He has written previously on “the code metaphor”, giving the example of encoding a military message that can be deciphered unambiguously. “When you go from one language to another, that’s not what happens at all. There’s no secret message that I’m seeing in Greek or Hebrew or French or German such that, if you do it right, there’s the exact meaning brought over into English. . . What makes a translation a good or great translation is its success in people who know both languages saying ‘That’s a darn’ good job!’ . . . Not capturing exactly every word, not revealing the hidden truth — there is no hidden truth — the expression is the expression and we make of it what we can, what we will. . . A translation is always a compromise between shadows cast and highlights illuminated.” The result is not, he emphasises, for liturgical use. His aim is accuracy rather than literary eloquence, giving readers “a sense of the strangeness of the text: the novelty, the impenetrability, the frequently unfinished quality of the prose and of the theology”. In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book’s power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine’s own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line—even for those who have never studied the language.

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 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”.Sometimes I just give up,” she tells me. “I crumble and I translate the word with two or three English words.” She compares the “very powerful, small vocabulary” of the original language to a “linchpin, the ball-bearing there, and the whole passage with its meaning moves around this word, with the very flexible meanings”. We are accustomed to thinking of English as an “incredibly rich language”, she says. “But in certain ways, English is limited . . . a pragmatic language.” the vacuum cleaner & Collaborators in rehearsals for For They let In The Light (2022). Produced and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo: Oscar Abdulla. At the heart of the workshops and the interaction with the young people was criticality. Young people were encouraged to look again at their creative work and develop it through constructive critical appraisals and guidance. The team encouraged the young people to interrogate their own creations in relation to their own lived experience; critiques which were progressed through group crits and reflection. Part of the problem is the perpetually romanticised narrative of the ‘artist’s struggle’, which sees the difference that disability or poor mental health brings as a catalyst of great art – but never the metaphor for or comment on the artist’s relationship with the outside world.

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Early on, building trust was prioritised through conversations around regular attendance, playing games, and building video and writing skills by slowing down and exploring artistic process in detail. After weeks of building the foundations for creative expressions, the young people came alive with ideas that surprised the entire team: Her baseline was a standardised edited text in Greek (“the result of hundreds of years of expert work by the best biblical scholars in the world, minutely vetted and persuasively reconstructed”). The standard translations that followed were, she says, “so rigorously controlled to avoid challenging and offending that their surface is flat and dull, their meanings obscure, and their footnotes an exercise in hiding anything interesting”. Most of us would find Christians “truly cast in the New Testament mould fairly obnoxious”, he argues, and draws attention to the “reassuring gloss” applied to the “raw rhetoric” of the New Testament’s strictures on wealth, for example, and its “relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism”. In the New Testament, “everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgement that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”

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. IN HER introduction, Dr Ruden explains that she has “often turned to a word’s basic imagery as a defence against anachronism, obfuscation, and lethargy, which drain communications of their primordial electricity”. Reading her translation during Advent I enjoyed reading that the baby " capered" in Elizabeth's womb. The rendering of "crucified" as "hung on the stakes" is a powerfully vivid. Her choices undoubtedly have the ability to unnerve.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.” For an ordinand, the motivation for learning Greek is very different from that of the average undergraduate. “It really matters that they understand the text well,” she writes. “Their very identity is bound up with doing so.” Biblical exegesis “carries a culturally transformative value in a way thinking about Homer is far less likely to — it isn’t preached from the pulpit on a weekly basis.” The contemporary debates around care were also being dissected and scrutinised to go beyond the usual ableist approaches which are either patronising and paternalistic or feats of virtue signalling. James developed a conversation of the aesthetics of care and safety which are crucial for working with vulnerable young people that challenged and catalysed Chisenhale Gallery’s praxis of ‘radical commissioning’: “to their credit, they rose to that challenge although not without problems on both sides. But like, you know, they took a punt on something”.

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”). AT THE inauguration was the true account, and this true account was with god, and god was the true account.” These words are unlikely to be read aloud at many carol services this month, but for Dr Sarah Ruden, this is what it sounds like to translate the Gospels “more straightforwardly than is customary”, to help the reader to “respond to the books on their own terms”. 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”. AMONG the seminars that Mr Belloli is taking is one exploring post-colonial and anti-racist approaches to the New Testament. Both Denise Buell and Willie James Jennings have drawn attention to “which languages are given less prestige both in priestly formation and in the academy”, he observes.As I watch, I’m reminded that who is, and who is not, permitted to call themselves an artist is still a source of frustration. Amongst the groups of people within society whose art is routinely disregarded or seen as subordinate are disabled people, people with mental health conditions, children and young people. Any intersectionality amongst these categories and the art world grows markedly more difficult. THE effect of encountering biblical languages and exploring various translations should not be underestimated, suggests Dr Cressida Ryan, who teaches New Testament Greek at the University of Oxford. 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. 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: I sometimes feel that the teaching I’ve had leaves me in a — quite broad — no man’s land: more than enough to be able to understand original-language references in a biblical commentary, not quite enough to apply it with scholarly precision in biblical studies,” he reflects. “I’m not sure where the future will take me with regard to this, but there are worse places to be. If it sometimes feels like redundant knowledge now, I have faith that it’s a kind of redundancy that’s good to sit with, and that might yet bear fruit.”