Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

13th December 2005

Although science has not unlocked the mystery of everything, it likes to think it can dispel the mysteries in mystery. Deconstruction attempted to untether art and literature not only from a sense of an artist and author but from a presence, be it human or divine. Fundamental Christians barely grasp these arguments, not knowing the subtle but threatening locutions of modern science and aesthetics. They hardly help themselves, using the Old and New Testaments like DIY kits for assembling furniture, with translations from the Hebrew and Greek that rarely invest in the beauty of language. Above all, the Bible is a work of literature in which, however faintly, if it is His, God's voice calls to man, and man's to Him.

I think it is in the Exodus (Ch19) of the King James translation where God repents of what He has said. In subsequent translations the meaning is altered or the passage is missing altogether. Mystery has been sanitized. The poetry of the last supper in the Gospel of John is hacked to pieces in the NIV and the Good News translations. One wonders, with the difficulties of translation alone present in any work, whether it is religious or not, if such books have endured beyond their usefulness. Christians may argue that the importance lies in what is said but how the language conveys whatever is said can subtly or radically change its meaning for the reader.

Comments

[Jim]

Andrew, my old friend, I see this week that your comments mechanism is working and I can leave various coarse and ribald comments here to amuse and annoy.
Anyway, interesting point about the various (English) translations of the Bible, but you have to consider the backgrounds to the later versions. Over 300 years after the King James the Good News version is an easy reading, informal version, more concerned with being accessible to everyone and the NIV is a scholarly work, more concerned with accuracy than poetry. Not that either of these is necessarily an improvement on the King James Version but they were brought forth with a different purpose. A useful parallel would be the modern "re-workings" of Shakespeare - more comprehensible to the average person but lacking the beauty of the language. Forsooth!