C.S. Lewis on the KJV

Some wise words from C.S. Lewis, who read Greek with a fluency I’ll never hope to match. I think Lewis overstates the case slightly in the bolded line, because irreverent translations do exist. But as applied to all the major modern English translations, he’s right on:

In the first place the kind of objection which they feel to a new translation is very like the objection which was once felt to any English translation at all. Dozens of sincerely pious people in the sixteenth century shuddered at the idea of turning the time-honoured Latin of the Vulgate into our common and (as they thought) ‘barbarous’ English. A sacred truth seemed to them to have lost its sanctity when it was stripped of the polysyllabic Latin, long heard at Mass and at Hours, and put into ‘language such as men do use’—language steeped in all the commonplace associations of the nursery, the inn, the stable, and the street. The answer then was the same as the answer now. The only kind of sanctity which Scripture can lose (or, at least, New Testament scripture) by being modernized is an accidental kind which it never had for its writers or its earliest readers. The New Testament in the original Greek is not a work of literary art: it is not written in a solemn, ecclesiastical language, it is written in the sort of Greek which was spoken over the Eastern Mediterranean after Greek had become an international language and therefore lost its real beauty and subtlety….

When we expect that [the Bible] should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King.

This is a very important point you simply cannot verify unless you trust someone (and I’m suggesting that Lewis is a trustworthy voice): God did not generally inspire the apostles to choose an elevated form of Greek, so an elevated form of English is not a truly accurate translation of the New Testament. God spoke in the respectable language of the contemporary common man, and so should Bible translations.

Lewis was, of course, pretty good at writing and reading English prose (ahem). So these comments are also apropos:

The Authorised Version has ceased to be a good (that is, a clear) translation. It is no longer modern English: the meanings of words have changed. The same antique glamour which has made it (in the superficial sense) so ‘beautiful’, so ‘sacred’, so ‘comforting’, and so ‘inspiring’, has also made it in many places unintelligible.

Ah, Lewis, such a great writer!

The truth is that if we are to have translation at all we must have periodical re-translation. There is no such thing as translating a book into another language once and for all, for a language is a changing thing. If your son is to have clothes it is no good buying him a suit once and for all: he will grow out of it and have to be reclothed.