Like Tony Crosby (The Tablet, Letters, 13 December 2014), I too had assumed for many years that the text of The Jerusalem Bible had been translated directly from the ancient Hebrew and Greek sources.
But we now know that this was not so. What we have is an English translation largely dependent on French translations of the ancient sources for La Bible de Jerusalem. More details can be found in The Story of the Bible: How it came to us, by Henry Wansbrough OSB, (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006).
One publisher of The Jerusalem Bible in the UK, Doubleday Books, states that "…from this French original [translation] came the English edition…". Presumably earlier claims of direct translation were to distinguish the work from translations of the Latin Vulgate. In contrast, The New Jerusalem Bible is a direct translation from biblical Hebrew and Greek.
Tony Doherty, Guilford, Surrey
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