By Fr Laurent Cleenewerck, EOB Editor
In 2021, Fr. John Whiteford published on his blog a substantial review of the EOB New Testament (Newrome Press portable edition). The review deserves a serious answer, first because it is serious criticism — specific, textual, and offered by a priest who plainly wants what the EOB itself wants, namely “a good, accurate translation of the New Testament that matches the Greek texts the Church has actually used, and is done by, and for, Orthodox Christians” — and second because some of his observations were simply correct.
This note records, point by point, what has been accepted and incorporated into the revised edition of the EOB NT, what has been retained as a matter of deliberate policy and why, and where the disagreement is really about the purpose of the translation rather than its execution.
It should be said at the outset that the review was generous where generosity was due: Fr. Whiteford affirms that “there is not a problem with the choice of the base text,” that much of the translation is accurate, that the EOB in some places “does a better job than most translations,” and that the footnotes are “very insightful.” The criticisms below are therefore received as they were offered — from within a shared concern for the Church’s text.
Criticisms accepted and incorporated in the (third) revised edition
Several of the review’s specific objections have been acted upon. In the revised text:
Mark 10:21. Fr. Whiteford objected that “Jesus looked at him and felt love for him” was both awkward and unwarranted, since “there is nothing in the Greek that speaks of how Christ ‘felt.’” He was right. The revised text reads “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” (A personal note is that “felt love” may be well be a more “sincere” rendering of what John is trying to convey; “Jesus wept” (famously the Bible’s shortest verse) is a reminder that for St John, Jesus really loved his friends and disciples and family; he felt things and was not an incarnate but merely theological or intellectual Savior…)
Luke 18:8. The rendering “will he find faith on the land?” has been changed to the natural “will he find faith on the earth?”, with “or ‘on the land?’” retained as a footnote. As the review observed, no subtlety of the Greek was served by the stranger wording in the text itself.
Luke 21:19. The review argued that translating psychē as “life” obscured precisely the distinction that matters in a persecution context, where “preserving your soul and preserving your life are two very different questions.” The revised text reads “By your endurance acquire your souls,” with “or lives” in the apparatus. This is a genuine improvement, and the point is well taken as a caution for the Old Testament project as well, where nephesh/psychē will pose the same question hundreds of times.
Hebrews 11:1. The rendering “the personal foundation of things hoped for” was, as the review said, an outlier, and the word “personal” imported into the text an interpretive step that belongs in the notes. The revised text reads “faith is the foundation of things hoped for, certainty about things that cannot be seen,” with a footnote laying out the range of hypostasis (person / substance / foundation / assurance — literally, what upholds the stability). “Foundation” itself, however, is retained deliberately: it is not a novelty but a rendering of hypostasis by its root sense, that which stands under, and it is closer to the patristic instinct — which heard in this verse that faith gives substance and standing to things hoped for — than the purely subjective “assurance” of many modern versions.
Proper names. The review rightly noted inconsistency in the treatment of names (Isaias here, Jeremiah there). The revised edition applies a uniform policy: the Greco-Latin form with the familiar English form in parentheses — “Isaias (Isaiah)” — at the first occurrence in each book, and the Greco-Latin form alone thereafter. One may still prefer, as Fr. Whiteford does, the standard English forms throughout; but the objection as stated was to inconsistency, and the inconsistency has been removed. The retained preference for the Greek forms is itself purposeful: these are the names as the Church’s text and her liturgy actually sound them.
The Lord’s Prayer. The review found it unjustifiable that Matthew 6 switched into traditional liturgical English while Luke 11 did not. The revised edition resolves this differently than by leveling: at Matthew 6 the text now presents two parallel columns — the EOB’s own contemporary rendering, consistent with the rest of the translation, alongside the received liturgical form (“Our Father who art in heaven…”). The reader loses nothing of the translation’s consistency and gains the form of the prayer as it is actually prayed. This is arguably what a study edition should do with the one passage every Orthodox reader knows by heart.
The stray header at Matthew 27:31–32. The review caught a genuine production error — a marginal section heading that had migrated into the body text. This has been corrected; the heading (“Simon of Cyrene—The way to Golgotha—The crucifixion of the Lord”) now stands properly as a section title between the paragraphs.
- Choices retained deliberately, with reasons
Proskyneō as “express adoration.” This is the review’s strongest stylistic objection — “worship” is undeniably smoother in John 4 — and the choice is nevertheless maintained, because it is not a stylistic choice. English “worship” flattens a distinction on which an ecumenical council turned. The Seventh Ecumenical Council distinguished the veneration (proskynesis) that may be offered to icons, the saints, and holy things from the divine service (latreia) due to God alone; the iconoclast controversy was, in large part, a controversy over exactly these words. A translation made for Orthodox readers has a particular duty not to erase that distinction, and the EOB’s introduction explains the policy at length: proskyneō is rendered consistently, with an explanatory apparatus, precisely so that the reader can see where the Greek says what. The clunkiness is a real cost, and it is paid knowingly: in a translation for personal study, terminological transparency was judged worth more than euphony. A liturgical translation would rightly decide otherwise — which is part of why the EOB does not claim to be one.
Presbyteros as “presbyter,” including for the Jewish elders. The review finds “the chief priests and the presbyters of the people” (Matthew 27:1) confusing, since English reserves “presbyter” for Christian clergy. The consistent rendering is retained, after explicit reconsideration, for the sake of concordance: the New Testament uses one word, presbyteros, for the elders of Israel, the members of the Sanhedrin, the apostolic clergy, and the twenty-four around the throne in Revelation, and the continuity of that word is itself part of the meaning — the Christian presbyterate did not come from nowhere. Splitting the term (“elders” here, “presbyters” there) would make the English smoother by making the Greek invisible, and would quietly decide for the reader which occurrences are “really” about clergy. The EOB prefers to show the reader the seam and let the footnotes do their work.
John 1:1 and the curly brackets. The rendering “the Word was {what} God {was}” is retained, with its braces. The Greek of John 1:1c — anarthrous theos as predicate — makes a qualitative assertion: the Word is everything that God is, without the clause collapsing into Sabellian identity (“the Word was ho theos”) and without the Arian diminution (“a god”). The bracketed rendering makes that precision visible in a way the bare “the Word was God” cannot, and the edition’s apparatus of codes states plainly that words in { } are to be skipped in public reading. Fr. Whiteford’s underlying complaint, however — that in six-point type the reader cannot tell { } from [ ] — is not a complaint about the translation at all, and it is a fair one; see below.
III. Matters of production, not translation
The zipper, the seven-point body text, and the six-point footnotes belong to the portable edition as a physical object, not to the EOB as a translation. The criticism of the footnote type is accepted without reservation — an apparatus that is “very insightful” but requires a magnifying glass is an apparatus half-lost — and it bears directly on the bracket problem above: conventions that are perfectly distinguishable at reading size vanish at six points. The remedy is a matter for formats and future printings (and digital editions, where the problem does not arise), not for revision of the text.
- On the standard being applied
Running through the review is a single standard: is this translation in beautiful English, suitable for liturgical proclamation? By that standard the review’s verdict — “I would not recommend it for liturgical use” — is one the EOB does not contest, because the EOB was not primarily designed as a liturgical translation. It was designed for personal reading and study, where theological precision and terminological coherence outrank cadence, and where a reader can profitably meet “express adoration,” “presbyters of the people,” and “{what} God {was}” with a footnote at hand. “Liturgical English” is in any case not one thing among the Orthodox jurisdictions of the United States: some are formed by hieratic, archaic English, while others — notably the Greek Archdiocese — proclaim the Scriptures in contemporary forms. A translation cannot serve both liturgical ears at once, and the EOB declined to try. Where Fr. Whiteford asks for a thorough revision before recommending the EOB for personal study, the revised edition documented here is, in substance, that revision — one which has adopted a good part of his own list.
The review closed by hoping that the needed revision would in fact be undertaken. It has been, and several of its improvements trace directly to criticisms Fr. Whiteford articulated. That is how the process described in the EOB’s own introduction is supposed to work: a translation prepared by an Orthodox priest, corrected over years by reviewers of the Church — a category in which a critical reviewer has, in the event, served as well as any friendly one.