Talk:John Bertram Phillips

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Oops. I didn't find a page at J. B. Phillips and so wrote an article. Then I found this one.

I've put the article I wrote below, in case it can be cannibalised. The Wednesday Island 16:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

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Canon J. B. Phillips (1906-1983) was an Anglican priest who translated the New Testament and much of the Old into dynamic modern English, starting with the Epistles (Letters to Young Churches). He attempted to produce the same effect on his readers as the original would have had to its original readers; to modern readers, the result reads rather as though the apostles were writing to English people of the 1950s. (For example, St Paul's injunction to "greet one another with a holy kiss" is rendered as "A handshake all round!")

Phillips spoke of his translation:

My story goes back to the days of the blitz when I was in London and in charge of a fairly large youth group. I'd always found the Epistles particularly inspiring and full of spiritual help, but these young people quite plainly couldn't make head or tail of them in the Authorised Version; these were not for the most part church young people at all. And when during the blackout I attempted to while the time away by reading to them from the Authorised Version, quite honestly they couldn't make any sense of it at all.

So in a very small and amateur sort of way I began to translate them from the Greek, simply in order that they might understand them. I think I began with Colossians. And then I had a bit of luck, because something prompted me to send a copy of Colossians to C.S. Lewis, whose works I at that time was greatly admiring. And he wrote back these most encouraging words: "It's like seeing an old picture that's been cleaned. Why don't you go on and do the lot?" Well, I took his advice, and I did eventually translate all the Epistles, and they were published as Letters to Young Churches.[1]

Phillips struggled for much of his life with depression.