Religion: Colloquial Scripture

“I doubt very much whether the New Testament writers were as subtle or as self-conscious as some commentators would make them appear,” writes the Rev. John Bertram Phillips. “They would be, or indeed perhaps are, amazed to learn what meanings are sometimes read back into their simple utterances!” Anglican Phillips’ attempt to make these utterances simple to 20th century readers is The New Testament in Modern English (Macmillan; $6), which last week was headed for the bestseller list.

As vicar of a London church during the World War II blitz, Phillips discovered why it was so hard to get the rudiments of Christianity across to the young people of his parish: the King James version of the Bible was a foreign language to them. So he began to translate it himself into the kind of talk they could understand. His first section, the Epistles, so delighted Oxford’s C. S. (The Screwtape Letters) Lewis that he wrote an introduction for it and supplied the title: Letters to Young Churches (it sold more than a million copies in the U.S.). Phillips followed it with the rest of the New Testament in three piecemeal volumes; all four comprise the present book.

Readers’ Sensibilities. The Bible translator, Phillips feels, must pay close attention to context—not only the context in which a word appears, or the context “of supreme urgency and often of acute danger” in which a passage was composed, but also the context of the modern readers’ sensibilities. This leads him to some surprising alterations. In the King James passage describing the raising of Lazarus, for instance, Martha protests Christ’s command to open the tomb with the words: “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” Phillips’ version: “But Lord,” said Martha, “he has been dead four days. By this time he will be decaying . . .”

Some theologians and all lovers of the King James version’s majesty will wince at Phillips’ rendering of the famed “In-the-beginning-was-the-Word” prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God and was God, and he existed with God from the beginning.” In the Beatitudes, too, many will take issue at Phillips’ rendering of the “poor in spirit” as “humble-minded,” “they that mourn” as “those who know what sorrow means,” “the meek” as “those who claim nothing,” and the “pure in heart” as “the utterly sincere.”

Brought to Life. Despite the objections Bible-lovers may raise, there can be no denying that the racy pace, the lively characterization and the lucidity of Phillips’ translation will bring the New Testament alive for countless 20th century readers to whom the Bible is nothing but a tedious arrangement of dead language. Phillips comes out way ahead of King James’s team of translators in the account of Paul’s defense against King Agrippa in Acts: 26 (see below).