Laudator Temporis Acti

H.W. Garrod (1878-1960), Scholarship: Its Meaning and Value (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1946), pp. 73-74:

I sometimes wonder whether anybody ever reads the Greek Testament for pleasure, pleasure in the Greek. For myself, I have never met anyone who did, not so much as a clergyman. Just as literature, and for mere language, the English is better, the German is better. Tindale, you may say, translated the New Testament so well because he was rather like an apostle or an evangelist. That certainly might help. But I can think of a more obvious reason. If Tindale is better than his original, that, I suggest, may mean not much more than that he disposed a better language, his sixteenth-century English, a better language than the Hellenistic Greek. From the New Testament I should infer, for the theory of translation, no more than that a translation made in a good language from an original made in an inferior language is likely to be better worth reading than the original.