While she isn’t chary of criticising the language of the Greek, which can tend towards “dutifulness and dullness”, she is also utterly convinced of the importance of her task. The Bible is a book that matters, she writes. “We all to some degree define ourselves in relation to it, whether we mean to or not.” THE effect of encountering biblical languages and exploring various translations should not be underestimated, suggests Dr Cressida Ryan, who teaches New Testament Greek at the University of Oxford.

Today, Dr Paula Gooder, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s and a popular author on the New Testament, has reassuring words for those who worry that they are at a disadvantage at only being able to read the Bible in translation. In her introduction, she seeks to convey the sheer strangeness of the text, which “speaks to itself and not to me; there is no author in his familiar role, reaching out to me across the centuries and using all his training and ingenuity. The Gospels are an inward-looking, self-confirming set of writings, containing some elements of conventional rhetoric and poetics, but not constructed to make a logical or aesthetic case for themselves; the case IS Jesus; so the words don’t stoop to argue or entice with any great effort . . .”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 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?’” 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”. 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.” TODAY, study of biblical languages is not a requirement for ordinands, although on many pathways it is either required or optional. Most will come to study with no prior knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, and, at St Stephen’s House, Dr Adam has observed students becoming “very excited at first discoveries”.

The director of communications for Southwark diocese, Sophia Jones, finds that the Bible “comes alive” when she listens to the Bible Society’s Jamaican Patois audio version. Launched in 2012 ( News, 28 September 2012), the Jamaican New Testament is the result of 20 years’ work by translators at the Bible Society of the West Indies, with a team from the Department of Linguistics at the University of the West Indies translating from the Greek. Her baseline was a standardised edited text in Greek (“the result of hundreds of years of expert work by the best biblical scholars in the world, minutely vetted and persuasively reconstructed”). The standard translations that followed were, she says, “so rigorously controlled to avoid challenging and offending that their surface is flat and dull, their meanings obscure, and their footnotes an exercise in hiding anything interesting”. In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book’s power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine’s own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line—even for those who have never studied the language.

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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. The result is not, he emphasises, for liturgical use. His aim is accuracy rather than literary eloquence, giving readers “a sense of the strangeness of the text: the novelty, the impenetrability, the frequently unfinished quality of the prose and of the theology”.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’.” If that were pertinent then we would never be able to run the UN or international diplomacy in general, because we would never be able to attain anything like cooperative agreement with other language groups,” he tells me. “Translation does its job.” Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it. Such careful, loving reading as we find in James Boyd White's book is as rare as it is precious. This is a book to be read slowly, allowing Augustine's Latin to resonate⁠—to be felt even when little understood. For words are living things, and we here come to know that Augustine's Confessions is a work that is alive in words with all their human complexity— but above all with love. David Jasper, author of Heaven in Ordinary: Religion and Poetry in a Secular Age Let in the Light offers a better way to read a work of literature of enormous and enduring importance. White argues that our easy familiarity with the English language and the inevitable distance and distortions associated with any translation create a barrier between Augustine and his readers. He is a lively, clear, and engaging writer, and the book is extremely sophisticated about literary criticism but wears its sophistication lightly. M. Cathleen Kaveny, author of Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Moralists and American Legal Thought 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. . .”

James and Chisenhale Gallery saw For they let in the Light, not as just another project for young people, but an opportunity for those who have faced mental health challenges to work with world-class artists and to create artworks which find their way into galleries – not as part of an education or engagement programme but as part of the gallery programme. As a result, Chisenhale has been building a team around their new Curator of Social Practice, Seth Pimlott, who oversaw the presentation of For They Let In the Light . 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.”

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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.