Customer Reviews

The New Testament

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Greek of the Hellenistic period is notoriously tricky to translate. First there is the matter of distance in time. Many of the idioms have lost their meaning, words have been recorded in the lexicon as having a variety of and often conflicting definitions, and the simple (or not so simple) matter of the differences between a pre-industrialized Mediterranean society and a post-industrial western one all can put seemingly unassailable walls between the scholar and his text. Yet despite all these obstacles, Professor Lattimore has provided the world with one of the finest English translations of the New Testament ever produced.

To say that Professor Lattimore's skill in translating both ancient and Hellenistic Greek is outstanding is to understate the matter. His ability is now legendary. Readers of his translations of Homer, Aeskylus, Euripides, and many others have long hailed them as the superlative editions of the works. We can all thank God that he saw fit to apply his talent to this, the most famous of all the Hellenistic Greek documents.

Doing away with the numbering system and printing the individual books in paragraph form is something someone should have done long ago. The text can now be read as it would have been recited long ago - cleanly and without the distraction of meaningless numbers (they were added centuries after the texts were written).

The texts themselves are splendid. Professor Lattimore took the time to convey the flavor of each one to the reader through subtle changes in style and word choice that most often accurately reflect the original Greek. For example, the stilted and simple language of the Gospel of Mark versus the more refined style of the Gospel of Luke is well established in the English translations. What's more, Professor Lattimore offers notes to the reader explaining why he chose one word or phrase over another. That is a sign of true scholarship rarely, if ever, seen in commercial translations of this text. The only regret that can be stated is that he did not team up with a noted anthropologist of the period, such as Richard Rohrbaugh or Jerome Neyrey, to put the final touches to the cultural subtleties so often lost in translations.

The only detraction from the work is the cover. The Andres Serrano photo on the cloth bound edition is unfortunate. North Point tried to depict the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth but ended up simply being gratuitous. It will likely put off many readers who will pass by the book simply because the cover photo is so repulsive. This is a shame. Thankfully, North Point thought the better of using the same photo on the paper bound edition.

Without a doubt, this edition of the New Testament is superior to all the well known editions, from the KJV to the NRSV. It makes such partisan tracts, such as The Book (perhaps the worst, I hesitate to write translation as I think it to be more a conglomeration of various other translations which were then simplified for a fourth grade reading level, edition of the New Testament ever produced) look like the intellectual laughingstocks that they are. I would hope more clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, would read Professor Lattimore's translation and also encourage their congregations to do so. It brings a collection of stories too often obscured by time, distance, and dogma much closer to intelligibility.

Lattimore's translation of the N.T. seems so new it's like it just came off the presses. It's so fresh you can smell the ink in your nostrils. It's so vibrant you can easily forget it's the N.T. and then forget to put it down. It's so gripping that instead of dreading the daily dose of a couple of verses, you look forward to overloading on your next fix. At least I do, and that's after reading countless translations, studying all sorts of helpful guide books, and knowing the Sunday School stories front to back.

But Lattimore's translation is different. He's a Greek translator not a theologian, concerned not so much with making the text say something in English, as with letting it live. And stripped of adornment, the Word is pulse-pounding, heart-racing, blood- pumping alive. "Wait a minute," someone may say, "Are we talking about the Bible?" Yes, we are. But reading Lattimore's version, one sees why people think the story is so exciting.

The genius of this book is in what it leaves out. So not the stately King James. Nor the Not-so-New International Version. No chapter or verse numbers. The four Gospels sound like stories, and the letters of St. Paul read like letters. Lattimore's other genius is his uncanny ear; he often uses simpler words than other translations, but sometimes he chooses bigger ones. Some parts flow together connecting half-remembered tales into a larger narrative, but others are told at a breathless pace: "we did this, and then we did that and then this happened, and then some other thing occured." This is exactly how someone, face to face, would relay a story.

In the preface Lattimore modestly says, "I was struck by the natural ease with which Revelation turned itself into English." I am struck with how he turned it into great reading.

Chillingly faithful and breathtakingly beautiful! I tell you the truth, this is Greek in English! There is absolutely no comparison between this and other translations. The poetry, sparseness, dignity, and immediacy of the original texts come shining through. There is none of the awkwardness of the NRSV/RSV, there are none of the maddening idioms of the NIV and other "junky" versions. I would make this manadatory reading for everyone.

Lattimore quite simply and directly removes the polish of committees and redactors in his stunning translation of the New Testament. Rather than making sure the language is stately and in keeping with other translations from the Greek all the way back to Jerome and his Vulgate, he makes the restoration of the voices -- and thus the points being made -- of the NT authors his objective. When the Markan author gets tangled up in the Greek, Lattimore doesn't try to hide that...when Paul is agitated over a point with his addressees, Lattimore's rendition of his letters allows that agitation to come through without politesse.
The result is a version of the New Testament that breathes and lives. Matters of content or specific-word-translation are not vastly different from some other 20th-century "new versions" or from the source material: what is radical is that he strives -- and succeeds -- to let the authors say what they actually said instead of "a version by a committee who wish Mark's Greek had been better".

Additionally, the format eliminates internal verse-numbering, etc. So the reader can simply read -- and is less likely to succumb to the urge to proof-text. Lattimore's splendid translation is more about passages in context -- when the verse/chapter divisions are removed, one finds flowing prose in which the author's messages are crystal clear.

For study purposes I use several different Biblical translations, but the one that travels with me on my 3-hrs.-in-each-direction daily commute and which I use for devotional reading is Lattimore's. It is the one that lives.

Richmond Lattimore's translation of the New Testament is a valuable addition to a thinking person's library. It gave me a much better sense of the styles of the various authors, and perhaps, even of their personalities. In many ways it is fresher and more readable than the church-approved translations, while at the same time being pretty literal. That being said, however, it's not quite as fresh as all that. Even though, for instance, Lattimore's avowed goal was to let the Greek style dictate the English style, Mark's use of the historical present in telling his stories is nowhere in evidence. In other words, despite the fact that Mark wrote in a narrative style which resembles that used in my old neighborhood ("And he says to me...", or "Then he goes...") for some mysterious reason, Lattimore, like virtually all other Bible translators, wants us to read Mark as a more elegant writer than he actually was. Why? In the arena of vocabulary, too, Lattimore makes a number of capitulations to tradition which are far from fresh. A prime example is the word 'ekklesia', which Lattimore, like every standard version, translates by the exclusively Christian term 'church', even though 'ekklesia' was a generic term for any group of people meeting/assembling for any purpose, sacred or secular, public or private, lawful or unlawful. Why use a misleading term like 'church' which suggests an institution and organization which was not yet contemplated in the first century? Similar theologically and culturally anachronistic views are reflected in other word choices, and even in capitalization practices, which again, were not thought of at the time the NT was written. I still am looking forward to the day that a translation allows the Biblical text to speak its own language, without pushing agendas not actually present in the text!

Tp read Lattimore's translation is to experience the shock of a familiar work made new, and newly enigmatic. One of the other reviewers used the word "sparse" to characterize the language, and I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more apt word. The highlight of the book would have to the Gospel of Mark: Lattimore does full justice to this Jesus: sublime, disturbing, and endlessly charismatic.

Another translation of the New Testament? Why? Don't we have enough Bibles already? I would not have paid any more attention this book, except that I noted Lattimore's other works.

Lattimore's background was interesting primarily because he had a reputation as a translator of Greek classics. He has translated most the major Greek works, from Homer to anonymous Greek tragic poems - a quick search of Amazon's store will show.

His approach to translating was to remain faithful to the original Greek as possible. Unburdened by dogmatic concerns, he is able to focus on the text itself. For those of us unschooled in ancient Greek, this is an unequalled opportunity to get closer to the writers.

Reading this translation was a very different experience from other translations. For one thing, the text is not printed with chapters and verse numbers - it flows as normal prose. Punctuation is kept to the minimum (in keeping with the ancient texts), so there is none of the "red-letter" versions of the Gospel that are popular among those who feel that Jesus's words are of greater importance than the rest of inspired Scripture.

The writings are now made alive with Lattimore's fresh perspective. I read Paul's letter to the Phillipians and felt the warmth and closeness that the Apostle had towards this community. I found myself reading the letters as a whole, instead of reading them in parts. Traditional bibles are designed almost as reference material, neatly indexed and divided to facilitate skimming and readings of short verses.

This translation is an excellent complement to the Bible.

There are two main ways to translate the New Testament: a) word-for-word; or b) the keep "the spirit" of what the author was trying to say. While many of the former translations are dry and unreadable (c.f. KJV and NKJV), many of the latter are in many ways interpretations of the NT rather than translations (c.f. Living Bible, The Unvarnished New Testament). Lattimore has done a fine job of spaning the gap and providing us with a translation that is both faithful to the words and spirit of the NT greek.

Couldn't put it down. When was the last time you read through the New Testament as though it were a novel?

Finally a vesrsion of the New Testament that reads as it was supposed to be read...in prose!

This is in my opinion Lattimore's best translations. He completed the undertaking right up until his death and used the original Greek sources as the basis for the translation.

It reads easily and eloquently, and one doesn't feel as if you're reading a translation as one often does in Lattimore's other ancient Greek translations.

Lattimore's doesn't really take any major risks in his version (as say Proffesor E. V. Rieu does in his translation of the 4 Gospels). But as he plays it safe, the stories take on a vastly different character then one's used to with the verse-narrative of the King James version for instance.

While Lattimore's collection doesn't contain every single letter, epistle etc. of the New Testment, it does have all the major books worth reading, especially a great translation of Revelation, something that doesn't often get re-interpreted!

As always, the Old and New Testaments contain many errors, and have been mistranslated and copied incorrectly and include various forgeries, which are all hard to spot and know about. But by far this is the best modern compilation on the market today, with pleasing print and spacings.