Biblical Translation and the Church

Extract

Not long ago different branches of the Church seemed to be univocally associated with certain translations of the Biblical text: Protestantism with the King James Version, Roman Catholicism with the Vulgate and, less centrally, with the Douai Version. Doctrine could be immediately referred to a single standard and official translation. This older situation has in recent years quite suddenly dissolved, and no one quite knows what will take its place. It is far from clear that new translations can or should come to occupy the position which the older ones had. For one thing, there are too many of them, with still more to come, and the search for finality would seem to be an infinite regress. One hears that modern scholarship is solving age-old problems, and this is partly true; but it is also increasing the complexity of factors which have to be taken into account and thus (I suspect) making more remote the possibility that a single translation, fully correct from the scholarly point of view, can be produced. It is not long ago that one heard in discussions of theological education that new and accurate translations might make less necessary the training of ordinands in the biblical languages; but on the contrary, the variety of translations may in course of time make the original languages more indispensable as a means to discrimination (thereby incidentally re-creating something of the situation in which St Jerome himself was led to learn Hebrew!).