‘Tis the Season to…Deport
A Bible Made to Measure
Every writer has had that moment when reality starts behaving like a badly edited novel. The characters contradict themselves, the plot swerves without warning, and someone in the audience is clearly reading a completely different book from everyone else.
My latest article was born from that feeling.
We tend to speak about “the Bible” as if it were a single, fixed object: one book, one message, one unchanging truth. But the moment you look closer — at languages, translations, editorial decisions, and above all at how different passages are selectively used — the picture becomes much stranger. In English alone there are multiple “King James Bibles.” In Spanish, things appear simpler on the surface… until you notice how acrobatically certain verses are chosen, trimmed, ignored, or loudly proclaimed depending on who needs them and for what purpose.
In the article, I wander through:
- How translation and philology quietly reshape what we think a “miracle” even is.
- How different gospels make radically different demands — and how modern believers choose between them with remarkable convenience.
- How a faith centered on a homeless, migrant preacher can be used to justify hostility toward migrants, indifference toward the poor, and comfort for the already comfortable.
What emerges is not just contradiction, but something more theatrical: a curated faith. A scrapbook religion. A Bible not translated from Greek or Hebrew, but from fear, grievance, and selective memory. A sacred text edited until it no longer disturbs the powerful — and no longer consoles the uncomfortable.
In other words, this is not a piece about “misreading.” It’s about custom reading. About what happens when a book meant to unsettle us is turned into a mirror that flatters us instead.
Click over to read it in Spanish here or read the English translation below.
‘Tis the Season to…Deport
You have to admit, it is a bit confusing. In most braided novels, the storylines eventually converge. Even experimental fiction agrees on basic coordinates. Narrators may quarrel about motives, but they generally know whether they are in Jerusalem or Galilee.
Which is why one is tempted to ask: what book, exactly, are they reading?
In my native English, the question is already slippery. There is no agreed-upon number of English Bibles; some say over a thousand, depending on how generously one counts revisions, paraphrases, and denominational edits. Even the most revered of them all, the King James Version, exists in multiple forms—1611, 1629, 1769, Oxford, Cambridge—each quietly amended while loudly proclaimed immutable.
Here in Spain, matters appear more straightforward. What the Church says goes—quite literally—to mass. Scripture is not necessarily read; it is filtered through tradition, authority, and liturgy.
My own Bible is an old, dog-eared Penguin edition translated from the original Greek, burdened with the heretical habit of explaining things. It is there one learns, for example, that Mary is called a “virgin” using the Greek parthénos, a word that in the first century meant a young, unmarried woman, not a biological claim in the modern sense.
But why let philology ruin a perfectly good miracle? Matthew adopts this inherited wording to frame Jesus’ birth theologically; Luke uses it to emphasize divine initiative. Neither show the slightest interest in the later, bureaucratic obsessions with celestial gynecology that would be erected upon it.
As Greek became Latin, and Latin became modern European languages, the meaning narrowed and hardened. Theology followed language downhill, then insisted the slope had always been there.
This habit of selection is hardly confined to the Nativity. Matthew solemnly insists that not one letter of the Torah will disappear and that anyone who relaxes even the smallest commandment will be least in heaven. Mark, however, briskly announces that Jesus declared all foods clean. Faced with these options, and a leg of jamón hanging on the wall, most Spaniards have sensibly sided with Mark.
The same selectivity becomes positively acrobatic when scripture is pressed into service against immigrants and the poor. John offers the thunderously exclusive “No one comes to the Father except through me,” often brandished like a theological border wall. Matthew, meanwhile, depicts a final judgment based not on belief or confession, but on whether one fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and clothed the naked.
A Christianity that demonizes migrants while worshipping a Middle Eastern refugee, that slashes aid while venerating a homeless preacher, this isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s performance art. It’s practicing curation. The result is not faith but a scrapbook: verses torn from history, language stripped of context, and a religion rendered safe for power, wealth, and indifference.
Which brings us back to the original puzzle. Maybe it isn’t that these people are reading the Bible wrongly. It’s that they are reading a Bible of their own making, one translated not from Greek or Hebrew, but from fear, grievance, and selective memory. Just maybe, the confusion is intentional. After all, a Bible open to interpretation is a Bible open to power. And a faith that can be curated is a faith that need never challenge the comfortable or comfort the challenged.
