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The Bible

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The Bible is the basic book (or collection of books) underlying both Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism recognises only the books called the Tanach as part of the Bible. Many Christians regard these books (generally arranged in a different order) as the Old Testament. Other Christians include further books in the Old Testament; the Church of England regards many of these as semi-holy and labels them as The Apocrypha.

There are also books that are, or have been, accepted by just a few groups of Jews or Christians as part of the Tanach or Old Testament. They are sometimes called The Pseudepigrapha. There is no definitive list of such books, but the most important are listed below.

All Christians (but not Jews) accept a further group of books as the New Testament, and there is now virtually no controversy about which books are in the New Testament.

Old Testament or Tanach

Five Books of Moses

Historical books (known as Former prophets)

Prophetic books (known as Later prophets)

Writings

Apocrypha

Pseudepigrapha

New Testament

The Gospels and Acts

The Pauline Letters

The non-Pauline Letters and Revelation


Languages

The translation will keep as closely as possible to the original languages:

  • Old Testament: The edition published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, edited by Meir Letteris.
  • Apocrypha: The Septuagint text as published by the University of Gottingen.
    • NB: Many of the books of the Apocrypha may originally have been written in Greek. Some of the books may originally have been in Hebrew or Aramaic, but only the Greek translation survives. Where some of the original is known, for example for Ecclesiasticus, this has generally been used rather than the Greek.
  • New Testament: The latest revision of the Nestle-Aland text.

Methodology

  • The language of the translation will be modern but dignified, and should be comprehensible to any reasonably well-educated person who speaks English fluently.
  • This should not be a slavish word-for-word translation, but should be grammatically correct English. In particular, there is no need to translate a given Hebrew word by the same English word wherever it occurs. On the other hand, paraphrases that may distort the meaning must be avoided. The guiding principle is "as literal as is possible, as paraphrased as is absolutely necessary".
  • The translation should always make sense. If the meaning of the original is uncertain or controversial, this should be explained in a note.
  • In the Old Testament, the traditional tune for chanting aloud often provides an indication of punctuation, and this should be adhered to where possible.
  • In general, it may be assumed that there is a full stop at the end of each verse, and none in the middle of a verse. However, this rule need not be followed slavishly. There is no presumption that a new chapter starts a new section, since the chapters are a mediaeval invention.
  • Where there might reasonably be doubt or controversy about a translation, it would be helpful to add a footnote justifying what has been done.
  • Headers giving one-line summaries of a passage may be inserted; they will be in italics to show that they are not part of the text.
  • For ease of comprehension, well-known proper names as used in most translations should be retained rather than replaced with more accurate transliterations. Thus we will have Moses not Moshe, Solomon not Shlomo, Jeremiah not Yirmeyahu.
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