Category: Bible

Over the past decade or so John Goldingay has produced an astonishing quantity of quality studies on what he calls the First Testament. His two erudite and elegant volumes in the International critical Commentary on Second Isaiah are reason enough to wonder. But they were preceded by the large monograph The Message of Isaiah 40-56, which is the best thing around for getting to the heart of this majestic document of renewed hope and persistent faith.

Three volumes of commentary on the Psalms constitute a further gift to the church, and these I've used regularly over the past few years. Years ago one of Goldingay's first books was a paperback study of the Psalms 42-51, Songs from a Strange Land. Those of us who used it hoped he would eventually write a full scale commentary. The three volumes in the Baker Wisdom Commentary series are comprehensive in exegesis without being overwhelming, the theology of the each psalm is explored and opened up for the church's response of praise, thanksgiving, confession or lament.

Then there is the trilogy on Old Testament Theology, a total of 2,500 pages of some of the most stimulating and discursive theological exegesis I've read. And discursive doesn't mean unstructured, or wandering – it means bringing a range of disciplines together in the task of interpreting the gospel, the faith and the life of Israel. He concedes that his approach overlaps with J W McClendon's threefold division of ethics, doctrine and witness, and like McClendon he insists that it is the life Israel is called to live, and its faithfulness in pursuing it, that gives credibility to Israel's gospel and substance to its faith. Likewise it is ethics, lived practice that most fully expresses the Gospel of Jesus. Not that doctrine and confessional proclamation are unimportant, but they depend upon transformative living through obedient appropriation of what God has declared in Jesus Christ.

Goldingay holds in close connectedness the First and Second Testaments. And his treatment of Torah gives no concession to the the extreme of reductionism that devalues and dismisses the biblical witness to Torah as the instruction for human life before God. But neither does he entertain any idealising or absolutising of Torah as overarching law whose requirements are mere demands without enabling grace. In Goldingay's approach there is a conscientious and respectful handling of the witness, faith and ethics of Israel. The result is one of the most usable and enlightening overviews of Old Testament Theology available.

Over the years I've worked through several of the big names, some of them double volumes, and learned much in the process. But Goldingay writes out of profound scholarship, alert to the post-modern challenges faced by faith traditions embedded in meta-narratives now open to question, sympathetic to the original bearers of the witness of the First Testament, yet committed to understanding the place of the Old Testament in Christian living and in the church's proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The three volumes expound life in community as it is lived towards God, embraces the neighbour and calls to personal integrity. And Goldingay writes well, out of personal conviction, generous to other views, lucid and engaged, and above all as someone who loves the text too much to force it into any distorting conformity with theological assumptions imported from elsewhere.

John Goldingay sits alongside several others whose work on the Old Testament I find illuminating, refreshingly unpredictable, and written by scholars respectful of both text and reader – Walter Brueggemann, Kathleen O'Connor, Terence Fretheim, William P Brown, Clinton McCann come to mind. Amongst the servants of God within the church, for whom the church should reserve a Sunday to celebrate and give thanks, are those biblical scholars who think and pray, consider and weigh, write and publish, providing the nourishment of soul and the fruit of scholarship for the nurture of the faith and the health of the church. John Goldingay is one such scholar.

It can't have escaped the notice of alert blog readers that 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible (The Authorised Version). Leaving aside the issue of the textual reliability of the Received Text, and the reliance on Erasmus's Greek New Testament, itself an insecure textual foundation, and the wholesale borrowing from Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament, the King James Bible remains a stellar achievement of English literature, and one of the glories of the English language.

However accessible or contemporary, relevant or scholarly, all other translations by comparison dilute, diminish and render banal a text produced by a rich vocabulary distilled into stylistic concentrate, and then composed into sonorous prose and sublime poetry. Mixed metaphor? Yes. Exaggeration? Caricature? Possibly – but only slightly.

Since the mid 20th Century, translation of the Bible has become a hugely profitable industry. Leave aside (yes, please do) the hundreds of sectional interest Bibles – I mean, recently we were insulted by the issue of the C S Lewis Bible. I can just hear Lewis delivering his lecture in heaven on the occasion of the publication of the C S Lewis Bible. And beginning with the acronym he used to describe the hated task of writing his allocated volume of the Oxford History of English Literature – OHEL!

Leaving aside all that nonsense, there has still been a conveyor belt of translations sponsored by publishers and major church traditions. The RSV, the Good News Bible, Living Bible (described by Ian Paisley as the Livid Libel), Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, The Common Bible, New International Version, Today's English Bible, New RSV, New Living Translation, Today's NIV. And yes, even a New KJV!

There are now substantial books written to guide Christians to the right Bible for them. Criteria range from readability, accuracy, theological presuppositions, cultural resonance, and marketing terminology includes new, today, contemporary. I get all of that. And I recognise that reading the Bible isn't easy for committed Christians, let alone the casually interested or dismissively indifferent. So there is a good case for accessibility balanced with accuracy, and readability linked to reliability. And I have absolutely no brief to defend the King James Version as the best translation – it isn't. Nor am I saying that the others are inferior in all ways to the King James – they are most decidedly not.

  But. If as an English language speaker and reader you want to hear the Psalms rendered into poetry written by a genius that sounds as if it was written by a genius – then read them in the Authorised Version.

And if you want to be moved to the deep places in your soul and ignited in the complacent corners of your heart, read the Authorised Version of Isaiah 1 and 2, 35 and 40, 53 and 55, and catch a glimpse of images that flash from inspired words. The Beatitudes read and sound in the Authorised Version like promises that, if they were true would be miracles, and in the unforgettable rhythms of the Authorised Version they do indeed sound miraculous. The King James translation of Romans 8 is a text worthy of Patrick Stewart's voice as Jean Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise declaring that life and the universe are ultimately and finally redeemed.

The scan of the big black Bible above is of my ordination Bible. And though seldom read in church now, and I preach from the New RSV (though I still love my even larger RSV!), now and then I take up this Bible with my name stamped on it in gold, and I read it. Not because it is accessible, relevant, the last word in textual integrity, culturally resonant or ecclesially approved – none of that matters. I read it because it is great literature. I read it because the cadences and rhythms of language are a joy to read and hear; because our language is sequined with words and phrases that still catch light and sparkle with meaning and point. I read it because it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and its language is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

And I read it now and again, because now and again, in the dumbed down discipleship for dummies approach of much contemporary Christianity, I need to hear a language that reminds me that God is Other than us, that the transcendent God whose eternal love is known in Beauty, Truth and Goodness, is one who is beyond the language of the news bulletin, whose holiness and mercy eludes the appeal of the too-clever advert, and whose Being is way above and beyond the reductionism that tries to domesticate majesty, or dissolve indescribable mystery in a solution of oversimplified prose justified by the impudent adjective "New"!

Feel better now. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant – much. Think it's time to remember the One who "maketh me to lie down in green pastures; [and] leadeth me beside the still waters…and restoreth my soul". Yea, verily…"my cup runneth over".

First line of an intercessory prayer heard recently at a morning service in a church, "O Lord, as you have served us very well in the past……."

The following claim, attributed by Craig Blomberg (Evangelical NT scholar) to Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: welcoming the publication, from within their own publishing house, of the Holman Christian Standard Bible Mohler spoke of the importance of having "a Bible translation we can control".

Now many a year ago, when the NIV was first published by Zondervan, it was promoted as an "Evangelical" translation. The Principal of the Baptist College then was R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was the equivalent of Jeremiah's scroll, and was to be ingested and digested as the very marrow of Christian life and faith. I still haven't met anyone who could match his enthusiasm for grammar, syntax, punctuation, textual criticism, etymology, critical apparatus, lexical investigation, and who quite simply revelled in the work of textual criticism, translation and exegesis, insisting that such disciplined detail showed reverence for words, and the Word. One of his heroes (not sure but think it was J B Lightfoot) spoke of burying his head in a lexicon and raising it in the presence of God.

So when the NIV was being advertised in Christian media as an "Evangelical" translation, he took time in the Greek class to ask the question I've never stopped asking, "Why would evangelicals of all christian people, want a Bible translation that is made in their own image?" By which he meant, and I concur, shouldn't our desideratum be the criterion of accuracy, disciplined faithfulness to the text, refusal to ignore or give in to the pull of our own theological presuppositions, linguistic honesty, scholarly deference before the challenge of the text, respect for the harder reading even if it is theologically inconvenient, honest acknowledgement of the difficulties and of the polar attractions and repulsions of dynamic and formal translation?

So as an Evangelical Christian, when I hear any publishing house or Christian tradition aspire to the control of a translation I have a deep and reluctant to articulate uneasiness. But that first line of the opening prayer I quoted at the start, "O Lord as you have served us so well in the past…", with its unacknowledged assumption of God at our service, may well be the hermeneutical clue I need to explain and interpret my uneasiness. As Blomberg (see here) gently comments, "Funny. I always thought the Bible should control us…" Yes. And I always thought in worship we are at the service of God.

Below is a quotation that providess an important perspective on what the Bible is, how the Christian community is to read it and live in it and through it – or rather, how through it's reading of the Bible, the Christian community is to live in Christ. The extract comes from Arthur McGill's slim but profound account of how Christians might seek to do theology in a world where suffering is interwoven in the textures of existence. The book, Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, was originally written in 1968 so the language is not gender inclusive:

Well I'm on holiday. That's when you get doing what you like. I like second-hand bookshops. So that's what we did, Graeme and I. James Dickson's out at Kilsyth, via Caulders Garden Centre with tea room. Only bought three books – two of them recently published but well reduced. One of them a wee gem from another era. A hardback first edition of Joachim Jeremias, The Central Message of the New Testament, published by SCM in 1965. What was a surprise about the book was the reverse of the dust cover. Unlike the bad and often annoying habit of contemporary publishers, who put the mutually congratulatory blurb of sympathetic peers on the back, this one has something much more interesting. A map. The SCM Map of Theology 1965, showing the university whereabouts of some of SCM's main European continental authors. Fascinating and a who's who of mid-20th century and mainly German and Swiss Protestant biblical scholars. It both dates me and pleases me that I've read something by most of them, and lots of stuff by some of them.

Joachim Jeremias himself I have admired and enjoyed reading ever since working through Volume 1 of his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. He never finished the second volume – and some of his main contentions are now questioned or superceded. But there is a seriousness of purpose and a reverence for the words of Jesus in Jeremias that helped to reassure a young Scottish Baptist student who had discovered that reading German biblical criticism can be like a debut attempt at white water rafting not knowing how to hold the paddle. So I bought this book in appreciation of a good man and a careful scholar. His other books, The Parables of Jesus, The Eucharistic Teaching of Jesus and Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, show the same careful learning tracing its way through ancient cultures and texts.

The last lines of Jeremias in The Central Message of the New Testament, on the Johannine Prologue (John 1.1-18), are a good example of his style and his way of doing New Testament theology from the standpoint of a faith both critical and confident:

Recently was away from home for a few days. Forgot to take my Bible. Now there was a Bible there, but it wasn't my Bible. It isn't the first time I've gone away without my Bible. But the unmistakable sense of loss, the definite feeling of non-attachment to other available Bibles, the apparently irrational annoyance that I didn't bring my familiar 20 year old re-bound but otherwise quite ordinary Bible, all got me thinking.

What exactly is it I don't have, if I don't have my Bible? How far is familiarity with one particular Bible a significant element in my relaxed contemplation of "the Word"" in the words?

Does using an unfamiliar Bible deprive me of familiar context; render less accessible that acquired inner mapping of literary memory that is the geography of this specific Bible I know so well; dissipate that resonance and reassurance that comes from knowing and finding yourself in familiar places? Well, yes, probably.

But does all that invest the physical printed object (the unavailable my Bible) with more significance than it should? After all I still have several Bibles I've used, each of them for years, before replacing them with the next.