The Gospels, Sarah Ruden
The Gospels, Sarah Ruden
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The Gospels
A New Translation

Author: Sarah Ruden

Narrator: Lisa Larsen

Unabridged: 17 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/19/2022


Synopsis

For millennia, the first four books of the New Testament have not only supported the central tenets of Christianity but have also proved to be formative texts for the modern Western world.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ—but they are perhaps best understood as four separate versions of the same story, showing complex origins, intricate interweavings, and often inherent contradictions.

Faithfully pointing listeners back to the original Greek, this translation from renowned scholar and acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden is the first to reconsider the Gospels as books to be read and understood on their own terms.

Ruden provides the most accessible version of the text available to date. Illuminating footnotes and a discursive glossary explain new word choices and phrasings, and present the Gospels as they originally were.

The result is a persuasive reappraisal of the accounts of these four evangelists, and presents a new appreciation of the ancient world as the foundation of our modern one. This robust translation is a welcoming ground on which a variety of listeners can meet, and a resource for new debate, discussion, and inspiration.

About Sarah Ruden

Sarah Ruden was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins. She has translated a number of ancient literary works, among them Vergil's Aeneid and Augustine's Confessions, and is the author of Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time and The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. She is a past recipient of Guggenheim and Whiting awards, and completed the Gospels translation with the help of a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Formerly a scholar-in-residence at Yale Divinity School, she is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mary

My friend asked for my thoughts when he saw I was reading this and was debating whether to get it himself, here's what I told him: Part 1: I've read Mark so far. I preferred the Reynolds Price translation as a literary translation, but he only translated 2 and this one's all 4 and has more scholarly......more

Goodreads review by Brian

I use this daily for the Gospel reading in the lectionary for the day, and I have found the notes to the text especially helpful. Ruden - a Quaker and graduate of Harvard - described in a book discussion on her translation style for The Gospels, her intent being to create a text reflecting the histo......more

Goodreads review by Joshua

The review is for Ruden's translation, remarkable in its achievement of her goal to strip centuries of artifice from the text and instead to 'look first at [the] thing itself', and not for the spiritual nature of the content. This was a fascinating dive into these venerated and oft misunderstood Chr......more