Sara Parvis (Letters, 10 August) points out that there is warrant in some Greek texts for the Revised New Jerusalem Bible’s (RNJB) rendering of the words of Jesus to Martha, which I criticised. It’s a fair cop, and I should certainly have registered the marginal variant she points to.

Dr Parvis alludes to “good scholarly grounds” that led the RNJB translators to set aside the reading in the body of the Nestle-Aland text, in favour of that variant. In fact that reading is carried over from the original Jerusalem Bible, and it seems likely that this was simply translating the Bible de Jerusalem, which has “pourtant il en faut peu, une seule même”, as flaccid in French (and Greek) as it is in English. The pithier and more memorable “Unum est necessarium”, “One thing is necessary”, is the version embedded in Catholic tradition and prayer, as well as in biblical translation.

Dr Parvis characterises the English Standard Version (ESV), correctly enough, as a “low-church evangelical Protestant translation”. There are undoubtedly issues for Catholics in that provenance, and not merely the thorny one of inclusive language. But every English bible translation till the 20th century shared that ancestry, descending as they all do from William Tyndale’s sublime Early Tudor version.