John Milton argued that all competent Christians should put in writing their own systematic theology. Given the proliferation of Bible translations in our day, it seems more likely each person will do his or her own private translation of the Bible. If so, novelist Reynolds Price's fascinating Three Gospels would be a good place to start.

Price is an important contemporary writer with a lifelong interest in the Bible-both for its claims on his life and for its challenge as a literary text. He first published translations of the Bible in A Palpable God (1978), which, like this book, includes wonderfully insightful reflections on the nature of story and of Scripture. In Three Gospels, Price offers a revised translation of Mark from the earlier book, a new translation of John, and a composite gospel of his own creation. The translations are interesting in their own right, but even more valuable is Price's fresh and insightful discussion of these eternal stories.

A translation of the Bible is, among other things, a work of art. As such, it should be judged by what it proposes to be, not by what other translations are. Price goes to great lengths to explain the goals of his translation of these gospels, and it is clear that his aims are different from those of the great majority of contemporary translators.

The mantra of Bible translation in the last 40 years has been accessibility. Most current translations put a premium on removing obstacles that separate the reader from the text. A translation of any text tends either to privilege the language of the original, preserving its features as closely as possible (including vocabulary, word order, figurative language, idioms, sentence length, and so on), or to shape the translation to fit the characteristics of the target language (in this case, English), reasoning that a successful translation must seem natural in the target language or it is not a genuine translation. Most contemporary Bible translations into English have moved the text toward the reader rather than required the reader to accommodate to the text.

Price will have none of it. He specifically rejects "dynamic equivalence," the term most frequently associated with a rejection of literalness in Bible translation. Dynamic equivalence approaches, which are evident even in translations that trumpet their close fidelity to the original, are based on the premise that the goal of translation should not be mere dictionary correctness, achieved at the expense of truly communicating the meaning and effect of the original. Contorting English to make it ape Hebrew or Greek honors neither the languages nor the message. Instead, according to this approach, one should seek to create a text that affects today's reader in the same way that the original text affected the original reader or hearer.

Price puts his finger on the most problematic link in the dynamic equivalence argument: Do we really know enough about the original effect to try to reproduce it in a different language to a different audience at a different time? Price doesn't think so. He argues, for instance, that since there was no single standard of koine Greek (as there is none for contemporary English), it is misguided to try to ascertain idiomatic equivalents. He says having Jesus turn to the leper in Mark and say, "O.K., you're healed" (as does a translation sponsored by the Jesus Seminar) sounds more like Woody Allen than Mark's Jesus.

Price sometimes overstates his case, as when he claims that "human beings alive on the same day in the same city block-not to speak of different countries and centuries-will witness, reflect on, and respond to equal stimuli in ways as divergent as an infant's and a leopard's." He follows this hyperbolic tribute to human difference with an equally dogmatic and equally questionable assertion: "we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago." True, we can reconstruct what things looked like, he concedes, but not how they felt. Therefore, it is misguided for translators to "pretend to strip from their subjects the immovable screens of age and distance."

If human experience were as solipsistic as Price suggests, then it would not only be futile to translate the Bible and other texts, it would be of little use to read them in their original languages. For that matter, why read Price's own novels? His experience is unique, after all, as is his use of language, so what would be the point? But art has always been dedicated to the notion that we can bridge the gaps that separate us, and Bible translation can legitimately attempt the same.

What drives Price to such excesses is the bland domestication of the Bible by both believers and translators. Just as we accommodate our theological emphases and our conceptions of the Christian life to mesh comfortably with an individualistic market-driven society, so we often insist that the Bible read like the morning paper or the latest self-help book. In the process, we risk clarifying what the original leaves ambiguous, smoothing what is jagged, and making stylistically dull and abstract what in the original is simple and concrete. Price warms the heart of all those bothered by modern attempts to pitch translations to the least prepared and least motivated reader when he says of the Gospels: "These texts were not written for, nor can they be successfully read by, the inattentive."

On the other hand, his actual translations at the least show why dynamic equivalence approaches have arisen. He claims to aim "at giving a Greekless contemporary reader the truest possible sense of the narrative and discursive atmosphere of my originals." For Price, "truest" means, as much as possible, word for word, original word order, limited range of vocabulary, plainness (especially in Mark), and minimal punctuation. The result is a translation with a kind of rough energy and directness that announces at every turn that it is not particularly comfortable existing in the English language.

Price claims in the Johannine discourses of Jesus, for instance, to "have hewn close to the original's relentlessly limited battery of words and to the original order of the Greek when feasible (it is, after all, the order in which an early reader or listener encountered the writer's images and ideas)." This sounds admirable. But think about translating from Spanish the simple phrase la casa roja. Since Spanish, unlike English, places adjectives after the nouns they modify, the most literal translation that preserves word order is "the house red." Does anyone really think that is a truer or more accurate translation than "the red house"?

But translations often stray from their own principles for pragmatic reasons. Does Price actually stick to his theory when the result is infelicitous? Sometimes he does, as in the opening of John: "Came a man sent from God, John by name." If the Jesus Seminar yields Woody Allen, this sounds like Yoda. The two surest clues to a nonnative speaker of any language are mispronunciation and unidiomatic syntax. Unless Price can convince us that John's Greek was not only koine but, in fact, pidgin Greek, he is not likely to convince us that this kind of construction is the "truest" translation.

Similarly, what is even an attentive and sophisticated reader to make of Price's rendering of John 1:16 (Price includes no chapter and verse demarcations): "From his fullness we all took grace on grace." No one, it seems to me, would have a clue as to what this means if he or she did not have a previous understanding. It does not seem likely that it was equally opaque to its original audience. Although we may rightly lament the modern tendency to require too little of the reader, it is still true that a rendering that conveys little or no meaning is not a successful translation, notwithstanding the literalist's cry, "But that's what it says!"

Perhaps the single most attractive aspect of this very attractive book is Price's extensive literary and theological discussions of the nature of John and Mark, especially the way Price's expertise as a novelist informs his theological assessments. His understanding of the techniques of narrative, for instance, leads him to the judgment that John's account of the final events of Jesus' life has the ring of an eyewitness. He agrees with C. S. Lewis that the gospel accounts are either essentially eyewitness reports or that the writers invented fictional techniques not otherwise seen until near our own time.

And where among current biblical scholars, whom Price calls "comically nervous" and "punitively self-limiting," will you find anything as eloquent and sensitive to the relation of art and history as the following:

John, with a tranquil mastery worthy of his teacher, stakes down the tent of his own story with the hard pegs of contemporary Palestinian detail, then floats it on the literal air of a voice unlike any other on human record. But a glance back at the central great Tabernacles confrontation will strengthen the point-Jesus' rising voice, insane if not true, and the all but murderous counter voices, mounting as unstoppably as the peroration of an organ fugue.

Furthermore, unlike most biblical scholars, Price asks the biggest and most personal questions raised by the Gospels: Is this story true, and what are its implications for my own life? Price expresses powerfully the cosmic, staggering, and, to many, offensive claims of the two Gospels, especially John, and makes clear that he essentially accepts the force of those claims for his o wn life-no small declaration in today's climate in the arts and academy. At a time when it is fashionable to speak condescendingly of the moral authority of the Bible and its writers, Price makes clear that it is the Gospels that interrogate us and not the reverse.

In many ways, the most interesting of the three separate translations in the book is Price's own composite of all four Gospels, fleshed out with a novelist's imagination. In this "apocryphal gospel," which he calls "An Honest Account of a Memorable Life," Price seeks to correct the currently dominant images of Jesus: on the one hand, the coolly omnipotent Savior of popular conservative Christianity; on the other hand, the wimpy human-potential poster child or the culturally bound Palestinian peasant of liberation theology.

Price's Jesus is initially confused, even frightened, by his growing powers. When Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do people say I am?" Price has him ask because Jesus is trying to figure out the answer for himself: "They could see that now he needed to know." Price's Jesus is all compassion and acceptance. His "ferocious anger" is directed only at "the intractable presence of evil in the world"-seemingly not at evil in individuals. Price is so anxious to separate himself from the common stereotypeof traditional Christianity as judgmental that he has banished the word sin from his translation ("Look, the Lamb of God who cancels the wrongs of the world") and in his discussions refers to "the Jesus sect" rather than to Christians, because for many the latter term "continues to evoke . . . a history of murderous intolerance." And yet Price's Jesus is traditional enough to indeed conquer death, both in miraculous healings and in his own genuine resurrection.

Three Gospels is an intriguing exploration by a major contemporary writer of the central portion of the greatest story ever told. All those interested in hearing this story anew should seek it out.

Three Gospels:

The Good News According to Mark

The Good News According to John

An Honest Account of a Good Life

By Reynolds Price

Scribners

288 pp.; $23

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 21

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