Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, 2 Corinthians
Roughly 2,000 years after the Apostle Paul wrote to a troubled Christian community in Corinth, Richard Francis Weymouth undertook a different kind of mission: rendering the New Testament into English that actually sounded like speech. His early 20th-century translation of Second Corinthians captures the raw emotion of Paul's most personal letter, where the apostle defends his authority, confronts false teachers, and pleads with believers to complete their promised gift to the poor in Jerusalem. This is Paul at his most vulnerable. He boasts of his weakness, describes his trials in Asia Minor, and begs the Corinthians to reconcile with him before grief hardens into permanent estrangement. Weymouth's renderings of these passages possess a startling directness that the Authorised Version's archaisms sometimes obscure. Whether one approaches this text for devotional study, historical curiosity, or appreciation of translation as its own art form, Weymouth's Second Corinthians offers Paul's passionate correspondence in language that still lands with force a century later.