The Word: On the Translation of the Bible

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The product of a lifetime's study of scripture, The Word itself reveals the central book of our culture anew - as it was written and as we know it.

John Barton was Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford from 1991 to 2014. There are many issues that arise in translating, particularly the balance between preserving the authority of the source text and the essential meaning it contains. How, he explores, are translators to deal with Isaiah 28:10, which seems to be deliberately meaningless: “precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.Thanks to the Septuagint translation, Christian Bibles contain texts outside the Jewish canon of Scripture, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the books of the Maccabees. An exhilarating exploration of the medium through which almost everyone has encountered scriptureThe Bible is held to be both universal and specific, the source of fundamental truths inscribed in words that are exact and sacred. Barton says this history is “the story of the interplay between religion and the book – neither mapping exactly onto the other”. Those who insist on the “right” version of the Bible would do well to remember they are reading a Hebrew text, translated into Greek, translated into Latin, turned into English, revised continually and as the King James has it, humbly to “make a good one better”.

Now, if you were to open the King James Version, you would get “Saul had reigned one year, and when he had reigned two years…” If you opened the New English Bible, lo and behold, it is “Saul was 50 years old when he became king”, and turning to the Revised English Bible, he is 30.As the former Oriel and Laing professor of the interpretation of holy scripture at Oxford, he is unusually well qualified to guide the reader through scholarly, ecclesial, ecumenical and wider cultural aspects of biblical study. At the beginning of Goethe’s Faust, the scholar is puzzling over the best word to convey the Greek “logos”, used at the beginning of the Gospel of St John and most usually translated as “the Word”. For many Christians today – let alone those with no religious commitment – to find some way of accommodating them into a.