Jesus at the lochsideThe New Testament in ScotsFirst published in 1983 (and by Penguin Books since 1985), the translation of the New Testament into Scots by William Laughton Lorimer, completed except for some final revisions during the last ten years of his life up to 1967 - and edited for the press by his son R. L. C. Lorimer - is a work of extraordinary power. Although the English reader might need to read it with a version in modern Standard English (or the Authorised Version) side by side, in order to grasp the precise meaning or general sense of certain less familiar Scots words, it is pretty immediately accessible - and it speaks (seemingly) with the voice of a whole culture, reflecting a long and living tradition of thinking, feeling, sharing, and communicating - plain speech, human warmth, precision, forthright colloquial vigour. There is also a classnessness about the Scots, which is neither archaic like the AV, nor suggestive of a middle-class Christian subculture, like the NEB. To me there seems an enormous difference between the prim, school-masterly briskness of Up with you to the mountain top in the NEBs version of Isaiah 40.9, and the Scots Awa wi ye with which Lorimer renders Jesuss response in Matthew, 8.32:
There is an added force to certain familiar phrases when they can take advantage of Scottish vocabulary and what seems its natural, inevitable alliterativeness. In Mark 14.38 our familiar The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak becomes Tho the spirit be freck, the flesh is feckless. And in the storm over Galilee, the jaws (i.e. the waves) cam jow-jowin owre the boat. Lorimer is a careful biblical scholar, adding textual notes, also in Scots, to the debatable passages - but he can also be daringly original in some of his renderings. According to his son he thought twice before translating I Corinthians 14.11 (in which Paul affirms the possibility of communication despite language difference, when the message is urgent) in a way which reflects the habitual Greek comparison of barbarian languages to the twittering of birds:
But this reading is adopted in the published text. Such language both dignifies, and is dignified by, the message which it conveys - the humanity of Christ as encountered in men and women of every age and culture. And how powerfully this language can rethink the thought and re-express the feeling of the most profound or poetic passages, can be judged from the opening of St Johns gospel:
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