English Bible Translations

The only kind of sanctity which Scripture can lose (or, at least, New Testament Scripture) by being modernized is an accidental kind which it never had for its writers or its earliest readers. The New Testament in the original Greek is not a work of literary art: it is not written in a solemn, ecclesiastical language, it is written in the sort of Greek which was spoken over the Eastern Mediterranean after Greek had become an international language and therefore lost its real beauty and subtlety.

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“Modern Translation of the Bible,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 229-30.  Originally published as a preface in J. B. Phillips, Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (Geoffrey Bles Ltd., 1947), vii-X.