Dillard’s story reflects maturity and understanding from someone who was forced to mature and understand too much too soon. But Barton – who is an Anglican with Lutheran leanings – believes that it’s perfectly possible to see the Bible as a book with its own history and also to regard it as a repository of religious truths. This book offers a fascinating review of translation philosophies as they apply to the Bible and really opened my mind to perspectives I hadn’t considered before.

So once the notion that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were all equal persons of the Trinity was established it became natural to seek confirmation of that doctrine in the Bible. It traces the challenges they faced, ranging from minute textual ambiguities to the sweep of style and stark differences in form and thought between the earliest biblical writings and the latest, and explains the bearing these have on some of the most profound questions of faith: the nature of God, the existence of the soul and possibility of its salvation. Much of the discussion around translation, especially in my circles, centers entirely around formal and functional equivalence. This is the dynamic reality of engaging and conversing with God in spiritual disciplines like Lectio Divina, where we create opportunity through meditation on the word for God to speak to our inner being.

By one of the coincidences that intrigue me, he, like Peter Davidson whose poetry I reviewed last week, is a Fellow of Campion Hall in Oxford. Barton's book demonstrates that the history of biblical interpretation, with its vast implications for centuries of theology and politics, is inseparable from the issue of translation -- Daniel Rey * Literary Review * Fully displays John Barton's great gift for explaining complicated things lucidly and judiciously -- Robert Alter Enjoyable .

This book examines how saints, scholars and interpreters from ancient times down to the present have produced versions of the Bible in the language of their day while remaining true to the original. Whilst Barton approaches the post-modern paradigm in this regard, he always shies away from it (perhaps pertaining to his own priesthood).Nonetheless, I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the Bible, translation, or ancient languages. It was Martin Luther’s determination in the early 16th century to make the Catholic church’s Latin version available to his fellow German-speakers in their own language that contributed to Rome’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to put him on trial for heresy.

That may be true, but this does not mean the Septuagint is divinely inspired, and that is the central point for evangelical protestants. In the end it comes down to the audience for whom you're translating and the purpose for which you're doing the work. This Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was especially important in the establishment of Christian theology. The Psalter, a mixture of liturgy, national history and individual experience, which Barton describes as “a mess”, probably came together in about 300BC, although individual psalms may be much older than this. Establishing the relevance of Old Testament ethics to contemporary life is, as John Barton concedes, an uphill task.One comment/question I have is that there is no mention of the New American Bible and NABRE in the discussion of Catholic Bible translations; that seemed an odd omission. Bible translations should take into account the different genres (such as legends, history, poetry) rather than translating the entire Bible as if was written in a single genre. In The Word, John Barton analyses the complexities involved in the process and demonstrates how (mis)translations of the Bible have shaped theology and history. The Word offers, of course, an overview of the history of biblical translation from Nehemiah and Ptolemaic Egypt to the present day.