Jacobs thinks we’re stuck with mediocre Bible translations because the divorce between belletrist and philologist will remain, given our ever-increasing specialization, even within the humanities. A major part of the problem is the way students are taught biblical languages. Prior to the Second World War, scholars would have learned their Greek by mastering Homer, Hesiod, Aeschelus, and Sophocles before moving to the New Testament. Now they are taught to master the grammar and vocabulary of the New Testament.

This leads to a raw substitutionary plug-and-play of dynamic equivalence as we encourage them to try and stick abstract content into English words. In short, we’re still structuralists (perhaps unwittingly) who forget were living in a post-structuralist age, and for good reason. Structuralists reduce human phenomena — language, art, literature, music, indeed all of culture — to the presumed structural relations of a few basic non-linguistic building blocks behind the phenomena, running roughshod over the dynamics of the biblical texts as we try to extract a few basic ideas we can stick into simple English. No wonder our Bible translations are often brutal and banal.

I’m more sanguine than Jacobs, however, for a few reasons. I see younger scholars and theologians reacting against the centrifugal forces of specialization and compartmentalization and engaging in interdisciplinary endeavors in English and literature. I see a renewed concern for beauty in all things, including language. I see an increasing rejection of the now-naive linguistic theories of the sixties. I see a large Christian body, the Anglophone wing of the Catholic Church, revising its liturgical texts and Bibles in the converging directions of fidelity and beauty.

— Leroy Huizenga