“In Luke 1.57…It is difficult to imagine anything being better done, but it was not thought good enough for the 20th-century translators of the New English Bible. They settled on: “Now the time came for Elizabeth’s child to be born, and she gave birth to a son.”
“That is a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality below Tyndale’s, perhaps even unaware of what the second Oxford company’s subtle minds had given them. The modern world had lost the thing that informs every act and gesture of King James’s sumptuously decorated Hatfield House, of the King James Bible, and of that incomparable age: a sense of encompassing richness that stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural, from theology to cushions, from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it.
“This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammar. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language that is not taut with a sense of its own significance, that is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language, in other words, that submits to its audience rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging, and even entertaining them, is no longer a language that can carry the freight the Bible requires.”
Adam Nicolson, King James Bible: The lost art of translation
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