However this week I felt really frustrated. The church where I was planned uses the so called "Good News Bible". This emerged in the 1950s and 1960s based on a theory of "dynamic equivalence". This means that translation from the earliest scriptures are "thought for thought" rather than "word for word" as in "formal equivalence".
It must be hard work translating an ancient document. What I would prefer is accuracy. Sadly the "thought for thought" concept leaves a lot of scope for the translator to interpose his or her own interpretation of what that thought is.
One of the key translators of the Good News Bible was a man called Robert Bratcher who clearly had his own agenda which seems to show at certain key points. For example John 3:16 is watered down to "For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life".
In the Good News Bible the Beatitudes are reduced from "blessed" to "happy". So we have "Happy are those who know God....", "Happy are those who mourn....., "Happy are those who are humble... and so on.
Now I can understand how happiness can be part of a blessing, but I don't accept that a blessing is limited to happiness. The earliest translations of Mathew's gospel are in Greek. It may be that Jesus spoke Greek - the city of Tiberius was and is just a few miles from Nazareth - but there is no evidence that Jesus visited the gentile Greek speaking city consider unclean by many Jews at the time.
The Greek word used in those early gospels is makarios which does mean "happy" but much more beside .The Hebrew word for blessing barukh is often used to include happiness but again much more, including be set aside, being consecrated. I feel far more comfortable with the wider interpretation of the Beatitudes rather than a narrow Good News one which confines it to happiness.
From my experience the Good News Bible is just not a reflection of the core of Christian belief, nor is it a true reflection of the Biblical hope. The sooner we send the copies we have in Methodism for re-cycling, the better.
