Penguins on Parade: The New Testament!

Some Penguin Classics are the only ones you can turn to when your city has incurred the wrath of the Almighty, as Boston so clearly has in this apocalyptic February of 2015, which has so far seen just a few inches short of 500 feet of snow. At such times, my book-hunting lapsed Catholic fingers just naturally twitch their way along the bookshelves and stop on atavistic territory – in this case, the 1961 UK-only Penguin Classic of the New English Bible‘s New Testament, released in an affordable mass market paperback in the wake of the notable financial success of the hardcover New English Bible among the general reading populace.

The committee of scholars and translators who undertook the creation of the New English Bible took their task very seriously, as the unsigned Introduction to the this Penguin paperback makes earnestly clear:

No one who has not tried it can know how impossible an art translation is. Only those who have meditated long upon the Greek original are aware of the richness and subtlety of meaning that may lie even within the most apparently simple sentence, or know the despair that attends all efforts to bring it out through the medium of a different language. Yet we may hope that we have been able to convey to our readers something at least of what the New Testament has said to us during these years of work, and trust that under the providence of Almighty God this translation may open the truth of the scriptures to many who have been hindered in their approach to it by barriers of language.

But beyond the circumspection (there were living, working New Testament scholars in 1961 who were driven to transports of livid rage by the above paragraph, though you’d hardly guess it now that all the echoes have died away completely) and the sober sense of purpose, they worked some genuine wonders; it’s always a treat for me to be reminded of just how good and new the New English Bible is. It takes nothing for granted in the courses of its rhetoric; it holds up every familiar passage into bright forensic light, dismantles it, then re-assembles it according to best translation practices rather than according to long liturgical tradition. It can make for genuinely page-turning reading.

It’s true in the Gospels, of course, but in my opinion it’s even more true in the Acts and especially the Epistles, where there’s far more of a narrative voice to capture, and where the footprints of tradition aren’t quite so deep. And nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in the greatest Epistle of them all, Hebrews, in so many ways the unknown heart of the New Testament, with its typically Pauline (though exigetical scamps say he didn’t write it) emphasis on the immediate doing of the new covenant:

So now, my friends, the blood of Jesus makes us free to enter boldly into the sanctuary of the new, living way which he has opened for us through the curtain, the way of his flesh. We have, moreover, a great priest set over the household of God; so let us make our approach in sincerity of heart and full assurance of faith, our guilty hearts sprinkled clean, our bodies washed with pure water. Let us be firm and unswerving in the confession of our hope, for the Giver of the promise may be trusted. We ought to see how each of us may best arouse others to love and active goodness, not staying away from our meetings, as some doe, but rather encouraging one another, all the more because you see the Day is drawing near.

Simply in terms of translation, I have my little doubts about that lovely ‘hearts sprinkled clean’ – but I’m hardly in a position to quibble, especially with Boston’s own Day so obviously drawing near. And if we meet our snowy Creator with Penguin Classics in our hands, shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?