The prominent James Martin the editor at large of the Jesuit magazine, America, who has long served a ministry to LGBTQ+ People is, you won't be surprised to hear, a frequent target of right-wingers and the "trad cath" cult. I don't listen to all of his podcasts though I probably should, his fine interview with Anthea Butler was linked to here over the weekend.
This is an interview with the greatly respected Methodist Bible scholar Ben Witherington that covers many things, including how to pray the scriptures during Lent. There is a lot of practical information about that. One of the things that surprised me is his advice to those who are familiar with the scriptures, especially for Catholics those readings that recur in the three-year cycle of liturgical readings. He suggested reading them in a translation you're not familiar with. Something I've found useful, myself, was listening to the daily mass in another language as a way to keep up my French.
But his advice to read The Message by Edward Patterson really surprised me. Patterson, he noted was a Biblical scholar in his own right which I hadn't know, I'd only seen him described as a novelist which made me kind of suspicious on the basis of nothing but my own prejudice.
I'd known about The Message which goes beyond the so-called dynamic equivalence method of translation instead of the so-called word-for-word method of translation to put the content of the Bible into vernacular English. There are lots of good English vernacular translations, I like the Common English and Good News translations so I'd never thought to look at The Message.
It being late in the evening when my eyes give me trouble and I don't want to watch a screen, I looked for readings of it online. After trying a recording of the Message book of Mark which had music in the background -yuck!- I found a good one of a man with a working class English accent reading it very well. I was really surprised at how big the impact of hearing a close but not "literal" telling of the familiar content was. I don't know if reading the same on the page would have as big an impact on me - I'll be ordering it when I get around to that.
In his far more traditionally "literal" translation of the New Testament, David Bentley Hart said that Mark which was originally written in hardly sophisticated Greek is something he translated into the equivalent of that in English, including the use of the highly vernacular historical present tense when that's how it's said in the Greek. That kind of thing which even scholarly revieweres have noted gives his translation a bracing freshness, something I can attest to. The way that Patterson translated it has an even more bracing effect.
I wouldn't consider replacing a more scholarly and direct reading of the texts with The Message but it's as good as reading a good study bible commentary and more direct than consulting a more extensive learned commentary.
Also, I tried his youtube of Romans and even in that great theological, not narrative book, and found the same was true. I will be buying that and use it as I would a commentary. It's not hard to imagine someone finding that starting with The Message might be the most useful thing for them to do.
Never looked into Ben Witherington before but I'll try to get to him. One of the problems is that there are so many very fine Bible scholars, theologians, spiritual writers (as well as so many who are far less good) that it's impossible to read or listen to all of even the best of them.
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