A new Spanish version of the Roman Catholic Bible – the Jerusalem Bible, is ditching the word man for person.
The move changes the iconic call of Jesus to His disciples to become fishers of men in Matthew 4:19 to the more gender-neutral fishers of persons.
In Greek, the word man is used more than 500 times in the New Testament, including multiple instances where Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man.
Spanish priest Father Jesús Silva took to Twitter to refute the new translation.
“What people was Jesus referring to: human, angelic or divine? Well, in the text, thus translated, it is not excluded that Jesus is calling the disciples to evangelize the angels or God himself,” wrote Silva on his twitter.
According to Silva, since persons is a relatively vague term, thus, to avoid misunderstandings that occur with words like person, human being or human earthling and adopting the principle of economy of language, we could translate the word anthropos as man, which includes all of the above.
The Jerusalem Bible is based on the original Hebrew and Greek texts when its first edition was published in French in 1956.