‘Even when I want to argue with particular translations, I’m grateful for the enormous labour of love they represent.’ Photo: Aaron Burden / Unsplash.
Version control
Theologian Rachel Muers chooses a Bible
When I’m marking essays that quote the Bible, I have a standard comment that I use a lot: ‘NRSV Please.’ I’m asking students to use the New Revised Standard Version. It’s the preferred English translation for academic purposes, a precise translation that sticks close to the original wording, even where that doesn’t seem to make much sense or doesn’t suit the theological preferences of the translators. Importantly for me, it uses gender-neutral language when the original is gender-neutral; it keeps ‘man’ for the points when the biblical writers were actually using the words for males.
I can understand why my students mostly aren’t quoting the NRSV. It’s not what they think the Bible sounds like. Quite a few of them think the real Bible is the Authorised Version. It sounds like the readings from the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, or like (still) most church services on TV. Like an old family Bible, not often read but there to remind you where you came from.
You can say that scholarship and language have moved on and we should too, but it doesn’t always work that way. Early Quakers’ dramatic claim that the living God was a guiding presence in everyone’s life, without exception, was closely linked to a verse in their Bible that nobody would translate that way any more: ‘That was the true light that lightens every man that cometh into the world’ (John 1:9). We understand the world they lived in a little bit better if we know the text they read.
Many of our choices are personal and idiosyncratic. My portable Bible is the one I was given when I first decided I wanted to study theology. And I made that decision from reading the version the Gideons gave out at my school. It was a New International Version and that’s what I thought the Bible sounded like. These days the text sometimes grates on me. It’s a theologically loaded translation – there are one or two points where the translators have put in a word that isn’t in the Greek, just to make it clear that the authors were proper Christians. But I’m not going to get rid of it. That’s one of the ways the Bible sounds in my head.
Even when I want to argue with particular translations, I’m grateful for the enormous labour of love they represent, and for each person’s faithfulness to their leadings. It’s easy to get hung up on details of wording. Once, when invited to preach a prepared sermon, I found out that they weren’t using the translation I’d prepared from and a large section of what I was saying no longer made sense. It’s useful on these occasions to remember the heart of the matter – attention to the Spirit in speaking, reading, interpreting, listening.
So when I’m not wearing an academic hat, if someone asks me about Bible translations I tend to say: listen to lots of voices, the ones that sound familiar and the ones that sound strange; let them bounce off each other, pick up the resonances, notice the dissonances. And be ready to receive new light from very old sources.
