The “formal equivalence” approach to biblical translation strives to bring the original-language source-text to the reader by effecting as close to a word-for-word translation as possible, given the constraints of moving from one language to another. By contrast, the “dynamic equivalence” approach (sometimes called “functional equivalence”) aims to bring the reader to the source-text through a sense-for-sense translation that is less literal but putatively more comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the cultural environment of the text’s original language. While he carefully explores the pros and cons of both approaches, to each of which he devotes an orienting chapter, it seems that professor Barton’s preference is to lean toward “formal equivalence.” 

On September 29, 1952, the D.C. Armory—capable of accommodating an audience of 10,000 and the site of numerous inaugural balls—hosted a different kind of event: a celebration of a new translation of the Bible, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), which had just been completed and was intended to replace the revered King James Version (KJV). The first copy of the RSV had been given to President Harry Truman three days earlier, but it was Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who was the principal speaker at the Armory event. The son of the late Episcopalian bishop of Connecticut did not disappoint, welcoming the new edition while describing in eloquent terms what the King James Bible had meant to American culture and public life:

In the earliest days in the Northeast, the Book was All. The settlers came here to live their own reading of it. It was the spiritual guide, the moral and legal code, the political system, the sustenance of life, whether that meant endurance of hardship, the endless struggle against nature, battle with enemies, or the inevitable processes of life and death. And it meant to those who cast the mold of this country something very specific and very clear. It meant that the purpose of man’s journey through this life was to learn and identify his life and effort with the purpose and will of God. … But this … did not exhaust the teachings of this Bible. For it taught also that the fear of God was the love of God and that the love of God was the love of man and the service of man.

Seventy-one years later, it is inconceivable that any such scene might be replicated in 21st-century America, and not just because ours has become a far less biblically literate culture over the past seven decades. Rather, a new biblical translation would be unlikely to generate the great interest displayed in the more than 3,000 events across the country that coincided with the public release of the complete RSV, because new biblical translations have proliferated enormously in the intervening years.

As John Barton notes in his instructive new book, The Word: How We Translate the Bible and Why It Matters, the King James Version was the Bible in the Protestant Anglosphere for centuries, and so a new edition created a major shift in cultural tectonic plates. Yet Barton’s glossary of English-language editions counts over a dozen new translations since the RSV, and that process of continuously re-translating the world’s most translated book seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Thus, a new biblical translation amid today’s biblical cornucopia would not be a big deal (even if American high culture had not become so biblically ignorant that a reporter, after asking Richard Neuhaus for a comment on some sexual scandal and being told that such shenanigans had been going on “since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden,” could follow up with, “And what garden was that, Father?”).

John Barton—Professor Emeritus of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford—does not offer his readers a guide to these various translations, and still less a detailed evaluation of each of them. And indeed, Barton declares his summary position early: “While there can be translations that are simply wrong, there cannot be one that is uniquely right.” Rather, The Word is a thorough mapping (to use the author’s cartographic image) of the translators’ terrain. And that complex landscape is, to simplify, defined by two promontories.

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