If Jesus always came off as too namby-pamby for your liking, the Conservative Bible Project will deliver a Scripture free from suspected liberal-leaning translative interpretation:

The project’s authors argue that contemporary scholars have inserted liberal views and ahistorical passages into the Bible, turning Jesus into little more than a well-meaning social worker with a store of watered-down platitudes.

“Professors are the most liberal group of people in the world, and it’s professors who are doing the popular modern translations of the Bible,” said Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com, the project’s online home.

Experts who have devoted their careers to unraveling the ancient texts of the Scriptures, many in long-extinct languages, are predictably skeptical about a project by amateur translators.

“This is not making scripture understandable to people today, it’s reworking scripture to support a particular political or social agenda,” said Timothy Paul Jones, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., who calls himself a theological conservative.

Religious publishers already provide an alphabet soup of Bible translations for a range of theological outlooks, from the King James Version (KJV) to the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and beyond. The most widely used traditional translations were overseen by scholars who are considered the best minds in conservative Christianity.

“The phrase ‘theological conservative’ does not mean that someone is politically conservative,” said Schlafly, who lives in Far Hills, N.J.

This liberal slanting, Schlafly argues, ranges from changing gendered language — Jesus calling his disciples to be “fishers of people” rather than “fishers of men” — to more subtle choices, like the 2001 English Standard Version of the Bible, which uses “comrade” and “laborer” more often than the conservative-friendly “volunteer.”

I guess these conservative cranks have run out of secular topics on which to focus their outrage, so now they’re turning to the spiritual. When you start probing for conspiracies among chapter and verse, I’d say you’ve pretty completely lost touch with this mortal coil.

As long as they’re looking for historical material that will jibe with and validate their pre-conceived notions, I’ll point the CBP in an obvious direction: Albert Rosenberg’s weirdo Gnostic/”Aryan Christ” theories. It’s a brush of Nazism with which to tar this latest Bible-cleansing effort; but it shows how unoriginal the effort is to begin with.