Remembering Eugene Nida (1914-2011)

    Eugene Nida is a towering figure in the history of Bible translation. In good ways and bad, few people more than Nida impacted the way the Bible is “received” in the modern world – in what guise and in what form. Scholars of biblical literature are ignorant at their own peril of the contribution of Nida to the history of reception of the literature they study. After all, people read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars do too, I’ve noticed, though they prefer literal translations, because they are “transparent to” the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - i.e., said translations serve as crutches for those whose command of the biblical languages is weak.