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Little problem with that. The Old Testament, which is what Jesus would have meant when he talked about "Scripture," was written in Hebrew, with little bits here and there in Aramaic. But the rub is that most Jews in the time and place Jesus lived did not speak or read Hebrew! So the version of Scripture that Jesus himself would have read (if he could read), or quoted (if, as some scholars believe, he was not literate himself), would have already been translated. Into Koiné Greek, the educated language in his culture. Jesus himself would have spoken Aramaic in everyday life. The translation he would have known or known about is called the Septuagint, which was the translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Koiné—the word means "common"—Greek. The Septuagint was created in the third century B.C. by 72 Hebrew scholars, six each from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, at the behest of the enlightened Ptolemy II Philadelphus. (I can't help a little digression here—"Philadelphus" means sibling-lover: Ptolemy II married his sister, Arsinoe. The word echoes down to our Philadelphia, the city of a kind of brotherly love that is fortunately not so literal.) The ancient books we call The New Testament were written in the first and second centuries Anno Domini, also in Koiné Greek.

Educated Greek speakers today can just about make out Koiné—they take it in school—but not terribly easily or fluently; perhaps, I imagine, like we English speakers read Chaucer. Here's a sample from the beginning of the General Prologue; see how you do:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

(Here's that bit spoken aloud.)

Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

(Larry D. Benson., Gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Houghton-Mifflin Company)

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small fowls make melody,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And specially from every shire's end
Of England to Canterbury they travel,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
Who helped them when they were sick.

It happened that in that season on one day,
In Southwark at the Tabard Inn as I lay
Ready to go on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with a very devout spirit,
At night had come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of various sorts of people, by chance fallen
In fellowship, and they were all pilgrims,
Who intended to ride toward Canterbury.

(Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website)

Most modern Greek speakers, I'm told, would still appreciate a translation to read the original New Testament. I appreciate a translation of Chaucer for reading, too. (Here's the one to read, specifically the 2006 Bantam Classics paperback by Beidler, Hieatt, and Hieatt, a dual-language version).

Unlike many Christians (ask them), my friend actually reads the Bible. But since he doesn't read Hebrew or Koiné Greek, which translation of the Bible into English does he consider to be the "real" Bible that shouldn't be changed? There have been between 100 and 250 translations into English, depending on definitions. The definitions include, do you require that the translation has to be complete? Many aren't, including the one I chose. Is it entirely fresh, or does it borrow from previous translations? The Jacobean Bible of 1611—that is to say, the King James Version (KJV) my friend approves of—borrows pretty liberally from Tyndale, there having been no particular squeamishness about intellectual property back then. Things like that.

Tyndale the doomed
There's another little problem, which is that a later major translation, based on the work of St. Jerome in the 4th century, was the so-called Vulgate, which has its own complex history. It's the Hebrew and Koiné Greek Bible translated into Latin. From there, when we come to the early English translations, many of those were based on Tyndale, who was executed for his pains but was good at his work, and Tyndale worked not just from the Hebrew and the Greek but also from the Vulgate and the German Bible to boot. Many English translations have been based on the Vulgate, which various Catholic eminences for centuries promulgated incorrectly as being the original language of the Bible. The King James translation was deliberately based on the Bishop's Bible of 1568, the first Bible in English prepared by a committee. Some scholars have identified as much as 93% of the KVJ as being identical to what survives of Tyndale. From there we can deduce that most of the Bishop's Bible must have come from Tyndale.

So then why read some committee's emendations? Why not go to the source and read the Tyndale Bible? Well, because there isn't one, really. Tyndale was strangled to death for his pains, and his body burned. In strangling him, by the way, they were being merciful to him, sparing him from having to die slowly in the flames, because he was, you know, a good guy. (Another little digression—if you think that humankind is making no progress, consider that States no longer burn people at the stake. Most capital punishments in history in fact were remarkably gruesome; there is a great deal that is humane about that little proscription in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution against "cruel and unusual punishments," which made its first appearance in the English Bill of Rights in 1689.) Tyndale's death, as you might expect, interfered with his translating endeavors. While you can find scholarly versions of his new testament, in antique English, and facsimiles of his original translation which was smuggled into England, they make rough going now. Many of the books he did complete, particularly the historical books of the Old Testament, are lost.

Facsimile page of Tyndale's 1526 translation. Revolutionary then for being written in language that was plain to the common man, it makes tough slogging for English speaking readers now.

I wanted to add more to this for my friend but then ran out of steam. I was getting into the issue of modern translations and their sources, and in some case their agendas. The twin problems are 1.) it's a big enough subject for a good big fat book, and 2.) I'm no expert. I should perhaps add to those two things that I'm not a practicing Christian. But it's interesting stuff. I got into the problem of translation with the Tao Te Ching, which has supposedly been translated into English more times than anything except the Bible. In the case of that book, some "translations" are done by people who don't even speak Chinese! They work from literal meanings of the Chinese characters, or, in some cases, by collating and synthesizing numerous earlier translations. Both of which seem like cheating to me. If you're translating from Chinese, you should at least read Chinese, don't you think? Then again, my longtime favorite version of that book is not a straight translation. It's based on one, by Gia-fu Feng, but he didn't speak English fluently, so it was greatly smoothed-out and made lyrical by its British editor, Toinette Lippe, as she explains in her fascinating Foreword to the 2011 edition.

J(ohn) B(ertram) Phillips
Long story short, unless it's way too late for that, is that my choice for reading the Bible, or at least The New Testament, is The New Testament in Modern English by J. B. Phillips. That's John Bertram Phillips, not to be confused with another John Phillips, of the Moody Bible Institute, who has written reams on the New Testament. An Anglican clergyman, J.B. started his translation to pass the time in bomb shelters during the Blitz of London, writing "for the young people who belonged to my youth club, most of them not much above school-leaving age...I undertook the work simply because I found that the Authorised Version was not intelligible to them." Although smaller parts were published earlier, his complete New Testament was first published in 1958, around the time I was born. More than 10 years later, after his version had become more famous than he thought it ever would, he spent two years minutely revising it for an edition published in 1972. Here's part of what he said of it in the introduction to that edition:

I began the work of translation as long ago as 1941, and the work was undertaken primarily for the benefit of my Youth Club, and members of my congregation, in a much-bombed parish in south-east London. I had almost no tools to work with apart from my own Greek Testament and no friends who could help me in this particular field. I felt then that since much of the New Testament was written to Christians in danger, it should be particularly appropriate for us who, for many months, lived in a different, but no less real, danger...In those days of danger and emergency I was not over-concerned with minute accuracy, I wanted above all to convey the vitality and radiant faith as well as the courage of the early Church. The attempt succeeded and, as I have mentioned in the Translator's Preface to earlier editions, the strong encouragement of C. S. Lewis led me to continue the task.

[...]

I offer this translation as a wholly new book. Having by this time done much collateral reading and learned more of the usages of the N.T. Greek, I felt that now, faced with a completely clean sheet, as it were, I could do a better job. Quite apart from my own feelings there were good reasons for tackling this rather daunting task. The most important by far was the fact, which perhaps I had been slow to grasp, that "Phillips" was being used as an authoritative version by Bible Study Groups in various parts of the world. I still feel that the most important "object of the exercise" is communication. I see it as my job as one who knows Greek pretty well and ordinary English very well to convey the living quality of the N.T. documents. I want above all to create in my readers the same emotions as the original writings evoked nearly 2,000 years ago. This passion of mine for communication, for I can hardly call it less, has led me sometimes into paraphrase and sometimes to interpolate clarifying remarks which are certainly not in the Greek. But being now regarded as 'an authority,' I felt I must curb my youthful enthusiasms and keep as close as I possibly could to the Greek text. Thus most of my conversationally-worded additions in the Letters of Paul had to go. Carried away sometimes by the intensity of his argument or by his passion for the welfare of his new converts I found I had inserted things like, 'as I am sure you realise' or 'you must know by now' and many extra words which do not occur in the Greek text at all. I must say that it was not without some pangs of regret that I deleted nearly all of them!

There was a further reason for making the translation not merely readable but as accurate as I could make it. It has been proposed that a Commentary on the Phillips translation should be undertaken. I felt it essential that the scholars who would contribute to such work should have before them the best translation of which I am capable. I certainly did not want them to waste time in pointing out errors which I had in fact by now corrected! The last, but not least important, reason for making a fresh translation was to check the English itself. It must be current and easily understood, and I must confess that I thought that the twenty-five years since the publication of Letters to Young Churches might have seriously 'dated' the English I used then. With the help of my wife, several friends, including some critical young people, we scrutinised the English very carefully. Rather to my surprise only a few alterations were necessary, and this showed me that the ordinary English which we use in communication changes far more slowly than I had imagined. I knew, however, that slang and colloquialisms change rapidly, but since I had used few of these there was not much to alter.

J.B. Phillips' comments on communication, which I have bolded above, match my own values pretty well. And they echo William Tyndale's mission precisely: Tyndale wrote that if God were to spare him, he would enable "the boy who drives the plow" to know more of Scripture than the educated clergy does. He died for serving that cause. At any rate it's Phillips' 1972 version I read, and I'm satisfied with the choice, much as I might harken to the echoes of the fated William Tyndale reverberating to us across the reaches of time, through the KVJ and its influences, the beauty of his prose, in places, unimprovable.

Not an easy or a simple matter, Bible translations. My friend's umbrage aside, there's no one "real" Bible in English, much as he might wish there were. The one begun in the bomb shelters during the Battle of Britain to communicate to the youth of that time serves fine for now.

Mike

*Education means primarily gaining knowledge and information, while edification means something more like improving oneself morally and spiritually. I had to go look up the distinction.

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