THE NEW ENGLISH BIBLE: NEW TESTAMENT. A new English translation prepared and directed by representatives of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, The Church of England, The Church of Scotland, The Congretional Union of England and Wales, The Council of Churches for Wales, The London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, The Methodist Church of Great Britain, The Presbyterian Church of England, The United Council of Christian Churches and Religious Communions in Ireland, The British and Foreign Bible Society, and The National Bible Society of Scotland. New York, 1961, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. 447 pp. 4.95.

is how you should pray:

Our father in heaven,

Thy name be hallowed;

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

earth as in heaven.

us today our daily bread. [a]

give us the wrong we have done,

we have forgiven those who

have wronged us.

And do not bring us to the test,

save us from the evil one."

[b]

Or: our bread for the morrow. Some witnesses add: For thine kingdom and the power and lory, for ever. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer from the English Bible.

ticism of the English Bible is as hoary as the Book itself. the year that the King ' (or Authorized) Version app, Dr. Hugh Broughton, an nt biblical scholar, wrote in anger to a harried court of

late Bible ... was sent to me sure: which bred in me a sad- that will grieve me while I it is so III done. Tell His that I would rather be rent ces with wild horses, than any translation by my consent be urged upon poor churches. e new edition crosseth me. it to be burnt.

New English Bible: New ent has bred in this reviewer sadness: much of it is very . All too often the transla crossed the fine limits of propriety; all too often have abandoned the rhythm he power of the Authorized for the jingle, the lifeless of bureaucracy, the quick and thoughtless uglyness of the contemporary idiom. I presume it will be accepted by the Protestant churches of this country; I hope it will be zealously neglected.

The King James Version is, undeniably, one of the glories of the English language. Its prose, as Herbert Read has noted, exemplifies "all the characteristics of a true narrative style--correctness, economy and speed." Its rhythms are supple, pleasing and forceful--ranging from the near hexameters of Isaiah's cry, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" (Isa. xiv: 12) to the bold anapests of the song of Moses, "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew." (Deut. xxxii, 2). And then the publication of the Authorized Version came at a time when the English language itself was expanding at a truly violent rate.

OLD VERSION ARCHAIC

Since then--and particularly during the course of this century, the English vocabulary has again effervesced, and much of the beautiful language of the King James Version is archaic, some of it confusingly so. Similarly, the continuing discovery of earlier and more authentic manuscripts (the so-called "Received Text" of the Authorized Version was little more than a compromise reading of the best available source of the period) has exposed a number of textual inaccuracies in the KJV.

The latter of these inedequacies had perhaps become apparent as early as 1698, the year that Sir John Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife first appeared:

Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil.

Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.

At any rate, by the middle of the last century both these shortcomings were quite painfully obvious--sufficiently so to prompt the Church of England to undertake (in 1870) a general revision of the scriptures. In company with the Church of Scotland and various dissenting sects (John Henry Newman was obliged to decline an offer to participate), the Church of England eventually produced the Revised Version of 1881. If the RV, as it was inevitably and almost immediately called, failed to arouse any considerable enthusiasm, this was in part the fault of the Church itself, which had given the Revisers a very limited authority. They were instructed to introduce "as few alterations as possible" into the text of the King James Version, limiting "as far as possible, the expression of such alterations to the language" of the early English bibles. Certain glaring mistranslations were tidied up, but the various obscure archaisms still remained sacrosanct.

Clearly, a further and more general revision was needed. And, since the Church itself was as yet unwilling to undertake the enterprise, many individual churchmen in the tradition of Erasmus did as best they could by themselves. In 1902, R. F. Weymouth brought out his The New Testament in Modern Speech; and in 1913 came James Moffatt's The New Testament: a New Translation. More recently Msgr. Ronald Knox--in 1945--and Dr. J. B. Phillips--in 1947--have published servicable and entirely adequate individual translations.