MetaCatholic

Thanks to Justin Anthony Knapp for a comment on my previous post on the issue of Lydia Playfoot’s case against her school over being denied permission to wear her silver chastity ring. He provides a link that shows that all was indeed not entirely as reported at the time. Most specifically:

It was later revealed that the girl’s parents had been directly involved in the UK branch of Silver Ring Thing. Heather Playfoot, her mother, has been the company secretary of Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd.

Lydia’s father, an elder of the Kings Church in Horsham, Philip Playfoot, has been the company’s Parents’ Programme Director.

Seems to me that the scriptures have at least as much to say about honesty as they do about chastity.

Update: Peter Kirk’s comment (see below) on this post suggests that the honesty question is more a question about poor reporting than about the couple’s non-disclosure. I’m also only going on what was reported, and have no idea when this information about the Playfoot family having a much stronger investment in their daughter’s stance became public knowledge, and whether it was willingly disclosed in early arguments with the school, or only emerged as part of the legal process. I still stand by the view of my earlier post that the court judgement was quite reasonable, and not, as some have sought to portray it, discrimination against Christians, whatever the precise timing of emerging facts.

One lasting bequest of the KJV is a sense of Bible English. It is all, largely, written in the same style and register. I presume the same is true of the Vulgate’s Latin, coming largely from one pen (I’m not enough of a Latinist to tell). It also seems to be true of contemporary English translations, so that you can take a guess at which translation a verse is from, and be somewhere in the ballpark.

Indeed, most new translations seek to describe the sort of English they’re aiming for, and most discussions of the English translations on, say, Better Bibles Blog, focus on whether the English is clear enough. One of the few that is explicit about trying to do more than that is the ESV:

The ESV is an “essentially literal” translation that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, its emphasis is on “word-for-word” correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus it seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and meaning of the original.

It is questionable, surely, whether placing as much emphasis as it does on “word-for-word correspondence” will actually enable a sense of the “personal style of each Bible writer.” The lack of correspondence between the languages is too great, and the sense of a Bible English overcomes, to my ear, at least, a sense of different styles, except in the most dramatic cases. John’s gospel, for example, is linguistically idiosyncratic enough to stand out in any translation.

What I’d really like to know, from those who are better informed about translations than I am, whether people have tried, or indeed, whether there’s a case for trying, to work up translations that aim for equivalent styles as much as for equivalent meanings. How rough should a translation of Mark be? How poetic one of Job? Should one seek to write the opening of Luke in quite traditional Bible English and switch registers as it moves into the main story? What, in short, would be the result if one paid as much attention to equivalent style and affect as to equivalent meaning and effect?