God in Translation: Encountering the Word

Review essay by Spencer A. Klavan of The New Testament: A Translation, by David Bentley Hart, and The Gospels: A New Translation, by Sarah Ruden, at the Claremont Review of Books.

"From the beginning, there was no escaping the fact that Christians would have a different relationship with Scripture than Jews have with the Torah, or than Muslims later came to have with the Koran—a word that literally means a 'Recitation' of specific words dictated in the language of classical Arabic. Not so the word 'Gospel,' which is an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Greek word euangelion, meaning simply 'good news.' It is that news—and not the letters or syllables in which it comes packaged—that constitutes the essential core of the New Testament. None of this is to say that the original Greek words are unimportant, or that the propositions of Judaism and Islam cannot be faithfully conveyed in other tongues. It is simply to suggest that by dint of its very content and structure, Christian Scripture compels faithful readers to assume that the urgent message contained therein can be accurately and wholly expressed to any speaker of any language.

"This has a tendency to cause problems."

See:
Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 54 Vol., 1952)

"Readers who are startled to find the Bible omitted from the set will be reassured to learn that this was done only because Bibles are already widely distributed, and it was felt unnecessary to bring another, by way of this set, into homes that had several already. References to the Bible are, however, included in both the King James and the Douai versions under the appropriate topics in the Syntopicon." (The Great Conversation, by Robert M. Hutchinsmm, volume 1, p. xvii). [Syntopicon is the title of the extensive topical index to the entire set.]

Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990)

"References to Bible, when present, are always placed first. The Bible is not included as part of the set, since there is no definitive version acceptable to everyone." Introduction to The Syntopicon (vol. 1, p. xiv),