The Gospels: A new translation, by Sarah Ruden

Author: Sarah Ruden. Review by Simon Webb.

Online searches for ‘Quaker Bible’ tend to find Anthony Purver, who spent thirty years translating both Testaments. He struggled to find a publisher until the Quaker physician John Fothergill bought the copyright and published it in 1764. It was not a success.

It may be that Purver should have tested the waters with a translation of the New Testament, followed up by an Old Testament if the first was well-received. This was the strategy of the publishers of the New English Bible (NEB). Sarah Ruden, a US Friend, may be testing the waters like King and the NEB publishers. In any case, her Gospels were preceded by well-received translations of Latin texts, a study of St Paul, and The Face of Water, a book about translating the Bible.

Ruden, whose Gospels are dedicated ‘To the Quakers’, insists that her approach is influenced by her Quakerism. ‘As a Quaker’ she writes in her introduction, ‘I’m supposed to be open to looking first at a thing in itself… as a Quaker translator, I would like to deal with the Gospels more straightforwardly than is customary, to help people respond to the books on their own terms’. She adds ruefully that ‘never before, in nearly forty years of translating, have I found texts so resistant to this purpose’.

Sarah’s approach to ‘telling it like it is’ ignores traditional interpretations. She assures us that as a Quaker she is ‘not equipped to deal with any later abstractions, rationalizations, or syntheses; I can only try to communicate in English what is in the ancient texts’. Her strategy therefore encompasses the use of transliterated Greek versions of key New Testament places and people. ‘Andrew’ becomes ‘Andreas’, ‘Galilee’ becomes ‘Galilaia’, and ‘Jesus’ becomes ‘Iēsous’. These unfamiliar-looking names are a startling feature of Ruden’s Gospels, and a reminder that in this case the oldest texts are Greek; but other choices are no less surprising. ‘Disciple’ becomes ‘student’, ‘angel’ becomes ‘messenger’ and ‘the Word’ becomes ‘the true account’, at least at the start of the Gospel of John (or ‘The Good News According to Iōannēs’).

Ruden is also keen to remind us that the Gospels were not written in Homer’s Greek, but in the street-Greek of the ancient Mediterranean. Her language is informal and slangy. Pilate’s ‘Behold the man’, used as he points at the broken figure of Jesus, becomes the suitably contemptuous ‘Look at this guy’. I was reminded of Donald Trump’s attempt to mock Serge Kovaleski, a journalist with a disability. ‘You gotta see this guy’ spluttered the future president, twisting his arms to mimic Koveleski’s condition.

Like George Fox, Anthony Purver started out as an apprentice shoemaker. As a Quaker he was excluded from academia, where Sarah Ruden seems to be very much at home. Among other advantages Purver didn’t enjoy, Ruden can spend time, as she puts it, ‘scouring… electronic databases of ancient literature’. The result is what she implies is an ‘estranging translation’. This reader at least did not feel estranged, but grateful.

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