Alter took an example from the “egregious” Jerusalem Bible’s ­version of Exodus 1: 8-14, about Pharaoh getting nasty with the children of Israel. Pharaoh’s words are rendered as: “We must take precautions to stop them increasing any further.” This, Alter says, “both in sound and diction could easily come from a bureaucratic report”. This book examines how saints, scholars, and interpreters from ancient times to the present have produced versions of the Bible in the language of their day, while remaining true to the original. It explains the challenges they negotiated, from minute textual ambiguities to the sweep of style and stark differences in form and thought between the earliest writings and the latest.” Barton notes that translation can affect doctrine. For example, the choice to use the word ‘soul’ instead of ‘life’ or ‘self’ can promote the belief that the soul is an independent entity, instead of a part of our psychosomatic unity. That is not adequate for understanding Classical texts, or Bible texts. Take the Book of Psalms: Barton refers warmly to the Prayer Book Psalter of Miles Coverdale (who had no Hebrew, and apparently no sense that such a deficit might disqualify him as a psalm-translator). As my first Bible was a GNB, I was mystified when people said that they loved the psalms. I thought that they were all the same: “God, you are great: I am miserable/happy/angry.” Conveying the ancient otherness of the Bible, and its complexity, need not always be off-putting. Biblical ideas are embedded in their context, and things can change or break when we force them into our thought world. The night in Oxford was the most beautiful event I have ever done. Not just the spectacular setting (of the Sheldonian), but an unforgettable evening.

Barton says that while the Bible has been understood as the source of fundamental truths, believers for most of the history of Judaism and for the entirety of Christian history have understood the Bible in translation rather than in the language it was first written. Barton looks at the challenges of producing versions of the Bible in the language of the day whilst remaining true to the original. He says translators have been among the most important people in mediating the Bible’s message and even in shaping it. The Biblical World is a comprehensive guide to the contents, historical settings and social context of the Bible. It presents the fruits of years of specialist study in an accessible form, and is essential reading for anyone who reads the Bible and would like to know more about how and why it came to be. The most enlightening thing about 'The Word' was understanding the 'litero-theosophy' of the translation of the Bible. The fact that power is clearly the crux of translation practice. Whilst Barton approaches the post-modern paradigm in this regard, he always shies away from it (perhaps pertaining to his own priesthood). It is the fact that ideological conviction overshadows the entire history of translation- one must look for the purpose of a text before trying to translate it. The theological identities both of textual authors as well as translators play an enormous role in the shaping of their works; whether it be evangelists looking towards functional (dynamic) equivalence to proselytise their message in mission, or scholars looking towards a formal (literal) equivalence to try and more deeply understand the 'alienation' of the text in a foreign tongue. What is so crucial about this book is that it is not written in an excoriating style that seeks to define the 'perfect' translation (as Barton himself says), but rather than take a telescopic view of the enormous platter of translations meted out over 100s of years. Whilst Barton clearly has reverence for some translations over others, such as the NKJV and the RSV (over something like the NRJB or the NIV), he continuously (and rather laboriously at some points) makes sure to apply his critical scalpel in a most accessible and scholarly way. A History of the Bible is a lucidly written distillation of a vast array of scholarship.”— Wall Street Journal

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Written by an international collection of experts, the volumes include a fulloverview of the full range of biblical material, before going on to more detailed discussions of myth and prophecy to poetry and proverbs. This book examines how saints, scholars and interpreters from ancient times down to the present have produced versions of the Bible in the language of their day while remaining true to the original. It explains the challenges they negotiated, from minute textual ambiguities up to the sweep of style and stark differences in form and thought between the earliest writings and the latest, and it exposes the bearing these have on some of the most profound questions of faith: the nature of God, the existence of the soul and possibility of its salvation. At the beginning of the 1980s I went to Gannetts Park, a well-appointed cul-de-sac in Swanage, to interview J B Phillips, then in his 70s. From the middle of the road you could see the sea, but not, I think, from his house.

To me, many phrases in the Bible are memorable precisely for the oddity of their translation. Later in Exodus, God gives Moses ins­tructions for making the priestly garments, specifying: “Thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about: A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.”

The “prince of peace” passage still features every Christmas Eve at the much-loved Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, though Barton says it is likely to have referred to the birth of a royal child at the time it was written. Similarly, Barton finds little support in the gospels for later Trinitarian thinking on the equal status of Christ with God the Father. In Judaism, meanwhile, the Midrash tradition performed its own sleights of hand to explain away textual anomalies in the ancient books. The Oxford festival is the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals. It’s a pleasure to both attend and perform there. The Bible is held to be both universal and specific, the source of fundamental truths inscribed in words that are exact and sacred. For much of Jewish and almost all of Christian history, however, most believers have understood scripture not in the languages in which it was first written but rather in their own - in translation. This book examines how saints, scholars and interpreters from antiquity to the present have negotiated the difficult task of producing usable versions of the Bible in their own language while remaining faithful to the original. It traces the challenges they faced, ranging from minute textual ambiguities to the sweep of style and the stark differences in form and thought between the earliest biblical writings and the latest, and explains the bearing these have on some of the most profound questions of faith: the nature of God, the existence of the soul and possibility of its salvation.

God uses the words of the Bible as a school of righteousness, of justice, and of love. In this school, the deepest learning we undergo is the shaping of our love: our love for God and our love for all our neighbours (Mark 12.29-31). Our reading shapes our desires, our imaginations, our emotions, our habits, our ideas, our relationships, our institutions, the structures of our society, and our cultures. It shapes all the physical stuff of the lives we live as bodily creatures together in the world. All of life is caught up in the curriculum of this school.There is much to like in Living in Love and Faith . Some may think it too long, but that seems to me one of its strengths: it takes as much time as it needs to provide not only argument but also empirical evidence, including the stories of those at the sharp end of debates about sexuality. It is a grown-up work, not taking refuge in platitude or ex cathedra pronouncements, but working through positions that people actually adopt, and presenting them fairly and in ways it’s hoped their proponents might recognize, without caricature or over-simplification. (Whether those greatly affected by the issues under discussion will feel fairly represented in practice, I’m not in a position to judge. Initial reactions suggest that they won’t.) Nothing quite like this has been seen before in the long and winding story of the Church of England’s discussions of human sexuality. It is a complicated set of issues, and this complicated document does it some justice in a way, I would judge, that previous documents have not. John Barton has written a wise and eminently sane book about a book which has inspired both insanity and wisdom. It is a landmark in the field, and it will do great good.”— Diarmaid MacCulloch This strikingly accessible yet wonderfully erudite volume will be welcomed by many … a tour de force.” – BBC History Magazine The account of the Hebrew Bible, or in Christian terms, the Old Testament, is a tour de force. Barton dates the texts it contains as almost certainly written from the eighth century BCE onwards – well after the times of Moses, Solomon and David and far from being a contemporaneous source of information on the exile of the Israelites in Egypt and their triumphant return to the promised land. The books are, rather, a later distillation of folk memory and foundation myth, constituting an uplifting national literature “for a small nation ... the size of Wales”. 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. Barton’s approach argues for compromise and equilibrium between ‘literal’ and ‘free’ approaches, and he argues it well.