He has written previously on “the code metaphor”, giving the example of encoding a military message that can be deciphered unambiguously. “When you go from one language to another, that’s not what happens at all. There’s no secret message that I’m seeing in Greek or Hebrew or French or German such that, if you do it right, there’s the exact meaning brought over into English. . . What makes a translation a good or great translation is its success in people who know both languages saying ‘That’s a darn’ good job!’ . . . Not capturing exactly every word, not revealing the hidden truth — there is no hidden truth — the expression is the expression and we make of it what we can, what we will. . . A translation is always a compromise between shadows cast and highlights illuminated.” Speaking about William Tyndale at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2017, the theologian Dr Jane Williams suggested that he and all translators “show us something of the sheer attention and love called out by faith”. Tyndale had believed, rightly, that “the Bible is too important to be in the hands of only a few.” Sometimes I just give up,” she tells me. “I crumble and I translate the word with two or three English words.” She compares the “very powerful, small vocabulary” of the original language to a “linchpin, the ball-bearing there, and the whole passage with its meaning moves around this word, with the very flexible meanings”. We are accustomed to thinking of English as an “incredibly rich language”, she says. “But in certain ways, English is limited . . . a pragmatic language.” The project challenged Chisenhale gallery to think about commissioning and understand that idea of value and how we value people. James led with a volley of questions that permeated throughout the organisation, making its staff think very differently about how they approach the commissioning process: CREATIVE COMMONS/CHESTER BEATTY A folio from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews from a codex containing the Pauline epistles (P46), written in Greek with ink on papyrus; made in Egypt and dated c.200. One of 11 Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri codices

It’s really important, if it’s at all possible, to get people to the stage of being able to read another language for the sake of the other language rather than the purpose of just rendering it in English.” For an ordinand, the motivation for learning Greek is very different from that of the average undergraduate. “It really matters that they understand the text well,” she writes. “Their very identity is bound up with doing so.” Biblical exegesis “carries a culturally transformative value in a way thinking about Homer is far less likely to — it isn’t preached from the pulpit on a weekly basis.” She doesn’t produce these objections from an “anti-religious” position, she emphasises. “In fact, I don’t think there is anything more dangerous to our morals, our politics, our spiritual health than the prevailing malleability of sacred literature and translation. If you read these documents in the original languages, nothing will come across more strongly than their vivid realities. To the authors, and to those who inspired the authors, what we call the unseen world was not only real: it was seen. There was no division between the natural and supernature. There is just one universe to enjoy or to try to destroy.” She speaks of their “very disturbing” anti-Semitism, and the Gnosticism in John (“This is Gnostics getting in there and claiming a very privileged authority to say what the truth is, to shut other people up, and to be the ‘we say so’ corporation”). In For They Let In The Light one of the cripping aesthetics of that piece came in the second period of the making. The young people wanted to respond to the videos that had been made while they were in hospital and they wanted to perform them. And I’m like – that’s amazing”.

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I was able to catch up with James soon after the event and he surprised me by describing himself as “an activist that uses art”. This was interesting for a number of reasons however, particularly as art and activism are seen as kind of separate, despite their evident crossover.

I had long long talks with my editor about how I could possibly handle this word, and she was very much for the consideration that the translators generally call dignity,” she recalls. “They make this judgement, this decree, about what’s appropriate for the author to have said. I’m sure they wouldn’t want anybody handling their work that way. But they feel justified in doing it when they translate sacred literature. As a reader of ancient literature, she writes, “most of what I see in English Bibles is loss: the loss of sound, the loss of literary imagery, the loss of emotion, and — inevitably, because these texts were performances deeply integrated into the lives of the authors and early readers and listeners — the loss of thought and experience.” Most of us would find Christians “truly cast in the New Testament mould fairly obnoxious”, he argues, and draws attention to the “reassuring gloss” applied to the “raw rhetoric” of the New Testament’s strictures on wealth, for example, and its “relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism”. In the New Testament, “everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgement that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”

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Yeah. I think I also kind of called the gallery out a little bit in the commissioning process. I asked them, ‘Why is this project labelled under an ‘engagement’ heading? Why aren’t we in the gallery as artists like everybody else?’” Donald Trump could not have the poisonous influence he continues to have without the support of conservative and even mainstream Christians. And part of their intellectual operations is an idolatry of the text . . . I was really interested in taking a more critical look at the Gospels and starting to deconstruct them as an idol.” Early on, building trust was prioritised through conversations around regular attendance, playing games, and building video and writing skills by slowing down and exploring artistic process in detail. After weeks of building the foundations for creative expressions, the young people came alive with ideas that surprised the entire team: I really would like believers to come to terms with the fact that being Christian does not defeat human nature,” she says. “It doesn’t. It properly, I think, should be an acceptance that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that we need self-examination, we need repentance . . . It sounds weird, but I think it’s appropriate to this political era that the Gospels translation is in part a protest against political and religious extremism.” Predictably, Hart’s attempt to produce a translation “not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history” has come in for criticism. “Part of the churches’ understanding of creeds, catechisms and confessions and the doctrines they promulgate — doctrines like the deity of the Holy Spirit or the eternal pre-existence of the Son of God — is that they are meant to aid in the reading of Scripture,” wrote Wesley Hill, associate professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry, Pennysylvania, in a review for ABC Religion and Ethics.

I think everything you can see in the Gospels is that Jesus wants us to think for ourselves,” she tells me. “He would be sad at somebody saying ‘Tell me what it actually means.’ He would say ‘no, no do some thinking. . .’” One can do some work toward equipping ordinands to inhabit the world of principalities and powers, of angels and demons, of spirit and soul and flesh, without acquainting oneself with the languages in which the people of God began to articulate their and our relation to that world; but one can travel more rapidly, deeper, more readily into that world by learning those languages, than by standing outwith those worlds and interacting only through the mediation of translators.” I was delighted to have been invited to this sharing of For They Let In The Light , art made by young people from a CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) ward, which was shown at Chisenhale Gallery, London. I couldn’t make it in person and was invited to join remotely. What was evident from the art I witnessed was that these were not young people who had been taught how to be artists based on someone else’s definition. Instead, it was the art of these young people from a CAMHS ward, in their own words and actions, which they had been helped to feel confident to share with the wider world. In a reflection for colleagues in Classics departments on teaching Greek for a theology faculty, she writes that the discipline “sometimes risks provoking a crisis of faith in new undergraduates at a time of transition in their lives when perhaps their faith is also being tested. There is a different kind of pastoral sensitivity needed when teaching the Gospels as opposed to Homer.” It is notable that the Jacobean translators of the Authorised Version were clear that a literal translation had not been attempted, writing in their preface: “we thinke good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. . .”

Let The Light In” is the twelfth song on Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. It features Father John Misty, with whom Lana has previously collaborated on the “Freak” on 2015’s albums Honeymoon with music video. Like Dr Ruden, he provides extensive notes on several of his key choices, in which he explains that he has allowed his thinking to be shaped by both the studies of modern biblical scholars and those of “ancient authorities”: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Anyone who has read his apologia for universal salvation, That All Shall Be Saved ( Books, 13 December 2019) will be unsurprised to see extended discussions concerning translations of what is typically rendered as “eternal” and “hell”. I sometimes feel that the teaching I’ve had leaves me in a — quite broad — no man’s land: more than enough to be able to understand original-language references in a biblical commentary, not quite enough to apply it with scholarly precision in biblical studies,” he reflects. “I’m not sure where the future will take me with regard to this, but there are worse places to be. If it sometimes feels like redundant knowledge now, I have faith that it’s a kind of redundancy that’s good to sit with, and that might yet bear fruit.” Translation is both “essential” and “never quite satisfactory”, he concludes. He gives the example of the “notorious” phrase “Son of Man”. In Greek, it’s “the son of the human”, and in Daniel it’s “a son of a human”. Yet, “we say ‘Son of Man’ and may well always say ‘Son of Man’, even though that’s plainly not what the Greek or Aramaic says. It’s what we’re used to; it’s punchy; it makes a metric rhyme with ‘Son of God’.”