The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1961. The New Bible

Press, Volume C, Issue 29466, 18 March 1961, Page 10

The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1961. The New Bible

Publication this week of the first part of the New English Bible—the New Testament—is a notable event One consideration that assures interest is the breadth of religious sponsorship of the work: it was planned and directed, at the original instigation of the Church of Scotland, by all the major religious bodies in England, Ireland and Scotland, except the Roman Catholic Church. The object of the sponsors is to provide English readers, whether familiar with the Bible or not, with a faithful rendering of the best available Greek text into the current speech of our own time, and with a rendering that should harvest the gains of recent biblical scholarship. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, the message of the Bible for those that have ears to hear does not change, but it must be conveyed through a language that its readers can understand. Many who are familiar with the Bible will miss challenging and wellloved phrases, but to very many more persons the language of the Authorised Version is archaic and difficult to understand—even more archaic and less generally understood than when the Revised Version was prepared in 1881. This is not another revision of the Authorised Version—the name by which the Bible put out by King James’s men has come to be known. It is a genuinely new translation, in which the attempt has been made to use the idiom of contemporary English to convey the meaning of the Greek. This principle placed a heavy burden on the translators, who found themselves, for instance, frequently compelled to make decisions where the older method of translation allowed a comfortable ambiguity. The introduction records that probably no member of the panel of compiling scholars did not find himself compelled to give up, perhaps with lingering regret, a cherished view about the meaning of this or that difficult or doubtful passage. In the end the panel reached a common mind; the members accept collective responsibility for their interpretations. The object of the sponsors would not have been served by scholarship alone. Conse-

quently, the panel of scholars was supported by a panel of literary advisers, to whom the work of the translating panel was submitted. They scrutinised it, once again, verse by verse, sentence by sentence, and took pains to secure the level of language appropri-: ate to the different: kinds of writing to be found in the New Testa-; ment whether narrative, familiar discourse, argument, rhetoric, or poetry. Always the overriding aims were accuracy and clarity. The new volume is reviewed on our Literary Page today. We commend this review to readers not only as a worthwhile discourse on a subject of absorbing interest, but as 1 helpful guidance in understanding the difference in style between the old and the new. The reviewer quotes passages where the gain in intelligibility is apparent. but mentions what seems an imperfection in clarity in the case of a phrase in the Lord’s Prayer. Indeed, it may safely be said that few will prefer the new version of the Lord’s Prayer to the old. But that beauty of language is not sacrificed on the altars of clarity and simplicity is made abundantly clear in a long passage the reviewer selects for comparison. Readers may well find a standard for judgment when they compare the chapter from I Corinthians set out in the review with the great chapter which, as the reviewer so rightly says, is one of the glories of the Authorised Version. Newspaper comment cabled from Britain conveys both commendation and criticism of the new work, and no doubt there will be mixed reactions here. There will be persons of conservative mind who will actually resent what they will see as interference with the glorious language with which the message of the Bible was conveyed to them. To such people we would commend the final words of the translators’ introduction: that “ under the providence of “Almighty God this trans- “ lation may open the truth “ of the scriptures to many “who have been hindered “ in their approach to it by “ barriers of language ”, If the Christian message reaches people more easily through the new translation is that not great gain?