You are at a disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t read the Bible as well,” she tells me. “That is the big distinction I would make.” Her recommendation, in the tradition of St Augustine, is to read a variety of translations. “A translation is an interpretation, just like a commentary or a book is . . . Very few people would ever say ‘I will only ever read one person or listen to one person preaching.’” She speaks of their “very disturbing” anti-Semitism, and the Gnosticism in John (“This is Gnostics getting in there and claiming a very privileged authority to say what the truth is, to shut other people up, and to be the ‘we say so’ corporation”). The Gospels are, she argues, “the first of the truly power-hungry Truth writings”, a “sweeping assault of words” against the modern world’s huge apparatus of material power, in which “assertions take over the poetry and the sense as well, making the text suitable as a basis for force, reform, or both.” The authors “thought that all conventional assumptions should be adjusted or replaced”, with the result that “great jolts” were given to the meaning of words, leaving translators aiming at “moving targets”. She finds in the Gospels “the stretching of traditional language past the breaking point”. He is sympathetic to concerns that biblical languages are being squeezed from the curriculum. “One part of that formation involves helping to sensitise ordinands to a different world, a world populated by leaders and ministries and forces and presences that people do not generally contemplate most of the time,” he says. Predictably, Hart’s attempt to produce a translation “not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history” has come in for criticism. “Part of the churches’ understanding of creeds, catechisms and confessions and the doctrines they promulgate — doctrines like the deity of the Holy Spirit or the eternal pre-existence of the Son of God — is that they are meant to aid in the reading of Scripture,” wrote Wesley Hill, associate professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry, Pennysylvania, in a review for ABC Religion and Ethics.

For the safe space to work, the young people were given control of performing or showing work, James and his counterpart, the curator Caroline Moore had given the young people the agency to pull out or not be in the space at the last minute without any repercussions. This is a crucial aspect of safeguarding, as it enabled them to be in control of their narrative and how and with whom it was shared. Even if months had been spent on creating or rehearsing a piece, if a young artist was not comfortable with sharing it, the work wouldn’t be shared. Each work could also be presented in different ways. James was working on a video artwork titled Exposure, in which he interviewed health workers from across the borough of Newham to talk about their experience of initial years of the Covid 19 pandemic. Although we know what happened in other departments of the NHS, such as in the intensive care unit, gynaecology and other units, there was an untold story with respect to mental health units during COVID, particularly the crisis facing children’s and young people’s mental health. Among the many health professionals interviewed was an occupational therapist that had worked in CAMHS during that first wave. These accounts were profoundly alarming. The project challenged Chisenhale gallery to think about commissioning and understand that idea of value and how we value people. James led with a volley of questions that permeated throughout the organisation, making its staff think very differently about how they approach the commissioning process: James spoke about the layers of structural violence laid upon oppressed communities, and the knowledge, wisdom and methods of surviving violence, that comes from people being oppressed, and defining “the artist, with those aesthetic relationships or those aesthetic understandings”. CREATIVE COMMONS/CHESTER BEATTY A folio from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews from a codex containing the Pauline epistles (P46), written in Greek with ink on papyrus; made in Egypt and dated c.200. One of 11 Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri codices

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The Bible Society has estimated that five million people around the world speak Jamaican Patois, and Ms Jones notes that it has “found its way into young people’s language”, including that of white children. She describes switching between “pure English” in some contexts and Patois among her friends. James ensured that no one was recording the presentation but also not forcing anyone to be there. Audience, staff and artists were allowed to step out to process what they were seeing without being judged: James and Chisenhale Gallery saw For they let in the Light, not as just another project for young people, but an opportunity for those who have faced mental health challenges to work with world-class artists and to create artworks which find their way into galleries – not as part of an education or engagement programme but as part of the gallery programme. As a result, Chisenhale has been building a team around their new Curator of Social Practice, Seth Pimlott, who oversaw the presentation of For They Let In the Light . I was just really glad to hear that from people because they participate, as they ought to. They are part of this enterprise; so they can see why I did this, and they are still not buying it, and that’s good. I want them to be that interested and that active.” At HowTheLightGetsIn London 2023 you can join a debate about the nature of the universe with the world's top scientists, laugh until your sides hurt with the UK's best comedians, dance at our famous disco tent to the finest beats or dine with our speakers at Inner Circle events. Join us again at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2024, 24- 27 May, for another unmissable weekend.

One of the most striking features of the record is just how pure and modest Wright is in her presentation. There is virtually no flash and glitter to her music, enabling the success of the material to be based solely on the strength of her voice and writing. Vocally, Wright is mysterious, sultry, defiant and proud all at once, exhibiting both confidence and vulnerability. Active yet moody piano accompaniment. cleanly played electric guitars, and steady yet unobtrusive percussion guide many of the album’s arrangements, contributing to — and causing, in many instances — the unrefined, natural feel of the music. Speaking about William Tyndale at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2017, the theologian Dr Jane Williams suggested that he and all translators “show us something of the sheer attention and love called out by faith”. Tyndale had believed, rightly, that “the Bible is too important to be in the hands of only a few.” I've spent fifty years translating Sanskrit texts, but only now has this book taught me how to read a text in a foreign language and how to read (and write) a translation. It is also a brilliant book about Latin, Augustine, God, and the meaning of life. Wendy Doniger, author of The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth

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Let The Light In” is the twelfth song on Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. It features Father John Misty, with whom Lana has previously collaborated on the “Freak” on 2015’s albums Honeymoon with music video. I really would like believers to come to terms with the fact that being Christian does not defeat human nature,” she says. “It doesn’t. It properly, I think, should be an acceptance that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that we need self-examination, we need repentance . . . It sounds weird, but I think it’s appropriate to this political era that the Gospels translation is in part a protest against political and religious extremism.”

As a reader of ancient literature, she writes, “most of what I see in English Bibles is loss: the loss of sound, the loss of literary imagery, the loss of emotion, and — inevitably, because these texts were performances deeply integrated into the lives of the authors and early readers and listeners — the loss of thought and experience.” James’ work is situational, it reacts or works within a situation and there is a sense of performance within that process. As James put it:THE result, The Gospels, is not Dr Ruden’s first translation of the Bible. In her 2017 book The Face of Water: A translator on beauty and meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017), she offered translations of passages from both the Old and New Testament after first setting out some of the inherent “impossibilities”.

It is notable that the Jacobean translators of the Authorised Version were clear that a literal translation had not been attempted, writing in their preface: “we thinke good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. . .” I had long long talks with my editor about how I could possibly handle this word, and she was very much for the consideration that the translators generally call dignity,” she recalls. “They make this judgement, this decree, about what’s appropriate for the author to have said. I’m sure they wouldn’t want anybody handling their work that way. But they feel justified in doing it when they translate sacred literature.One can do some work toward equipping ordinands to inhabit the world of principalities and powers, of angels and demons, of spirit and soul and flesh, without acquainting oneself with the languages in which the people of God began to articulate their and our relation to that world; but one can travel more rapidly, deeper, more readily into that world by learning those languages, than by standing outwith those worlds and interacting only through the mediation of translators.” I was able to catch up with James soon after the event and he surprised me by describing himself as “an activist that uses art”. This was interesting for a number of reasons however, particularly as art and activism are seen as kind of separate, despite their evident crossover. Equally attuned to the resonances of individual words and the deeper currents of Augustine’s culture, Let in the Light considers how the form and nuances of the Latin text allow greater insight into the work and its author. White shows how to read Augustine’s prose with care and imagination, rewarding sustained attention and broader reflection. In For They Let In The Light one of the cripping aesthetics of that piece came in the second period of the making. The young people wanted to respond to the videos that had been made while they were in hospital and they wanted to perform them. And I’m like – that’s amazing”. It is difficult to achieve reading proficiency in either language in the amount of time available, he says, and one of the pitfalls that he seeks to avoid is confirming the “ingrained inclination to think of other languages as more or less successful simulations of English in a sort of secret coded way. They aren’t simulations of English: they are living cultural and expressive phenomena on their own. . .