The Bible exists in some 700 languages – so it still has a long way to go

I’ve never met John Barton. But reading his books on the Bible I keep thinking of him as an early church father, perhaps St Jerome. Barton has the obligatory beard, he’s an ordained minister in the Church of England, and his writing is sage and measured, scholarly but accessible.

Jerome was of course the translator of the Bible into Latin. In the fourth century his Latin Vulgate caused a riot in Tripoli, then part of the Roman empire, because Jonah was portrayed sheltering in the shade of a fast-growing ivy rather than under a gourd, as in the traditional rendering. (This accounts for the ugly spherical fruit dangling from the rafters, like one of those constant memories you’d rather forget, in Albrecht Dürer’s famous depiction of the saint in his study.) As Barton says, never underestimate the power of biblical translation.

St Jerome in his study, oil on panel, after Albrecht Dürer – with a gourd dangling from the ceiling, like one of those constant memories you’d rather forget (Bridgeman Images)

T.S. Eliot called the NEB ‘vulgar’ and ‘trivial’, and thought it presaged the lasting decline of the English language

The Word is the follow-up to Barton’s bestselling, prizewinning A History of the Bible (2019). Most of us, lacking the necessary Hebrew or first-century Greek, read the Old and New Testaments in translation. What then are the challenges of vocabulary and syntax, of style, rhythm and genre that the Bible’s translators face? The Bible exists today in some 700 languages. It still has a long way to go if one considers that there are around 7,000 living languages extant in the world. Progress can be slow. The first complete Russian Bible to achieve any success didn’t appear until the 18th century; a Chinese Bible emerged only in the early 19th.