paul j. griffiths

We Christians have from the beginning thought it good to translate our Scriptures. One important result of this is that we have no scriptural text: we have, instead, versions. Every book of the canon exists in many versions — Hebrew, Greek, Latin Syriac, English, Spanish, Telugu, Japanese, Swahili, and so on. For Catholics, some versions are authorized locally to be read (and chanted) liturgically. The worldwide list of such versions is long, and each version found on that list is Scripture exactly in the sense that when we read and hear it in the context of a liturgical celebration we read and hear the word of the Lord — which is exactly what we say after having read it: “The Word of the Lord.” But what are these versions versions of? They are all (it seems to me) authoritative versions of what the Lord says to his people. That must be so if we call each and any of them verbum Dei. But the versions differ among themselves in many ways: lexically, syntactically, semantically, in register and tone and diction, and so on. This variation, I should think, is not a problem for the Church but an opportunity. Thinking through in what that opportunity consists requires a theology of the versions, something which the Church has not yet fully developed.