Making the Writ Simple

Cain has just committed mankind's first murder, and the Lord asks him what happened to Abel. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain replies, or so say most Bibles. Now, that is all changed. Says Cain: "Am I supposed to take care of my brother?" As for his parents, there are no longer any euphemisms about Adam "knowing" Eve. The new version says straightforwardly that Adam and Eve "had intercourse."

With these and similar wordings (see box), the Good News Bible, published this week by the American Bible Society, turns Holy Writ into modern, everyday English. In doing so, the new translation continues one of the great success stories in publishing history. Until the late 1950s, the Bible Society limited itself to distributing low-cost editions of traditional translations. Then it decided to prepare its own Bible, beginning with a New Testament, aimed at roughly a high school reading level.

The strategy worked sensationally well. Since the New Testament appeared in 1966 as Good News for Modern Man (also called Today's English Version), it has become the alltime paperback bestseller (52.5 million copies). In 1967 eight translators began the Old Testament, a far more difficult task.

High Style. Of the four major translations in recent years, the two British projects, the Jerusalem and the New English Bibles, emphasize high literary style. The New American Bible attempted some simplification but the Good News Bible goes much farther. It shuns what one of its translators, the Rev. Heber Peacock, brands "churchy gobbledygook," as well as wording that might be confusing. In the 23rd Psalm, for example, "I shall not want" becomes "I have everything I need." Traditionalists may find that in the process some of the poetry of the standard versions has been clarified out of existence. Often the results are blunt indeed: "Gossip is so tasty! How we love to swallow it!" (Proverbs 26: 22); or "You bastard!" (in I Samuel 20:30).

Good News is so conversational that readers may wonder guiltily if it is a "real" Bible at all. At first look it resembles Kenneth Taylor's folksy The Living Bible, a paraphrase rather than a translation, which has sold nearly 20 million copies since 1971. But Good News is a true translation, insists the Bible Society's Eugene A. Nida. The Living Bible is "interested in what the author intended. We are interested in what he said." This does not mean word-for-word translation. Says one project expert, "There is no way to translate the Hebrew poetic form into decent English." The modernizers did, however, preserve the meaning of every sentence. Besides its readable style, the Good News Bible helps readers along with explanatory notes, and it is graced with 500 stylized line drawings by Swiss Artist Annie Vallotton.

With such a comprehensible, attractive Bible available at $2.50 in hardcover, $1.90 paperback, a clergyman phoned Translator Peacock the other day in jest to register a complaint. The Bible, he said, is now "so clear that I don't have to interpret it."

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