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The New English Bible
There now seem to be as many English versions of the Bible in existence as there are potatoes in the box beside the stove in my cottage – the cottage the Sisters of Compassion have lent to me, where I now sit at midnight.
I think of the Authorised Version, the Douai Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, several Bibles in the modern vernacular, the Knox translation, and the Maori Bible I keep in my cupboard but cannot yet read. Yet multiplication of Bibles teaches us one thing – that the Holy Scriptures are holy only in their meaning and their message, not in any set form of phraseology.
The translators and scholars who made the New English Bible tell us:
People did not want to hear what the Moffat Bible says, nor what the Phillips translation says, but simply what the Bible says. And this is what the New English Bible sets out to do: to offer a translation based on the most accurate and up-to-date findings (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) in all the relevant fields of knowledge – as truthful as human skill could make it – and carried out by the best scholars and translators that the Churches possessed: men who themselves hear the voice of God speaking to them in Holy Scripture. . . .
The aim, though laudable, in the sense that new versions of the Bible may improve the translation and interpretation of given texts, is probably by definition self-defeating, since the voice of God is in the meaning of the texts, and texts are always subject to variable renderings and interpretations.
As an ignorant man who reads the Bible solely for devotional purposes, I am not happy with all the road-signs that the makers of the New English Bible have erected.
Can the story of the Garden of Eden be correctly called ‘the beginnings of history’? Personally I doubt it. That story is a statement of the first paradisal state of man and his fall therefrom; in it each detail has a sacred and analogical meaning, like the details on the carved panels of a Maori meeting-house. It is much more true than history.
The lens of the historian shrinks man to an historical actor playing his part in a time-bound drama; but the role of Adam, like the role of Christ, is page 204 at one and the same time inside not outside time. The Garden of Eden both is and was real. The paradisal state is not in the ordinary sense an historical phenomenon. The story of Adam and Eve is your story and my story. We understand our relation to God by reading it.
I am not happy when the beginning of the First Letter of the Apostle John carries the heading ‘Recall to fundamentals.’ Such exegesis smells of the lecture room of the seminary. The Apostle was not recalling his readers to fundamentals: he was expressing, in the most profound words ever written, the relation of the Uncreated Word to the manhood of Our Lord. I imagine that his words touched his first readers with new revelation, not with an expected return to the ABC of Christian theology.
There are flash-points for all of us in the Scriptures. One such flash-point occurs for me near the end of the Letter of the Apostle James: ‘Weep and howl, you rich men, at the miseries that are coming upon you’.
I write from memory of the Authorised Version. The Knox translation is less immediate and more remote: ‘Come, you men of riches, bemoan yourselves and cry aloud over the miseries that are to overtake you’.
The New English Bible has it: ‘Next a word to you who have great possessions. Weep and wail over the miserable fate descending on you’.
It is definitely the poorest rendering of the three. The Apostle James seems to be delivering a lecture, and reading it from a prepared script. My favourite flash-point has become a damp squib.
I look for another flash-point, that passage in the writings of the Prophet Hosea where God speaks of Israel (and thus also of His Church and your soul and my soul) very tenderly. First I will quote the version that Ronald Knox gave us:
It is but love’s stratagem, thus to lead her out into the wilderness; once there, it shall be all words of comfort. Clad in vineyards that wilderness shall be that vale of sad memory a passage-way of hope; and a song shall be on her lips, the very music of her youth, when I rescued her from Egypt long ago . . .
I think that Knox’s pastoral experience led him to this profound and beautiful rendering. Also, he is at his best a master of the English language. The makers of the New English Bible labour at it like a woman at the washtub:
But now listen,
I will woo her, I will go with her into the wilderness and comfort her;
there I will restore her vineyards,
turning the Vale of Trouble into the Gate of Hope,
and there she will answer as in her youth,
when she came up out of Egypt . . .
It is a most pedestrian translation of the Hebrew poem. The inner spiritual dimension is lost entirely.
I am no scholar at all. The opinion I express is the opinion of an unenlightened reader. To me it seems that the New English Bible has one virtue only, namely, lucidity. The Jerusalem Bible is superior in the force and beauty of its rendering of the Old Testament; the Knox Version superior in its balanced and delicate rendering of the New Testament.
The King James Authorised Version will remain as a classic of English literature and the archetypal Bible of English-speaking people, despite its frequent rhetoric and obscurity. But the New English Bible has failed to make the grade. It is too much like a seminary text-book.
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