1 - Ways of reading the Bible
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2011
Summary
Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil.
Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
(Vanbrugh, The Provok'd Wife, 1697, I.i.)We start with two quotations – both about the Bible. First Coleridge:
I take up this work with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should any other work, – as far at least as I can or dare. For I neither can, not dare, throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favour – certain as I am that a large part of the light and life, in which and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the strengths co-organised into a living body of faith and knowledge … has been directly or indirectly derived to me from this sacred volume, – and unable to determine what I do not owe to its influences.
Our second quotation is from a far more respectable source in its own time than was Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit in 1849: the Preface to the Good News Bible of 1976:
The primary concern of the translators has been to provide a faithful translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. Their first task was to understand correctly the meaning of the original … the translators' next task was to express that meaning in a manner and form easily understood by the readers … Every effort has been made to use language that is natural, clear, simple, and unambiguous.
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- Information
- Words and The WordLanguage, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation, pp. 4 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986