Let in the Light

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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. . .” Like Dr Ruden, he provides extensive notes on several of his key choices, in which he explains that he has allowed his thinking to be shaped by both the studies of modern biblical scholars and those of “ancient authorities”: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Anyone who has read his apologia for universal salvation, That All Shall Be Saved ( Books, 13 December 2019) will be unsurprised to see extended discussions concerning translations of what is typically rendered as “eternal” and “hell”. Without necessarily regretting the emphasis on Greek and Hebrew, I wonder what options could be given for people in my position to learn other languages of the Anglican Communion and the implications it might have for ministry — especially as some of the most effective places in which Churches have made reparations for their colonial history is by using their resources to preserve and teach indigenous languages, including through Bible translation.” I was just really glad to hear that from people because they participate, as they ought to. They are part of this enterprise; so they can see why I did this, and they are still not buying it, and that’s good. I want them to be that interested and that active.”

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 Part of the problem is the perpetually romanticised narrative of the ‘artist’s struggle’, which sees the difference that disability or poor mental health brings as a catalyst of great art – but never the metaphor for or comment on the artist’s relationship with the outside world.Donald Trump could not have the poisonous influence he continues to have without the support of conservative and even mainstream Christians. And part of their intellectual operations is an idolatry of the text . . . I was really interested in taking a more critical look at the Gospels and starting to deconstruct them as an idol.” James and the team at Chisenhale decided not to focus on counting creative outputs or forcing a benchmark of ‘quality’, as these are extractive approaches to engagement. Instead, confidence, belief and creating a safe space were prioritised. Many of these young people had never heard of Chisenhale Gallery and had limited exposure to the arts. 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”. AT THE inauguration was the true account, and this true account was with god, and god was the true account.” These words are unlikely to be read aloud at many carol services this month, but for Dr Sarah Ruden, this is what it sounds like to translate the Gospels “more straightforwardly than is customary”, to help the reader to “respond to the books on their own terms”. Sometimes I just give up,” she tells me. “I crumble and I translate the word with two or three English words.” She compares the “very powerful, small vocabulary” of the original language to a “linchpin, the ball-bearing there, and the whole passage with its meaning moves around this word, with the very flexible meanings”. We are accustomed to thinking of English as an “incredibly rich language”, she says. “But in certain ways, English is limited . . . a pragmatic language.”

IN HER introduction, Dr Ruden explains that she has “often turned to a word’s basic imagery as a defence against anachronism, obfuscation, and lethargy, which drain communications of their primordial electricity”. Reading her translation during Advent I enjoyed reading that the baby " capered" in Elizabeth's womb. The rendering of "crucified" as "hung on the stakes" is a powerfully vivid. Her choices undoubtedly have the ability to unnerve. We discuss pneuma and its translation as “Spirit”. In John 3 (“no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”), she observes, “there’s this whole play on the word pneuma and it becomes a life breath, this essence of life, an essence of God’s life, of God giving life, and then the wind and its mysteries, the mysteries of its movement. It’s really kind of mind-blowing, the poetics of the whole thing, and the medieval scribe or Renaissance translator up to the modern era — people did not have an idea of how the rhetoric of this vocabulary could work, or how this vocabulary could work to elaborate the very important concepts here. Just rubber-stamp one word ‘spirit’ in English. It’s really important, if it’s at all possible, to get people to the stage of being able to read another language for the sake of the other language rather than the purpose of just rendering it in English.” He is sympathetic to concerns that biblical languages are being squeezed from the curriculum. “One part of that formation involves helping to sensitise ordinands to a different world, a world populated by leaders and ministries and forces and presences that people do not generally contemplate most of the time,” he says. One can do some work toward equipping ordinands to inhabit the world of principalities and powers, of angels and demons, of spirit and soul and flesh, without acquainting oneself with the languages in which the people of God began to articulate their and our relation to that world; but one can travel more rapidly, deeper, more readily into that world by learning those languages, than by standing outwith those worlds and interacting only through the mediation of translators.”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.” The Bible Society has estimated that five million people around the world speak Jamaican Patois, and Ms Jones notes that it has “found its way into young people’s language”, including that of white children. She describes switching between “pure English” in some contexts and Patois among her friends. 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 . . .” The Gospels are, she argues, “the first of the truly power-hungry Truth writings”, a “sweeping assault of words” against the modern world’s huge apparatus of material power, in which “assertions take over the poetry and the sense as well, making the text suitable as a basis for force, reform, or both.” The authors “thought that all conventional assumptions should be adjusted or replaced”, with the result that “great jolts” were given to the meaning of words, leaving translators aiming at “moving targets”. She finds in the Gospels “the stretching of traditional language past the breaking point”. 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”.