Who Killed the Bible?: Last Words on Translating the Holy Scriptures, by Ian Robinson, Bishopstone, England: The Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2006. 140 pp.
In this compact and forceful book the distinguished English literary critic Ian Robinson speaks out regarding the abysmal consequences of the movement of new translations of the English Bible during the last half century. He does not mince his words nor water down his conclusions in the 140 pages that make up his book. The cruel fact is that we have now lost the Bible, he contends, as a direct result of removing the divine from common consciousness; without exception, he adds, all the recent translations and the new liturgies are “godforsaken.” In the process of this deformation the sensibility of English-speaking peoples has been assaulted and changed, affecting the major Western denominations including the Church of Rome. Modern translators, in effect, have deviated from the original texts both irresponsibly and arrogantly. In theory and practice they demonstrate “a drastically irreligious view of language.” Translators who claim “complete equivalence” ultimately pursue a chimera and weaken our confidence. Doubtlessly, translation is a very important activity to Christians, as Robinson avers, but it has its limits. Most serious Bible translators largely agree that fidelity to the original is essential, but they disagree as to what counts as fidelity. The author thus sets out here to examine theory and practice as a unity that has fallen into error in the form of “atrocity” and “outrage.”
In the modern situation Robinson sees a general and often deleterious demand for providing theory in all subjects. Does theory, he asks, have a role in translation? This central question occupies Robinson as he estimates the religious authenticity of (by one count) 106 different English translations of the Bible in print. This is a large number of bibles, to be sure, but he also concludes that, withal, we have lost the English Bible: the King James [Authorised] Version, 1611. The two-fold upshot of even well-intentioned translations is that the Bible has ceased to be current and has been extinguished in common consciousness. For Robinson, and no doubt for many religious traditionalists, there is one inescapable fact that must be faced: No new translation can replace the English Bible. No work on converting language and taking the Word of God to the people can succeed, even as “no variety of prose that carries the modern world can replace it [the English Bible].” Indeed, any attempt to replace the “Authorised Version” is in itself an empiriocritical attempt to replace religious language and expression, the “infinite religious idea” (as Thomas Carlyle termed it), religious life, and ultimately spiritual meaning and divine mystery.
A major argument that engages Robinson, both analytically and judgmentally, and that he presents with vigor and conviction, is that new biblical translations founder precisely because they put into practice mistaken theories and a mistaken notion of theory. He observes that the demand for theory in all subjects assumes a doctrinaire attitude that dictates “scientism” as a mark “of the modern situation.” Most translators of the Bible, Robinson argues, believe that they can render meaning more accurately than older versions by applying the theory of “dynamic equivalence.” In his book he scrutinizes the linguistic science of the dynamists and exposes the fallacy of a reliance on theory that is built on impiety, on deconstructive impulses and habits that lead to nihilism. What we discover in this phenomenon is the confrontation between the supersecular and the supernatural world. The new translators, it can be said, are in essence what we may call ideologue-usurpers who seek to replace, even destroy, our sacred patrimony.
Throughout his text Robinson examines the individuating faults of the modern “dynamic translations” of Holy Scriptures from the standpoint of doctrine, accuracy of translation, and standards of English prose style. He focuses on verbal infelicities, distortions of language, irregular rhythms. “To remove the imagery and flatten the rhythm is a sure method of failing to convey the message,” he observes, as he weighs the prevarications in the function of words on the part of translators who choose to make changes without recourse to right reason. He addresses the major problems of modern translations without any fear of calling a spade a spade as he considers, for example, “the progressive diminution of prayer as a common activity and whether English can now be said to have a common language of prayer at all.” He is not only forthright in expressing his judgments, but also strenuous in adjudicating the meaning and value of language for purposes of cognition and communication. It is especially bracing, given current conditions and circumstances, to see a circumspect critic like Robinson confronting the powerful alliance of relativist and ideologue that leads to the violation of the function and the meaning of words.
In his monograph Robinson is chiefly addressing not only the subject of translation but also the authors of translations, and this critical exclusivity obviously limits his audience mainly to that of the specialists and the biblical scholars. No doubt the generalist, both as critic and as reader, will tend to be intimidated by the author’s choice of approach. And yet it is the generalist who will in the end most profit from the book’s content in wrestling with the question, Who killed the Bible? After all, translators and experiments will in the end adhere to a vested interest in what they have done to the Bible, and no study (let alone protest) such as Robinson’s will persuade them to renounce either what they have perpetrated or their intentions.
This work, however daunting it is in its technical and linguistic orientation, will repay thoughtful study on the part of those who continue to believe, with John Henry Newman, that translators of the Bible have great difficulty “in combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the adopted vernacular.” This difficulty is one that Robinson focuses on with a singular tenacity and critical penetration, as he proceeds to point to the long parade of errors in “modern English bibles and their languages,” crystallized in The Good News Bible, the translation published by the American Bible Society from 1966 onwards as Today’s English Version and subject to ongoing revision, in the process extinguishing the Bible in the common consciousness. “There is no point in offering as the Word of God,” Robinson stresses, “a version that is evidently godforsaken.” He further claims that “no variety of the prose that carries the modern world” can supplant the religious language of the Bible, prayer, and hymns.
There is, then, for Robinson, only one English version that could possibly fulfill the standards of the sense, rhythm, and style of the original translation, The King James Version (Authorised Version, 1611). In an important respect, Robinson recognizes that in a better-educated world, “careful replacement of archaisms and correction of mistakes would be desirable”—but “the text of KJV has been fixed,” even as to spelling and punctuation! “As it is,” he remarks, “in view of the rhythmless results of the nineteenth-twentieth-century tinkerings, for instance of NRSV [New Revised Standard Version, Oxford etc., 1977], we had better leave well enough alone.” Too, there is no other way of recognizing the Bible, as a possession of the language, “than by reconnecting ourselves with English tradition.” “Once done,” he stipulates, “the work to establish the Bible in a language cannot be done again, though it can be lost.”
Who Killed the Bible? is worth pondering as both a protest and a warning, as Robinson painstakingly reminds English-speaking readers that, in the century of Shakespeare, England “‘made a step from which it cannot retrograde’—unless and until it loses its character and mind. The Church has had to do with both.” La trahison des clercs is indeed an operative factor that, in the postmodern phase in which we find ourselves, not only kills the Bible but also desecrates the Word.
Readers of Professor John Ferns’s insightful essay-in-reconsideration entitled “Ian Robinson and the English Tradition,” published in Modern Age, in the Winter 2006 issue, will find in this latest work a remarkable critic of language who is deserving of respect: a thinking Christian in direct contrast to his magistrative Cambridge mentor, Dr. F. R. Leavis, whose religious position was distinctly unorthodox; he had, as he once wrote to Robinson, the Protestant conscience, but without religion.
What we miss in Leavis, as much as we admire his moral standards of criticism, we find abundantly present in Robinson’s defense of Christian tradition as a redeeming force both in the Western cultural tradition and in English literature. Robinson’s recognition of the active presence of the religious sense in literature gives his critical judgment that added dimension not found in Leavis’s oeuvre. Thus, in bemoaning the loss of “Religious English” in translations like The Good News Bible, The New English Bible, The Contemporary English Version, and The New International Version, and in staunchly defending The King James Version, as well as The Book of Common Prayer, Robinson simultaneously demonstrates courage of judgment and courage of faith. He discloses, above all, the necessity to resist the savage pull of chronolatry and of a cheap contemporaneity that, from the standpoint of techniques of modern translators and Protestant scholars, creates an anomaly that can be called “the Atheists’ Bible.”
As in his previous works, Robinson’s formidable distinctions in this book as a linguist and a literary critic shine. What rounds out these distinctions, what gives a deeper resonance and meaningfulness in an age of moral and spiritual declension, is Robinson’s reverence for the religious sensibility, which is today under attack by theorists and nihilist critics who legislate their worship of relativism and conduce the abandonment of “ontological referents” in favor of pragmatic significations and the drift and circumstance which, according to Richard M. Weaver, have diminished language as a vehicle of order. Although Robinson makes no mention of Weaver, the great American rhetorical theorist and upholder of our inherited society would certainly have expressed his appreciation of the English critic’s religiocritical labors.
Like Weaver, Robinson is a conservator of language, as is readily confirmed in Who Killed the Bible?, to which he could have added this epigraph from Weaver’s chapter, “The Power of the Word,” in Ideas Have Consequences (1948): “We live in an age that is frightened by the very idea of certitude, and one of its really disturbing outgrowths is the easy divorce between words and the conceptual realities which our right minds know they must stand for. This takes the form especially of looseness and exaggeration.” Today, more than ever, we sorely need conservators of humane civilization and guardians of the treasures of English prose like Richard Weaver and Ian Robinson if contemporary Jacobins are to be kept at bay, and if principle is to transcend theory.
Who killed the Bible? is a question that much troubles Ian Robinson no less than it also did T. S. Eliot, who in 1962, speaking of the New English Bible, lamented that, as a modern translation, it was a “symptom of the decay of the English language,” even as he also warned that “the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.” It should give a measure of confidence to know that T. S. Eliot and Richard M. Weaver have, in Ian Robinson, a stalwart ally in the struggle against enemies of the permanent things.
