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.