Elsewhere, the same directness of style makes the Epistles informal and down-to-earth. There is no grandiloquence when Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘I wis fu o douts an dreid, an terrible nervish, whan I cam tae ye’ (I Cor. 2–3). Reading one of the shortest books, Paul’s Letter to Philemon, confirms how rooted Lorimer’s Scots is in daily speech. Yet as a whole his translation – which at times can be challenging even to those with a good knowledge of Scots3 – demonstrates not just the colloquial versatility of the language, but also its higher capabilities. He can make it soar in passages such as the Beatitudes and Paul’s praise of love in I Corinthians 13 (‘Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt . . .’) and he exploits to the full its vocabulary and subtleties of syntax whether recounting the Crucifixion or the apocalyptic visions of St John’s Revelation.
William Laughton Lorimer, as his son Robin acknowledges in the Editor’s Introduction, ‘like his collateral ancestor Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, was sometimes an exuberant translator’. He was well aware that there are many ways of moving a text from one language into another, and that shades of meaning will be accentuated or muted according to the options chosen. But he never allowed this to obstruct his first loyalty as a translator – to the original. David Ogston was correct when he wrote: ‘We see the nature of the man himself when we read Lorimer’s versions of some incidents and exchanges; but we remain conscious that he is forever striving to clarify his subject-matter, not simply trying to glorify the means. The Scots remains a servant of the labour thrust upon it.’4 Ironically, it was by sticking to this principle that Lorimer triumphantly demonstrated that Scots – or at least the Scots that he knew and encountered in his lifetime – was fully capable of coping with the demands the New Testament made upon it.
Robin Lorimer’s Introduction paints an engaging portrait of his father, both as a father and as a man of learning. His teaching career spanned forty-five years, interrupted only by the First World War, and it was not until the last twenty years of his life that he began his great task, and only in the final decade that he made his ‘definitive translation’. Despite – or perhaps in part because of – the religious tradition in which he was raised, he had as a young man lost his own faith (though not his respect for the faith of others), and so the question of why he chose to devote his energies to producing a Scots New Testament must be asked. Clearly that long Presbyterian heritage left its mark, giving him not only detailed knowledge of the Bible and theology, but also resilience and discipline: the boy who walked six miles a day to and from school, and who, aged ten, walked right round Loch Tay in one day, was well equipped for the long haul of his translation. He was also blessed with what appears to have been a genetic propensity for acquiring languages, and grew up in a household which enthusiastically encouraged such acquisition. His abiding interest and pleasure in Scots (again, despite or perhaps because of his mother’s insistence that her children should speak correct standard English when in polite society) was a crucial motivation: it inspired him, aged nine, to keep a notebook of Scots words and phrases used by his father’s parishioners, the three ‘auld wives’ of Strathmartine, and led to him becoming, as an adult, an expert contributor to The Scottish National Dictionary, which was being created during the same period that he was working on The New Testament in Scots. Finally, he had had instilled in him the kind of intellectual rigour, tending sometimes to pedantry, for which Scottish education in the nineteenth century was famed. All these factors gave him the tools necessary for the project he embarked on in 1946.
It was not evangelical fervour that drove him forward. Indeed there was no religious incentive for rendering the Scriptures into Scots, since the King James Bible had been in use for more than three centuries. Lorimer was motivated not by God but by culture: Scotland lacked an authentic version of the New Testament in its own Lowland tongue, and he believed it should have one. Once having adopted this resolution, he does not seem to have been the kind of man lightly to abandon it. It is of course debatable as to whether a cultural need existed for a Scots New Testament, but Lorimer did not doubt it. Part of his quite deliberate strategy, in choosing the New Testament as his text, was a belief that virtually every household in Scotland would have an English crib readily to hand.5 His achievement should be seen as part of the wider literary and artistic renaissance, initiated by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s, which reinvigorated Scottish cultural life through to the 1950s, and the influences of which continue to this day.
David Ogston, addressing the impact of Lorimer’s translation from the point of view of a minister of religion, declared, ‘We have seen the Lord apparelled in the hodden grey of our own speech, and it is marvellous in our eyes.’6 For practising Scottish Christians, reading or hearing The New Testament in Scots should indeed be an uplifting experience. But to see this book as only a religious text is to limit its appeal and its importance. It is emphatically a work of literature, especially of Scottish literature, and as such it is as much a part of the shared inheritance of those of little or no Christian faith as it is a part of the inheritance of the churches and individual Christians. To assert this does not, or should not, undermine the book’s sacred character. It does however emphasise that it belongs to us all.
In about 1520 a ‘Scotticised’ version of the New Testament was transcribed, but not printed, from an early (Wycliffite) English Bible by one Murdoch Nisbet. Since then there have been a few other renditions into Scots of different sections of both the Old and New Testaments, mostly adaptations of English versions. None of these, in scale or quality, comes close to Lorimer’s translation from the Greek. It has often been said that, had a complete and authoritative Scots Bible been produced in Reformation Scotland, the subsequent history and health of the Scots language would have been very different. If only, this lament sometimes continues, The New Testament in Scots had happened four hundred years before it did! The sentiment is understandable, but burdens Lorimer’s masterpiece with a failure for which of course neither he nor it can be held responsible. The point is, it did not happen four hundred years ago. The Lorimer translation is the product of a twentieth-century mind – a mind which, moreover, though steeped in a rich and intense Christian tradition, both personal and national, had moved away from religious faith. The late Professor John Gibson made an astute assessment in 1988 when he wrote that, for all its vigour and lyricism, Lorimer’s translation had ‘come too late to be a genuinely religious or even popular event’. However, Professor Gibson continued, its real role in the future would be to serve the Scots literary renaissance pioneered by MacDiarmid. ‘But where that renaissance will lead, and whether it will effect a rapprochement with the still surviving dialects of the Scottish regions and go on from there to achieve authentic success and a revival of Scotland’s brightness – and, if it does, where along the line religious Scotland will join in – only time will tell.’7
The regret is not that The New Testament in Scots was published in 1983 rather than in, say, 1583. However convincing the argument that the confused linguistic condition of modern Scotland is directly related to missed opportunities in the past, it will change nothing.