The Four Gospels

An influential literary rendering of the four Gospels, prepared by E. V. Rieu, the founding editor of the Penguin Classics series, whose translations of Greek epic had already brought classical texts to a wide general readership. The work is a fresh translation from the Greek Gospels rather than a revision of an existing English version, and it follows an idiomatic and literary philosophy in keeping with the aims of the series in which it appeared. Its distinctive purpose is to render the evangelists in vigorous modern prose in place of the ecclesiastical diction inherited from the King James tradition, treating the Gospels as literature accessible to readers without a church background. It belongs to the mid-twentieth-century movement toward readable, non-liturgical English Bibles, and it is often cited alongside other single-translator efforts of that period.