Abstract
Tom Wright completed his immensely popular New Testament ‘For everyone’ series in 2011, a year after John Goldingay published the first volume of his companion Old Testament ‘For everyone’. Each of these separate volumes was designed to provide an accessible introduction to the books of the Bible, setting out the author’s translation alongside an accompanying commentary. These fresh translations have now been gathered and revised for publication in the attractively bound The Bible for Everyone. The lion’s share of the work, of course, has fallen on Goldingay’s Old Testament, which takes up 924 of the 1268 pages, even with the eye-wateringly small print that has been used.
Goldingay presents the rationale for his work in a short preface. This sets out a strategy of trying to stick as closely as possible to the Hebrew, although the manuscript base is far from clear: Goldingay says only that a ‘traditional Hebrew text (like the New Jewish Publication Society Version)’ has been used, meaning, presumably, some form of the Masoretic text. An ‘everyday’ English style has been adopted, with a slight American accent, using verbal contractions as necessary but avoiding theologically loaded terms such as salvation, holiness or righteousness where these English words might miss the subtle nuances of the underlying Hebrew. Consistency is seen as a virtue, so a Hebrew term is normally translated throughout with the same English equivalent unless there are overwhelmingly compelling reasons to do otherwise. Some Hebrew names have been translated into English (for example, Ramah becomes ‘The Heights’), but, curiously, familiar names such as Jerusalem, Joseph and Moses have been transliterated to ‘render the familiar unfamiliar’ in a way that will strike some readers as slightly odd. Interestingly, inclusive language has been avoided, to remind the reader that most of the Old Testament is heavily gendered.
The translation of each book is preceded with a brief introduction giving a fair, though generally conservative, overview of recent scholarly opinion on that text. The book itself is presented in traditional format, with two columns to the page, interspersed with summary headings steering the reader towards a perceived focus for that section. Some maps are also printed within the main body to help with geographical orientation.
As might be expected, Tom Wright adopts the same format for the New Testament: a preface setting out his translation strategy, a broad introduction to the New Testament (which seems here to consist only of the gospels and Paul), followed by a brief introduction to each individual text. It is interesting to compare the two approaches, however: Wright, for example, does not attempt to translate consistently words such as dikaiosuné, which in Greek can convey a range of meaning not easily captured in English. Wright also opts for a more racy, ‘chatty’ style, which means that, from the literalist point of view, he has occasionally taken a few liberties with the text. All this leaves a slight unevenness in the feel of the English across the two testaments.
These two authors appear to share a broadly conservative evangelical theology that colours their translation, although they fall on slightly different sides of the spectrum between the literal and dynamic approaches to translation. But they also share a Protestant agenda, as witnessed by their separate appeal to Tyndale as the pioneer who aimed to make the Bible accessible to the ordinary person. For both, the Bible is something to be read mostly for devotional study in private, not heard in public liturgy. This is an approach that will almost certainly be popular in some circles, but may not appeal so much to those who do not share the authors’ theological convictions, or who seek to discern the Word of God speaking not just to the individual but to the gathered community in worship.