A Glasgow Bible

Last updated
A Glasgow Bible
A Glasgow Bible.jpg
Full nameA Glasgow Bible
AbbreviationGlasgow
LanguageScots
PublisherSaint Andrew Press
Copyright1997 by Jamie Stuart
It wis a lang time ago, right enough – thoosans an thoosans o years since. There wis nuthin whaur the earth is the noo – absolutely nuthin at aw.
'Weel noo,' God says tae himsel wan day, 'I'll fix a wee bit dod o land – doon there.'
So, tae stert wi, God ordered up some light tae brek oot ower aw the darkness.

A Glasgow Bible is a Scots paraphrase of selected passages of the Bible by Jamie Stuart (1920 - 2016) in the Glaswegian dialect. [1]

In 1981, Stuart visited the Edinburgh Festival to see Alec McGowan, who had memorised the whole of the Gospel of Mark in the Authorised Version. It caused Stuart to ponder about translating the gospel into Scots. Over the next two years, the four gospels were combined into a one-man play, 'A Scots Gospel in the Guid Scots Tongue' which toured around churches and halls in Scotland, Canada and New York state. [2]

This encouraged others to invite him to publish it into a book. The original book was called 'The Glasgow Gospel', published in 1992. The copies sold out within hours of their publication, and went top of the Scottish bestsellers' chart. [3] In the following years, he followed the success of 'The Glasgow Gospel' with two books of 'Auld Testament Tales' (in which David challenges Goliath with “Weel, come oan then, ya big scrawny plook!”). In 1997, both books were combined into a single volume called 'A Glasgow Bible'. [1]

A Glasgow Bible ran into several editions, and was also issues as a bestselling DVD featuring actors such as Tony Roper, Andy Cameron and Johnny Beattie and the Govan-born Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson. [2]

His other books include Proverbs in the Patter, a Glasgow dialect version of the Old Testament book, which includes such pearls of wisdom as: “The lazy lout (is) a pain in the behouchie tae the honest folk wha hiv tae thole him” and “The bevvy-drinker isnae clever: it’s daft tae get fu wi the hard stuff.”

In 2014 he published his autobiography, Still Running.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doric dialect (Scotland)</span> Northeastern dialect of the Scots language

Doric, the popular name for Mid Northern Scots or Northeast Scots, refers to the Scots language as spoken in the northeast of Scotland. There is an extensive body of literature, mostly poetry, ballads, and songs, written in Doric. In some literary works, Doric is used as the language of conversation while the rest of the work is in Lallans Scots or British English. A number of 20th and 21st century poets have written poetry in the Doric dialect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scots language</span> West Germanic language

Scots is an Anglic language variety in the West Germanic language family, spoken in Scotland and parts of Ulster in the north of Ireland. Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, Northern Isles, and northern Ulster, it is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Goidelic Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides, and Galloway after the sixteenth century; or Broad Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Standard English. Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300).

The Glasgow dialect, also called Glaswegian, varies from Scottish English at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum to the local dialect of West Central Scots at the other. Therefore, the speech of many Glaswegians can draw on a "continuum between fully localised and fully standardised". Additionally, the Glasgow dialect has Highland English and Hiberno-English influences owing to the speech of Highlanders and Irish people who migrated in large numbers to the Glasgow area in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While being named for Glasgow, the accent is typical for natives across the full Greater Glasgow area and associated counties such as Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire and parts of Ayrshire, which formerly came under the single authority of Strathclyde. It is most common in working class people, which can lead to stigma from members of other classes or those outside Glasgow.

William Barclay CBE was a Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister, and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow. He wrote a popular set of Bible commentaries on the New Testament that sold 1.5 million copies.

Middle English Bible translations (1066-1500) covers the age of Middle English, beginning with the Norman conquest and ending about 1500.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peshitta</span> Standard Syriac Christianity version of the Bible

The Peshitta is the standard version of the Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition, including the Maronite Church, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Malabar Independent Syrian Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syro-Malabar Church.

James Moffatt was a Scottish theologian and graduate of the University of Glasgow.

Scottish Bible Society (SBS), founded in 1809 as the Edinburgh Bible Society, amalgamated in 1861 with the Glasgow Bible Society to form the National Bible Society of Scotland, is a Scottish Christian charity that exists to make the Bible available throughout the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gospel Hall Assemblies</span>

The Gospel Halls are a group of independent Christian assemblies throughout the world that fellowship with each other through a set of shared Biblical doctrines and practices. Theologically, they are evangelical and dispensational. They are a conservative strand of the Open Brethren movement and tend to only collaborate with other assemblies when there is doctrinal agreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bible translations into Albanian</span>

The history of Bible translations into Albanian can be divided into early and modern translations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modern Scots</span> Varieties of Scots spoken since 1700

Modern Scots comprises the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, from 1700.

The complete Bible has been translated into three of the dialects of Inupiat language, the New Testament in two more and portions in another.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bible translations into Macedonian</span>

The history of Bible translations into Macedonian is connected in its early years with the history of Bible translations into Bulgarian. After the codification of Macedonian in 1945, in 1952 a liturgical edition of the four Gospels was printed as the first official translation into standard Macedonian.

Part of the Bible was first available in the Kurdish language in 1856. Modern translations of the whole Bible are available in standard Kurmanji and Sorani, with many portions in other dialects.

The Bible has been completely translated into Lowland Scots, with parts also translated. In 1513-39 Murdoch Nisbet, associated with a group of Lollards, wrote a Scots translation of the New Testament, working from John Purvey's Wycliffite Bible. However, this work remained unpublished, in manuscript form, and was known only to his family and Bible scholars. It was published by the Scottish Text Society in 1901–5. The first direct translation of a book of the Bible from one of the original languages, rather than a pre-existing English model was Peter Hately Waddell's The Psalms: frae Hebrew intil Scottis, published in 1871.

The New Testament was first published in Scottish Gaelic in 1767 and the whole Bible was first published in 1801. Prior to these, Gaels in Scotland had used translations into Irish.

The history of all Bible translations into Slavic languages begins with Bible translations into Church Slavonic. Other languages include:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scots-language literature</span>

Scots-language literature is literature, including poetry, prose and drama, written in the Scots language in its many forms and derivatives. Middle Scots became the dominant language of Scotland in the late Middle Ages. The first surviving major text in Scots literature is John Barbour's Brus (1375). Some ballads may date back to the thirteenth century, but were not recorded until the eighteenth century. In the early fifteenth century Scots historical works included Andrew of Wyntoun's verse Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland and Blind Harry's The Wallace. Much Middle Scots literature was produced by makars, poets with links to the royal court, which included James I, who wrote the extended poem The Kingis Quair. Writers such as William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Walter Kennedy and Gavin Douglas have been seen as creating a golden age in Scottish poetry. In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose also began to develop as a genre. The first complete surviving work is John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome (1490). There were also prose translations of French books of chivalry that survive from the 1450s. The landmark work in the reign of James IV was Gavin Douglas's version of Virgil's Aeneid.

Iain Donald Campbell was a minister and former Moderator in the Free Church of Scotland. He was a prolific author on a range of Biblical topics and church history. Campbell died in January 2017, and it subsequently emerged that he killed himself due to revelations surrounding Campbell having multiple extra-marital affairs with members of his congregation.

References

  1. 1 2 "Jamie Stuart, Glasgow Bible author – obituary", The Daily telegraph, 5 August 2016
  2. 1 2 "Jamie Stuart, Glasgow Bible author – obituary". The Telegraph. 2016-08-05. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 2024-05-03.
  3. "Obituary - Jamie Stuart, actor and athlete who wrote The Glasgow Bible". The Herald. 2016-08-02. Retrieved 2024-05-03.