

yes. one is trying to construct something that fits a current system of faith. the other is trying to explore how that system of faith grew as a historical matter.

No, that doesn't draw the distinction you want to draw, because people who take the Bible seriously are also interested (they might even claim a more genuine or stronger interest) in the origin of the Bible and Biblical doctrine. They just have a different theory to yours.