| Summary: | "The Bible is held to be both universal and specific, the source of fundamental truths inscribed in words that are sacred and unerring. However, for much of Jewish history and almost all of Christian history, most believers have understood scripture not in the languages in which it was first written but rather in their own-in translation. In The Word, John Barton examines how saints, scholars, and interpreters have negotiated the difficult task of producing usable versions of the Bible in their own language while remaining faithful to the original. Barton, both an acclaimed Bible scholar and an ordained Anglican priest, traces the challenges faced by translators from antiquity to the present, 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. He considers not just the question of literal vs. free translation-Barton argues for compromise, while exploring the many forms compromise has taken-but also matters of literary style, of consistency (or not) across the Bible's books, of inclusive language, and more. Far from mere academic abstractions, these considerations speak to the most profound questions of faith: the nature of God, the existence of the soul, and the possibility of its salvation. Reading dozens of renderings alongside their Ancient Hebrew and Greek antecedents, Barton shows how the passage of meaning and ideas across linguistic borders has been far from straightforward, and draws out the place of Biblical translation at critical junctures in the history of religion, from the separation of Christianity and Judaism to the Reformation to the rise of evangelicalism. Drawing on a lifetime of study, The Word reveals how fundamentally Biblical translation has shaped not only how we read the Bible, but our very conception of faith itself"--
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