The Patois translation allows the Bible’s humour to come through, such as in Jesus’s words about the log in one’s eye, she says: “the way he says it would be like how my Dad would have said it.” Patois is a “very animated” language, she explains, with its origins in West Africa and some words taken directly from Twi. Sometimes, she notes, laughing, Jesus will ask “ee? ee?” when asking a question. “I just love it.” Most of us would find Christians “truly cast in the New Testament mould fairly obnoxious”, he argues, and draws attention to the “reassuring gloss” applied to the “raw rhetoric” of the New Testament’s strictures on wealth, for example, and its “relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism”. In the New Testament, “everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgement that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.” TODAY, study of biblical languages is not a requirement for ordinands, although on many pathways it is either required or optional. Most will come to study with no prior knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, and, at St Stephen’s House, Dr Adam has observed students becoming “very excited at first discoveries”.

He has been taking his Greek New Testament and Hebrew Bible to Morning and Evening Prayer in the chapel — “I love the way that it changes the kind of attention I pay to God in prayer, without losing intensity or prayerfulness” — and, having started to preach, has come to question the “received wisdom” that “they’ll switch off if you mention the original Greek in the pews.” Donald Trump could not have the poisonous influence he continues to have without the support of conservative and even mainstream Christians. And part of their intellectual operations is an idolatry of the text . . . I was really interested in taking a more critical look at the Gospels and starting to deconstruct them as an idol.”I think everything you can see in the Gospels is that Jesus wants us to think for ourselves,” she tells me. “He would be sad at somebody saying ‘Tell me what it actually means.’ He would say ‘no, no do some thinking. . .’” We discuss pneuma and its translation as “Spirit”. In John 3 (“no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”), she observes, “there’s this whole play on the word pneuma and it becomes a life breath, this essence of life, an essence of God’s life, of God giving life, and then the wind and its mysteries, the mysteries of its movement. It’s really kind of mind-blowing, the poetics of the whole thing, and the medieval scribe or Renaissance translator up to the modern era — people did not have an idea of how the rhetoric of this vocabulary could work, or how this vocabulary could work to elaborate the very important concepts here. Just rubber-stamp one word ‘spirit’ in English. A philologist who has translated classical texts, including The Aeneid (described by Ursula Le Guin as “the best translation yet”) and St Augustine’s Confessions, Dr Ruden is unafraid of ruffling feathers with her approach. In her introduction to The Gospels (Vintage, 2021), she argues that, when it comes to the New Testament, “the self-expressing text has fallen under the muffling, alien weight of later Christian institutions and had the life nearly smothered out of it.” The Bible Society has estimated that five million people around the world speak Jamaican Patois, and Ms Jones notes that it has “found its way into young people’s language”, including that of white children. She describes switching between “pure English” in some contexts and Patois among her friends. The director of communications for Southwark diocese, Sophia Jones, finds that the Bible “comes alive” when she listens to the Bible Society’s Jamaican Patois audio version. Launched in 2012 ( News, 28 September 2012), the Jamaican New Testament is the result of 20 years’ work by translators at the Bible Society of the West Indies, with a team from the Department of Linguistics at the University of the West Indies translating from the Greek.

As a reader of ancient literature, she writes, “most of what I see in English Bibles is loss: the loss of sound, the loss of literary imagery, the loss of emotion, and — inevitably, because these texts were performances deeply integrated into the lives of the authors and early readers and listeners — the loss of thought and experience.” In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book’s power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine’s own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line—even for those who have never studied the language.AMONG the seminars that Mr Belloli is taking is one exploring post-colonial and anti-racist approaches to the New Testament. Both Denise Buell and Willie James Jennings have drawn attention to “which languages are given less prestige both in priestly formation and in the academy”, he observes. The Gospels are, she argues, “the first of the truly power-hungry Truth writings”, a “sweeping assault of words” against the modern world’s huge apparatus of material power, in which “assertions take over the poetry and the sense as well, making the text suitable as a basis for force, reform, or both.” The authors “thought that all conventional assumptions should be adjusted or replaced”, with the result that “great jolts” were given to the meaning of words, leaving translators aiming at “moving targets”. She finds in the Gospels “the stretching of traditional language past the breaking point”.

At the heart of the workshops and the interaction with the young people was criticality. Young people were encouraged to look again at their creative work and develop it through constructive critical appraisals and guidance. The team encouraged the young people to interrogate their own creations in relation to their own lived experience; critiques which were progressed through group crits and reflection. In the summer of 2021, James was invited to submit a proposal to run The Mayor of London’s cultural response to the mental health crisis. This enabled them to start to formulate the shape of an arts led intervention that was tailored to young people and spoke about mental health. This led to a chance to work with the culture team at the GLA (Greater London Authority) and James turned to Zoé Whitley, Director of Chisenhale Gallery, to see if they could collaborate and extend the scope of this process. Their proposal was accepted and James, together with Chisenhale Gallery and Bernie Grants Art Centre has embarked on a long term process that builds on For They Let In The Light .For an ordinand, the motivation for learning Greek is very different from that of the average undergraduate. “It really matters that they understand the text well,” she writes. “Their very identity is bound up with doing so.” Biblical exegesis “carries a culturally transformative value in a way thinking about Homer is far less likely to — it isn’t preached from the pulpit on a weekly basis.” I was able to catch up with James soon after the event and he surprised me by describing himself as “an activist that uses art”. This was interesting for a number of reasons however, particularly as art and activism are seen as kind of separate, despite their evident crossover.

James ensured that no one was recording the presentation but also not forcing anyone to be there. Audience, staff and artists were allowed to step out to process what they were seeing without being judged: Yeah. I think I also kind of called the gallery out a little bit in the commissioning process. I asked them, ‘Why is this project labelled under an ‘engagement’ heading? Why aren’t we in the gallery as artists like everybody else?’” If that were pertinent then we would never be able to run the UN or international diplomacy in general, because we would never be able to attain anything like cooperative agreement with other language groups,” he tells me. “Translation does its job.” In her introduction, she seeks to convey the sheer strangeness of the text, which “speaks to itself and not to me; there is no author in his familiar role, reaching out to me across the centuries and using all his training and ingenuity. The Gospels are an inward-looking, self-confirming set of writings, containing some elements of conventional rhetoric and poetics, but not constructed to make a logical or aesthetic case for themselves; the case IS Jesus; so the words don’t stoop to argue or entice with any great effort . . .” One can do some work toward equipping ordinands to inhabit the world of principalities and powers, of angels and demons, of spirit and soul and flesh, without acquainting oneself with the languages in which the people of God began to articulate their and our relation to that world; but one can travel more rapidly, deeper, more readily into that world by learning those languages, than by standing outwith those worlds and interacting only through the mediation of translators.”

He is sympathetic to concerns that biblical languages are being squeezed from the curriculum. “One part of that formation involves helping to sensitise ordinands to a different world, a world populated by leaders and ministries and forces and presences that people do not generally contemplate most of the time,” he says.