Moffatt also does not hesitate to discuss textual decisions in his New Testament footnotes (he was primarily a NT scholar) with full citations in Greek. (But why? Doesn't that assume that the final form of the text is the only one eligible for translation? Who says?) In fact, most translators would not see the marking of interpolations as their job that's the work of the literary critic. I think scholars are more modest today, and few if any translators are confident enough to mark definitely within the text itself some verses rather than others as interpolations.

This denotes, throughout the entire Old Testament, passages which are either editorial additions or later interpolations.' The reader will soon run into Genesis 4:20, 21, which are so enclosed, although these are usually now assigned to J. 'The only other mark which requires a word of explanation,' he says, with wonderful confidence, 'is the double square brackets (]). He also often distinguishes the pentateuchal sources typographically: P occurs in ordinary type, J in italics, and E within single square brackets (). His Genesis begins with Genesis 2:4a, moved to the beginning of the text from its canonical position, presumably on the supposition that it originally belonged there. I think Robert Alter's new translation of the Pentateuch is the only recent example.īut Moffatt is particularly fascinating because he makes very few concessions to canonical form or to anyone's prior idea of what a 'bible' should be like. Moffatt interests me because his book is a one-man scholarly translation, something that is pretty rare these days.

Some sample pages are available at Amazon. Apparently it is still in print, although I rarely see it cited any more. The copy I have (it was my mother's) is dated 1954, but the first printing is listed as 1922. One of the most interesting is James Moffatt's version. I have a ton of Bible translations, because I'm interested in the Bible and I'm also interested in translation.

Moffat translation new testament