Who knew, for example, that there is a Lowland Scots version of the story of Christ's temptation in which the Devil speaks like a posh Englishman?

He views the New Testament as a collection of records written by different people, probably for different religious communities, at different times. Are the words of the original the most important thing, and therefore to be rendered as closely as possible? Were I a language professor at a seminary (as I hope I might be someday), I would assign this book to my students. 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).He is co-editor of The Oxford Bible Commentary , and his previous book A History of the Bible won the Duff Cooper Prize for nonfiction. 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. However learned we may be, we stand on giants’ shoulders, and trust others’ judgements, to catch glimpses, or wangle views, of the Truth. Probably the best summation of Barton's aims comes towards the end of his book: "the Bible and its faiths are not identical, and translation is one of the primary sites where the difference between Scripture and religious beliefs is negotiated".I finished this book with a deeper understanding of and respect for the skills of a good translator: deep knowledge of the original language and a feel for its culture, and a nuanced, sophisticated command of (in this case) English.