Deciding who to highlight here in this space sometimes comes down to a moral choice; some of the people I’ve investigated as a result of a quote from my collection have turned out to have lived lives that are, frankly, not worthy of my spending time and effort to share their history. One was a multi-billionaire who was a womanizer and a miser who loved tormenting people under his control. He lived a miserable life and died a lonely death. As Jesus said, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36). Others, while they may have lived lives worth remembering, made strings of unwise choices that led to scandals and/or dodgy associations with corrupt foreign powers. While a quote or two from such a person might hold a grain of truth or wit, I personally find it difficult to un-see the stains behind the curtain, as it were, and so I choose to highlight lives that have something worth learning from or from those people who’ve done something worthy of our respect.
The person I’d like to highlight today is John Bertram Philips (1906-1982), best known for his translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament into modern English. This work wasn’t done in a stuffy theologian’s office, but in the bomb shelters of the London Blitz of World War 2. During that war, he was the Anglican vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Lee, London, and he realized that the young people in his church had difficulty relating to, or understanding, the Authorized Version of the Bible, aka the King James Bible, which was first published in 1611*. By the mid-1940s, English had changed fundamentally, and it has continued to grow and adapt; the older version of the biblical translation was and is (for most people) stuffy and unrelatable. [For those of you wondering which version of the Bible is most accurately translated from the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, the NIV Bible adheres most closely to them; 2011 saw a major revision to the NIV translation, based on recently published critical editions from biblical scholars.]
[*The history of how The King James Bible came to be the king’s Bible is long and sordid, littered with spies, political intrigue and betrayal, ending in the gruesome martyrdom of William Tyndale, whose translation was basically appropriated after his death, which is ironic, as he was tried because his translation was illegal…”unauthorized” by the Holy Roman Empire political elite… but that’s another story.]
Encouraged by his friend, C.S. Lewis, Philips published the first section of the New Testament, starting with Paul’s letters to the churches, in 1947, with the Gospels following in 1952. The final compilation of the New Testament was published in 1958. In the 1960s, he translated and published parts of the Old Testament, though this was never finished within his lifetime.
As a minister and translator, a communicator at heart, it’s no wonder that there are numerous quotes taken from his writings, sermons, and letters written during his lifetime; in some ways, like Tyndale, he was ahead of his time in his understanding of God and our relationship with Him. As the saying goes, we today see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether or not you believe in God, if you live in any nation with Judeo-Christian foundations, you benefit from those shoulders in more ways than you know.
If you’d like to read more about the life of this complex man, who struggled with clinical depression most of his life and yet remained firm in his faith, please click on the link to an article titled, A Bruised Reed Firmly Planted.
Without further ado, here is a selection of quotes from John Bertram Phillips:
- “The refusal to be committed and the attitude of indifference can, in fact, never be neutral.”
- “Christianity is not a religion at all but a way of life, a falling in love with God, and through him a falling in love with our fellows (fellow man).”
- “Christ is the aperture through which the immensity and magnificence of God can be seen.”
- “God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job.”
- “All poetry and music, and art of every true sort, bears witness to man’s continual falling in love with beauty and his desperate attempt to induce beauty to live with him and enrich his common life.”
- “It is refreshing and salutary to study the poise and quietness of Christ. His task and responsibility might well have driven a man out of his mind. But He was never in a hurry, never impressed by numbers, never a slave of the clock.”
- “You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern.” (from his NT translation)
- “There is… no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living…They were to be the spearhead of good against evil.”
- “Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.” (from his NT translation)
Stephanie Huesler 