C.S. Lewis on Bible Translations

The following is an excerpt from God in the Dock Essays on Theology and Ethics, and I like that Lewis and I are fans of James Moffatt:

...the Authorised Version (KJV) has ceased to be a good (that is, a clear) translation. It is no longer modern English: the meanings of words have changed. The same antique glamour which has made it (in the superficial sense) so ‘beautiful’, so ‘sacred’, so ‘comforting’ and so ‘inspiring’, has also made it in many places unintelligible. Thus where St Paul says ‘I know nothing against myself,’ it translates ‘I know nothing by myself’. [I Cor 4:4]. That was a good translation (though even then rather old-fashioned) in the sixteenth century: to the modern reader it means either nothing, or something quite different from what St Paul said. The truth is that if we are to have translation at all we must have periodical re-translation. There is no such thing as translating a book into another language once and for all, for a language is a changing thing. If your son is to have clothes it is no good buying him a suit once and for all: he will grow out of it and have to be re-clothed.

And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox—we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful an so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hoes and adoration. Does the word ‘scourged’ [John 19:1] really come home to us like ‘flogged’? Does ‘mocked him’[Matt 27:29, Mk 15:20; Lk 22:63, 23:11, 23:36] sting like ‘jeered at him’?

We ought therefore to welcome all new translations (when they are made by sound scholars) and most certainly those who are approaching the Bible for the first time will be wise not to begin with the Authorised Version—except perhaps for the historical books of the Old Testament where its archaisms suit the saga-like material well enough. Among modern translations those of Dr Moffat [James Moffat (1870-1944), whose translation of the New Testament appeared in 1913, his translation of the Old Testament in 1924, and the whole being revised in 1935.] and Monsignor Knox [Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957) published a translation of the New Testament in 1945, and a translation of the Old Testament in 1949.] seem to me particularly good..