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PRESENTED BY

VU)

ON THE

AUTHORIZED VERSION

NEW TESTAMENT

Works by R. C. Trench, D. D., Dean of Westminster.

IN UNIFORM STYLE WITH THIS VOLUME. I.

ON THE STUDY OF WORDS.

1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. II.

ON THE LESSONS IN PROVERBS.

1 vol 12mo. Price 50 cents. III.

SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

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IV. ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

PAST AND PRESENT.

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V.

POEM S.

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VI. CALDERON, HIS LIFE AND GENIUS,

WITH SPECIMENS OP HIS PLAYS. I vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents.

VII. SERMONS ON THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.

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VIII.

ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE

NEW TESTAMENT,

IN CONNECTION WITH RECENT PROPOSALS FOR ITS REVISION

1 vol 12mo. Pric 7o cents.

PUBLISHED BY J. S. REDFIELD, NEW YORK.

ON THE

AUTHORIZED VERSION

OF THE

NEW TESTAMENT

IN CONNECTION WITH SOME RECENT PROPOSALS FOR ITS REVISION

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D. D.

DEAN OF WESTMINSTER

4UTHOR OF " SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT"—" THE STUDY OF WOBD9" " THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE PAST AND PBESENT"-" THE LESSONS IN FBOVEBBS"— " SEBMONS"— " POEMS"— " CALDEBON," ETC.

RED FIELD

34 BEEKMAN STREET, NEW YORK 1858

\ -.- • '- - • •

PREFACE.

A word or two, which is all that I have to say by way of preface, will not refer so much to the book as to the form of the book. Were the materials of this little volume to be disposed over again, I should cer- tainly prefer to follow in their disposition that sim- pler arrangement which Professor Scholefield adopted in his Hints for an Improved Translation of the New Testament. He has there followed throughout the order of the books of Scripture ; and, as these passed in succession under his review, he has made such ob- servations as seemed to him desirable, without at- tempting any more ambitious arrangement. After I had advanced so far as to make it almost impossible to recede, I found continual reason to regret that I had chosen any other plan. I am not, indeed, with- out the strongest conviction that a book, well and happily arranged on the scheme of rather bringing

O . PREFACE.

subjects to a point, and considering together matters which have a certain unity in themselves, both ought to be, and would be, more interesting and instructive than one in which the same materials were disposed in such a merely fortuitous sequence. But this ar- rangement is very difficult to attain. I can not charge myself with having spared either thought or pains in striving after it ; but am painfully conscious how little has been my success, and how unsatisfactory the re- sult. Some things, indeed, already, as they escape the confusion of MS., and assume the painful clear- ness of print, I see might be in fitter place than they are ; but much refuses still to group itself in any sat- isfying combination. This acknowledgment is not made with the desire to anticipate and avert the cen- sure which this fault in the composition of the book, to speak nothing of other more serious faults, may deserve ; but only to suggest that a better and happier distribution, though doubtless possible, was yet not so easy and obvious as one who had never made the endeavor to attain it might perhaps take for granted.

Westminster, June 24, 1858.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. Introductory Remarks page 9

CHAPTER II. On the English of the Authorized Version 19

CHAPTER III. On some Ques - ions of Translation .1 49

CHAPTER IV. On some Unnecessary Distinctions introduced 65

CHAPTER V. On some Real Distinctions effaced 84

CHAPTER VI.

On some Better PiExderings forsaken, or placed in the

Margin 97

CHAPTER YII. On some Errors of Greek Grammar in oue Version 113

8 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VIII. On some Questionable Renderings 02? Words... page 135

CHAPTER IX. On some Words wholly or partially mistranslated . . 148

CHAPTER X.

On some Charges unjustly brought against our Ver- sion 164

CHAPTER XI. On the Best Means of carrying out a Revision 173

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

It is clear that the question, u Are we, or are we not, to have a new translation of Scripture ?" or ra- ther— since few would propose this who did not wish to loosen from its anchors the whole religious life of the English people — " Shall we, or shall we not, have a new revision of the Authorized Version ?" is one which is presenting itself more and more familiarly to the minds of men. This, indeed, is not by any means the first time that this question has been ear- nestly discussed ; but that which diiferences the pres- ent agitation of the matter from preceding ones is, that on all former occasions the subject was only de- bated among scholars and divines, and awoke no in- terest in circles beyond them. The present is appa- rently the first occasion on which it has taken the slightest hold of the popular mind. But now indica- tions of the interest which it is awakening reach us from every side. America is sending us the instal-

1*

10 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

ments — it must be owned not very encouraging ones — of a New Version, as fast as she can. The wish for a revision has for a considerable time been work- ing among Dissenters here ; by the voice of one of these it has lately made itself heard in Parliament, and by the mouth of a Regius Professor in Convoca- tion. Our Reviews, and not those only which are specially dedicated to religious subjects, begin to deal with the question of revision. There are, or a little while since there were, frequent letters in the news- papers, urging, or remonstrating against, such a step — few of them, it is true, of much value, yet at the same time showing how many minds are now occupied with the subject.

It is manifestly a question of such immense impor- tance, the issues depending on a right solution of it are so vast and solemn, that it may well claim a tem- perate and wise discussion. Nothing is gained on the one hand by vague and general charges of inaccuracy brought against our Version ; they require to be sup- ported by detailed proofs. Nothing, on the other hand, is gained by charges and insinuations against those who urge a revision, as though they desired to undermine the foundations of the religious life and faith of England ; were Socinians in disguise, or Pa- pists — Socinians who hoped- that, in another transla- tion, the witness to the divinity of the Son and of the Spirit might prove less clear than in the present — Papists who desired that the authority of the English

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 11

Scripture, the only Scripture accessible to the great body of the people, might be so shaken and rendered so doubtful, that men would be driven to their Church, and to its authority, as the only authority that re- mained. As little is the matter advantaged, or in any way brought nearer to a settlement, by sentimen- tal appeals to the fact that this, which it is now pro- posed to alter, has been the Scripture of our child- hood, in which we and so many generations before us first received the tidings of everlasting life. All this, well as it may deserve to be considered, yet as argu- ment at all deciding the question, will sooner or later have to be cleared away ; and the facts of the case, apart from cries, and insinuations, and suggestions of evil motives and appeals to the religious passions and prejudices of the day — apart, too, from feelings which in themselves demand the highest respect — will have to be dealt with in that spirit of seriousness and ear- nestness which a matter affecting so profoundly the whole moral and spiritual life of the English people, not to speak of nations which are yet unborn, abun- dantly deserves.

In the pages which follow, I propose not mainly to advocate a revision, nor mainly to dissuade one, but to consider rather the actual worth of our present Translation — its strength, and also any weaknesses which may affect that strength — its beauty, and also the blemishes which impair that beauty in part — the grounds on which a new revision of it may be do-

12 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

manded — the inconveniences, difficulties, the dangers it may be, which would attend such a revision ; and thus, so far as this lies in my power, to assist others, who may not have been able to give special attention to this subject, to form a decision for themselves. I will not, in so doing, pretend that my own mind is entirely in equilibrium on the subject. ' On the whole, I am persuaded that a revision ought to come ; I am convinced that it will come. Not, however, I would trust, as yet ; for we are not as yet in any respect prepared for it; the Greek and the English which should enable us to bring this to a successful end might, it is to be feared, be wanting alike. Nor cer- tainly do I underrate the other difficulties which would beset such an enterprise ; they look, some of them, the more serious to me the more I contemplate them: and yet, believing that this mountain of difficulty will have to be surmounted, I can only trust and believe that it, like so many other mountains, will not on nearer approach prove so formidable as at a distance it appears. Only let the Church, when the due time shall arrive, address herself to this work with earnest prayer for the Divine guidance, her conscience bear- ing her witness that in no spirit of idle innovation, that only out of dear love to her Lord and his truth, and out of an allegiance to that truth which overbears every other consideration, with an earnest longing to present his Word, whereof she is the guardian, in all its sincerity to her children, she has undertaken this

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 13

hard and most perilous task, and in some way or other every difficulty will be overcome. Whatever pains and anxieties the work may cost her, she will feel herself abundantly rewarded if only she is able to offer God's Word to her children, not indeed free from all marks of human infirmity clinging to its out- ward form — for we shall have God's treasure in earthen vessels still — but with some of these blem- ishes which she now knows of removed, and altogether approaching nearer to that which she desires to see it — namely, a work without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; a perfect copy of an archetype that is perfect.

In the meantime, while the matter is still in sus- pense and debate — while it occupies, as it needs must, the anxious thoughts of many — it can not misbecome those who have been specially led by their duties or their inclinations to a more close comparison of the English Version with the original Greek, to offer whatever they have to offer, be that little or much, for the helping of others toward a just and dispas- sionate judgment, and one founded upon evidence, in regard to the question at issue. And if they consider that a revision ought to come, or, whether desirable or not, that it will come, they must wish to throw in any contribution which they have to make toward the better accomplishment of this object. Assuming that they have any right to mingle in the controversy at all, they may reasonably hope, that even if much which

14 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

they bring has long ago been brought forward by others, or must be set aside from one cause or an- other, yet that something will remain, and will sur- vive that rigid proof to which every suggestion of change should be submitted. And in a matter of such high concernment as this the least is much. To have cast in even a mite into this treasury of the Lord, to have brought one smallest stone which it is permitted to build into the walls of his house, to have detected one smallest blemish that would not otherwise have been removed, to have made in any way whatever a single suggestion of lasting value toward the end here in view, is something for which to be for ever thank- ful. It is in that intention, with this hope, that I have ventured to publish these pages.

The work, indeed, which I thus undertake, can not be regarded as a welcome one. There is often a sense of something ungenerous, if not actually unjust, in passing over large portions of our Version, where all is clear, correct, lucid, happy, awaking continual admiration by the rhythmic beauty of the periods, the instinctive art with which the style rises and falls with the subject, the skilful surmounting of difficulties the most real, the diligence with which almost all which was happiest in preceding translations has been retained and embodied in the present ; the constant solemnity and seriousness which, by some nameless skill, is made to rest upon all ; in passing over all this and much more with a few general words of rec-

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 15

ognition, and then stopping short and urging some single blemish or inconsistency, and dwelling upon and seeming to make much of this, which often in itself is so little. For the flaws pointed out are fre- quently so small and so slight, that it might almost seem as if the objector had armed his eye with a mi- croscope for the purpose of detecting that which oth- erwise would have escaped notice, and which, even if it were faulty, might well have been suffered to pass by, unchallenged and lost sight of in the general beauty of the whole. The work of Momus is never, or at least never ought to be, other than an unwel- come one.

Still less do we like the office of faultfinder, when that whose occasional petty flaws we are pointing out, has claims of special gratitude and reverence from us. It seems at once an unthankfulness and almost an im- piety to dwell on errors in that to which we for our- selves owe so much ; to which the whole religious life of our native land owes so much ; which has been the nurse and fosterer of our national piety for hundreds of years ; which, associated with so much that is sad and joyful, sweet and solemn, in the heart of every one, appeals as much to our affections as to our reason.

But admitting all this, we may still reconcile our- selves to this course by such considerations as the fol- lowing : and first, that a passing by of the very much which is excellent, with a dwelling on the very little

16 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

which is otherwise, lies in the necessity of the task undertaken. "What is good, what is perfect, may have, and ought to have, its goodness freely and thankfully acknowledged ; but it offers comparatively little mat- ter for observation. It is easy to exhaust the lan- guage of admiration, even when that admiration is intelligently and thoughtfully rendered. We are not tempted to pause till we meet with something which challenges dissent, nor can we avoid being mainly occupied with this.

Then, too, if it be urged that many of the objec- tions made are small and trivial, it can only be replied that nothing is really small or trivial which has to do with the Word of God, which helps or hinders the exactest setting forth of that Word. That Word lends an importance and a dignity to everything con- nected with it. The more deeply we are persuaded of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, the more intol- erant we shall be of any lets and hinderances to the arriving at a perfect understanding of that which the mouth of God has spoken. In setting forth his Word in another language from that in which it was first uttered, we may justly desire such an approximation to perfection as the instrument of language — to which, marvellous organ of mind as it is, there yet cleaves so much of human imperfection — will allow; and this not merely in greatest things, but in smallest.

Nor yet need the occasional shortcomings of our Translators be noted in any spirit of irreverence or

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 17

disparagement. Some of the errors into which they fell were inevitable, and belonged in no proper sense to them more than to the whole age in which they lived — as, for instance, in the matter of the Greek article. Unless we were to demand a miracle, and that their scholarship should have been altogether on a different level from that of their age, this could not have been otherwise. We may reasonably require of such a company of men, undertaking so great a work, that their knowledge should approve itself on a level with the very best which their age could sup- ply ; even as it was ; but more than this it would be absurd and unfair to demand. If other of their mis- takes might have been avoided, as is plain from the fact that predecessors or contemporaries did avoid them, and yet were not avoided by them, this only shows that the marks of human weakness and infirm- ity, which cleave to every work of men, cleave also to theirs. Let me also observe, further, that he who may undertake in any matter to correct them does not in this presumptuously affirm himself a better scholar than they were. He for the most part only draws on the accumulated stores of the knowledge of Greek which have been laboriously got together in the two hundred and fifty years that have elapsed since their work was done ; he only claims to be an inheritor in some sort of the cares specially devoted to the eluci- dation of the meaning of Holy Scripture during this period. It would be little to the honor of these ages

18 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

»

if they had made no advances herein ; little to our honor, if we did not profit by their acquisitions. This much premised, I shall proceed to consider our Au- thorized Yersion of the New Testament under certain successive aspects, devoting a chapter to each.

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 19

CHAPTER II.

ON THE ENGLISH OF THE AUTHORIZED VERSION.

The first point which I propose to consider is the English in which our Translation is composed. This has been very often, and very justly, the subject of highest commendation ; and if I do not reiterate in words of my own or of others these commendations, it is only because they have been uttered so often and so fully, that it has become a sort of commonplace to repeat them ; one fears to encounter the rebuke which befell the rhetorician of old, who, having made a long and elaborate oration in praise of the strength of Her- cules, was asked, " Who has denied it ?" at the close. Omitting, then, to praise in general terms what all must praise, it may yet be worth while to consider a very little in what those high merits, which by the confession of all it possesses, mainly consist ; nor shall I shrink from pointing out what appear to me its oc- casional weaknesses and blemishes, the spots upon the sun's face, which impair its perfect beauty. When

20 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

we seek to measure the value of any style, there are two points which claim to be considered : first, the words themselves ; and then, secondly, the words in their relations to one another, and as modified by those relations ; in brief, the dictionary and the gram- mar. Now, I should not hesitate in expressing my conviction that the dictionary of our English Version is superior to the grammar. The first seems to me nearly as perfect as possible, the other not altogether faultless.

In respect of words, we recognise the true delectus verborum on which Cicero* insists so earnestly, and in which so much of the charm of style consists. All the words used are of the noblest stamp, alike re- moved from vulgarity and pedantry ; they are neither too familiar, nor on the other side not familiar enough ; they never crawl on the ground, as little are they stilted and far-fetched. And then how happily mixed and tempered are the Anglo-Saxon and Latin voca- bles ! No undue preponderance of the latter makes the language remote from the understanding of sim- ple and unlearned men. Thus, we do not find in our Yersion, as in the Rheims, whose authors seem to have put off their loyalty to the English language with their loyalty to the English crown, ' odible' (Rom. i. 30), nor 'impudicity' (Gal. v. 19), nor * longanimity' (2 Tim. iii. 10), nor ' co-inquinations' (2 Pet. ii. 13, 20), nor < comessations' (Gal. v. 21),

* Be Oral., 3, 37.

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 21

nor ' contristate' (Ephes. iv. 30), nor ' zealatours' (Acts xxi. 20), nor ' agnition' (Philem. 6), nor ' suasible' (Jam. iii. 17), nor ' domestical' (1 Tim. v. 8), nor ' repropitiate' (Heb. ii. 17).* And yet, while it is thus, there is no extravagant attempt on the other side to put under ban words of Latin or Greek deri- vation, where there are not, as very often there could not be, sufficient equivalents for them in the homelier portion of our language ; no affectation of excluding these, which in their measure and degree have as good a right to admission as the most Saxon vocable of them all ; no attempt, like that of Sir John Cheke, who in his version of St. Matthew — in many respects a valuable monument of English — substituted 'hun- dreder' for t centurion,' ' freshman' for ' proselyte,' ' gainbirth' (that is, againbirth) for ' regeneration,' with much else of the same kind. The fault, it must be owned, was in the right extreme, but was a fault and affectation no less.

One of the most effectual means by which our Trans- lators have attained their happy felicity in diction, while it must diminish to a certain extent their claims

* Where the word itself which the Kheims translators employ is a perfectly good one, it is yet curious and instructive to observe how often they have drawn on the Latin portion of the language, where we have drawn on the Saxon ; thus, they use ' corporal' where we have 'bodily' (1 Tim. iv. 8), 'incredulity' where we have 'unbelief* (Heb. iii. 19, and often), 'precursor' where we have 'forerunner' (Heb. vi. 20^, 'dominator' where we have 'Lord' (Jude 4), 'cogita- tion' where we have 'thought' (Luke ix. 46), 'fraternity' where we have 'brotherhood' (1 Pet. ii. 17).

22 ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

to absolute originality, enhances in a far higher de- gree their good sense, moderation, and wisdom. I allude to the extent to which they have availed them- selves of the work of those who went before them, and incorporated this work into their own, everywhere building, if possible, on the old foundations, and dis- placing nothing for the mere sake of change. It has thus come to pass that our Version, besides having its own felicities, is the inheritor of the felicities in language of all the translations which went before. Tyndale's was singularly rich in these, which is the more remarkable, as his other writings do not surpass in beauty or charm of language the average merit of his contemporaries ; and though much of his work has been removed in the successive revisions which our Bible has undergone, very much of it still remains : the alterations are for the most part verbal, while the forms and moulds into which he cast the sentences have been to a wonderful extent retained by all who succeeded him. And even of his "k£%is very much sur- vives. To him we owe such phrases as " turned to flight the armies of the aliens,"* " the author and fin- isher of our faith ;" to him, generally, we owe more than to any single laborer in this field — as, indeed, may be explained partly, though not wholly, from the fact that he was the first to thrust in his sickle into this harvest. Still, while King James's Translators

* It may be said that this is obvious ; yet not so. The Rheims does not get nearer to it than "turned away the camp of foreigners."

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 23

were thus indebted to those who went before them in the same sacred office, to Tyndale above all, for innu- merable turns of successful translation, which they have not failed to adopt and to make their own, it must not be supposed that very many of these were not of their own introduction. A multitude of phrases which, even more than the rest of Scripture, have be- come, on account of their beauty and fitness, " house- hold words" and fixed utterances of the religious life of the English people, we owe to them, and they first appear in the Version of 1611 ; such, for instance, as "the Captain of our salvation" (Heb. ii. 10), "the sin which doth so easily beset us" (Heb. xii. 1), " the Prince of life" (Acts iii. 15).

But in passing, as I now propose to do, from gen- erals to particulars, it is needful to make one prelimi- nary observation. He who passes judgment on the English of our Yersion, he, above all, who finds fault with it, should be fairly acquainted with the English of that age in which this Version appeared. Else he may be very unjust to that which he is judging, and charge it with inexactness of rendering, where indeed it was perfectly exact according to the English of the time, and has only ceased to be so now through sub- sequent changes or modifications in the meaning of words. Few, I am persuaded, who have studied our Translation, and tried how far it will bear a strict comparison with the original which it undertakes to represent, but have at times been tempted to make

24 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

hasty judgments here, and to pass sentences of con- demnation which they have afterward, on better knowl- edge, seen reason to recall. Certainly, in many places where I once thought our Translators had been want- ing in precision of rendering, I now perceive that, according to the English of their own day, their Ver- sion is exempt from the faintest shadow of blame. It is quite true that their rendering has become in a certain measure inexact for us, but this from circum- stances quite beyond their control — namely, through those mutations of language which never cease, and which cause words innumerable to drift imperceptibly away from those meanings which once they owned. In many cases, no doubt, our Authorized Version, by its recognised authority, by an influence working si- lently, but not the less profoundly felt, has given fixity to the meaning of words, which otherwise they would not have possessed, has kept them in their places ; but the currents at work in language have been some- times so strong as to overbear even this influence. The most notable examples of the kind which occur to me are the following : —

Matt. vi. 25. — " Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink." This " take no thought" is certainly an inadequate transla- tion in our present English of m ^spifxvoLrs. The words seem to exclude and to condemn that just, forward- looking care which belongs to man, and differences him from the beasts which live only in the present ;

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 25

and " most English critics have lamented the inadver- tence of our Authorized Version, which, in bidding us i take no thought' for the necessaries of life, prescribes to us what is impracticable in itself, and would be a breach of Christian duty even were it possible."* But there is no ' inadvertence' here. When our Transla- tion was made, " take no thought" was a perfectly correct rendering of w fxspi/xvars. * Thought' was then constantly used as equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care ; as let witness this passage from Bacon :f " Har- ris, an alderman in London, was put in trouble, and died with thought and anxiety before his business came to an end ;'•' or still better, this from one of the Somers Tracts (its date is of the reign of Elizabeth) : " In five hundred years only two queens have died in childbirth. Queen Catherine Parr died rather of thought."% A better example even than either of these is that occurring in Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar\\ ("take thought and die for Caesar"), where " to take thought" is to take a matter so seriously to heart that death ensues.

Luke xiii. 7. — " Why cumbereth it the ground?" < Cumbereth' seems here too weak and too negative a rendering of xarap/sf, which is a word implying active, positive mischief; and so no doubt it is in the present acceptation of "to cumber ;" which means no more

* Scrivener, Notes on the New Testament, vol. i., p. 162; and cf. Alford, in loco.

t History of Henry VII. $ Vol. i., p. 172. || Act. ii., sc. 1.

2

26 ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

than " to burden." But it was not so always. " To cumber" meant once to vex, annoy, injure, trouble ; Spenser speaks of " cumbrous gnats." It follows that when Bishop Andrews quotes the present passage,* " Why troubleth it the ground ?" (I do not know from whence he derived this ' troubleth,' which is not in any of our translations), and when Coverdale renders it, " Why hindereth it the ground ?" they seem, but are not really, more accurate than our own Transla- tors were. The employment by these last of ' cum- ber,' at Luke x. 40 (the only other place in the Au- thorized Version where the word occurs), is itself decisive of the sense they ascribed to it. nepisova<ro (literally " was distracted") is there rendered by them, " was cumbered."!

Acts xvii. 23. — ' Devotions.'' This was a perfectly correct rendering of cs^aCfxara at the time our Trans- lation was made, although as much can scarcely be affirmed of it now. ' Devotions' is now abstract, and means the mental offerings of the devout worshipper ; it was once concrete, and meant the outward objects

* Works, vol. ii., p. 40.

t I have no doubt that most readers of that magnificent passage in Julius Caesar, where Antony prophesies over the dead body of Caesar the ills of which that murder shall be the cause, give to ' cumber* a wrong sense in the following lines : —

" Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy."

They understand, shall load with corpses of the slain, or, as we say, ' encumber' — so at least I understood it long. A good, even a grand sense, but it is not Shakespeare's. He means, shall trouble or mis- chief.

ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION. 27

to which these were rendered, as temples, altars, im- ages, shrines, and the like ; * Heiligthiimer' De Wette has very happily rendered it ; cf. 2 Thess. ii. 4, the only other passage in the New Testament where the word occurs^ and where we have rendered iruvra. Xeyopsvov ©sov v? tfe'/Jaa'fjia, " all that is called God or that is worshipped." It is such — not the c devotions' of the Athenians worshipping, but the objects which the Athenians devoutly worshipped — which St. Paul affirms that he ' beheld,' or, as it would be better, " accurately considered" (ava^wpwv) : yet the follow- ing passage in Sidney's Arcadia will bear out our Translators, and justify their use of ' devotions,' as accurate in their time, though no longer accurate in ours : " Dametas began to look big, to march up and down, swearing by no mean devotions that the walls should not keep the coward from him."

Acts xix. 37. — uYe have brought hither these men, who are neither robbers of churches, nor blas- phemers of your goddess." I long counted this " rob- bers of churches," as a rendering of IspotfuXoucr, if not positively incorrect, yet a slovenly and indefensible transfer of Christian language to heathen objects. But it is not so. ' Church' is in constant use in early English for heathen and Jewish temples as well as for Christian places of worship. I might quote a large array of proofs, but two will suffice. In the first, which is from Holland's Pliny* the term is ap-

* Vol. ii., p. 502.

28 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

plied to a heathen temple: "This is that Latona which you see in the Church of Concordia in Rome ;" while in the second, from Sir John Cheke's transla- tion of St. Matthew, it is a name given to the temple at Jerusalem : " And lo the veil of the Church was torn into two parts from the top downwards" (Matt, xxvii. 51).

Acts xxi. 15. — " After three days we took up our carriages and went up to Jerusalem." A critic of the early part of this century makes himself merry with these words, and their inaccurate rendering of the original: "It is not probable that the Cilician tent-maker was either so rich or so lazy." And a more modern objector to the truthfulness of the Acts asks, " How could they have taken up their carriages, when there is no road for wheels, nothing but a mountain-track, between Caesarea and Jerusalem?" But ' carriage' is a constant word in the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries* for baggage, being that which men carry, and not, as now, that which carries them. Nor can there be any doubt that it is employed by our Translators here, as also in one or two other passages where it occurs, in this sense (Judg. xviii. 21 ; 1 Sam. xvii. 22) ; and while so understood, the words " took up our carriages" are a very sufficient rendering of the sarfxevada^svoi of the original. The Geneva has it correctly, though some- what quaintly, " trussed up our fardels."

* See North's Plutarch, passim.

ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION. 29

Ephes. iv. 3. — "Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Passages like this, in which the verb ' endeavor' occurs, will some- times seem to have been carelessly and loosely trans- lated ; when,, indeed, they were rendered with perfect accuracy according to the English of that day. " En- deavor," it has been well said, " once denoted all possible tension, the highest energy that could be directed to an object. With us it means the last, feeble, hopeless attempt of a person who knows that he can not accomplish his aim, but makes a conscience of going through some formalities for the purpose of showing that the failure is not his fault."* More than one passage suffers from this change in the force of ' endeavor ;' as 2 Pet. i. 15, and this from the Ephe- sians still more. If we attach to S endeavor' its pres- ent meaning, we may too easily persuade ourselves that the Apostle does no more than bid us to attempt to preserve this unity, and that he quite recognises the possibility of our being defeated in the attempt. He does no such thing ; he assumes success. 2tfou<5a- gWss means " giving all diligence," and ' endeavoring* meant no less two centuries and a half ago.

1 Tim. v. 4. — "If any widow have children or nephews" But why, it has been asked, are Ixyova, or descendants, translated ' nephews' here ? and why should * nephews' be specially charged with this duty of supporting their relatives ? The answer is that

* Lincoln's Inn Sermons, by F. D. Maurice, p. 156.

30 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUE VERSION.

1 nephews' (= ' nepotes') was the constant word for grandchildren and other lineal descendants, as wit- ness the following passages ; this from Hooker : " With what intent they [the apocryphal books] were first published, those words of the nephew* of Jesus do plainly signify: < After that my grandfather Jesus had given himself to the reading of the Law and of the Prophets, he purposed also to write something pertaining to learning and wisdom ;' "* and this from Holland : " The warts, black moles, spots, and freck- les of fathers, not appearing at all upon their own children's skin, begin afterward to put forth and show themselves in their nephews, to wit, the children of their sons and daughters."! There is no doubt that ' nephews' is so used here, as also at Judg. xii. 14. Words which, like this, have imperceptibly shifted their meaning, are peculiarly liable to mislead ; though by no fault of the Translators. This one has misled a scholar so accurate as the late Professor Blunt; who, in his Church of the First Three Centuries, p. 27, has urged the circumstance that in the apos- tolic times the duties of piety extended so far, that t children only, but even nephews, were expected to support their aged relations. Words of this character differ from words which have become wholly obsolete. These are like rocks which stand out from the sea ; we are warned of their presence, and there is little danger of our making shipwreck upon them. But

* Ecclesiastical Polity, b. v,, c. xx. t Plutarch's Morals, p. 555

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 31

words like those which have been just cited, as famil- iar now as when our Version was made, but employed in quite different meanings from those which they then possessed, are like hidden rocks, which give no notice of their presence, and on which we may be ship- wrecked, if I may so say, without so much as being aware of it. It would be manifestly desirable that these unnoticed obstacles to our seizing the exact sense of Scripture, obstacles which no carelessness of our Translators, but which Time in its onward course, has placed in our way, should, in case of any revision, be removed. " Res fug-iunt, vocabula manent" — this is the law of things in their relation to words, and it renders necessary at certain intervals a read- justment of the two.

In thus changing that which by the silent changes of time has become liable to mislead, we should only be working in the spirit, and according to the evident intention, which in their time guided the Translators of 1611. They evidently contemplated, as part of their task, the removing from their revision of such words as in the lapse of years had become to their contemporaries unintelligible or misleading. For in- stance, ' to depart' no longer meant to separate ; and just as at a later day, in 1661, " till death us depart" was changed in the Marriage Service for that which now stands there, " till death us do part" so in their revision ' separate' was substituted for ' depart' (u depart us from the love of G-od") at Rom. viii. 39.

32 ON TEE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

At Matt, xxiii. 25, we have another example of the same. The words stood there up to the time of the Geneva version, " Ye make clean the outer side of the cup and of the platter ; but within they are full of bribery and excess." * Bribery,' however, about their time was losing, or had lost, its meaning of rapine or extortion — was, therefore, no longer a fit rendering of apitayy) ; the ' bribour' or ' briber' was not equiva- lent to the robber : they, therefore, did wisely and well in exchanging ' bribery' for ' extortion' here. They dealt in the same spirit with ' noisome' at 1 Tim. vi. 9. In the earlier versions of the English Church, and up to their revision, it stood, " They that will be rich fall into temptation and snares, and into many foolish and noisome (/3Xa/3spacr) lusts." 'Noisome,' that is, when those translations were made, was sim- ply equivalent to noxious or hurtful ;* but in the be- ginning of the seventeenth century it was acquiring a new meaning, the same which it now retains, namely, that of exciting disgust rather than that of doing act- ual hurt or harm. Thus, a tiger would have been < noisome' in old English, a skunk or a polecat would be 'noisome' in modern. Here was reason enough for the change which they made.

Indeed, our only complaint against them in this matter is, that they did not carry out this side of

* " He [the superstitious person] is persuaded that they be gods indeed, but such as be noisome, hurtful, and doing mischief unto men." — Holland, Plutarch's Morals, p. 260.

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 33

their revision consistently and to the full. For in- stance, in respect of this very word, they have suffered it to remain in some other passages, from which, also, it should have disappeared. Three or four of these occur in the Old Testament, as Job xxxi. 40 ; Ps. xci. 3 ; Ezek. xiv. 21 ; only one in the New, Rev. xvi. 2 ; where xaxov sXxos is certainly not " a noisome sore" in our sense of ' noisome,' that is, offensive or disgusting, but an ' evil/ or, as the Rheims has it, " a cruel sore." It is the same with ' by-and-by.' This, when they wrote, was ceasing to mean immediately. The inveterate procrastination of men had caused it to designate a remoter term ; even as * presently' does not any longer mean, at this present, but, in a little while ; and " to intend anything" is not now, to do it, but to mean to do it. They did well, therefore, that in many cases, as at Mark ii. 12, they did not leave 1 by-and-by' as a rendering of evdiwg and sudCs ; but they would have done still better if they had removed it in every case. In four places (Matt. xiii. 21 ; Mark vi. 25 ; Luke xvii. 7 ; xxi. 9) they have suffered it to remain. Again, l to grudge' was ceasing in their time to have the sense of, to murmur openly, and was already signifying to repine inwardly; a 'grudge' was no longer an open utterance of discontent and displeasure at the dealings of another,* but a secret resentment

* " Yea, without grudging Christ suffered the cruel Jews to crown Him with most sharp thorns, and to strike him with a reed." — Ex- amination of William Thorpe, in Fox's Book of Martyrs.

2*

34 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

■

thereupon entertained. It was only proper, therefore, that they should replace ' to grudge' by l to murmur,' and a ' grudge' by a ' murmuring,' in such passages as Mark xiv. 5 ; Acts vi. 1. On two occasions, however, they have suffered ' grudge' to stand, where it no longer conveys to us with accuracy the meaning of the origi- nal, and even in their time must have failed to do so. These are 1 Pet. iv. 9, where they render avsu yoyyvd^uv " without grudging ;" and Jam. v. 9, where pws <freva%srs is rendered " Grudge not." These renderings were inherited from their predecessors, but the retention of them was an oversight.

On another occasion, our Translators have failed to carry out to the full the substitution of a more appro- priate phrase for one which, indeed, in the present instance, could have been at no time worthy of praise, or other than more or less misleading ; I allude to Acts xii. 4 : " Intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people." They plainly felt that ' Easter,' which had designated first a heathen, and then a Chris- tian festival, was not happily used to set forth a Jew- ish feast, even though that might occupy the same place in the Jewish calendar which Easter occupied in the Christian ; and they therefore removed ' Easter' from places out of number, where in the earlier ver- sion it had stood as the rendering of na^«, substitu- ting ' passover' in its room. With all this they have suffered 'Easter' to remain in this single passage — sometimes, I am sure, to the perplexity of the English

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 35

reader. ■ Jewry' in like manner, which has been re- placed by * Judaea' almost everywhere, has yet been allowed, I must needs believe by the same oversight, twice to remain (Luke xxiii. 5 ; John vii. 1).

In dealing with obsolete words, the case is not by any means so plain. And yet it does not seem diffi- cult to lay down a rule here ; the difficulties would mainly attend its application. The rule would seem to me to be this : Where words have become perfectly unintelligible to the great body of those for whom the translation is made, the tfiurai of the Church, they ought clearly to be exchanged for others ; for the Bible works not as a charm, but as reaching the heart and conscience through the intelligent faculties of its hearers and readers. Thus it is with ' taches,' ' ouches,' 1 boiled,' * ear' (arare), l daysman,' in the Old Testa- ment, words dark even to scholars, where their schol- arship is rather in Latin and Greek than in early English. Of these, however, there is hardly one in the New Testament. There is, indeed, in it no incon- siderable amount of archaism, but standing on a quite different footing ; words which, while they are felt by our people to be old and unusual, are yet, if I do not deceive myself, perfectly understood by them, by wise and simple, educated and uneducated alike. These, shedding round the sacred volume the rever- ence of age, removing it from the ignoble associations which will often cleave to the language of the day, should on no account be touched, but rather thank-

86 ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

fully accepted and carefully preserved. For, indeed, it is good that the phraseology of Scripture should not be exactly that of our common life ; should be re- moved from the vulgarities, and even the familiarities, of this ; just as there is a sense of fitness which dic- tates that the architecture of a church should be dif- ferent from that of a house.

It might seem superfluous to urge this ; yet it is far from being so. It is well-nigh incredible what words it has been sometimes proposed to dismiss from our Version, on the ground that they " are now almost or entirely obsolete." Symonds thinks " clean escaped" (2 Pet. ii. 18) " a very low expression ;" and, on the plea of obsoleteness, Wemyss proposed to get rid of ' straightway,' ' haply,' ' twain,' ' athirst,' ' wax,' 4 lack,' ' ensample,' 'jeopardy,' 'garner,' 'passion,' with a multitude of other words not a whit more apart from our ordinary use. Purver, whose New and Literal Translation of the Old and New Testa- ment appeared in 1764, has an enormous list of ex- pressions that are " clownish, barbarous, base, hard, technical, misapplied, or new coined;" and among these are 'beguile,' 'boisterous,' 'lineage,' 'perse- verance,' ' potentate,' ' remit,' ' seducers,' ' shorn,' 4 swerved,' ' vigilant,' ' unloose,' ' unction,' ' vocation.' For each of these (many hundreds in number) he pro- poses to substitute some other.

This retaining of the old diction in all places where a higher interest, that, namely, of being understood

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 87

by all, did not imperatively require the substitution of another phrase, would be most needful, not merely for the reverence which attaches to it, and for the avoiding every unnecessary disturbance in the minds of the people, but for the shunning of another and not a trivial harm. Were the substitution of new for old carried out to any large extent, this most injurious consequence would follow, that our Translation would be no longer of a piece, not any more one web and woof, but in part English of the seventeenth century, in part English of the nineteenth. Now, granting that nineteenth-century English is as good as seventeenth, of which there may be very serious doubts, still they are not the same ; the differences between them are considerable : some of these we can explain, others we must be content only to feel. But even those who could not explain any part of them would yet be con- scious of them, would be pained by a sense of incon- gruity, of new patches on an old garment, and the one failing to agree with the other. Now, all will admit that it is of vast importance that the Bible of the nation should be a book capable of being read with delight — I mean quite apart from its higher claim as God's Word to be read with devoutest rev- erence and honor. It can be so read now. But the sense of pleasure in it, I mean merely as the first English classic, would be greatly impaired by any alterations which seriously affected the homogeneous- ness of its style. And this, it must be remembered,

38 ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

is a danger altogether new, one which did not at all beset the former revisions. From Tyndale's first edi- tion of his New Testament in 1526 to the Authorized Version there elapsed in all but eighty-five years, and this period was divided into four or five briefer por- tions by Cranmer's, Coverdale's, the Geneva, the Bish- ops' Bible, which were published in the interval be- tween one date and the other. But from the date of King James's Translation (1611) to the present day nearly two hundred and fifty years have elapsed ; and more than this time, it is to be hoped, will have elapsed before any steps are actually taken in this matter. When we argue for the facilities of revision now from the facilities of revision on previous occasions, we must not forget that the long period of time which has elapsed since our last revision, so very much longer than lay between any of the preceding, has in many ways immensely complicated the problem, has made many precautions necessary now which would have been superfluous then.*

* It is an eminent merit in the Revision of the Authorized Version by Five Clergymen, of which the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Romans have already appeared, that they have not merely urged by precept, but shown by proof, that it is possible to revise our Ver- sion, and at the same time to preserve unimpaired the character of the English in which it is composed. Nor is it only on this account that we may accept this work as by far the most hopeful contribution which we have yet had to the solution of a great and difficult problem ; but also as showing that where reverent hands touch that building, which some would have wholly pulled down that it might be wholly bui t up again, these find only the need of here and there replacing a stone which had been incautiously built into the wall, or which, trust- worthy material once, has now yielded to the lapse and injury of time,

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 39

Certainly, too, when we read what manner of stuff is offered to us in exchange for the language of our Authorized Version, we learn to prize it more highly than ever. Indeed, we hardly know the immeasura- ble worth of its religious diction till we set this side by side with what oftentimes is proffered in its room. Thus, not to speak of some suggested changes which would be positively offensive, we should scarcely be gainers in perspicuity or accuracy, if for James i. 8, which now stands, " A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways," we were to read, " A man unsteady in his opinions is unconstant in all his actions' ' (We- myss). Neither would the gain be very evident, if, " I have a baptism to be baptized with" (Luke xii. 50) gave place to, " I have an immersion to undergo." — " Wrath to come" we may well be contented to re- tain, though we are offered " impending vengeance" in its place. " In chambering and wantonness" would not be improved, even though we were to substitute for it " in unchaste and immodest gratifications." Dr. Campbell's work " On the Four Gospels" contains dis sertations which have their value ; yet the advantage would not be great of superseding Mark vi. 19, 20, as it now stands, by the following : " This roused Hero-

while they leave the building itself in its main features and framework untouched. Differing as the Revisers occasionally do even among themselves, they will not wonder that others sometimes differ from the conclusions at which they have arrived ; but there can, I think, be no difference upon this point, namely, that their work deserves the most grateful recognition of the Church.

40 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

dias' resentment, who would have killed John ; but could not, because Herod respected him, and, know- ing him to be a just and holy man, protected him, and did many things recommended by him, and heard him with pleasure. " I have only seen quoted in a news- paper, and, therefore, it may possibly be a jest, that in the American Bible Union's Improved Version such improvements as the following occur : " That in the name of Jesus, every knee should bend of heavenlies, and of earthlies, and of infernals" (Phil. ii. 4) ; " Ye have put on the young man" (Col. iii. 10). Of Har- wood's Literal Translation of the New Testament (London, 1768) and the follies of it, not far from blasphemous, it is unnecessary, to give any example.

When we consider, not the words of our Version one by one, but the words in combination, as they are linked to one another, and by their position influence and modify one another ; in short, the accidence and the syntax, this, being good, is yet not so good as the selection of the words themselves. There are, un- doubtedly, inaccuracies and negligences here. Bishop Lowth long ago pointed out several faults in the gram- matical construction of sentences ;* and although it must be confessed that now and then he is hypercriti- cal, and that his abjections will not stand, yet others which he has not pressed would be found to supply the place of those which must therefore be withdrawn.

* In his Short Introduction to English Grammar.

ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION. 41

But here, too, and before entering on this matter, there is room for the same observation which was made in respect of the words of our Translation. Many charges have here also been lightly, some igno- rantly, made. Our Translators now and then appear ungrammatical, because they give us, as they needs must, the grammar of their own day, and not the grammar of ours. It is curious to find Bishop New- come* taking them to task for using ' his' or ' her,' where they ought to have used < its ;' as in such pas- sages as the following : " But if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted ?" (Matt. v. 13.) " Charity doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own." (1 Cor. xiii, 5 ; cf. Rev. xxii. 2.) " This sometimes," he says, " introduces strange confusion." But this confusion, as he calls it, when they wrote was inevitable, or at least could only be avoided by cir- cumlocutions, as by the use of ' thereof.' Nor, more- over, did this usage present itself as any confusion of masculine and neuter, or of personal and impersonal, at the time when our Translators wrote ; for then that very serviceable, but often very inharmonious, little word, ' its,' as a genitive of ' it,' had not appeared, or had only just appeared, timidly and rarely, in the language,! and ' his' was quite as much a neuter as a masculine.

* Historical View of the English Biblical Translations. D ublin, 1792, p. 289.

1 1 have elsewhere entered on this matter somewhat more fully {English Past and Present, 3d ed., p. 124 sqq.), and have there bb-

42 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

Others have in other points found fault with the grammar of our Version, where, in like manner, they " have condemned the guiltless," their objections fre- quently serving only to reveal their own unacquaint- ance with the history and past evolution of their na- tive tongue — an unacquaintance excusable enough in others, yet hardly in those who set themselves up as critics and judges in so serious and solemn a matter as is here brought into judgment. This ignorance is, indeed, sometimes surprising. Thus. Wemyss* com- plains of a false concord at Rev. xviii. 17 : " For in one hour so great riches is come to nought." He did not know that ' riches' is properly no plural at all, and the final ' s' in it no sign of a plural, but belong- ing to the word, in its French form, ' richesse,' and that ' riches' has only become a plural, as ' alms' and ' eaves' are becoming such, through our forgetfulness of this fact. When Wiclif wants a plural, he adds another ' s,' and writes ' richessis' (Rom. ii. 4 ; Jam. v. 2). It is true that at the time when our Version

served that 'its' nowhere occurs in our Authorized Version. Lev. xx. 5 ("of its own accord") has been since urged as invalidating my assertion ; but does not do so really : for reference to the first, or in- deed to any of the early editions, will show that in them the passage stood " of it own accord." Nor is ' it' here a misprint for ' its ;' for we have exactly the same "by it own accord" in the Geneva Version, Acts xii. 10 ; and in other English books of the beginning of the sev- enteenth century, which never employ 'its.' There is a fuller treat- ment of this word and the first appearance of it, in Mr. Craik's very valuable work, On the English of Shakespeare, p. 91, and I should desire what I have written on the matter to be read with the correc- tions which he supplies.

* Biblical Gleanings, p. 212.

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 43

was made, * riches' was already commonly regarded and dealt with as a plural ; it is there generally so used, and therefore it would have been better if, for consistency's sake, they had so used it here ; but there is no grammatical error in the case, any more than when Shakespeare writes, " The riches of the ship is come to shore." The same objector finds fault with " asked an alms'1 (Acts iii. 3), and suggests, " asked some alms," in its room, evidently on the same as- sumption that c alms' is a plural. Neither can ho tolerate our rendering of 1 Tim. v. 23 : " Use a little wine for thine often infirmities ;" but complains of ' often,' an adverb, here used as though it were an adjective, while, indeed, the adjectival use of ' oft,' ' often,' surviving still in i o/Ztimes,' ' oftentimes,' is the primary, the adverbial merely secondary.

But all frivolous, ungrounded objections set aside, there will still remain a certain number of passages where the grammatical construction is capable of im- provement. In general the very smallest alteration will set everything right. These are some : —

Heb.v. 8. — " Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered." If the Apostle had been putting a possible hypothetical case, this would be correct ; for example, " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him" (Job xiii. 15), is without fault. But here, on the contrary, he is assuming a certain conceded fact, that * Christ was a Son, and though He vms such, yet in this way of suf-

44 ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION.

fering He learned obedience. 'Though' is here a concessive, conditional particle, the Latin t etsi' or 6 etiamsi' as followed by an indicative, and should have itself been followed by such in our Version. It ought to be, " Though He was a Son," &c.

John ix. 31. — "If any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him He heareth." As in the passage just noted, we have a subjunctive instead of an indicative, an actual objective fact dealt with as though it were only a possible subjective conception, so here we have just the converse, an indicative in- stead of a subjunctive. It is true that in modern English the subjunctive is so rapidly disappearing, that " If any man doeth his will" might very well pass. Still it was an error when our Translators wrote ; and there is, at any rate, an inconcinnity in allowing the indicative ' doeth,' in the second clause of the sentence, to follow the subjunctive ' be' in the first, both equally depending upon 'if;' one would gladly, therefore, see a return to " do his will,*' which stood in Tyndale's version.

Matt. xvL 15. — " Whom say ye that I am ?" The English is faulty here. It ought plainly to be, " Wlw say ye that I am ?" as is evident if only f who' be put last : " Ye say that I am who ?" The Latin idiom, " Quern me esse dicitis ?" probably led our Transla- tors, and all who went before them, astray. Yet the cases are not in the least parallel. If the English idiom had allowed the question to assume this shape,

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 45

" Whom say ye me to be ?" then the Latin form would have been a true parallel, and also a safe guide ; the accusative ' whom9 not, indeed, as governed by ' say,' but as corresponding to the accusative ' me J being then the only correct case, as the nominative ' who,' to answer to the nominative ' I,' is the only correct one in the passage as it now stands. The mistake repeats itself on several occasions : thus, at Matt, xvi. 13 ; Mark viii. 27, 29 ; Luke ix. 18, 20 ; Acts xiii. 25.

Heb. ix. 5. — " And over it the Cherubims of glory." But ' Cherubim' being already plural, it is excess of expression to add another, an English plural, to the Hebrew, which our Translators on this one occasion of the word's occurrence in the New Testament, and constantly in the Old, have done. " Cherubiws of glory," as it is in the Geneva and Kheims versions, is intelligible and quite unobjectionable. The Hebrew singular is then dealt with as a naturalized English word, forming an English plural ; just as there would be nothing to object to ' automatons' or ' terminuses,' which ultimately, no doubt, will be the plurals of * automaton' and < terminus ;' but there would be much to ' automatas' or * terminis,' or to ' erratas,' though, strangely enough, we find this in Jeremy Taylor, as we do ' synonymas' in Mede. It might be free to use either ' geniuses' or ' genii' as the plural of ' genius' (we do, in fact, employ both, though in different senses), but not ' genifs ;' and it is exactly this sort of error into which our Translators have here fallen.

46 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

Rev. xxi. 12. — " And had a wall great and high." The verb ' had' is here without a nominative. All that is necessary is to return to Wiclif 's translation : " And it had a wall great and high."

Again, we much regret the frequent use of adjec- tives ending in ' ly,' as though they were adverbs. This termination, being that of so great a number of our adverbs, easily lends itself to the mistake, and at the same time often serves to conceal it. Thus, our Translators at 1 Cor. xiii. 5 say of charity, that it " doth not behave itself unseemly." Now this, at first hearing, does not sound to many as an error, because the final ' ly' of the adjective ' unseemly' causes it to pass with them as though it were an adverb. But substitute another equivalent adjective ; say, " doth not behave itself improper" or " doth not behave itself unbefitting" and the violation of the laws of grammar makes itself felt at once. Compare Tit. ii. 12 : " soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world." It ought to be ' godlily' here, as ' unseeni- lily' in the other passage ; or if this repetition of the final ' ly' is unpleasing to the ear, as indeed it is, then some other word should be sought. The error recurs in 2 Tim. iii. 12 ; Jude 15 ; and is not unfrequent in the Prayer Book. Thus, we find it in the thirty-sixth Article : " We decree all such to be rightly, orderly, and lawfully consecrated."*

* It is curious to note how frequent the errors are arising from the same cause. Thus, I remember meeting in Fox's Book of Mar-

ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 47

Should a revision of our Version ever be attempted, it seems to me that the same principle should rule in dealing with archaic forms as I have sought to lay down in respect of archaic words. Nothing but ne- cessity should provoke alteration. Thus, there can be no question that our old English prseterites, 6 clave,' * drave,' ' sware,' ' brake,' ' strake,' should stand. They are as good English now as they were two centuries and a half ago : they create no perplexity in the minds of any ; while at the same time they profitably differ- ence the language of Scripture from the language of common and every-day life. But it is otherwise, as it seems to me, with archaisms which are in positive opposition to the present usage of the English tongue. Thus, ' his' and ' her' should be replaced by ' its,' at such passages as Matt. v. 13 ; Mark ix. 50 ; Luke xiv. 34 ; Rev. xxii. 2 ; 1 Cor. xiii. 5 ; which might be done almost without exciting the least observation ; so also ' which' by ' who,' wherever a person and not a thing is referred to. This, too, might be easily done, for

tyrs (I have not the exact reference) the words, "if this be perpend." Here it is clear that Fox was for the moment deceived by the termi- nation of 'perpend,' so like the usual termination of the past parti- ciple ; and did not observe that he ought to have written, " if this be perpended." In our own day Tennyson treats 'eaves' as if the final 's' were the sign of the plural, which being dismissed, one might have 'eave' for a singular; and he writes the "cottage eave." But 'eaves' (' efese' in the Anglo-Saxon) is itself the singular. With the same momentary inadvertence Lord Macaulay deals with the final ' s' in ' Cyclops' as though it were the plural sign, and speaks in one of the late volumes of his history of a ' Cyclop ;' and pages might be filled with mistakes which have their origin in similar causes.

48 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION.

our Translators have no certain law here ; for instance, in the last chapter of the Romans, * which' occurs seven times, referring to a person or persons, ' who' exactly as often. The only temptation to retain this use of ' which' would be to mark by its aid the distinction between fang and fe, so hard to seize in English. At the same time a retention with this view would itself involve many changes, seeing that our Translators did not turn < which' to this special service, but for tig and fang employed < who' and < which' quite promiscuously. But upon this part of my subject that which has been said must suffice.

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 49

CHAPTER III.

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

How many questions at once present themselves, many among them of an almost insuperable difficulty in their solution, so soon as it is attempted to transfer any great work from one language into another ! Let it be only some high and original work of human ge- nius, the Divina Commedia, for instance, and how many problems, at first sight seeming insoluble, and which only genius can solve, even it being often con- tent to do so imperfectly, to evade rather than to solve them, at once offer themselves to the translator !* The loftier and deeper, the more original a poem or other composition may be, the more novel and unusual the sphere in which it moves, by so much the more these difficulties will multiply. They can therefore nowhere be so many and so great as in the rendering

* Only to few translators, and to them only on rare occasions, is it given to deserve the magnificent praise which Jerome gives to Hilary, and to his translations from the Greek (Ep., 33) : "Quasi captivos scnsus in suam linguam victoris jure transposuit."

3

50 ON SOME QUESTIONS OP TRANSLATION.

of that Book which is sole of its kind ; which reaches far higher heights and far deeper depths than any- other ; which has words of God and not of man for its substance ; while the importance of success or fail- ure, with the far-reaching issues which will follow on the one or the other, sinks in each other case into ab- solute insignificance as compared with their impor- tance here.

Thus, the missionary translator, if he be at all aware of the awful implement which he is wielding, of the tremendous crisis in a people's spiritual life which has arrived, when their language is first made the vehicle of revealed truths, will often tremble at the work he has in hand ; tremble lest he should be permanently lowering or confusing the whole religious life of a people, by choosing a meaner and letting go a nobler word for the setting forth of some leading truth of redemption. Even those who are wholly ignorant of Chinese can yet perceive how vast the spiritual inter- ests which are at stake in China, how much will be won, or how much lost, for the whole spiritual life of that people, it may be for ages to come, according as the right or the wrong word is selected by the trans- lators of the Scriptures into Chinese for expressing the true and the living God.* As many of us as are igno- rant of the language can be no judges in the contro- versy whicli on this matter is being carried on, but

* See the Rev. S. C. Malan's Who is God in China, Shin or Shang- tef

ON SOME QUESTIONS OP TRANSLATION. 51

we can all feel how enormous the interests which are at stake.

And even where the issues are not so vast and awful as in this case, how much may turn on having or not having the appropriate word ! Very often there is none such ; and some common, some profane word has to be seized, and set apart, and sanctified, and gradually to be impregnated with a higher and ho- lier meaning than any which, before its adoption into this sacred service, it knew. Sometimes, when the trans- fer is being made into a language which has already received a high development, the embarrassment will not be this, but the opposite to this. Two, or it may be more, words will present themselves — each inade- quate, yet each with its own advantages, so that it shall be exceedingly difficult for the most skilful mas- ter of language to determine which ought to be pre- ferred. Thus, it was not indifferent whether Aoyag should be rendered in ecclesiastical Latin l Sermo' or ' Verbum.' The fact that ' Verbum' has from the be- ginning been the predominant rendering, and that * Verbum' is a neuter impersonal, possessing no such mysterious duplicity of meaning as Ao/oj, which is at once the l Word' and the ' Reason,' has, I do not hesi- tate to affirm, modified the whole development of Latin theology in respect of the personal " Word of God." I do not, indeed, believe that the advantages which in ' Verbum' are lost, would have been secured by the choosing of ' Sermo' rather ; any gains from this would

52 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

have been accompanied by more than countervailing losses. I can not, therefore, doubt that the Latin Church did wisely and well in preferring * Verbum' to ' Sermo ;' indeed, it ultimately quite disallowed the latter ; but still the doubts and hesitation which ex- isted for some time upon this point* illustrate well the difficulty of which I am speaking.

Or take another question, not altogether unlike this. Was the old ' pcenitentia,' or the ' resipiscen- tia,' which some of the Reformers sought to introduce in its room, the better rendering of ii.era.voia ? should peruvosTrs be rendered c pcenitete' or ' resipiscite' ?f The Roman Catholic theologians found great fault with Beza, that instead of the ' pcenitentia,' hallowed by long ecclesiastical usage, and having acquired a certain prescriptive right by its long employment in the Yulgate, he, in his translation of Scripture, sub- stituted ' resipiscentia.' Now Beza, and those who stood with him in this controversy, were assuredly right in replying, that while a serious displeasure on the sinner's part at his past life is an important ele- ment in all true fjtsravoia or repentance, still ' pceniten- tia' is at fault, in that it brings out nothing but this, leaves the changed mind for the time to come, which is the central idea of the original word, altogether unexpressed and untouched ; that, moreover, ' resipi-

* See Petavius, De Trin., vi., 1. 4.

t See Fred. Spanheim's Dub. Evangelica, pars 3a, dub. vii. ; Camp- bell, On the Four Gospels, vol. i., p. 292, sqq.

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 53

scentia' was no such novelty, Lactantius having al- ready shown the way in a rendering with which now so much fault was found. Taking his ground rigidly on etymology, Beza was quite right ; but it was also true, which he did not take account of, that ^eravoia, even before it had been assumed into scriptural usage, and much more after, had acquired a superadded sense of regret for the past, or 4 hadiwist' (had-I-wist), as our ancestors called it ; which, if * pcenitentia' seemed to embody too exclusively, his ' resipiscentia,' making at least as serious an omission, hardly embod- ied at all. On the whole, I can not but think that it would have been better to leave ' pcenitentia' undis- turbed, while yet how much on either side there was here to be urged !

It may be worth while to consider a little in what ways our own Translators have sought to overcome some of these difficulties of translation, which have met them, as they have met all others, so to speak, on the threshold of their work. Of course, wherever they acquiesced in preceding solutions of these diffi- culties, they adopted and made them their own ; and we have a right to deal with them as responsible for such.

Let us take, first, a question which in all transla- tion is constantly recurring— this, namely : In what manner ought technical words of the one language, which have no exact equivalents in the other, to be rendered ; measures, for instance, of wet and dry, as

54 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

the ficvrog and xcpo; of Luke xvi. 6, 7 ; the f«*-£»icfa of John ii. 6 ; coins, such as the Sifywjgwv of Matt. xvii. 24 ; the ava.<rrg of Matt. xvii. 27 ; the dpa-xM °f Luke xv. 8 ; titles of honor and authority which have long since ceased to be, and to which, at best, only remote resemblances now exist, as the yfajx/xaTS^ and wswxopog of Acts xix. 35 ; the 'Atfjap^ai of the same chapter, ver. 31 ; the avAfaearos of Acts xiii. 7 ?

The ways in which such words may be dealt with reduce themselves to four, and our Translators, by turns, have recourse to them all. The first, which is only possible when the etymology of the word is clear and transparent, is to seize this, and to produce a new technical word which shall utter over again in the language of the translation what the original word uttered to its own. This course was chosen when they rendered iAps.es tayos, " Mars-hill" (Acts xvii. 22), Aido'tf^wrov, < the Pavement' (John xix. 13) ; when Sir John Cheke rendered ix«<rov«r a f^o.c, ' hundreder' (Matt. viii. 5), tfeXijvia^ojXEvoff, 'mooned' (Matt. iv. 24). But the number of words which allow of this repro- duction is comparatively small. Of many the etymol- ogy is lost ; many others do not admit the formation of a corresponding word in another language. This scheme, therefore, whatever advantages it may possess, can of necessity be very sparingly applied.

Another method, then, is to choose some generic word, such as must needs exist in both languages, the genus of which the word to be rendered is the species,

ON SOME QUESTIONS OP TRANSLATION. 55

and, without attempting any more accurate designa- tion, to employ this. Our Translators have frequently taken this course ; they have done so, rendering /3>og-, xo'pof, x°""L alike by ' measure' (Luke xvi. 6, 7 ; Rev. vi. 6), with no endeavors to mark the capacity of the measure ; fya^^ ^y " piece of silver" (Luke xv. 8), cVaWp by " piece of money" (Matt. xvii. 27), av^aro^ by 'deputy' (Acts xiii. 8), tfrfowTjyoi by 'magistrates' (Acts xvi. 2z), lutayoi by a wise men" (Matt. ii. 1). A manifest disadvantage which attends this course is the want of a close correspondence between the origi- nal and the copy, a certain vagueness which is given to the latter, with the obliteration of strongly-marked lines.

Or, thirdly, they may seek out some special word in the language into which the translation is being made, which shall be more or less an approximative equivalent for that in whose place it stands. "We have two not very happy illustrations of this scheme in ' town-clerk,' as the rendering of ypa^arslg (Acts xix. 35), 'Easter' as that of n^xa (Acts xii. 4). The turning of lA^rs^tg into 'Diana' (Acts xix. 24), of '£pf/% into ' Mercurius' (Acts xiv. 12), are, in fact, other examples of the same, although our Translators themselves, no doubt, were not aware of it, seeing that in their time the essential distinction between the Greek and the Italian mythologies, and the fact that the names of the deities in the former were only adapted with more or less fitness to the deities of the

56 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

latter, was unknown even to scholars. This method of translating has its own serious drawback, that, al- though it often gives a distinct and vigorous, yet it runs the danger of conveying a more or less false, impression. Except by a very singular felicity, and one which will not often occur, the word selected, while it conveys some truth, must also convey some error bound up with the truth. Thus, xoSpfarrg is not a 'farthing' (Mark xii. 42), nor (fyvapwv a ' penny* (Matt. xx. 2), nor perp-qrr.s a ' firkin' (John ii. 6) ; not, I mean, our farthing, or penny, or firkin. So, too, if u piece of money" is a vague translation of fy*XM (Luke xv. 8), Wiclif's ' bezant' and Tyndale's i grote' involve absolute error. Add to this the dan- ger that the tone and coloring of one time and age may thus be substituted for that of another, of the modern world for the ancient, as when Holland, in his translation of Livy, constantly renders " Pontifex Maximus" by ' Archbishop,' and it will be seen that the inconveniences attending this course are not small. There remains only one other way possible : To take the actual word of the original, and to transplant it unchanged, or at most with a slight change in the termination, into the other tongue, in the trust that time and use will, little by little, cause the strange- ness of it to disappear, and that its meaning will grad- ually be acquired even by the unlearned reader. We have done this in respect of many Hebrew words in the Old Testament, as ' Urim,' ' Thummim,' ' ephod,'

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 57

6 shekel,' ' cherub,' ' seraphim,' ' cor,' ' bath,' ' ephah ;' and with some Greek in the New, as ' tetrarch,' ' prose- lyte,' ' Paradise,' 'pentecost,' ' Messias ;' or, by adopting these words from preceding translations have acqui- esced in the fitness of this course. The disadvantage of it evidently is, that in many cases the adopted word continues always an exotic for the mass of the people : it never tells its own story to them, nor be- comes, so to speak, transparent with its own meaning.

It is impossible to adhere rigidly and constantly to any one of these devices for representing the things of one condition of society by the words of another ; they must all in their turn be appealed to, even as they all will be found barely sufficient. Our Trans- lators have employed them all. Their inclination, as compared with others, is perhaps toward the second, the least ambitious, but at the same time the safest, of these courses. Once or twice they have chosen it when one of the other ways appears manifestly pref- erable, as in their rendering of avdCirarog by ' deputy' (Acts xiii. 7, 8, 12), ' proconsul' being ready made to their hands, with Wiclif 's authority for its use.

There is another question, doubtless a perplexing one, which our Translators had to solve ; I confess that I much regret the solution at which they have arrived. It was this : how should they deal with the Hebrew proper names of the Old Testament, which had gradually assumed a form somewhat different from their original on the lips of Greek-speaking Jews, and

3*

58 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

which appeared in these their later Hellenistic forms in the New Testament ? Should they bring them back to their original shapes ? or suffer them to stand in their later deflections ? Thus, meeting 'RXia: in the Greek text, should they render it ' Ellas' or ' Elijah' ? I am persuaded that for the purpose of keeping vivid and strong the relations between the Old and New Testament in the minds of the great body of English hearers and readers of Scripture, they should have recurred to the Old Testament names ; which are not merely the Hebrew, but also the English names, and which, therefore, had their right to a place in the English text ; that 'HXi'aj, for instance, should have been translated into that which is not merely its He- brew, but also its English equivalent, ' Elijah,' and so with the others. Let us just seek to realize to our- selves the difference in the amount of awakened atten- tion among a country congregation, which Matt. xvii. 10 would create, if it were read thus, " And his dis- ciples asked him, saying, Why then say the Scribes that Elijah must first come ?" as compared with what it now is likely to create. As it is, we have a double nomenclature, and as respects the unlearned members of the Church, a sufficiently perplexing one, for a large number of the kings and prophets, and other personages, of the earlier Covenant. Not to speak of 1 Elijah' and ' Elias,' we have ' Elisha' and ' Eliseus,' ' Hosea' and ' Osee,' ' Isaiah' and ' Esaias,' i Uzziah' and s Ozias,' ' Hezekiah' and ' Ezechias,' ' Korah' and

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 59

' Core' (commonly pronounced as a monosyllable in our National Schools), ' Rahab' and ■ Rachab,' and (most unfortunate of all) ' Joshua' and ' Jesus.'

It is, indeed, hardly possible to exaggerate the con- fusion of which the ' Jesus' of Heb. iv. 8 must be the occasion to the great body of unlearned English read- ers and hearers, not to speak of a slight perplexity arising from the same cause at Acts vii. 45. The fourth chapter of the Hebrews is anyhow hard enough ; it is only with strained attention that we follow the Apostle's argument. But when to its own difficulty is. added for many the confusion arising from the fact that 'Jesus' is here used, not of Him whose name is above every name, but of the son of Nun, known ev- erywhere in the Old Testament by the name of ' Josh- ua,' the perplexity to many becomes hopeless. It is in vain that our Translators have added in the mar- gin , " that is Joshua ;" for all practical purposes of avoiding misconception the note, in most of our Bibles omitted, is useless. In putting ' Jesus' here they have departed from all our preceding Versions, and from many foreign. Even if they had counted that the letter of their obligation as Translators, which yet I can not think, bound them to this, one would willingly have here seen a breach of the letter, that so they might better keep the spirit.

There is another difficulty, entailing, however, no such serious consequences, even if the best way of meeting it is not chosen : how, namely, to deal with

60 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

Greek and Latin proper names ? to make them in their terminations English, or to leave them as we find them ? Our Translators in this matter adhere to no constant rule. It is not merely that some proper names drop their classical terminations, as ' Paul,' and * Saul,' and ' Urban,'* while others, as ' Sylvanus,' which by the same rule should be i Sylvan,' and ' Mer- curius,' retain ft. This inconsistency is prevalent in all books which have to do with classical antiquity. There is almost no Roman history in which ' Pompey' and ' Antony' do not stand side by side with ' Augus- tus' and ' Tiberius.' Merivale's, who always writes 1 Pompeius' and ' Antonius,' is almost the only excep- tion which I know. If this were all, there would be little to find fault with in an irregularity almost, if not quite, universal, and scarcely to be avoided with- out so much violence done to usage as to make it doubtful whether the gain exceeded the loss.f But in our Version the same name occurs now with a Latin ending, now with an English ; as though it were now ' Pompeius' and now ' Pompey,' now 'Antonius' and now 1 Antony,' in the same volume, or even the same page, of some Roman history. Consistency in such details is avowedly difficult ; and the difficulty of attaining it

* So it ought to be printed in our modern Bibles, not ' Urbane/ which is now deceptive, though it was not so according to the orthog- raphy of 1611; it suggests a trisyllable, and the termination of a female name. Jt is Oip0av6v in the original.

t See an article with the title, Orthographic Mutineers, in the Mis- cellaneous Essays of De Quineey.

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 61

must have been much enhanced by the many hands that were engaged in our Version. But it is strange that not in different parts of the New Testament only, which proceeded from different hands, we have now 4 Marcus' (Col. iv. 10 ; Philem. 24 ; 1 Pet. v. 13), and now ' Mark' (Acts xii. 12, 25 ; 2 Tim. iv. 11) ; now ' Jeremias' (Matt. xvi. 14), and now ' Jeremy' (Matt, ii. 17) ; now ' Apollos' (Acts xviii. 24 ; xix. 1), now ' Apollo'* (1 Cor. iii. 22 ; iv. 6) ; now " Simon, son of Jona" (John i. 42), and now " Simon, son of Jonas" (John xxi. 15, 16, 17) ; now * Timotheus' (Acts xvi. 1), and now ' Timothy' (Heb. xiii. 21) ; but in the same chapter we have TipMeog rendered first ' Timothy' (2 Cor. i. 1), and then 'Timotheus' (ib., ver. 19). In like manner the inhabitants of Crete (Kp9jTss) are now ' Cretes' (Acts ii. 11), which can not be right, and now ' Cretians' (Tit. i. 12).

There are other inconsistencies in the manner of dealing with proper names. Thus, 7Apeng Uayos is ' Areopagus' at Acts xvii. 19, while three verses fur- ther on the same is rendered ' Mars-hill.' In which of these ways it ought to have been translated may very fairly be a question ; but one way or other,, once chosen, should have been adhered to. Then, again, if our Translators gave, as they properly did, the Latin termination to the names of cities, ' Ephesws,' ' Mile-

* This latter form, which was manifestly inconvenient, as confound- ing the name of an eminent Christian teacher with that of a heathen deity, has been tacitly removed from later editions of our Bible, but existed in all the earlier.

62 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

tws,'* not i Ephesos,' ' Miletos,' they should have done this throughout, and written ' Assws' (Acts xx. 13, 14), and ' Pergarnws' (Rev. i. 11 ; ii. 12), not ' Assos' and ' Pergamos.' In regard of this last, it would have been better still if they had employed the form 4 Per- gamum ;' for while no doubt there are examples of the feminine Tiigyap.*g in Greek authors,! they are excessively rare, and the city's name is almost always written Higymp* m Greek, and ' Pergamum' in Latin. J It is the carrying of one rule through which one desires in these matters, and this is not seldom ex- actly what we miss. Thus, seeing that in the enu- meration of the precious stones which constitute the foundations of the New Jerusalem (Rev. xxi. 19, 20), all with the exception of two, which are capable of receiving an English termination, do receive it, ' beryl* and not ' beryllus,' ' chrysolite' || and not ' chrysolithus,' 4 jacinth' and not ' jacinthus,' we might fairly ask that these should not be exceptionally treated. It should therefore be ' chrysoprase,' and not ' chrysoprasus.'

* A singular mistake, the use of 'Miletww' at 2 Tim. iv. 20, has been often noted. This is one of the errors into which our Transla- tors would probably not have fallen themselves, but have inherited it from the Versions preceding, all which have it. Yet it is strange that they did not correct it here, seeing that it, or a similar error, ' Mileton/ had at Acts xx. 15, 17, been by them discovered and removed, and the city's name rightly given, ' Miletus/

t Ptol., v. 2, cf. Lobeck's Phrynichus, p. 422.

% Xenophon, Anab., vii. 8, 8 ; Strabo, xiii. 4 ; Pliny, H. N.t xxxv. 46.

|| Mis-spelt ' chrysolite,' and the etymology obscured, in all our modern editions, but correctly given in the exemplar edition of 1611.

ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 63

Zagfoos is somewhat more difficult to deal with ; but the word is as much an adjective here as (f^pdivos at Rev. iv. 3, Xi'docr, which is there expressed, being here understood (we have " Sardius lapis" in Tertullian), and it would have been better to translate " a sardine stone" here as has been done there ; tfcipdw, not <*J.?5iog, is the Greek name of this stone, and ' sarda' the Latin, which last Holland has naturalized in English, and written c sard.' The choice lay between " sardine stone" and ' sard ;' unless, indeed, they had boldly ventured upon ' ruby.' ' Sardius/ which they have employed, as it seems to me, is anyhow incorrect, though the Yulgate may be quoted in its favor.

Hammond affirms, and I must needs consider with reason, that " Tres Tabernse" should have been left in its Latin form (Acts xxviii. 15), and not rendered " The Three Taverns." It is a proper name, just as much as "Appii Forum," which occurs in the same verse, and which rightly we have not resolved into <; The Market of Appius." Had we left " Tres Ta- bernae" untouched (I observe De Wette does so), we should then have only dealt as the sacred historian himself has dealt with it, who has merely written it in Greek letters, not turned into equivalent Greek words. As little should we have turned it into English.

Sometimes our Translators have carried too far, as I can not but think, the turning of qualitative geni- tives into adjectives. Oftentimes it is prudently done, and with a due recognition of the Hebrew idiom which

64 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION.

has moulded the Greek phrase with which they have to deal. Thus, " forgetful hearer" is unquestionably better than " hearer of forgetfulness" (Jam. i. 25) ; " his natural face" than " face of his nature," or " of his generation" (ib.); " unjust steward" than " stew- ard of injustice" (Luke xvi. 8). Yet at other times they have done this without necessity, and occasion- ally with manifest loss. " Son of his love," which the Rheims version has, would have been better than "beloved son"* (Col. i. 13), and certainly "the body of our vileness," or " of our humiliation," bet- ter than " our vile body ;" " the body of his glory" than " his glorious body" (Phil. iii. 21). " The un- certainty of riches" would be better than " uncer- tain riches" (1 Tim. vi. 17), " children of the curse" than " cursed children" (2 Pet. ii. 14). " The glo- rious liberty of the children of God" (Rom. viii. 21), not merely comes short of, but expresses something very different from, " the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (see Alford, in loco). Doubtless the accumulated genitives are here awkward to deal with ; it was probably to avoid them that the transla- tion assumed its present shape ; but still, when higher interests are at stake, such awkwardness must be en- dured, and elsewhere our Translators have not shrunk from it, as at Rev. xvi. 19 : " The cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath."

* Augustine (De Trin., xv. 19) lays a dogmatic stress on the geni- tive (" Fi/ius caritatis ejus nullus est alius, quam qui de substantia Ejus est gem'tus"), but this may be questioned.

UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 65

CHAPTER IV.

ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED.

Let me here, before entering on this subject, make one remark, which, having an especial reference to the subject-matter of this and the following chapter, more or less bears upon all. It has been already ob- served that the advantages doubtless were great, of coming, as our Translators did, in the rear of other translators, of inheriting from those who went before them so large a stock of work well done, of successful renderings, of phrases consecrated already by long usage in the Church. It was a signal gain that they had not, in the fabric which they were constructing, to make a new framework throughout, but needed only here and there to insert new materials where the old from any cause were faulty or out of date ; that of them it was not demanded that they should make a translation where none existed before ; nor yet that they should bring a good translation out of a bad or an indifferent one ; but only a best, and that not out

6t3 UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED.

of one, but out of many good ones, preceding. None who have ever engaged in the work of translating but will freely acknowledge that in this their gain was most real ; and they well understood how to turn these advantages to account.

Yet vast as these doubtless were, they were not without certain accompanying drawbacks. He who revises, especially when he comes to the task of revis- ion with a confidence, here abundantly justified, in the general excellency of that which he is revising, is in constant danger of allowing his vigilance to sleep, and of thus passing over errors, which he would not him- self have' originated, had he been thrown altogether on his own resources. I can not but think that in this way the watchfulness of our Translators, or revi- sers rather, has been sometimes remitted ; and that errors and inaccuracies, which they would not them- selves have introduced, they have yet passed by and allowed. A large proportion of the errors in our Translation are thus an inheritance from former ver- sions. This is not, indeed, any excuse, for they who passed them by became responsible for them ; but is merely mentioned as accounting for the existence of many. With this much of introduction, I will pass on to the proper subject of this chapter.

Our Translators sometimes create distinctions such as have no counterparts in their original, by using two or more words to render at different places, or it may be at the same place, a single word in the Greek

UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 67

text. I would not by any means affirm that such va- rieties of rendering are not sometimes, nay frequently, inevitable. It manifestly would not be possible to represent constantly one word in one language by one in another. If this has ever been proposed as an in- flexible rule, it must have been on the assumption that words in one language cover exactly the same spaces of meaning which other words do in another, that they have exactly the same many-sidedness, the same elas- ticity, the same power of being applied, it may be, now in a good sense, now in a bad. But nothing is further from the case. Words are enclosures from the great outfield of meanings ; but different languages have enclosed on different schemes, and words in different languages which are precisely co-extensive with one another, are much rarer than we incuriously assume.

It is easy to illustrate this, the superior elasticity of a word in one language to that of one which is in part its equivalent in another. Thus, we have no word in English which at once means heavenly mes- sengers and earthly, with only the context determin- ing which is intended. There was no choice, there- fore, but to render wyyskm by ' messengers' at Luke vii. 24 ; ix. 52 ; Jam. ii. 25 ; however it was translated ' angels' in each other passage of the New Testament where it occurs. Again, no word in English has the power which fjiotyog has in Greek, of being used at will in an honorable sense or a dishonorable. There was

68 UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED

no help, therefore, but to render jaayci by ' wise men,'* or some such honorable designation, Matt. ii. 1 ; and /xa^ocr by ' sorcerer,' Acts xiii. 6.

Thus, again, it would have been difficult to repre- sent napowX'/]<ro£, applied now to the Holy Spirit (John xiv. 16, 26), and now to Christ (1 John i. 21), by any single word. ' Paraclete' would alone have been pos- sible ; and such uniformity of rendering, if indeed it could be called rendering at all, would have been dearly purchased by the loss of ' Comforter' and ' Ad- vocate'— both of them Latin words, it is true, but much nearer to the heart and understanding of Eng- lishmen than the Greek < Paraclete' could ever have becomcf

So, too, it would have been unadvisable to render ycupis as the compilation of one person by another, al- ways ' Sir/ or always ' Lord.' The word has a wider range than either of these two ; it is only the two to- gether which cover an equal extent. ' Sir,' in many cases, would not be respectful enough ; ' Lord' in some

* Milton, indeed, speaks of these wise men as the " star-led wiz- ards," and ' wizard' is the word which Sir John Cheke employs in his translation of St. Matthew; but the word is scarcely honorable enough for the nayct of this place, nor opprobrious enough for the [tayoi of the Acts.

t We should not forget, in measuring the fitness of ' Comforter,' that the fundamental idea of ' Comforter,' according to its etymology and its early use, is that of ' Strengthened' and not ' Consoler ;' even as the 7rjpa«Aijros is one who, being summoned to the side of the ac- cused or imperilled man (advocatus), stands by to aid and to encour- age. See the admirable note in Hare's Mission of the Comforter, pp. 521-527.

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would be too respectful (John xx. 15). Our Trans- lators have prudently employed both; and in most cases have shown a fine tact in their selection of one or the other. My only doubt is, whether, in the con- versation of our Lord with the Samaritan woman (John iv.), they should not have changed the ' Sir,' which is perfectly in its place at ver. 11, where she is barely respectful to her unknown interrogator, into * Lord' at ver. 15, or, if not there, yet certainly at ver. 19. The Rheims version, beginning, as we do, with ' Sir,' already has exchanged this for 4 Lord' at ver. 15 ; and thus delicately indicates the growing reverence of the woman for the mysterious stranger whom she has met beside Jacob's well.

We do not, then, make a general complaint against our Translators that they have varied their words where the original does not vary ; oftentimes this va- riation was inevitable ; or, if not inevitable, yet was certainly the more excellent way ; but that they have done this where it was wholly gratuitous, and where sometimes the force, vigor, and precision of the origi- nal have consequently suffered not a little. It is true that the adoption of this course was not on their parts altogether of oversight ; and it will be only fair to hear what they, in an "Address to the Reader," now seldom or never reprinted, but, on many accounts, well worthy of being so,* say upon this matter ; and

* Their " pedantic and uncouth preface" Symonds calls it. There would certainly be pedantry in any one now writing with such rich-

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how they defend what they have done. " Another thing," they say, " we think good to admonish thee of (gentle reader), that we have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men some- where have been as exact as they could that way. Truly, that we might not vary from the sense of that which we had translated before, if the word signified the same in both places (for there be some words be not of the same sense everywhere), we were especially careful, and made a conscience according to our duty. But that we should express the same notion in the same particular word ; as, for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by purpose , never to call it intent; if one where journeying, never travel- ling ; if one where think, never suppose ; if one where pain, never ache ; if one where joy, never gladness, &c, thus to mince the matter, we thought to savor more of curiosity than wisdom, and that rather it would breed scorn in the atheist, than bring profit to

ness and fullness of learned allusion, a pedantry from which our com- paratively scanty stores of classical and ecclesiastical learning would effectually preserve most among us. But this preface is, on many grounds, a most interesting study, as giving at considerable length, and in various aspects, the view of our Translators themselves in regard of the work which they had undertaken ; and ' uncouth' as this objector calls it, every true knower of our language will acknowledge it a masterpiece of English. Certainly it would not be easy to find a more beautiful or affecting piece of writing than the twenty or thirty lines with which the fourth paragraph, " On the praise of the Holy Scriptures," concludes.

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the godly reader. For is the kingdom of God become words or syllables ? why should we be in bondage to them, if we may be free, use one precisely when we may use another no less fit, as commodiously ? We might also be charged (by scoffers) with some unequal dealing toward a great number of good English words. For as it is written of a certain great philosopher, that ho should say, that those logs were happy that were made images to be worshipped ; for their fellows, as good as they, lay for blocks behind the fire : so if we should say, as it were, unto certain words, ' Stand up higher, have a place in the Bible always,' and to others of like quality, ' Get ye hence, be banished for ever,' we might be taxed peradventure with St. James's words, namely, ' To be partial in our selves and judges of evil thoughts.' "

This is their explanation — to me, I confess, an in- sufficient one, whatever ingenuity may be ascribed to it ; and for these reasons. It is clearly the office of translators to put the reader of the translation, as nearly as may be, on the same vantage-ground as the reader of the original ; to give him, so far as this is attainable, the same assistances for understanding his author's meaning. Now, every exact and laborious student of his Greek Testament knows that there is almost no such help in some passage of difficulty, doc- trinal or other, as to turn to his Greek Concordance, to search out every other passage in which the word or words wherein the difficulty seems chiefly to reside,

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occur, and closely to observe their usage there. It is manifestly desirable that the reader of the English Bible should have, as nearly as possible, the same re- source. But if, where there is one and the same word in the original, there are two, three, half a dozen, in the version, he is in the main deprived of it. Thus, he hears the doctrine of the atonement discussed ; he would fain turn to all the passages where ' atonement' occurs ; he finds only one (Rom. v. 11), and of course is unaware that in other passages where he meets ' rec- onciling,' and ' reconciliation' (Rom. xi. 15 ; 2 Cor. v. 18, 19), it is the same word in the original. In words like this, which are, so to speak, sedes doctrines, one regrets, above all, variation and uncertainty in rendering.

Thus, it will sometimes happen, that when St. Paul is pursuing a close train of reasoning, and one which demands severest attention, the difficulties of his ar- gument, not small in themselves, are aggravated by the use of different words where he has used the same ; the word being sometimes the very key of the whole ; as, for instance, in the fourth chapter of the Romans. Aoy»'fo/xai occurs eleven times in this chap- ter. We may say that it is the key-word to St. Paul's argument throughout, being everywhere employed most strictly in the same sense, and that a technical and theological. But our Translators have no fixed rule of rendering it. Twice they render it ' count' (ver. 3, 5) ; six times < impute' (ver. 6, 8, 11, 22, 23, 24) ;

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and three times ' reckon' (ver. 4, 9, 10) ; while at Gal. iii. 6, they introduce a fourth rendering, ' ac- count.' Let the student read this chapter, employing everywhere ' reckon,' or, which would be better, ev- erywhere i impute,' and observe how much of clearness and precision St. Paul's argument would in this way acquire.

In other places no doctrine is in danger of being obscured, but still the change is uncalled for and in- jurious. Take, for instance, Rev. iv. 4 : " And round about the throne (fyo'vou) were four-and-twenty seats" (fyo'voi). It is easy to see the motive of this variation ; and yet if the inspired Apostle was visited with no misgivings lest the creature should seem to be en- croaching on the dignity of the Creator, and it is clear that he was not — on the contrary, he has, in the most marked manner, brought the throne of God and the thrones of the elders together — certainly the Trans- lators need not have been more careful than he had been, nor made the elders to sit on ' seats,' and only God on a ' throne.' This august company of the four- and-twenty elders represents the Church of the Old and the New Testament, each in its twelve heads ; but how much is lost by turning their ' thrones' into 1 seats ;' for example, the connection of this Scripture with Matt. xix. 28 ; and with all the promises that Christ's servants should not merely see his glory, but share it, that they should be cuvfyovoi with Him (Rev. iii. 21), this little change obscuring the truth that

4

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they are here set before us as (fvpfioufikeCwres (1 Cor. iv. 8 ; 2 Tim. ii. 12), as kings reigning with Him! This truth is saved, indeed, by the mention of the golden crowns on their heads, but is implied also in their sitting, as they do in the Greek but not in the English, on seats of equal dignity with his, on ' thrones.' The same scruple which dictated this change makes itself felt through the whole translation of the Apoca- lypse, and to a manifest loss. In that book is set forth, as nowhere else in Scripture, the hellish parody of the heavenly kingdom ; the conflict between the true King of the earth and the usurping king ; the loss, therefore, is evident, when for " Satan's throne" is substituted " Satan's seat" (ii. 13) ; for " the throne of the beast," " the seat of the beast" (xvi. 10).

A great master of language will often implicitly refer in some word which he uses to the same word, or, it may be, to another of the same group or family, which he or some one else has just used before ; and where there is evidently intended such an allusion, it should, wherever this is possible, be reproduced in the translation. There are two examples of this in St. Paul's discourse at Athens, both of which have been effaced in our Version. Of those who encoun- tered Paul in the market at Athens, some said, " He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods" (Acts xvii. 18). They use the word xarayyihs^i and he, remembering and taking up this word, retorts it upon them : " Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him

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set I forth (xaTa/ys'XXw) unto you" (ver. 23). He has their charge present in his mind, and this is his an- swer to their charge. It would more plainly appear such to the English reader, if the Translators, having used " setter forth" before, had thus returned upon the word, instead of substituting, as they have done, ' declare' for it. The Rheims version, which has i preacher' and i preach,' after the Yulgate * annuntia- tor' and ' annuntio,' has been careful to retain and indicate the connection.

But the finer and more delicate turns of the divine rhetoric of St. Paul are more seriously affected by another oversight in the same verse. "We make him there say, "As I passed by, and beheld your devo- tions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the Unknown God (dyvutfrw 0s£). Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly (ayvoouvrg^) worship, Him declare I unto you." But if anything is clear, it is that St. Paul in a/voouvres intends to take up the preceding ayvwtfrw; the chime of the words, and also, probably, the fact of their etymological connection, leading him to this. He has spoken of their altar to an " Unknown God," and he proceeds, " whom, therefore, ye worship un- knowing^ Him declare I unto you." ' Ignorantly' has the further objection that it conveys more of rebuke than St. Paul, who is sparing his hearers to the utter- most, intended.

In other passages also the point of a sentence lies in the recurrence and repetition of the same word,

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which yet they have failed to repeat ; as in these which follow : —

1 Cor. iii. 17. — "If any man defile (<pd£j'psi) the temple of God, him shall G-od destroy (yQepef)." It is the fearful law of retaliation which is here pro- claimed. He who ruins shall himself be ruined in turn. It shall be done to him, as he has done to the temple of God. Undoubtedly it is hard to get the right word, which will suit in both places. ' Corrupt* is the first which suggests itself; yet it would not do to say " If any man corrupt the temple of God, him shall God corrupt." The difficulty which our Trans- lators felt, it is evident that the Yulgate felt the same, which, in like manner, has changed its word : " Si quis autem templum Dei violaverit, disperdet ilium Deus." Yet why should not the verse be rendered, " If any man destroy the temple of God, him shall God destroy" ?

Matt. xxi. 41. — A difficulty of exactly the same kind exists here ; where yet the xaxouj xaxug of the original ought, in some way or other, to have been preserved ; as in this way it might very sufficiently be : " He will miserably destroy those miserable men." — Neither would it have been hard at 2 Thess. i. 6, to retain the play upon words, and to have rendered toTs 8\i(3ov<fiv ufjoaf dxtyiv, " affliction to them that afflict you," instead of " tribulation to them that trouble you," there being no connection in English between the words ' tribulation' and ' trouble,' though some-

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thing of a likeness in sound : while yet the very pur- pose of the passage is to show that what wicked men have measured to others shall be measured to them again.

Let me indicate other examples of the same kind, where the loss is manifest. Thus, if at Gal. iii. 22, (fwixkerfev is translated ' hath concluded,' CuyxXsiofASvoi in the next verse, which takes it up, should not be rendered ' shut up.' The Vulgate has well, i conelu- sit' and ' conclusi.' Let the reader substitute ' hath shut up' for l hath concluded' in ver. 22, and then read the passage. He will be at once aware of the gain. In like manner, let him take Rom. vii. 7, and read " I had not known lust (sMufxiav) except the law had said, Thou shalt not lust (o-jx s-Tridufjwjtfeis) ;" or Phil. ii. 13 : " It is God which worketh (o svspyojv) in you both to will and to ivork (to evspyfiv) ;" and the passages will come out with a strength and clearness which they have not now. So, too, if at 2 Thess. ii. 6, to xariyov is rendered " what ivithholdeth" 6 xarg^wv in the verse following should not be " he who letteth." While, undoubtedly, there is significance in the imper- sonal to xars-^ov exchanged for the personal 6 xaTs'^wv, there can be no doubt that they refer to one and the same person or institution ; but this is obscured by the change of the word. So, too, I would have gladly seen the connection between "ks^o^svoi and Xs»Vsrai at Jam. i. 4, 5, reproduced in our Yersion. ' Lacking' and ' lack,' which our previous versions had, would

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have done it. The " patience and comfort of the Scriptures" (Rom. xv. 4) is derived from " the God of patience and comfort" (ver. 5) ; this St. Paul would teach, who uses both times -n-apaxX^ : but there is a slight obscuration of the connection between the ' com- fort* and the Author of the l comfort' in our Version, which, on the second occasion, has for ' comfort' need- lessly substituted ' consolation.'

How many readers have read in the English the third chapter of St. John, and missed the remarkable connection between our Lord's words at ver. 11, and the Baptist's taking up of those words at ver. 32 ; and this because nuprvpla, is translated ' witness' on the former occasion, and ' testimony' on the latter! — "Why, again, we may ask, should li/3pj£ xa\ £*ifi.»'a be " hurt and damage" at Acts xxvii. 10 ; and " harm and loss," at their recurrence, ver. 21 ? Both ren- derings are good, and it would not much import which had been selected ; but whichever had been employed on the first occasion ought also to have been employed on the second. St. Paul, repeating in the midst of the danger the very words which he had used when counselling his fellow-voyagers how they might avoid that danger, would remind them, that so he might obtain a readier hearing now, of that neglected warn- ing of his, which the sequel had only justified too well.

These are less important, and might well be passed by, if anything could be counted unimportant which helps or hinders ever so little the more exact setting

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forth of the Word of God. Thus, in the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. xx. 1), oiWeoVoVtjff is ' householder,' ver. 1 ; it should scarcely be " good man of the house" at ver. 11.* As little should the "governor of the feast" of John ii. 8, be " the ruler of the feast" in the very next verse ; or the " goodly apparel," of Jam. ii. 2, be the " gay clothing" of the verse following, the words of the original in each case remaining unchanged.

Again, it would have been clearly desirable that where in two or even three Gospels exactly the same words, recording the same event or the same conver- sation, occur in the original, the identity should have been expressed by the use of exactly the same words in the English. This continually is not the case. Thus, Matt. xxvi. 41, and Mark xiv. 38, exactly cor- respond in the Greek, while in the translation the words appear in St. Matthew : " Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation ; the spirit indeed is wil- ling, but the flesh is weak ;" in St. Mark : " Watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation ; the spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak." So, too, in a quotation from the Old Testament, where two or more sacred writers cite it in identical words, this fact

* Scholefield (Hints, p. 8) further objects to this last rendering as having " a quaintness in it not calculated to recommend it." But it had nothing of the kind at the time our Translation was made. Com- pare Spenser, Fairy Queen, iv. 5, 34 : —

" There entering in, they found the goodman self Full busily upon his work ybent."

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ought to be reproduced in the version. It is not so in respect of the important quotation from Gen. xv. 6 ; but on the three occasions that it is quoted (Rom. iv. 3 ; Gal. iii. 6 ; Jam. ii. 23) it appears with variations, slight, indeed, and not in the least affecting the sense, but yet which would better have been avoided. Again, the phrase 6<fpri tjuSia$, occurring twice in the New Testament, has so fixed, and, I may say, so technical a significance, referring as it does to a continually- recurring phrase of the Old Testament, that it should not be rendered on one occasion, " a sweet-smelling savor" (Eph. v. 2), on the other, " an odor of a sweet smell" (Phil. iv. 18).

Sometimes interesting and important relations be- tween different parts of Scripture would come out more strongly, if what is precisely similar in the ori- ginal had reappeared as precisely similar in the trans- lation. The Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Co- lossians profess to have been sent from Rome to the East by the same messenger (cf. Eph. vi. 21, 22 ; Col. iv, 7, 8) ; they were written, therefore, we may confidently conclude, about the same time. When we come to examine their internal structure, this ex- actly bears out what under such circumstances we should expect in letters proceeding from the pen of St. Paul — great differences, but at the same time re- markable points of contact and resemblance, both in the thoughts and in the words which are the garment of the thoughts. Paley has urged this as an internal

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evidence for the truth of those statements which these Epistles make about themselves. This internal evi- dence doubtless exists even now for the English read- er ; but it would press itself on his attention much more strongly, if the exact resemblances in the origi- nals had been represented by exact resemblances in the copies. This oftentimes has not been the case. Striking coincidences in language between one Epistle and the other, which exist in the Greek, do not exist in the English. For example, svipyeta is * working/ Eph. i. 19 ; it is ' operation,' Col. ii. 12 ; ra-reivotppotfu'v*} is ' lowliness,' Eph. iv. 2 ; " humbleness of mind," Col. iii. 12 ; <fvpf3t(3a%6txevov is ' compacted,' Eph. iv. 16 ; 4 knit together,' Col. ii. 19, with much more of the same kind ; as is accurately brought out by the late Professor Blunt,* who draws one of the chief motives why the Clergy should study the Scriptures in the original languages, from the shortcomings which exist in the translations of them.

It may be interesting, before leaving this branch of the subject, to take a few words, and to note the variety of rendering to which they are submitted in our Version. I have not taken them altogether at random, yet some of these are by no means the most remarkable instances in their kind. They will, how- ever, sufficiently illustrate the matter in hand.

'Adsrs'w, 4 to reject' (Mark vi. 26) ; < to despise' (Luke

* Duties of the Parish Priest, p. 71. The whole section (pp. 47- 76) is eminently instructive.

4*

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x. 16) ; ' to bring to nothing' (1 Cor. i. 19) ; ' to frus- trate' (Gal. ii. 21) ; ' to disannul' (Gal. iii. 15) ; ' to cast off' (1 Tim. v. 12).

'Avatfrarow, 'to turn upside down' (Actsxvii. 6); ' to make an uproar' (Acts xxi. 38) ; 'to trouble' (Gal. v. 12).

•AflroxaXu^gj ' revelation' (Rom. ii. 5) ; ' manifesta- tion' (Rom. viii. 19) ; ' coming' (1 Cor. i. 7) ; ' ap- pearing' (1 Pet. i. 7).

AsXsa£w, ' to entice' (Jam. i. 14) ; l to beguile' (2 Pet. ii. 14) ; ' to allure' (2 Pet. ii. 18).

Zo<pof, ' darkness' (2 Pet. ii. 4) ; ' mist' (2 Pet. ii. 17) ; 'blackness' (Jude 13).

Karupysu, ' to cumber' (Luke xiii. 7) ; ' to make with- out effect' (Rom. iii. 3) ; ' to make void' (Rom. iii. 31) ; ' to make of none effect' (Rom. iv. 14) ; ' to destroy' (Rom. vi. 6) ; 'to loose' (Rom. vii. 2) ; 'to deliver, (Rom. vii. 6) ; ' to bring to nought' (1 Cor. i. 8) ; ' to do away' (1 Cor. xiii. 10) ; ' to put away' (1 Cor. xiii. 11) ; ' to put down' (1 Cor. xv. 24) ; ' to abolish' (2 Cor. iii. 13). Add to these, xarapyio^ai, ' to come to nought' (1 Cor. ii. 6) ; 'to fail' (1 Cor. xiii. 8) ; 'to vanish away' (ibid.) ; ' to become of none effect' (Gal. v. 4) ; ' to cease' (Gal. v. 11) ; and we have here sev- enteen different renderings of this word, occurring in all twenty-seven times in the New Testament.

Kara£W£u, ' to mend' (Matt. iv. 21) ; ' to perfect' (Matt. xxi. 16) ; ' to fit' (Rom. ix. 22) ; ' to perfectly join together' (1 Cor. i. 10) ; ' to restore' (Gal. vi.

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1) ; ' to prepare' (Heb. x. 5) ; ' to frame' (Heb. xi. 3) ; 1 to make perfect' (Heb. xiii. 21).

Kau^aojxa;, * to make boast' (Rom. ii. 17) ; ' to re- joice' (Rom. v. 2) ; ' to glory' (Rom. v. 3) ; c to joy' (Rom. v. 11) ; < to boast' (2 Cor. vii. 14).

KpaTs'w, < to take' (Matt. ix. 25) ; ' to lay hold on' (Matt. xii. 11) ; < to lay hands on' (Matt, xviii. 28) ; ' to hold fast' (Matt. xxvi. 48) ; < to hold' (Matt, xxviii. 9) ; ' to keep' (Mark ix. 10) ; * to retain' (John xx. 23) ; < to obtain' (Acts xxvii. 13).

napaxoftiw, ' to comfort' (Matt. ii. 18) ; c to beseech' (Matt. viii. 5) ; ' to desire' (Matt, xviii. 32) ; ' to pray' (Matt. xxvi. 53) ; < to entreat' (Luke xv. 28) ; ' to ex- hort' (Acts ii. 40) ; < to call for' (Acts xxviii. 20).

Let me once more observe, in leaving this part of the subject, that I would not for an instant imply that in all these places one and the same English word could have been employed, but only that the variety might have been much smaller than it is.

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CHAPTER V.

ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

If it is impossible, as was shown at the beginning of the last chapter, in every case to render one word in the original by one word and no more in the trans- lation, equally impossible is it to render in every case different words in the original by different words in the translation. It will continually happen that one language possesses, and fixes in words, distinctions of which another takes no note. The more subtile- thoughted a people are, the finer and more numerous the differences will be which they will thus have seized, and to which they will have given permanence in words. What can an English translator do to ex- press the distinction, oftentimes very significant, be- tween av^ and av^uirofr? — the honor which lies often in the first (Acts xiii. 16 ; xvii. 22), the slight which is intended to be conveyed in the second (Matt. xxvi. 72) ? At this point the Latin language, with < vir' and < homo,' is a match for the Greek, but not so our

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own. In like manner the differences, oftentimes in- structive, occasionally important, between tepo'v and

vao£, (3ios and £oj?j, ciXkog and ersgog, vsog and xaivog, aky]^g

and d\r,6msy (piXg'w and dyaxau, mostly disappear, and there seems no help but that they must disappear, in any English translation of the Greek Testament. Such facts remind us that language, divine gift to man as it is, yet working itself out through human faculties and powers, has cleaving to it a thousand marks of weakness, and infirmity, and limitation.

To take an example of this, the obliteration of dis- tinctions, which is quite unavoidable, or which could only have been avoided at the cost of greater losses in some other direction, and to deal with it somewhat more in detail — the distinction between "Ai%, the under-world, the receptacle of the departed, and ys'cwa, the place of torment, quite disappears in our Version. They are both translated ' hell,' gffois being so rendered ten times, and ys'ewa twelve ; the only at- tempt to give adrig a word of its own, being at 1 Cor. xv. 55, where it is translated ' grave.' The confusion of which this is the occasion is serious ; though how it could have been avoided, or how it would be pos- sible now to get rid of it, I do not in the least per- ceive. It would not be possible to render adrlS, wher- ever it occurs, by ' grave,' thus leaving < hell' as the rendering of ysewa, only ; for see Matt. xi. 23 ; xvi. 18, the first two places of its occurrence, where this plainly would not suit. On the other hand, the popu-

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lar sense links the name of ' hell' so closely with the place of torment, that it would not answer to keep ' hell' for ao-ns, and to look out for some other render- ing of ye'ewa, to say nothing of the difficulty or impos- sibility of finding one ; for certainly ' gehenna,' whicli I have seen proposed, would not do. The French have, indeed, adopted the word, though it is only ' gene' to them ; and Milton has once used it in poetry ; but it can not in any sense be said to be an English word. It is much to be regretted that ' hades' has never been thoroughly naturalized among us. The language wants the word, and in it the true solution of the difficulty might have been found.

Yet freely granting all which this example illus- trates, it is evident that the forces and capacities of a language should be stretched to the uttermost, the riches of its synonyms thoroughly searched out ; and not till this is done, not till its resources prove plainly inadequate to the task, ought translators to acquiesce in the disappearance from their copy, of distinctions which existed in the original from which that copy was made, or to count that, notwithstanding this dis- appearance, they have done all that lay in them to do. More assuredly might have been here accom- plished than has by our Translators been attempted, as I will endeavor by a few examples to prove.

Thus, one must always regret, and the regret has been often expressed, that in the Apocalypse our Translators should have rendered fyffov and £wov by

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the same word, ' beast.' Both play important parts in the book ; both belong to its higher symbolism ; but to portions the most different. The £ua or " liv- ing creatures/' which stand before the throne, in which dwells the fullness of all creaturely life, as it gives praise and glory to God (iv. 6, 7, 8, 9 ; v. 6 ; vi. 1 ; and often) form part of the heavenly symbolism ; the d*if ia, the first beast and the second, which rise up, one from the bottomless pit (xi. 7), the other from the sea (xiii. 1), of which the one makes war upon the two Witnesses, the other opens his mouth in blasphe- mies, these form part of the hellish symbolism. To confound these and those under a common designa- tion, to call those ; beasts' and these ' beasts,' would be an oversight, even granting the name to be suita- ble to both ; it is a more serious one, when the word used, bringing out, as this must, the predominance of the lower animal life, is applied to glorious creatures in the very court and presence of Heaven. The error is common to all the translations. That the Rheims should not have escaped it is strange ; for the Vulgate renders £wa by * animalia' (' animantia' would have been still better), and only dij^'ov by ' bestia.' If £wa had always been rendered " living creatures," this would have had the additional advantage of setting these symbols of the Apocalypse, even for the English reader, in an unmistakable connection with Ezek. i. 5, 13, 14, and often ; where " living creature" is the rendering in our English Version of rp)l> as ?^ov is in the Peptuagint

88 ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

In like manner, in the parable of the Marriage of the King's Son (Matt. xxii. 1-14), the foiJXoi who sum- mon the bidden guests (ver. 3, 4), and the St&xovoi who in the end expel the unworthy intruder (ver. 13), should not have been confounded under the common name of ' servants.' A real and important distinction between the several actors in the parable is in this way obliterated. The SovXoi are men, the ambassadors of Christ, those that invite their fellow-men to the blessings of the kingdom of heaven ; but the &axovoi are angels, those that " stand by" (Luke xix. 24), ready to fulfil the Divine judgments, and whom we ever find the executors of these judgments in the day of Christ's appearing. They are as distinct from one another as the " servants of the householder," who in like manner are men, and the ' reapers,' who are an- gels, in the parable of the Tares (Matt. xiii. 27, 30). In the Vulgate the distinction which we have lost is preserved ; the 8ov\oi are ' servi,' the &axovo» ' ministri ;' and all our early translations in like manner rendered the words severally by ' servants' and ' ministers ;' the Rheims by ' servants' and ' waiters.'

There is a very real distinction between fafHtria and dtfsiGsiu. It is often urged by our elder divines ; I re- member more than one passage in Jackson's works where it is so ; but it is not constantly observed by our Translators. 'An-ioWa is, I believe, always and rightly rendered, ' unbelief,' while d^si&sia, is in most cases rendered, and rightly, ' disobedience ;' but on

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two occasions (Heb. iv. 6, 11) it also is translated ' unbelief.' In like manner, d.*i<i<rs7v is properly " to refuse belief" dirsiSsTv " to refuse obedience;" but d-irsidsTv is often in our Translation allowed to run into the sense of dfutreTv, as at John. iii. §6; Acts xiv. 2 ; xix. 9 ; Rom. xi. 30 (the right translation in the margin) ; and yet, as I have said, the distinction is real ; diesidsia or disobedience is the consequence of cwritfTia or unbelief; they are not identical with one another.

Again, there was no possible reason why tfopoV and (ppov»|xo? should not have been kept asunder, and the real distinction which exists between them in the original maintained also in our Yersion. We possess 1 wise' for (fo?6$, and ' prudent' for (ppovijao^. It is true that (fjvtrog has taken possession of 'prudent,' but might have better been rendered by ' understanding.' Oar Translators have thrown away their advantage, rendering, I believe in every case, both <to$6g and £povifxo£ by ' wise,' although in no single instance are the words interchangeable. The <ppov»jao^ is one who dexterously adapts his means to his ends (Luke xvi. 8), the wora expressing nothing in respect of the ends themselves, whether they are worthy or not; the <ro<po's is one whose means and ends are alike wor- thy. God is <ro<poV (Jude 25) ; wicked men may be cppoviaoi, while tfo^o.', except in the tfopla rov xoV/xou, they could never be. How much would have been gained at Luke xvi. 8, if <p£ov/f/.ws had been rendered, not

90 ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

' wisely,' but ' prudently :' how much needless offence would have been avoided !

The standing word which St. Paul uses to express the forgiveness of sins is aystig a^a^Tiojv ; but on one remarkable occasion he changes his word, and instead of a(pe<fig employs vagedis (Rom. iii. 25). Our Transla- tors take no note of the very noticeable substitution, but render vagediv ajuagTiZv, or rather here a^a^-ni/jtaTwv, "remission of sins," as everywhere else they have rendered the more usual phrase. But it was not for nothing that St. Paul used here quite another word. He is speaking of quite a different thing ; he is speaking, not of the * remission' of sins, or the letting of them quite go, but of the l praetermission' (xapttig from ra^Vi), the passing of them by on the part of God for a while, the temporary dissimulation upon his part, which found place under the Old Covenant, in consid- eration of the sacrifice which was one day to be. The passage is further obscured by the fact that our Translators have rendered &a tt,m tfagstiv as though it had been Six *% iragKtsug — "for the remission," that is, with a view to the remission, while the proper ren- dering of Sta, with an accusative, would, of course, have been " because of the remission," or rather " the pretermission," or, as Hammond proposes, " because of the passing by, of past sins." What the Apostle would say is this : " There needed a signal manifesta- tion of the righteousness of God on account of the long pretermission, or passing by, of sins in his infi-

ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. 91

nite forbearance, with no adequate expression of his righteous wrath against them, during all those ages which preceded the revelation of Christ : which mani- festation of his righteousness at length found place, when He set forth no other and no less than his own Son to be the propitiatory sacrifice for sin." But the passage, as we have it now, can not be said to yield this meaning.

There are two occasions on which a multitude is miraculously fed by our Lord ; and it is not a little remarkable that on the first occasion in every narra- tive, and there are four records of the miracle, the word xocpivog is used of the baskets in which the frag- ments which remain are gathered up (Matt. xiv. 20 ; Mark vi. 43 ; Luke ix. 17 ; John vi. 13) ; while on occasion of the second miracle, in the two records which are all that we have of it, tfirvpig is used (Matt. xv. 37 ; Mark viii. 8) ; and in proof that this is not accidental see Matt. xvi. 9, 10 ; Mark viii. 19, 20. The fact is a slight, yet not unimportant, testimony to the entire distinctness of the two miracles, and that we have not here, as some of the modern assailants of the historical accuracy of the Gospels assure us, two confused traditions of one and the same event. What the exact distinction between xo'cpivos and oVupfc is, may be hard to determine, and it may not be very easy to suggest what second word should have marked this distinction ; yet I can not but think that where, not merely the Evangelists in their narrative, but the

92 ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

Lord in his allusion to the event, so distinctly marks a difference, we should have attempted to mark it also, as the Vulgate by ' cophini' and ' spartae' has done.

Again, our Translators obliterate, for the most part, the distinction between crafc ©sou and v)os ©sou, as ap- plied to Christ. There are five passages in the New Testament in which the title iraTg ©sou is given to the Son of God. In the first of these (Matt. xii. 18) they have rendered iraTg by < servant ;' and they would have done well if they had abode by this in the other four. These all occur in the Acts, and in every one of them the notion of ' servant' is abandoned, and ' son' (Acts iii. 13, 26), or < child' (Acts iv. 27, 30), introduced. I am persuaded that in this they were in error. UaTg Gsov might be rendered " servant of God," and I am persuaded that it ought. It might be, for it needs not to say vrws is continually used like the Latin ' puer* in the sense of servant, and in the LXX. «oas ©sou as the u servant of God." David calls himself so no less than seven times in 2 Sam. vii. ; cf. Luke i. 69 ; Acts iv. 25; Job i. 8; Ps. xix. 12, 14. But not merely it might have been thus rendered ; it also should have been, as these reasons convince me : Every student of prophecy must have noticed how much there is in Isaiah prophesying of Christ under the aspect of " the servant of the Lord ;" " Israel my servant;" "my servant whom I uphold" (Isai. xlii. 1-7 ; xlix. 1-12 ; lii. 13 ; liii. 12). I say, prophesy-

ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. 93

ing of Christ ; for I dismiss, as a baseless dream of those who a priori are determined that there are, and therefore shall be, no prophecies in Scripture, the no- tion that " the servant of Jehovah" in Isaiah is Israel according to the flesh, or Isaiah himself, or the body of the prophets collectively considered, or any other except Christ Himself. But it is quite certain, from the inner harmonies of the Old Testament and the New, that wherever there is a large group of prophe- cies in the Old, there is some allusion to them in the New. Unless, however, we render iraTg ©sou by " ser- vant of God" in the place where that phrase occurs in the New, there will be no allusion throughout it all to that group of prophecies which designate the Mes- siah as the servant of Jehovah, who learned obedience by the things which He suffered. I can not doubt, and, as far as I know, this is the conclusion of all who have considered the subject, that nraTg ©sou should be rendered " servant of God," as often as in the New Testament it is used of Christ. His sonship will re- main sufficiently declared in innumerable other pas- sages.

Something of precision and beauty is lost at John x. 16, by rendering auXvj and toi>v?i both by ' fold :' " And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold (au'x^c:) ; these also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice ; and there shall be one fold (Wjuv^), and one shepherd." It is remarkable that in the Vulgate there is the same obliteration of the distinction be-

94 ON SOME EEAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

tween the two words, ' ovile' standing for both. Sub- stitute ' flock' for ' fold' on the second occasion of its occurring (this was Tyndale's rendering, which we should not have forsaken) , and it will be at once felt how much the verse will gain. The Jew and the Gentile are the two ' folds,' which Christ, the Good Shepherd, will gather into a single ■ flock.'

As a further example, take John xvii. 12 : " While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name. Those that Thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost." It is not a great matter, yet who would not gather from this ' kept' recurring twice in this verse, that there must be also in the original some word of the like recurrence ? Yet it is not so ; the first * kept' is sV^ouv, and the second icpuXa^a. : nor are nigsTv and (puXaCo'sfv here such mere synonyms, that the distinction between them may be effaced without loss. The first is ' servare,' or better, 4 conservare,' the second ' custodire ;' and the first, the keeping or preserving, is the consequence of the second, the guarding. What the Lord would say is : "I so guard- ed, so protected (£pu> afa), those whom Thou hast given me, that I kept and preserved them (this the «"^pqtfi£) unto the present day." Thus Lampe : "rypsTv est generalius, vitaeque novae finalem conservationem potest exprimere ; (puXacceiv vero specialius mediorum praestationem, per quae finis ille obtinetur." He quotes excellently to the point, Prov. xix. 6: 6s

(pv"ka.tf(f£i svroX^y, TY\ps7 <rrjv lauToC ^u^>;v.

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Before leaving this branch of the subject, I will give one or two examples more of the way in which a single word in the English does duty for many in the Greek. Thus, take the words i thought' and 4 think.' The Biblical psychology is anyhow a sub- ject encumbered with most serious perplexities. He finds it so, and often sees his way but obscurely, who has all the helps which the most accurate observation and comparison of the terms actually used by the sa- cred writers will afford. Of course, none but the student of the original document can have these helps in their fullness ; at the same time it scarcely needed that i thought' should be employed as the rendering alike of ivduu.ijcis (Matt. ix. 4), SiaXoyKf^og (Matt. xv. 19), <Jiav6*ifi.a (Luke xi. 17), tohoia, (Acts viii. 22), \oy\dpoc, (Rom. ii. 15), and vo^a (2 Cor. x. 5) ; or that the verb " to think" should in the passages which fol- low be the one English representative of a still wider circle of words, of <Ww (Matt. iii. 9), voj*i£u (Matt. v. 17), evdujxs'ofAai (Matt. ix. 4), &aXoyi£ofjia» (Luke xii. 17), &evdu/Aso|xa' (Acts x. 19), uirovos'w (Acts xiii. 25),

riyio^at (Acts XXVi. 2), X£i'vw (Acts XXVi. 8), p£ov^W

(Rom. xii. 3), Xoyi'Jojxai (2 Cor. iii. 5), vos'w (Ephes. iii. 20), o'/o/j-ccj (Jam. i. 7).

One example more. The verb " to trouble" is a very favorite one with our Translators. There are no less than ten Greek words or phrases which it is employed by them to render ; these, namely : xoirovg •jraps'xw (Matt. xxvi. 1 0) , €-< :x\w (Mark v. 35) , foarapaoWw

96 ON SOME EEAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED.

(Luke i. 29), <ruP/3a£w (Luke x. 41), *apsvo^Xs'w (Acts XV. 19), Qogvpiopai (Acts XX. 10), rapatfifw (Gal. i. 7), dvceffVarow (Gal. V. 12), 6\if3u (2 Thess. i. 6), evcr^Xew (Heb. xii. 15) . If we add to these ixntpatfttu, " ex- ceedingly to trouble" (Acts xvi. 20), dposVal> "to be troubled" (Matt. xxiv. 6), the word will do duty for no fewer than twelve Greek words. Now, the Eng- lish language may not be so rich in synonyms as the Greek ; but with ' vex,' ' harass,' ' disturb,' ' distress,' i afflict,' ' disquiet,' ' unsettle,' i burden,' ' terrify ;' al- most every one of which would in one of the above places or other seem to me more appropriate than the word actually employed, I can not admit that the pov- erty or limited resources of our language left no choice here, but to efface all the distinctions between these words, as by the employment of ' trouble' for them all has, in these cases at least, been done.

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CHAPTER VI.

ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN, OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN.

Occasionally, but rarely, our Translators dismiss a better rendering, which was in one or more of the earlier versions, and replace it with a worse. It may be said of their Version, in regard of those which went before, that it occupies very much the place which the Vulgate did in regard of the Latin versions pre- ceding. In the whole, an immense improvement, while yet in some minor details they are more ac- curate than it. This is so in the passages which follow.

Matt, xxviii. 14. — "And if this come to the gov- ernor''s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you." The Geneva version, but that alone among the previ- ous ones, had given the passage rightly : " And if this come before the governor (xa/ sJcv dxov<fdjj rovro ixl tou ^-e^'vos), Ave will pacify him, and save you harmless." The words of the original have reference to a judicial 5

98 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN

hearing of the matter before the governor (" si res apud ilium judicem agatur," Erasmus), and not to the possibility of its reaching his ears by hearsay, but this our Translation fails to express. In tfsVo.asv, I may observe, lies a euphemism by no means rare in Hel- lenistic Greek (see Krebs, Obss. e Josepho, in loco) : " We will take effectual means to persuade him ;" as, knowing the covetous, greedy character of the man, they were able confidently to promise.

Mark xi. 17. — " Is it not written, My house shall be called, of all nations, the house of prayer ? but ye have made it a den of thieves." In Tyndale's ver- sion, in Cranmer's, and the Geneva : " My house shall be called the house of prayer unto all nations; but ye," &c, and rightly. There is no difficulty what- ever in giving iratfi roTg sdvsd, a dative rather than an ablative sense ; while thus the passage is brought into exact agreement with that in Isaiah, to which Christ, in his " it is written," refers, namely, Isai. lvi. 7 ; and, moreover, the point of his words is preserved, which the present translation misses. Our Lord's in- dignation was aroused in part at the profanation of the holy precincts of his Father's house ; but in part, also, by the fact that, the scene of this profanation being the Court of the Gentiles, the Jews have thus managed to testify their contempt for them, and for their share in the blessings of the Covenant. Those parts of the temple which were exclusively their own, the Court of the Priests, and the Court of Israelites,

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they had kept clear of these buyers and sellers ; but that part assigned to the Gentile worshippers, the <re/3o;x£voi rov ©sov, they were little concerned about the profanation to which it was exposed, perhaps pleased with it rather. In a righteous indignation Christ quotes the words of the prophet, which they had done all that in them lay to defeat : " My house shall be called the house of prayer unto all nations :" all which intention on his part in the citation of the prophecy our Version fails to preserve. Mede* ascribes to the influence of Beza this alteration, which is certainly one for the worse.

Ephes. iv. 18. — " Because of the blindness of their hearts." The Geneva version had given this rightly, " because of the hardness of their heart ;" which bet- ter rendering our Translators forsake, being content to place it in the margin. But there can be no doubt that tfwpwCis is from the substantive tupog, a porous kind of stone, and from urupew, to become callous, hard, or stony (Mark vi. 52 ; John xii. 40 ; Rom. xi. 7 ; 2 Cor. iii. 14) ; not from irugog, blind. How much bet- ter, too, this agrees with what follows — " who being past feeling" (that is, having, through their hardness or callousness of heart, arrived at a condition of mis- erable avaKrtVi'a), "have given themselves over to work all uncleanness with greediness." I may ob- serve that at Rom. xi. 7, they have in like manner put ' blinded' in the text, and ' hardened,' the correct

Works, p. 45.

100 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN,

rendering of J^wpw^tfav, in the margin ; while at 2 Cor. iii. 16, where they translate aXX' ltfa>pwd»] ra vo^ai-a otuTuv, " but their minds were blinded" the correcter is not even offered as an alternative rendering. Wiclif and the Rheims, which both depend on the Vulgate (" sed obtusi sunt sensus eorum"), are here the only correct versions.

1 Thess. v. 22. — "Abstain from all appearance of evil." An injurious translation of the words, a-jro ita.vr% s)dovg <xovr]pov d<ffs-)(S<f&s, and a going back from the right translation, "Abstain from all kind of evil," which the Geneva version had. It is from the reality of evil, and s7Sos here means this (see a good note in Hammond), not from the appearance, which God's Word elsewhere commands us to abstain ; nor does it here command anything else. Indeed, there are times when, so far from abstaining from all appearance of evil, it will be a part of Christian courage not to ab- stain from such. It was an " appearance of evil" in the eyes of the Pharisees, when our Lord healed on the Sabbath, or showed himself a friend of publicans and sinners ; but Christ did not therefore abstain from this or from that. How many " appearances of evil," which he might have abstained from, yet did not, must St. Paul's own conversation have presented in the eyes of the zealots for the ceremonial law ! I was once inclined to think that our Translators used ' ap- pearance' here as we might now use ' form,' and that we therefore had here an obsolete, not an inaccurate,

OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN. 101

rendering ; but I can find no authority for this use of the word.

Heb. xi. 13.— -" These all died in faith ; not having received the promises ; but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them." But with all respect be it said, this " embracing the promises" was the very thing which the worthies of the Old Testament did not do ; and which the sacred writer is urging throughout that they did not do, who only saw them from afar, as things distant and not near. Our present rendering is an unfortunate going back from Tyndale's and Cranmer's " sallfted them," from Wielif's " greeted them." The beautiful image of mariners homeward-bound, who recognise from afar the promontories and well-known features of a beloved land, and ' greet' or ' salute' these from a distance, is lost to us. Estius : " Chrysostomus dictum putat ex metaphora navigantium qui ex longinquo prospiciunt civitates desideratas, quas antequam ingrediantur et inhabitent, salutatione praeveniunt." Cf. Virgil, Ma.^ iii. 524 :—

"Italiam laeto socii clamore salutant."

In other respects our Version is unsatisfactory. The words, " and were persuaded of them," have no right to a place in the text ; while the " afar off" (#o£|wdsv) belongs not to the seeing alone, but to the saluting as well. How beautifully the verse would read thus amended ! " These all died in faith ; not having re- ceived the promises, but having seen and saluted them

102 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN

from afar." We have exactly such a salutation from afar in the words of the dying Jacob : " I have waited for thy salvation, 0 Lord" (Gen. xlix. 18).

1 Pet. i. 17. — "And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear." Here, too, it must be confessed, that we have left a better, and chosen a worse, rendering. The Geneva had it, " And if ye call Him Father, who without respect of persons," &c. ; and this, and this only, is the meaning which the words of the original,

•kou sl Uaripa, itfixoCksTtjQs rov drf potf 'wflr'oXyjTrws xpivovra, x.r.X.,

will bear.

It must not be supposed from what has been here adduced that our Translators did not exercise a very careful revision of the translations preceding. In ev- ery page of their work there is evidence that they did so. Very often our Authorized Version is the first that has seized the true meaning of a passage. It would be easy for me to bring forward many passages in proof, only that my task is here, passing over the hundred excellencies, to fasten rather on the single fault ; and I must therefore content myself with one or two illustrations of this. Thus, at Heb. iv. 1, none of the preceding versions, neither our own, nor the Rheims, had correctly given xaraXswofi.£v»js sieayyekias : they all translate it " forsaking the promise," or some- thing similar, instead of, as we have rightly done, " a promise being left us." Again, at Acts xii. 19, the

OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN. 103

technical meaning of dcor^vai, that it signifies to be led away to execution, is wholly missed by Tyndale (" he examined the keepers and commanded to de- part"), by Cranmer, and the Rheims ; it is only par- tially seized by the Geneva version, but perfectly by our Translators. Far more important than this is the clear recognition of the personality of the Word in the prologue of St. John by our Translators : " All things were made by Him ;" " In Him was life" (John i. 3, 4) ; while in all our preceding versions it is read, " All things were made by it" and so on. Our Ver- sion is the first which gives <fwaXi%wevog (Acts i. 4) rightly.

Improvements are also very frequent in single words and phrases, even where those which were displaced were not absolutely incorrect. Thus, how much bet- ter " earnest expectation" (Rom. viii. 19) than " fer- vent desire," as a rendering of droxapaJox.'a ; 4 tattlers' instead of ' triflers,' as a rendering of pXuapoi (1 Tim. v. 13 ; indeed, the latter could hardly be said to be correct.* "Whited sepulchres" is an improvement upon "painted sepulchres" (r'^cj xsw. e'vci, Matt, xxiii. 27), which all our preceding versions had. " Without distraction" (1 Cor. vii. 35) is a far better rendering of ^=,J " ■tfTCJs *aan "without separation." It was slovenly to introduce ' Candy,' the modern

* Unless, indeed, ' trifler' once meant " utterer of trifles," and thus 'tattler;' which may perhaps be, as I observe in the fragment of a Nominale published by Wright, National Antiquities, vol. i., p. 216, ' nugigerulus' given as the Latin equivalent of ' trifler.'

104 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN,

name of Crete, which all the Anglican versions before our own had done at Acts xxvii. 7, 12, 21 ; but which in ours is removed. " Profane person" is a singularly successful rendering of /S£/£q--»<g (Heb. xii. 16), while yet none of our preceding versions had lighted upon it ; at the same time it is possible that we ourselves owe it to the Rheims, where it first appears.

But, further, our Translators sometimes put a bet- ter rendering in the margin, and retain a worse in the text. It may perhaps be urged that here at least they offer the better to the reader's choice. But practi- cally this can not be said to be the case. For, in the first place, the proportion of our Bibles is very small which are printed with these marginal variations, as compared with those in which they are suppressed. They are thus brought under the notice of very few among the readers of Scripture, not to say that by these they are very rarely referred to. How many, for instance, among these even know of the existence of a variation so important as that at John iii. 3 ? And even if they do refer, they commonly attach com- paratively little authority, to them. They acquiesce for the most part, and naturally acquiesce, in the ver- dict of the Translators about them ; who, by placing them in the margin, and not in the text, evidently declare that they consider them the less probable ren- derings. Then, too, of course, they are never heard in the public services of the Church, which must al-

OR PLACED* IN THE MARGIN. 105

ways be a chief source of the popular knowledge of Scripture. It is impossible, then, to attach to a right interpretation in the margin any serious value, as re- dressing an erroneous or imperfect one in the text. Marginal variations are quite without influence as modifying the view which the body of English readers take of any passages in the English Bible ; and this leads me to observe that the suggestion which has been sometimes made of a large addition to these, as a middle way and compromise between leaving our Version as it is, and, introducing actual changes into its text, does not seem to me to contain any real so- lution of our difficulties, not to say that it would be attended with many and most serious objections.

But to return. The following are passages in which I can not doubt that we have placed the better ren- dering in the margin, the worse in the text : —

Matt. v. 21. — " Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time." This rendering of ,^|^ ro~g d^aiois is grammatically defensible, while yet there can be no reasonable doubt that " to them of old time," which was in all the preceding versions, but which our Transla- tors have dismissed to the margin, ought to resume its place in the text.

Matt. ix. 36. — "They fainted and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd." But " scat- tered abroad" does not exactly express i^ipptvoi, any more than does the 4 zerstreut' of Luther's version. It is not their dispersion one from another, but their

106 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN,

prostration in themselves, which is intended. The J^ifji/xsvoi are the ' prostrati,' ' temere projecti ;' those that have cast themselves along for very weariness, unable to travel any farther. The Vulgate had it rightly, c jacentes,' which Wiclif follows, " lying down." Our present rendering dates as far back as Tyndale, and was retained in the subsequent versions ; while the correct translation is relegated to the mar- gin.

Matt. x. 16. — "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." Wiclif, following the Vul- gate, had "simple as doves." ' Simple' our Transla- tors have dismissed to the margin ; they ought to have kept it in the text, as rightly they have done at Rom. xvi. 19. The rendering of dxiguiog by ' harmless' here and at Phil. ii. 15, grows out of wrong etymology, as though it were from & and xipag, one who had no horn with which to push or otherwise hurt. Thus, Bengel, who falls in with this error, glosses here : " Sine cornu, ungula, dente, aculeo." But this " without horn" would be dxiearog ; while the true derivation of dxigaiog, it needs hardly be said, is from d and xepawufxi, unmingled, sincere, and thus single, guileless, simple, without all folds. How much finer the antithesis in this way becomes ! " Be ye therefore wise (' prudent' would be better) as serpents, and simple as doves" — having care, that is, that this prudence of yours do not degenerate into artifice and guile; letting the columbine simplicity go hand in hand with the ser-

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pentine prudence. The exact parallel will then be 1 Cor. xiv. 20.

Mark vi. 20. — "For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him." This may be after Erasmus, who renders xa/ cuvsr^psi ajTov, " et magni eum faciebat ;" so, too, Grotius and others. Now, it is undoubtedly true that tfuvrnjprfv «ra 6,'xaia (Polybius, iv. 60, 10) would be rightly trans- lated " to observe things righteous ;" but here it is not things, but a person, and no such rendering is admissible. Translate rather, as in our margin, " kept him or saved him," that is, from the malice of Hero- dias ; she laid plots for the Baptist's life, but up to this time Herod tfuvs^psi, sheltered or preserved, him (" custodiebat eum," the Yulgate rightly), so that her malice could not reach him. See Hammond, in loco. It will at once be evident in how much stricter logical sequence the statement of the Evangelist will follow, if this rendering of the passage is admitted.

Mark vii. 4. — ' Tables.' This can not be correct : our Translators have put ' beds' in the margin, against which rendering of xXjvgjv nothing can be urged, ex- cept that the context points clearly here to these in a special aspect, namely, to the ' benches' or i couches' on which the Jews reclined at their meals.

Luke xvii. 21. — " The kingdom of heaven is within you." Doubtless, the words hrl$ ujxwv may mean this ; but how could the Lord address this language to the Pharisees ? A very different kingdom from the king-

108

dom of heaven was within them, not to say that this whole language of the kingdom of heaven being within men, rather than men being within the kingdom of heaven, is, as one has justly observed, modern. The marginal reading, " among you," should have been the textual. " He in whom the whole kingdom of heaven is shut up as in a germ, and from whom it will unfold itself, stands in your midst."

Col. ii. 18. — " Let no man beguile you of your re- ward." It is evident that this xa,ra.3pa(36viru v^as seriously perplexed our early translators, and indeed others besides them. Thus, in the earlier Italic we find, " vos superet ;" in the Vulgate, " vos decipiat ;" Tyndale translates, " make you shoot at a wrong mark ;" the Geneva, " bear rule over you ;" while our Translators have proposed as an alternative reading to that which they admit into the text, "judge against you." The objection to this rendering, which marks more insight into the true character of the word than any which went before, is that it is too obscure, and does not sufficiently tell its own story. The meaning of (3pu(3sCeiv is, to adjudge a reward ; of xaLTafipafietov, out of a hostile mind (this is implied in the xar<x), to adjudge it away from a person, with a subaudition that this is the person to whom it is justly due. Je- rome (ad Algas. Qu. 10) does not quite seize the meaning ; for he regards the xara/3pa,3gjuv as the com- petitor who unjustly bears away, not the judge who unjustly ascribes, the reward : otherwise his explana-

OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN. 109

tion is good : " Nemo adversum vos braviura accipiat : hoc enim Graece dicitur xara£pa/3eueVu, quum . quis in certamine pqsitus, iniquitate agonothetae, vel insidiis magistrorum, (SpafisTov et palmam sibi debitam perdit." It is impossible for any English word to express the fullness of allusion contained in the original Greek ; while long circumlocutions, which should turn the version in fact into a commentary, are clearly inad- missible. If "judge against you" is too obscure, and too little of an English idiom, and "judge away the reward from you" would underlie the second at least of these objections, the substitution of ' deprive' for ' beguile' (which last has certainly no claim to stand), might, in case of a revision, be desirable.

1 Thess. iv. 6. — " Let no man go beyond or defraud his brother in any matter." But tw here is not = t^ = Ti'vj, which would alone justify the rendering of iv ru) * pay pan, " in any matter." A more correct trans- lation is in the margin, namely, " in the matter," that is, " in this matter," being the matter with which the Apostle at the moment has to do. The difference may not seem very important, but, indeed, the wholo sense of the passage turns on this word ; and, as we translate in one way or the other, we determine for ourselves whether it is a warning against overreach- ing our neighbor, and a too shrewd dealing with him in the business transactions of life, strangely finding place in the midst of warnings against uncleanness and a libertine freedom in the relation of the sexes ;

110

or whether an unbroken warning against this is con- tained through all these verses (3-9). I can not doubt that the latter is the correct view, that ro fpZyixa is an euphemism, and that our marginal ver- sion is the right one ; the Apostle warning his Thes- salonian converts that none, in a worse -rXsovsg/a than that which makes one man covet his neighbor's goods, overstep the limits and fences by which God has hedged round and separated from him his brother's wife. See Bengel, in loco. Accepting this view of the passage, • overreach,' which the margin suggests instead of ' defraud,' as the rendering of *\so\>exre7v, would also be an undoubted improvement.

1 Tim. vi. 5. — " Supposing that gain is godliness." It is difficult to connect any meaning whatever with this language. But Coverdale, and he alone of our translators, deals with these words, vo^ovrsg -ropiCfxov eTvcu rr,v svtiefieiuv, rightly — " which* think that godli- ness is lucre" that is, a means of gain. The want of a thorough mastery of the Greek article and its use, left it possible here to go back from a right rendering once attained.

Heb. v. 2. — " Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way, for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity." But is, it may fairly be asked, " who can have com- passion," the happiest rendering of ^erpioirakTv Swa^evos? and ought ixsrpto^oi&sTv to be thus taken as entirely sy- nonymous with <fv^ahr\ ? The words fAS<rp»o<7ra0srv, fxfc'rpj.

OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN. Ill

oflfadsia, belong to the terminology of the later schools of Greek philosophy, and were formed to express that moderate amount of emotion (the iierplus *a<fyziv} which the Peripatetics and others acknowledged as becom- ing a wise and good man, contrasted with the &va.deia, or absolute indolency, which the Stoics required. It seems to me that the Apostle would say that the high priest taken from among men, out of a sense of his own weakness and infirmity was in a condition to estimate mildly and moderately, and not transported with indignation, the sins and errors of his brethren ; and it is this view of the passage which is correctly expressed in the margin : " who can reasonably bear with the ignorant," &q.

Heb. ix. 23. — " It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." The employment of ' patterns' introduces some confusion here, and is not justified by the use of the word in the time of our Translators, any more than in our own. It is, of course, quite true that v^oSsty^a may mean, and, in- deed, often does mean, ' pattern' or ' exemplar' (John xiii. 15). But here, as at viii. 5 (yieoSs^fut xai tfxia)9 it can only mean the copy drawn from this exemplar. The heavenly things are themselves " the patterns" or archetypes, the * Urbilden ;' the earthly, the Levitical tabernacle, with its priests and sacrifices, are the copies, the similitudes, the ' Abbilden,' which, as such,

112 ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN.

are partakers not of a real but a typical purification. This is, indeed, the very point which the Apostle is urging, and his whole antithesis is confused by calling the earthly things themselves " the patterns." The earlier translators, Tyndale, Cranmer, and the Gene- va, had ' similitudes,' which was correct, though it seems to me that ' copies' would be preferable.*

2 Pet. iii. 12. — "Hasting unto the coming of the day of God." The Vulgate had in like manner ren- dered the (ftfeuSovreg <n}v •jrapoud'av, " properantes in ad- ventum ;" and this use of tf*s68sw may be abundantly justified, although " hasting toward the coming" seems to me to express more accurately what our Transla- tors probably intended, and what the word allows. This will then be pretty nearly De Wette's ' ersehn- end.' Yet the marginal version, " hasting- the com- ing" (accelerantes adventum," Erasmus), seems bet- ter. The faithful, that is, shall seek to cause the day of the Lord to come the more quickly by helping to fulfil those conditions, without which it can not come — that day being no day inexorably fixed, but one, the arrival of which it is free to the Church to help and hasten on by faith and by prayer, and through a more rapid accomplishing of the number of the elect.

* It is familiarly known to all students of English that 'pattern5 is originally only another spelling of ' patron' (the client imitates his patron ; the copy takes after its pattern), however they may have now separated off into two words. But it is interesting to notice the word when as yet this separation of one into two had not uttered itself in different orthography. We do this Heb. viii. 5 {Geneva Version) : " which priestes serve unto the patrone and shadow of heavenly things."

ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR IN OUR VERSION. 113

CHAPTER VII.

ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR IN OUR VERSION.

I have already spoken of the English Grammar of our Translators ; but the Greek Grammar is also oc- casionally at fault. The most recurring blemishes which have been noted here, are these: 1. A failing to give due heed to the presence or absence of the article ; they omit it sometimes, when it is present in their original, and when, according to the rules of the language, it ought to be preserved in the transla- tion ; they insert it, when it is absent there, and has no claim to have found admission from them. 2. A certain laxity in the rendering of prepositions ; for example, sv is rendered as if it was sk, and vice versa ; the different forces of &*, as it governs a genitive or an accusative, are disregarded, with other inaccura- cies of the same kind. 3. Tenses are not always ac- curately discriminated ; aorists are dealt with as per- fects, perfects as aorists ; the force of the imperfect is not always given. Moods, too, and voices, are oc-

114 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

casionally confounded. 4. Other grammatical lapses, which can not be included in any of these divisions, are noticeable. These, however, are the most seri- ous and most recurring. I will give examples of them all.

I. In regard of the Greek article, our Translators err in both excess and defect, but oftenest in the lat- ter. They omit it, and sometimes not without serious loss, in passages where it ought to find place. Such a passage is Rev. xvii. 14 : " These are they which came out of great tribulation." Rather, " out of the great tribulation" (sx rrng d\Qeug ryg peyakvig) . The leaving out of the article, so emphatically repeated, causes us to miss the connection between this passage and Matt. xxiv. 22, 29 ; Dan. xii. 1. It is the char- acter of the Apocalypse, the crowning book of the Canon, that it abounds with allusions to preceding Scriptures ; and, numerous as are those that appear on the surface, those which lie a little below the sur- face are more numerous still. Thus, there can be no doubt that allusion is here to " the great tribula- tion" (the same phrase, ^Xi-^ig fxsyaM') of the last days, the birth-pangs of the new creation, which our Lord in his prophecy from the Mount had foretold.

Heb. xi. 10. — "He looked for a city which hath foundations." Not so; the language is singularly emphatic. " He looked for the city which hath the foundations" (r^v roucr Ss^sXlovg syo\)(fav tfoXiv), that is, the well-known and often-alluded-to foundations — in

IN OUR VERSION. 115

other words, he looked for the New Jerusalem, of which it had been already said, " Her foundations are in the holy mountains" (Ps. lxxxvii. 1 ; cf. Isai. xxviii. 16) ; even as in the Apocalypse great things are spoken of these glorious foundations of the Heav- enly City (Rev. xxi. 14, 19, 20). Let me here ob- serve that those expositors seem to me to be wholly astray who make the Apostle to say that Abraham looked forward, to a period when the nomad life which he was now leading should cease, and his descendants be established in a well-ordered city, the earthly Je- rusalem. He may, indeed, have looked on to that as a pledge of better things to come ; but never to that as " the City having the foundations ;" nor do I sup- pose for an instant that our Translators at all intended this ; but still, if they had reproduced the force of the article, they would, in giving the passage its true emphasis, have rendered such a misapprehension on the part of their readers well-nigh impossible.

John iii. 10. — " Art thou a teacher of Israel, and knowest not these things ?" Middleton may perhaps make too much of 6 8i8a<rxu\og here, as though it singled out Nicodemus from among all the Jewish doctors as the one supereminent. Yet it is equally incorrect to deny it all force. It is, as Erasmus gives it, " ille magister ;" " Art thou that teacher, that famed teacher of Israel, and yet art ignorant of these things ?" and the question loses an emphasis, which I can not but believe, with Winer and many more, it was intended

116 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

to have, by the obliteration in our Version of the force of the article.

In other passages it is plain that a more complete mastery of the use of the article would have modified the rendering of a passage which our Translators have given. It would have done so, I am persuaded, at 1 Tim. vi. 2 : "And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren, but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit" (on *i<rroi e/tfi

xxi dy ewnjrof, ol <r7,g slspy stilus dv-rjXa(x/3avo'|X£voiV It is

clear that for them " partakers of the benefit" is but a further unfolding of " faithful and beloved," the ' benefit' being the grace and gift of eternal life, com- mon to master and slave alike. But so the article in this last clause has not its rights, and the only correct translation of the passage will make latirol xai ayauenroi the predicate, and oi t% evegystrlas avr»Xa/x/3avo(xsvoi the subject. St. Paul reminds the slaves that they shall serve believing masters the more cheerfully out of the consideration that they do not bestow their service on unconverted, unthankful lords, but rather that they who are " partakers of the benefit," that is, the benefit of their service, they to whom this service is rendered, are brethren in Christ. The Vulgate lightly: "quia fideles sunt et dilecti, qui beneficii participes sunt." It needs only to insert the words " who are" before ' partakers,' to make our Version correct.

IN OUR VERSION. 117

But more important than in any of these passages, as rendering serious doctrinal misunderstandings pos- sible, is the neglect of the article at Rom. v. 15, 17. In place of any observations of my own, I will here quote Bentley's criticism on our Version. Having found fault with the rendering of oS ncXkoi, Rom. xii. 5, he proceeds : " This will enable us to clear up another place of much greater consequence, Rom. v .; where after the Apostle had said, ver. 12, ' that by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed wpon all men (sfc tctvrug dvfywtfous), for that all have sinned,' in the rendition of this sentence, ver. 15, he says, * for if through the offence of one (Vou Ivof) many (o) atoXXoi) be dead' (so our Transla- tors), ' much more the grace of God by one man Qrov Iv6s) Jesus Christ hath abounded unto many1 (sfc roZg vroXkovs). Now, who would not wish that they had kept the articles in the version which they saw in the original ? ' If through the offence of the one' (that is, Adam) * the many have died, much more the grace of God by the one man hath abounded unto the many.9 By this accurate version some hurtful mistakes about partial redemption and absolute reprobation had been happily prevented. Our English readers had then seen, what several of the Fathers saw and testified, that ol qroXXbi, the many, in an antithesis to the one, are equivalent to iravrsg, all, in ver. 12, and compre- hend the whole multitude, the entire species of man- kind, exclusive only of the one. So, again, ver. 18

118 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

and 19 of the same chapter, our Translators have repeated the like mistake ; where, when the Apostle had said ' that as the offence of one was ujwn all men (ck fccvrus dv^pwTi'ob^) to condemnation, so the righ- teousness of one was upon all men to justification ; for,' adds he, ' as by the one man's (Vou hog) disobedi- ence the many (o« toXXci) were made sinners ; so by the obedience of the one (rod Wos) the many (ol weXXoi) shall be made righteous.' By this version the reader is admonished and guided to remark that the many, in ver. 19, are the same as iravrsg, all, in the 18th. But our Translators, when they render it, ' many were made sinners, many were made righteous,' what do they do less than lead and draw their unwary readers into error ?"*

By far the most frequent fault with our Translators is the omission of the article in the translation when it stands in the original ; yet sometimes they fall into the converse error, and insert an article in the Eng- lish where it does not stand in the Greek ; and this, too, it may be, not without injury to the sense and intention of the sacred writer. It is so at Rom. ii. 14, where we make St. Paul to say, " For when the Gen- tiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves." One might conclude from this, that the Apostle regarded such a fulfilling of the law on the part of the Gentiles, as ordinary and normal.

* A Sermon upon Popery. Works, vol. iii., p. 245 ; cf. p. 129.

IN OUR VERSION. 119

Yet it is not ra U\rti but 0*0, and the passage must be rendered, "For when Gentiles, which have not the law," &c, the Apostle having in these words his eye on the small election of heathendom, the exceptions, and not the rule.

St. Paul has been sometimes charged with exag- geration in declaring that " the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Tim vi. 10) ; and there have been attempts to mitigate the strength of the assertion, as that when he said " all evil," he only meant " much evil." The help, however, does not lie here ; but in more strictly observing what he does say. " The love of money," he declares, " is" — not "the root," but — " a root, of all evil." He does not affirni that this is the bitter root from which all evil springs, but a bitter root from which all evil may spring ; there is no sin of which it may not be, as of which it has not been, the impulsive motive.

But perhaps at another place, Acts xxvi. 2, the insertion of the article in the English, where there is no article in the Greek, works still more injuriously. St. Paul would by no means have affirmed or admit- ted that " the Jews" accused him ; all true Jews, all who held fast the promises made to the Fathers, and now fulfilled in Christ, were on his side. He is ac- cused " of Jews" unfaithful members of the house of Abraham, by no means " of the Jews." The force of ver. 7 is still more seriously impaired. In that verse St. Paul puts before Agrippa, a Jewish prose-

120 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

lyte, and therefore capable of understanding him, the monstrous, self-contradicting absurdity, that for cher- ishing and asserting the Messias-hope of his nation, he should now be accused — not of heathens, that would have been nothing strange — but " of Jews" when that hope was indeed the central treasure of the whole Jewish nation. — Before leaving this point, I may observe that " a Hebrew of Hebrews" (Phil. iii. 5), one, namely, of pure Hebrew blood and language ('E/Spaios gf 'E^parwv), while it is more accurate, would tell also its own story much better than " a Hebrew of the Hebrews," as we have it now.

II. Our Translators do not always seize the precise force of the prepositions. They have not done so in the passages which follow : —

John iv. 6. — " Jesus therefore being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well." It should be ra- ther, "by the well" (i*l <ry leyiyjj), in its immediate neighborhood. On two other occasions, namely, Mark xiii. 29 ; John v. 2, they have rightly gone back from the more rigorous rendering of M with a dative, to which they have here adhered : cf. Exod. ii. 15, LXX.*

Heb. vi. 7. — " Herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed." The Translators give in the margin as an alternative, "for whom" But it is no mere alterna- tive; of &' we (not &' wv), it is the only rendering

* Yet it ought to be said that Winer (Gramm., § 52, c.) is on the

side of our Version as it stands.

IN OUR VERSION. 121

which can be admitted. The rendering which has been preferred, besides being faulty in grammar, dis- turbs the spiritual image which underlies the passage. The heart of man is here the earth ; man is the dres- ser ; but the spiritual culture goes forward, not that the earth may bring forth that which is meet for him, the dresser by whom, but for God, the owner of the soil, for whom, it is dressed. The plural &' ov$, instead of or cv, need not trouble us, nor remove us from this, the only right interpretation. The earlier Latin ver- sion had it rightly ; see Tertullian, De Pudic, c. 20 :

" Terra enim quae peperit herbam aptam his,

propter quos et colitur," &c. ; but the Yulgate, " a quibus" anticipates our mistake, in which we only follow the English translations preceding.

Luke xxiii. 42. — "And he said unto Him, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into thy kingdom." But how could Christ come into his kingdom, when He is Himself the centre of the kingdom, and brings the kingdom with Him ? The passage will gain im- mensely when, leaving that strange and utterly un- warranted assumption that sk, a preposition of motion, is convertible with s'v, a preposition of rest ; and thus that h <rv) /^atfjXsia, which stands here, is the same as sig tyiv (3oL<fikeia\), we translate, " Lord, remember me when Thou comest in thy kingdom" that is, " with all thy glorious kingdom about Thee," as is so sub- limely set forth, Rev. xix. 14 ; cf. Jude 14 ; 2 Thess. i. T ; Matt. xxv. 31 (h <njj 5oT*j). It is the stranger

6

122 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

that our Translators should have fallen into this er- ror, seeing that they have translated sp^M-svov sv rjj (3a<fi\eici aCro-j (Matt. xvi. 28) quite correctly, " com- ing in his kingdom" The Vulgate has " in regno tuo" there, although it shares the error of our Trans- lation, and has "in regnum tuum" here. The exe- getical tact of Maldonatus overcomes on this, as on many other occasions, his respect for his authentic Vulgate, and he comments thus : " Itaque non est sensus, Cum veneris ad regnandum, sed, Cum veneris jam regnans, cum veneris non ad acquirendum reg- num, sed regno jam acquisito, quemadmodum venturus ad judicium est.', The same faulty rendering of iv, and assumption that it may have the force of sfc, oc- curs, Gal. i. 6 ; and indeed this, or the converse, in too many other passages as well.*

2 Cor. xi. 3. — "But I fear lest .... your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ" (atfo Trts a<z\Wy\7og <r% zl$ <rov xpioVov). Here, again, the injurious supposition that s& and sv may be confounded, has been at work, and to serious loss in the bringing out of the meaning of the passage. The atf\6rris here is the simple, undivided affection, the sin- gleness of heart, of the Bride, the Church, eig Xpitfvw, toward Christ. It is not their " simplicity in Christ" or Christian simplicity, which the Apostle fears lest

* See Winer's Gramm., § 54, 4, where he enters at length into the question whether els is ever used for iv, or iv for eis, in the New Tes tament. He denies both.

IN OUR VERSION. 123

they may through addiction to worldly wisdom forfeit and let go ; but, still moving in the images of espousals and marriage, that they may not bring a simple, undi- vided heart to Christ. If after a^XoV^ro^ we should also read xal *% ayvorriros, which seems probable, it will then be clearer still what St. Paul's intention was. 2 Pet. i. 5-7. — " Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness,"

&C. (s'!tix0Prl'yv^a'rs sv <rr) tfirfrsi u/xwv <r»)v ojpS<njv, x. r. X.)

Tyndale had rendered the passage: " In your faith minister virtue, and in your virtue knowledge," &c, and all translations up to the Authorized had followed him. Henry More (On Godliness, b. 8, c. 3) has well expressed the objection to the present version : " Grotius would have £v to be redundant here ; so that his suffrage is for the English translation. But, for my own part, I think that sv is so far from being re- dundant that it is essential to the sentence, and inter- posed that we might understand a greater mystery than the mere adding of so many virtues one to an- other, which would be all that could be expressly signified if sv were left out. But the preposition here signifying causality, there is more than a mere enu- meration of those divine graces. For there is also implied how naturally they rise one out of another, and that they have a causal dependence one of anoth- er." See this same thought beautifully carried out in detail by Bengel, in loco.

124 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

III. Our Translators do not always give the true force of tenses, moods, and voices.

Oftentimes the present tense is used in the New Testament, especially by St. John in the Apocalypse, to express the eternal Now of Him for whom there can be no past and no future. It must be consid- ered a fault, when this is let go, and exchanged for a past tense in our Version. Take, for instance, Rev. iv. 5 : " Out of the throne proceeded lightnings, and thunderings, and voices." But it is much more than this ; not merely at that one moment when St. John beheld, but evermore out of his throne proceed Qxito- £sJovTcti) these symbols of the presence and of the ter- rible majesty of God. Throughout this chapter, and at chapter i. 14-16, there is often a needless, and sometimes an absolutely incorrect, turning of the pres- ent of eternity into the past of time.

Elsewhere a past is turned without cause into a present. It is so at Acts xxviii. 4 : " No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet Vengeance suffereth not to live." A fine turn in the words of these barbarous islanders has been missed in our Version, and in all the English versions except the Geneva. The /3<xpp«poj, the ' na- tives,' as I think the word might have been fairly translated, who must have best known the qualities of the vipers on the island, are so confident of the deadly character of that one which has fastened itself on Paul's hand, that they regard and speak of him as

IN OUR VERSION. 125

one already dead, and in this sense use a past tense ; he is one whom " Vengeance suffered not (oux siWsv) to live." Bengel : " Non sivit; jam nullum putant esse Paulum ;" De Wette : " nicht habt leben lassen." Let me observe here, by-the-way, that our modern editions of the Bible should not have dropped the capital V with which ' Vengeance' was spelt in the exemplar edition of 1611. These islanders, in their simple but most truthful moral instincts, did not con- template * Vengeance' or Atxy in the abstract ; but personified her as a goddess ; and our Translators, who are by no means prodigal of their capitals, in their manner of spelling the word, did their best to mark and reproduce this personification of the divine Justice, although the carelessness of printers has since let it go.

Elsewhere there is confusion between the uses of the present and the perfect. There is such, for ex- ample, at Luke xviii. 12 : "I give tithes of all that I possess" But oVa xrujxcu is not " all that I possess" but " all that I acquire" (" quae mihi acquiro, quae mihi redeunt"). The Vulgate which has ' possideo,' shares, perhaps suggested, our error. In the perfect xixr^ai the word first obtains the force of " I possess," or, in other words, " I have acquired."* The Phari- see would boast himself to be, so to say, another Jacob, such another as he who had said, " Of all that Thou sh lit give me, I will surely give the tenth unto

* See Winer's Gramm., § 41, 4.

126 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

Thee" (Gen. xxviii. 22; cf. xiv. 20), a careful per- former of that precept of the law, which said, " Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year" (Deut. xiv. 22) ; but change ' acquire' into 6 possess,' and how much of this we lose !

"We must associate with this passage another, name- ly, Luke xxi. 19 : " In your patience possess ye your souls ;" for the same correction ought there to find place. It is rather, " In your patience make ye your souls your own" — that is, " In and by your patience or endurance acquire your souls as indeed your own" (" salvas obtinete"). Thus Winer: " Durch Aus- dauer erwerbt euch eure Seelen ; sie werden dann erst euer wahres, unverlierbares Eigenthum werden." It is noticeable that our Translators have corrected the ' possess' of all the preceding versions at Matt, x. 9, exchanged this for the more accurate ' provide' (xr^cds), or, as it is in the margin, i get ;' which makes it strange that they should have allowed it in these other places to stand.

Imperfects lose their proper force, and are dealt with as aorists and perfects. The vividness of the narration often suffers from the substitution of the pure historic for what may be called the descriptive tense ; as, for example, at Luke xiv. ,7 : " He put forth a parable to those that were bidden when He marked how they chose out the chief rooms." Read, " how they were choosing out (^eXg'yovro) the chief

IN OUR VERSION. 127

rooms" — the sacred historian placing the Lord's ut- terance of the parable in the midst of the events which he is describing. So Acts iii. 1 : " Now Peter and John went up together into the temple." Read, "were going' up" (avs'/3a»vov). Again, Mark ii. 18: " And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast." Read, "were fasting" (?cav vyitfrsuovrs^), namely, at that very time ; which gives a special vigor to their remonstrances ; they were keeping a fast while the Lord's disciples were celebrating a festival. The incomplete, imperfect sense, which so often belongs to this tense, and from which it derives its name, they often fail to give ; the commencement of a work which is not brought to a conclusion, the consent and co-operation of another party, which was necessary for its completion, having been withheld ; in such cases the will is taken for the deed.* Thus, Luke i. 59: "And they called him Zacharias." It is not so, for Elizabeth would not alfow this name to be given him ; but with the true force of the incom- plete, imperfect tense, " they were calling (ixaXouv) him Zacharias." Once more, Luke v. 6 : " And their net brake." Had this been so, they would scarcely have secured the fish at all. Rather, "was in the act of breaking," or " was at the point to break" (<m»jyvuTo). Other passages where they do not give the force of the imperfect, but deal with it as though it had been a perfect or an aorist, are John iii. 22 ;

* See Jelf ' s Kiihner's Gramm., § 398, 2.

128 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

iv. 47 ; vi. 21 ; Luke xxiv. 32 ; Matt. xiii. 34 ; Acts xi. 20.

Aorists are rendered as if they were perfects ; and perfects as if they were aorists. Thus, we have an example of the first, Luke i. 19, where a*s<j'<raX*)v is translated as though it were asrstfraX/xaf, " I am sent," instead of " I was sent." Gabriel contemplates his mission, not at the moment of its present fulfilment, but from that of his first sending forth from the pres- ence of God. Another example of the same occurs at 2 Pet. i. 14 : " Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me." By this "hath shewed me," we lose altogether the special allusion to an historic mo- ment in the Apostle's life, to John xxi. 18, 19, which would at once come out, if l&jXwtfg /xo» had been ren- dered,-" shewed me." Doubtless there are passages which would make difficult the universal application of the rule that • perfects should be translated as per- fects, and aorists as aorists ; thus, Luke xiv. 18, 19, where one might hesitate in rendering tyoputa " I bought" instead of " I have bought" and some at least in the long line of aorists, sco'gatfa, sVsXsiWa, g<pa- ve'pwtfa, £Xa/2ov (ver. 4, 6, 8), in the high-priestly prayer, John xvii. Still, on these passages no conclusion can be grounded that the writers of the New Testament did not always observe the distinction.*

Again, the force of the aorist is missed, though in

* See Winer, Gramm., § 41, 5.

IN OUR VERSION. 129

another way, at Mark xvi. 2, where dvarslXavTog <rou TjXiov is translated, "at the rising of the sun." It can only be, " when the sun was risen" Did the anxiety to avoid a slight seeming discrepancy between this statement and that of two other Evangelists (Matt, xxviii. 1 ; Mark xvi. 2) modify the translation here ?

Examples, on the other hand, of perfects turned into aorists are frequent. Thus, at Luke xiii. 2: '" Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they svffered such things ?" Rather, " because they have suffered (VstfoVWiv) such things." Our Lord contemplates the memorable ca- tastrophe by which they perished, not as something belonging merely to the historic past ; but as a fact reaching into the present ; still vividly presenting itself to the mind's eye of his hearers.

One other example must suffice. In that great doc- trinal passage, Col. i. 13-22, St. Paul declares, ver. 16, that " by Christ were all things created." The aorist ixrlaQ-q has its right force given to it here ; but the Apostle in a most remarkable way, when in the last clause of the verse he resumes the doctrine of the whole, changes the aorist s*nVdrj for the perfect gxnovai. And why ? Because he is no longer looking at the one historic act of creation, but at the permanent re- sults flowing on into all time and eternity therefrom. Our Translators have not followed him here, but, as if no change had been made, they render this clause also : " All things were created by Him, and for Him ;"

6*

130 ON SOME ERRORS OP GREEK GRAMMAR

but read rather: "All things have been created by Him, and for Him."*

Imperfects and aorists are turned without necessity into pluperfects. It is admitted by all that an aorist, under certain conditions, may have this sense of a past behind another past ;f nor, according to some, can this force be altogether denied to the imperfect ; but a pluperfect force is given in our Version to these tenses, where certainly no sort of necessity requires it. Thus, for the words, " because He had done these things on the sabbath" (John v. 16), read, "because He did (stto/si) these things on the sabbath." And, again, in the same chapter read, " for Jesus conveyed Himself away" (sgs'vsutfsy) ; that is, so soon as this dis- cussion between the Jews and the healed man arose, not, " had conveyed Himself away" previously, as our Version would imply.

Neither do our Translators always give its right force to a middle verb. They fail to do so at Phil, ii. 15 : " among whom ye shine as lights in the world." To justify these words, " ye shine" which are shared by all the Versions of the English Hexapla, St. Paul ought to have written cpcuWs, and not <paiW0s, as he has written. $aj'vsrv, indeed, is to shine (John i. 5 ;

* The fact that we almost all learn our grammar from the Latii^ and that in the Latin the perfect indicative does its own duty and that of the aorist as well, renders us very unobservant of inaccuracies in this particular kind till we have been specially trained to observe them.

t What these conditions are, see Winer's Gramm., § 41, 5.

IN OUR VERSION. 131

2 Pet. i. 19 ; Rev. i. 16) ; but <paiWdai to appear (Matt, xxiii. 27 ; 1 Pet. iv. 18 ; Jam. iv. 14). It is worthy of note that while the Yulgate, having ' lucetis,' shares and anticipates our error, the earlier Italic Version was free from it ; as is evident from the verse as quoted by Augustine (Enarr. in Psalm., cxlvi. 4) : " In qui- bus apparetis tanquam luminaria in mundo."

Sometimes the force of a passive is lost. Thus is it at 2 Cor. v. 10 : " For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ." The words contain a yet more solemn and awful announcement than this : " For we must all be made manifest" Qiravrag r^SLg (pavspwdSjva/ Set), "exhibited as what we indeed are, displayed in our true colors, the secrets of our hearts disclosed, and we, so to speak, turned inside out" (for the word means as much as this) "before the judgment-seat of Christ." There is often reason to think that the exposition of Chrysostom exercised considerable influence on our Translators. Here it might have done so with benefit ; for, commenting on these words (in Cor. Horn., 10), he says: "ou yap

tfapatfrSjvai q^ag airXtig SsT, ctXXa xai <pavspwd5jvai,"

showing that he would not have been satisfied with what our Translators have here done.

With one or two miscellaneous observations I will conclude this chapter. It would be very impertinent to suppose that our Translators, who numbered in their company many of the first scholars of their time, were not perfectly at home in the use of **$, and

132 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR

familiar with the very simple modifications of its meaning as employed with or without an article ; and yet it must be owned that they do not always observe its rules. One example may suffice.

Acts x. 12. — " Wherein were all manner of four- footed beasts of the earth." But tfavra ra rsypewroSa, can not possibly have the meaning ascribed to it here. Translate rather : " Wherein were all the four-footed beasts of the earth" — " omnia animalia," as the Vul- gate rightly has it. Here, probably, as Winer ob- serves, they were tempted to forsake the more accu- rate rendering from an unwillingness to ascribe some- thing which seemed to them like exaggeration to the sacred historian : how, they said to themselves, could " all the four-footed beasts of the earth" be contained in that sheet ? For, indeed, this shrinking from a meaning which an accurate translation would render up, is a very frequent occasion of mistranslation, and also of warped exegesis. It is much better, however, that the translator should go forward on his task without regard to such considerations as these. The Word of God can take care of, and vindicate itself, and does not need to be thus taken under man's pro- tection.

It is remarkable how little careful our Translators are to note the difference between the verb of being and that of becoming-; between e/pi and yiywa. It would not be easy to find the passage in the New Tes- tament where these are confounded, but they confound

IN OUR VERSION. 133

them frequently, and often to our loss. Thus, at Heb. v. 11, the Apostle complains of the difficulty of un- folding some hard truths to those whom he addresses, " seeing ye are dull of hearing." But the rebuke is sharper than this — " seeing ye have become dull of hearing" Qxel vwdpo; ysyovare <ra?s cocoais). This would imply that it was not so once, in the former days, when they first were enlightened (x. 32) ; but that now they had gone back from that liveliness of spirit- ual apprehension which once they had (see Chrysos- tom). The Vulgate has it rightly : " Quoniam imbe- cilles facti estis ad audiendum ;" being followed by the Rheims : " Because ye are become weak to hear ;" so, too, De Wette: "Da ihr trage von Yerstande geworden seid." At Matt. xxiv. 32, there is the same loss of the true force of the word. Not the being tender of the branch of the fig-tree, but the becoming tender, is the sign of the nearness of sum- mer.

In other points our Translators are without fault, where yet the modern copies by careless reproduction of their work involve them in apparent error, which indeed is none of theirs, but that of the too care- less guardians of their text. They have their own burden to bear ; they ought not to be made to bear the burden of others. But they do so at Matt. xii. 23. Correcting all our previous translations, they rendered the words, ^r,n cure's sgvjv 6 u\os Aao'o, with perfect accuracy : " Is this the Son of David ?" fully

134 ERRORS OP GREEK GRAMMAR IN OUR VERSION.

understanding that, according to the different idioms of the Greek and English, the negative particle of the original was not to reappear in the English ; cf. Acts vii. 42 ; John viii. 22. I am unable to say when the reading, which appears in all our modern Bibles, " Is not this the Son of David ?" first crept in ; it is already in Hammond, 1659 ; but it is little creditable to those who should have kept their text inviolate, that they have not exercised a stricter vigilance over it. It is curious that, having escaped error here, our Transla- tors should yet have fallen into it in the exactly simi- lar phrase at John iv. 29, \iA*\ ourfc knv 6 Xpufrig; where they do render, " Is not this the Christ ?" but should have rendered, "Is this the Christ?" The Samaritan woman in her joy, as speaking of a thing too good to be true, which she will suggest, but dare not absolutely affirm, asks of her fellow-countrymen, " Is this the Christ ? — can this be He whom we have looked for so long ?" — expecting in reply not a nega- tive but an affirmative answer.

QUESTIONABLE RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 135

CHAPTER VIII.

ON SOME QUESTIONABLE RENDERINGS OF WORDS.

There are a certain number of passages in which no one can charge our Translators with error, the version they have given being entirely defensible, and numbering among its defenders some, it may be many, well worthy to be heard ; while yet another version on the whole will commend itself as preferable to that which they have adopted. Let me adduce a few pas- sages where, to me at least, it seems there is a greater probability, in some a far greater, in favor of some other translation rather than of that which they have admitted.

Matt. vi. 27 (cf. Luke xii. 25). — "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature ?" Erasmus was, I believe, the first who suggested the rendering of IjXixia not by ' stature,' but by " length of life ;" and this his suggestion has since found ac- ceptance with a large number of interpreters ; with Hammond, Wolf, Olshausen, Meyer, and others. While

136 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

the present translation may be abundantly justified, yet this certainly appears far preferable to me, and for the following reasons : a. In that natural rhetoric of which our Lord was the great master, He would have adduced some very small measure, and reminded his hearers that they could not add even this to their stature ; He would not have adduced a cubit, which is about a foot and a half; but He would have de- manded, " Which of you with all your carking and caring can add an inch or a hair's breadth to his stature ?" (3. Men do not practically take thought about adding to their stature ; it is not an object of desire to one in a thousand to be taller than God has made him ; this could scarcely therefore be cited as one of the vain solicitudes of men. On the other hand, everything exactly fits when we understand our Lord to be asking this question about length of life. The cubit, which is much when compared with a man's stature, is infinitesimally small, and therefore most appropriate, when compared to his length of life, that life being contemplated as a course, or opo,uo.-, which he may attempt, but ineffectually, to prolong. And then, further, this the prolonging of life is something which men do seek ; striving, by various precautions, by solicitous care, to lengthen the period of their mortal existence ; to which yet they can not add a cubit, no, not a hand's breadth, more than God has apportioned to it.

Luke ii. 49. — " Vrist ye not that I must be about

RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 137

ray Father *s business ?" But h <ro~s rov Harp6g will as well mean, " in my Father's house .•', and if the words will mean this as well, they will surely mean it bet- ter. We shall thus have a more direct answer on the part of the Child Jesus to the implied rebuke of his blessed Mother's words, " Behold thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing ;" to which he answers, " How is it that ye sought Me?" — that is, in any other place ? " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house ? here in the temple ; and here without lengthened seeking ye might have found me at once." There was a certain misconception in respect of his person and character, which had led them to look for Him in other places of resort rather than in the temple.

John xii. 6. — " He was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein." I can not but think that it was St. John's intention to say not merely that Judas " bare," but that he "bare away" purloined, or pilfered, what was put into the common purse. It has the appearance of a tautology to say that he " had the bag, and bare what was put therein ;" unless, indeed, the latter words are introduced to explain the opportunity which he enjoyed of playing the thief; hardly, as it appears to me, a sufficient explanation. On the other hand, the use of (3a<fra%sn, not in the sense of ' portare,' but of ' auferre,' is frequent ; it is so used by Josephus, Antt., xiv. 7. 1, and in the New Testament, John xx. 15 ; and such, I am persuaded, is

138 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

the use of it here. We note that already In Augus- tine's time the question had arisen which was the right way to deal with the words ; for, commenting on the 4 portabat' which he found in his Italic, as it has kept its place in the Yulgate, he asks : " Portabat an ex- portabat ? Sed ministerio portabat, furto exportabat." Here he might seem to leave his own view of the pas- sage undecided; not so, however, at Ep., 108. 3: u Ipsi [Apostoli] de illo scripserunt quod fur erat, et omnia qua3 mittebantur de dominicis loculis avfere- baty After all is said, there will probably always remain upholders of one translation and upholders of the other ; yet to my mind the probabilities are much in^ favor of that version which I observe that the " Five Clergymen" have also adopted.

Rom. i. 26, 27. — I speak with hesitation, yet in- cline strongly to think that in this awful passage where St. Paul dares to touch on two of the worst enormities pf the heathen world, and with purest lips to speak, and that with all necessary plainness, of the impurest things, we should have done well, if we had followed even to the utmost where he would lead us. For ' men' and ' women,' as often as the words occur in these verses, I should wish to see substituted ' males' and ' females ;' o.etsvss and ^Xs<a< are through- out the words which St. Paul employs. It is true that something must be indulged to the delicacy of modern Christian ears ; our Translators have evidently so considered in rendering more than one passage in

RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 139

the Old Testament ; but, reading these verses over with this substitution, while they gain in emphasis, while they represent more exactly the terrible charge which St. Paul brings against the cultivated world of heathendom, they do not seem to me to acquire any such painful explicitness as they ought not to have, hardly more of this than they possessed before.

2 Cor. ii. 14. — "Now thanks be unto God which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." Here, too, our Translators may be right, and, if they are wrong, it is in good company. I must needs think that for " causeth us to triumph" we should read, " leadeth us in triumph ;" and that the Vulgate, when it ren- dered 8piaii(3suuv fyxofc, " qui triumphat nos," and Jerome (which is the same thing), " qui triumphat de nobis," though even he has failed to bring out his meaning with clearness, were right. Gpiu^f3e6siv occurs but on one other occasion in the New Testament (Col. ii. 5). No one there doubts that it means, to lead in triumph, to make a show of, as vanquished and subdued ; and it is hard to withdraw this meaning from it here, being as it also is the only meaning of the word in classical Greek; thus Plutarch, Thes. et Ro?n.,iv.: (3a<ti\e7g idpia^s^e xcu ^ysjxovac: : he led kings and captains in triumph ; and see other examples in Wetstein. But, it may be asked, what will St. Paul mean by the dec- laration, " who everywhere leadeth us in triumph in Christ" ? The meaning is, indeed, a very grand one.

140 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

St. Paul did not feel it inconsistent with the pro- foundest humility, to regard himself as a signal trophy and token of God's victorious power in Christ. Lying with his face upon the ground, he had anticipated, though in another sense, the words of another fighter against God, " Yicisti, Galilaee ;" and now his Al- mighty Conqueror was leading him about through all the cities of the Greek and Roman world, an illustri- ous testimony of his power at once to subdue and to save. The foe of Christ was now, as he gloried in naming himself, the servant of Christ ; and this, his mighty transformation, God was making manifest to the glory of his name in every place. The attempt of some to combine the meanings of being led in tri- umph, which they feel that the word demands, and triumphing or being made to triumph, which it seems to them the sense demands, is in my judgment an at- tempt to reconcile irreconcileable images ; as, for instance, when Stanley says, " The sense of conquest and degradation is lost in the more general sense of ' making us to share this triumph.' " But in the lit- eral triumph who so pitiable, so abject, so forlorn, as the captive chief or king, the Jugurtha or Yercingeto- rix, doomed often, as soon as he had graced the show, to a speedy and miserable death ? But it is not with God as with man : for while to be led in triumph of men is the most miserable, to be led in triumph of God as the willing trophy of his power, is the most glorious and blessed lot which could fall to any ; and

RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 141

it is this, I am persuaded, which the Apostle claims for his own.

2 Cor. ii. 17. — "For we are not as many, which corrupt the Word of God." Doubtless there is much to be said in favor of this version of xcHttjXsuovrsg <rov Xoyov rou ©sou. Kcfrcr\KsiB\v is often to adulterate ; vodsC- siv, as Chrysostom expounds it, to mingle false with true, as the x&wn-jXoc, or petty huckster, would frequently do. Still, the matter is by no means so clear in favor of this meaning of xa<ir?)\evsiv, and against the other, " to make a traffic of," as some in later times would have it ; and the words s% slXixpivsias, which Meyer con- ceives decisive, seems to me rather an argument the other way. What so natural as that St. Paul should put back the charge of making a traffic with the Word of God ; above all, seeing how earnestly elsewhere in this Epistle he clears himself from similar charges (xii. 14, 17) ? I believe when Tyndale rendered xaT7)XsJe»v here, " to chop and change with," he was on the right track ; and many will remember the re- markable passage in Bentley's Sermon upon Popery, which is so strong in this view, that, long as it is, I can not forbear to quote it : " Our English Transla- tors have not been very happy in their version of this passage. We are not, says the Apostle, xa^Xsuovrsj rov Xo/ov rou 0sou, which our Translators have rendered, 4 We do not corrupt' or (as in the margin) deal de- ceitfully with ' the Word of God.' They were led to this by the parallel place, c. iv. of this Epistle, ver. 2,

142 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

1 not walking in craftiness,' fwj^s Sokovvrss tov Xoyov too ©£oiJ, ' nor handling the word of God deceitfully ;' they took xatrfeCovrss and Sokovvrss in the same ade- quate notion, as the vulgar Latin had done before them, which expresses both by the same word, adul- terantes verbum Dei ; and so, likewise, Hesychius makes them synonyms, ixxcMmjXe&iv, &>Xouv. AoXoSv, in- deed, is fitly rendered adulterare ; so <3oXoCv tov xpv<*vj> <rov oivov, to adulterate gold or wine, by mixing worse ingredients with the metal or liquor. And our Trans- lators had done well if they had rendered the latter passage, not adulterating, not sophisticating the Word. But xairriksowrsg in our text has a complex idea and a wider signification ; xai^Xsusiv always comprehends tfoXouv ; but £oXo£v never extends to xofrnjXeusiv, which, besides the sense of adulterating, has an additional notion of unjust lucre, gain, profit, advantage. This is plain from the word x<W*}Xo£, a calling always infa- mous for avarice and knavery : ' perfidus hie caupo,' says the poet, as a general character. Thence 7uvxrr Xsusjv, by an easy and natural metaphor, was diverted to other expressions where cheating and lucre were signified : xamiXeiJeiv tov Xo^ov, says the Apostle here, and the ancient Greeks, xcmtiiXsjsiv rag Slxas, r^v sjpjpniv, r^y Cocpiav, <ro. ixa&^ara, to corrupt and sell justice, to barter a negotiation of peace, to prostitute learning and philosophy for gain. Cheating, we see, and adul- terating, is part of the notion of xawrjXgJciv, but the principal essential of it is sordid lucre. So cauponari

RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 143

in the famous passage of Ennius, where Pyrrhus re- fuses the offer of a ransom for his captives, and restores them gratis : —

' Non mi aurum posco, nee mi pretium dederitis, Non cauponanti bellum, sed belligeranti.'

And so the Fathers expound this place. ... So that, in short, what St. Paul says, xaicrikslovrsg tov Xo'yov, might be expressed in one classic word — Xo^fwropoi, or 'koyotp.rai, where the idea of gain and profit is the chief part of the signification. Wherefore, to do jus- tice to our text, we must not stop lamely with our Translators, ' corrupters of the word of God ;' but add to it as its plenary notion, ' corrupters of the word of God for filthy lucre* "*

Col. ii. 8. — " Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit." This translation may very well hold its place : tivXayuysTv does mean to rob or spoil ; this, however, is its secondary meaning ; its first, and that which agrees with its etymology (tfuXov and CC7/60), would be, to lead away the spoil, " praedam abigere ;" and certainly the warning would be more emphatic if we understood it as a warning lest they themselves should become the spoil or booty of these false teachers : " Beware lest any man make a booty of you, lead you away as his spoil, through philosophy and vain deceit. " Bengel: " tfuXayuywv, qui non so- lum de vobis, sed vos ipsos spolium faciat."

Col. ii. 23. — "Which things have indeed a shew

Work*, vol. iii., p. 242.

144 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

of wisdom in will-worship, and humility, and neglect- ing of the body, not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh." The first part of this verse, itself not very easy, appears to me to be excellently rendered in our Version. Perhaps, if the thing 'were to do over again, instead of " a shew of wisdom," " a repu- tation of wisdom" would more exactly express X6/ov doyias : and there may be a question whether ' neglect- ing' is quite strong enough for dyeidia; whether ' pun- ishing' or ' not sparing,' which are both suggested in the margin, would not either of them have been well introduced into the text. But in the latter part of the verse, where its chief difficulties reside, our Trans- lators leave us in a certain doubt as to what their exact view of the passage was. About the Geneva Version I have no doubt. Its authors, evidently un- der the leading of Beza, have seized the right mean- ing : " [Yet] are of no value, [but appertain to those things] wherewith the flesh is crammed." At the same time, their version is too paraphrastic ; the words which I have enclosed within brackets having no corresponding words in the original. Did our Translators mean the same thing ? I am inclined to think not ; else they would have placed a comma after ' honor ;' but that rather they, in agreement with many of the best Interpreters of their time, understood the verse thus : " Which things have a shew of wisdom, &c, but are not in any true honor, as things serving to the satisfying of the just needs of the body."

RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 145

Against this it may be urged that rrM^ovrj has a con- stant sense of filling overmuch, of stuffing (Isai. i. 14 ; Ps. cv. 16 ; Ezek. xvi. 48) ; and followed by tfapxdg could scarcely have any other sense ; it being impos- sible that <fap% here can be used in an honorable inten- tion as equivalent to tfw.ua, but only in the constant Pauline sense of the flesh and mind of the flesh. Some rendering which should express what the Geneva Ver- sion expresses, but in happier and conciser terms, is, I believe, here to be desired. "A golden sentence," as he calls it, which Bengel quotes from the Commen- tary of Hilary the Deacon on this passage, " Sagina carnalis sensus traditio humana est," shows that this interpretation of it was not unknown in antiquity.

1 Tim. vi. 8. — " Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content." Would it not be better to translate, " Having food and covering-, let us be there- with content" ? It is possible that St. Paul had only raiment in his eye ; and tfxsVacrua is sometimes used in this more limited sense (Plato, Polit., 279 d) ; but seeing that it may very well include, and does very often include, habitation, this more general word, which it would have been still free for those who liked to understand as ' raiment' alone, appears to me preferable. The Yulgate, which translates, " Ha- bentes alimenta et quibus tegamur," and De Wette, ' Bedeckung,' give the same extent to the word.

Jam. iii. 5. — " Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth !" This may be right. Our Translators

7

146 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE

have the high authority of St. Jerome on their side, who renders fin Esai., 6Q~) : " Parvus ignis quam grandem succendit materiam;" and compare Ecclus. xxviii. 10 ; yet certainly it is much more in the spirit and temper of this grand imaginative passage to take oX'/jv here as ' wood' or ' forest :' " Behold how great a forest a little spark kindleth !" So the Vulgate long ago : " Ecce quantus ignis quam magnam silvam incendit !" and De Wette : " Siehe, ein kleines Feuer, welch einen grossen Watd ziindet es an !" It need hardly be observed how frequently in ancient classi- cal poetry the image of the little spark setting the great forest in a blaze recurs-^- in Homer, 11. , xi. 155 ; in Pindar, Pyth., iii. 66, and elsewhere ; nor yet how much better this of the wrapping of some vast forest in a flame by the falling of a single spark sets out that which was in St. James's mind, namely, of a far- spreading mischief springing from a smallest cause, than does the vague sense which in our Version is attached to the word. Our Translators have placed 4 wood' in the margin. '

Rev. iii. 2. — " Strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die." The better Commentators are now pretty well agreed that tol Xoi^a, thus rendered "the things which remain," should be taken rather as = rovs Xono'js, and that the Angel of the Sardian Church is not bidden, as we generally understand it, to strengthen the graces that remain in his own heart, but the few and feeble believers that remain in the

RENDERINGS OP WORDS. 14?

Church over which he presides ; the allusion being probably to Ezek. xxxiv. 2. Yitringa : " Commendat vigilantiam, qua sibi a morte caverent, et alios ab interitu imminente vindicarent." The use of the neu- ter, singular and plural, where not things but persons are intended, is too frequent in the New Testament, to cause any difficulty here (Winer, Gramm., § 27, 4).

148 ON SOME WORDS

CHAPTER IX.

ON SOME WORDS WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED.

Our Translators occasionally fail in part or alto- gether to give the true force of a word or phrase. In some cases it is evident they have assumed a wrong etymology. These are examples : —

Matt. viii. 20. — " The birds of the air have nests." It stood thus in the versions preceding ; the Vulgate in like manner has * nidos ;' some of the earlier Latin versions, however, instead of ' nidos' had l diversoria,' and Augustine, using one of these, has ' tabernacula,'* and these, with their equivalent English, are on all accounts the preferable renderings. For, in the first place, birds do not retire to their ' nests,' except at one brief period of the year; and then, secondly, xctrcurxrivCMfsis will not bear that meaning; or at all events has so much naturally the more general mean- ing of shelters, habitations (' Wdhnungen,' De Wette), that one must needs agree with G-rotius, who here

* Qucest. xvii. in Matt., qu. 5.

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 149

remarks : " Quin vox haec ad arborum ramos perti- neat, dubitaturum non puto qui loca infra, xiii. 32, Marc. iv. 32, et Luc. xiii. 19, inspexerit." He might have added to these, Ps. civ. 12 ; Dan. iv. 18, LXX. Matt. x. 4 ; cf. Mark iii. 18. — " Simon the Canaan- ite" I have often asked myself in perplexity what our Translators meant by this ' Canaanite ;' which they are the first to use ; although Cranmer's " Simon of Canaan" and probably Tyndale's " Simon of Ca- nan" come to the same thing. Take ' Canaanite' in its obvious sense, and in that which everywhere else in the Scripture it possesses (Gen. xii. 6 ; Exod. xxv. 28; Zech. xiv. 21, and continually), and the word would imply that one of the Twelve, of those that should sit on the twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel, was himself not of the seed of Abraham, but of that accursed stock which the children of Israel, going back from God's commandment, had failed ut- terly to extirpate on their entrance into the Promised Land ; and which, having thus been permitted to live, had gradually been absorbed into the nation. This, of course, could not be ; to say nothing of the word in the original being KavaWr^, and not XavavaTb?, as would have been necessary to justify the rendering of the Authorized Version. There can be no doubt that KavaviViis here is = ^Xwt^, Luke vi. 15 ; Acts i. 13 ; and expresses the fact that Simon had been, before he joined himself to the Lord, one of those stormy zealots who, professing to follow the example of Phin-

150 ON SOME WORDS

eas (Num. xxv. 9), took the vindication of God's out- raged law into their own hands. There is, indeed, another explanation sometimes given of the word; but the manner in which our Translators have spelt 4 Canaanite' will hardly allow one to suppose that by it they meant, " of Cana," the village in Galilee. This is Jerome's view, and I suppose Beza's (' Ca- naanites'), and De Wette's (< Der Kananit') ; yet

Kava would Surely yield, not KavaviVȣ, but Kavirr^, as

"A/3<$7]pa, 'Afitrisgirrig. I confess myself wholly at a loss to understand the intention of our Translators. The same difficulty attends the " Simon Chananceus" of the Vulgate.

Matt. xiv. 8. — "And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger." A meaning is given here to <rpo/3»/3a- cdsitfa which the word will not bear. I do not think that the Yulgate exercised much influence on our Translators ; yet the ' prsemonita' of it may have led the way to this error. H>o/3j/3a£siv is to urge on, or push forward, to make to advance, or sometimes, in- transitively, to advance ; the *p6 not being of time, but of place ; thus, <po/3j/3i£sjv t-^v -rarpjoa, to set for- ward the might of one's country (Polyb., ix. 10, 4) ; and it is sometimes used literally, sometimes figura- tively. On the one other occasion when it occurs in the New Testament, it is used literally ; *poef3ifiaam 'AXs'S-avfyov (Acts xix. 33), " they pushed forward," not, "they drew out, Alexander;" here figuratively

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 151

«•

and morally. We may conceive the unhappy girl with all her vanity and levity, yet shrinking from the petition of blood, which her mother would put into her lips, and needing to be urged on, or pushed for- ward, before she could be induced to make it ; and this is implied in the word. I should translate, " And she, being- urged on by her mother."

Matt. xiv. 13. — " They followed Him on foot out of the cities." Usyfi might very well mean " on foot ;" yet it does not mean so here ; but rather, " by land." There could be no question that the multitude who fok lowed Jesus would in the main proceed " on foot," and not in chariots or on horses, and it is not this which the Evangelist desires to state. The contrast which he would draw is between the Lord who reached the desert place by ship (see the earlier part of the verse), and the multitude who found their way thither by land. Compare the use of *s%e6ew at Acts xx. 13, by the Rheims rightly translated, "- to journey by land ;" but in our Translation, not with the same precision, "to go afoot."

Mark xi. 4. — "A place where two ways met." "Afwpotfos (ajAvpi and lS6g) is rather, a way round, a crooked lane.

Mark xii. 26. — "Have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him ?*' But iirl *% (3a<rov, as all acknowledge now, is not, " in the bush," as indicating the place from which God spake to Moses, but means, " in that portion of Scripture

152 ON SOME WORDS

which goes by the name of The Bush" — the Jews being wont to designate different portions of Scripture by the most memorable thing or fact recorded in them ; thus, one portion was called h /3a,ro.c. How, indeed, to tell this story in the English Version is not easy to determine, without forsaking the translator's sphere, and entering on that of the commentator. I may ob- serve that sv 'HXj'a (Rom. xi. 2) is a quotation of the same kind. It can never mean, " of Elias," as in our Translation ; but is rather, " in the history of Elias," in that portion of Scripture which tells of him ; so De Wette : " in der Geschichte des Elia."

Acts xiv. 13. — " We also are men of like passions with you." This fact would not have disproved in the eyes of these Lycaonians the right of Paul and Silas to be considered gods. The heathen were only too ready to ascribe to their gods like passions, re- venge, lust, envy, with their own. 'OxmirakTg v^Tv means rather, " subject to like conditions," that is, of pain, sickness, old age, death, " with yourselves." Translate, " We also are men who suffer like things with yourselves." The Vulgate, " Et nos mortales sumus," is on the right track ; and Tyndale, " We are mortal men like unto you." The only other pas- sage in the New Testament in which hy.Mwab7,s occurs (Jam. v. 17), will need to be slightly modified in the same sense.

Acts xvii. 22. — "I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious" This, as Luther's " allzu aber-

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 153

glaiibisch," is a rendering very much to be regretted. Whatever severe things St. Paul might be obliged to say to his hearers, yet it was not his way to begin by insulting, and in this way alienating them from him- self, and from the truth of which he was the bearer. Rather, if there was anything in them which he could praise, he would praise that, and only afterward con- demn that which demanded condemnation. So is it here ; he affirmed, and no doubt they took it for praise, that by his own observation he had gathered they were &s Setft6atii.ovs<f'<rsgovs, as men greatly addicted to the worship of deities, " very religious,'' I should render it, giving to * religious' its true sense, and not the mischievous sense which it has now acquired. So Beza, ' religiosiores ;' and De Wette, " sehr gottes- fiirchtig." This was the praise which all antiquity gave to the Athenians, and which Paul does not with- hold, using at the same time with the finest tact and skill a middle word, capable of a good sense, and capable of a bad — a word originally of honorable meaning, but which had already slipped in part into a dishonorable sense ; thus finely insinuating that this service of theirs might easily slip, or have slipped already, into excess, or might be rendered to wrong objects. Still, these words are to be taken, not as a holding up to them of their sin, but as a captatio be- nevolentice, and it must be confessed they are coarsely rendered in our Version.

Acts xxv. 5. — " Let them therefore, said he, which

r

154 ON SOME WORDS.

among you are able, go down." But oi <Wtoj is not " those which are able," but " those which are in au- thority," as the Vulgate rightly, " qui potentes sunt :" see Losner, Obss. in N. T., in loc.

Rom. ii. 22. — "Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege ?" This is too general, and fails to bring out with sufficient distinctness the charge which the Apostle, in this lepotfuXsis, is making against the Jew. The charge is this : " Thou professest to abhor idols, and yet art so mastered by thy eovetous- ness, that, if opportunity offers, thou wilt not scruple thyself to lay hands on these gold and silver abomi- nations, and to make them thy own" (see Chrysostom, in loco). Read, " Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples ?"

Rom. xi. 8. — "According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber." Our Trans- lators must have derived xaraw^s from wdra^siv, as indeed many others have done, before they could have given it this meaning. Yet they plainly have their misgiving in respect of the correctness of this etymol- ogy, for they propose ' remorse' in the margin, evi- dently on the correcter hypothesis that the word is not from vutft-afeiv, but vjrfcsiv. Still, even if they had put ' remorse,' as the compunction of the soul (the Yulgate has i compunctio'), into the text, though they would have been etymologically right, they would not have seized the exact force of xaravu^?, at least in Hellenistic Greek ; as is plain from the service which

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 155

it does in the Septuagint, and from the Hebrew words which it is there made to render. This is no place for entering at length into all (and it is much) which has been written on this word. Sufficient to say that it is properly the stupor or stupefaction, the astonish- ment, bringing ' astonishment' back to its stronger and earlier meaning, the stunnedness (4 Betaubung,' De Wette) consequent on a wound or blow, vjtftfsiv, as I need hardly observe, being to strike as well as to pierce. ' Torpor,' only that this so easily suggests the wrong etymology, and runs into the notion of deep sleep, would not be a bad rendering of it. * Stupor,' which the " Five Clergymen" have adopted, is perhaps better. Hammond, whose marginal emendations of the Authorized Version are often exceedingly valuable, and deserve more attention than they have received, being about the most valuable part of his book on the New Testament, has suggested ' senselessness ;' but this is not one of his happiest emendations.

Gal. i. 18. — " I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter." 'Itfropsfv is not merely ' to see,' but properly, to inquire, to investigate, to interrogate, to arrive by personal knowledge, ocular or other, at the actual knowledge of past events : and then, secondarily, to set down the results of these investigations, just as icropfa is, first, this investigation, and then, in a secondary sense, the result of it duly set down, or, as we say, ' history.' Here, indeed, it is a person, and not things, which is the object of this closer knowledge. " I went up

156 ON SOME WORDS

to Jerusalem," says Paul, " to acquaint myself with Peter" (" accuratius cognoscere ; itaque plus iuest quam in verbo iSsTv :" Winer).

Gal. v. 20. — ' Seditions.' It is at first perplexing to find this as the rendering of Styofraifiai, which is evidently a word of wider reach; but Archdeacon Hare has admirably accounted for its appearance in this place.* I will quote his words : " When our Version is inaccurate or inadequate, this does not arise, as it does throughout in the Rhemish Version, from a coincidence with the Vulgate ; yet its inade- quate renderings often seem to have arisen from an imperfect apprehension of some Latin substitute for the word in the Greek text — from taking some pecu- liar sense of the Latin word different from that in which it was used to represent the Greek original. Let me illustrate this by a single instance. Among the works of the flesh St. Paul (Gal. v. 20) numbers Sixptfrcuficu, which we render ' seditions.' But * sedi- tions' in our old, as well as our modern language, are only one form of the divisions implied by biy^dradlaA, and assuredly not the form which would present itself foremost to the Apostle's mind when writing to the Galatians. At first, too, one is puzzled to understand how the word ' seditions' came to suggest itself in the place, instead of the more general term ' divisions,' which is the plain correspondent to ^otfracfai, and is so ujsed in Rom. xvi. 17, and in 1 Cor. iii, 3. Here

* Misriqn of the Comforter ^ p. 391.

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 157

the thought occurs that the Latin word ' seditio,' though in its ordinary acceptation equivalent to its English derivative, yet primarily and etymologically answers very closely to ^occao'ia ; and one is natu- rally led to conjecture that our Translators must have followed some Latin version, in which the word ' sedi- tiones' was used, not without an affectation of archaic elegance. Now, the Vulgate has ' dissensiones,' but in Erasmus, whose style was marked by that charac- teristic, we find the very word ' seditiones.' Hence Tyndale, whom we know, from his controversial wri- tings, to have made use of Erasmus' version, took his ' sedition,' not minding that the sense in which Eras- mus had used the Latin word was alien to the Eng- lish ; and from Tyndale it has come down, with a mere change of number, into our present Version ; while Wiclif and the Rhemish render the Vulgate by 1 dissensions.' "

Ephes. iv. 29. — "Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying." But to justify these last words, to which Beza's " ad aedificationis usum" may have led the way, we should have found, not *pk oixoSo^v <r% Xps»'a£, but *gk or bis x?Siav t~k oiWo|u%. No one will affirm that we have such an hypallage here. There is much more in the words than such a translation, even were it allowable, would educe from them. It is not very easy to give, without circumlocution, a satisfactory English rendering ; but the meaning is

158 ON SOME WORDS

abundantly clear. " Let such discourse," St. Paul would say, H proceed from your mouths as is fitted to the present need or occasion : do not deal in vague, fiat, unmeaning generalities, which would suit a thou- sand other cases equally well, and probably, therefore, equally ill ; let your words be what the words of wise men will always be, nails fastened in a sure place, words suiting the present time and the present per- son, being for the edifying of the occasion." " Edi- fication of the need," Ellicott has it ; and De Wette, " zur Erbauung nach Bediirfniss." An admonition of a similar character is couched in the eiStvat cwj osT kvl txatrCj aflroxpiWtai of the parallel passage in the Co- lossians (iv. 6). Each man must have his own an- swer, that which meets his difficulties, his perplexities. There must not be one unfeeling, unsympathizing an- swer for all.

Col. i. 15. — "Who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature." This is one of the very few renderings in our Version, I know not whether the only one, which obscures a great doctri- nal truth, and, indeed, worse than this, seems to play into the hands of Arian error. For does it not legiti- mately follow on this " first-born of every creature," or '* of all creation," that He of whom this is predi- cated must be Himself also a creature, although the first in the creation of God? But in the phrase

*pur6roxas ^OL(fr,g xrfaeus9 we are not to regard oratf-off

xrfaeug as a partitive genitive, so that Christ is in-

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 159

eluded in the " every creature," though distinguished as being the first-born among them, but rather as a genitive of comparison, depending on, and governed by, the ifpurog (see John i. 15, 30) which lies in flrpw«roVoxo£. I am not quite satisfied with " born be- fore every creature," or " brought forth before every creature ;" because there lies in the original words a comparison between the begetting of the Son and the creation of the creature, and not merely an opposition ; He is placed at the head of a series, though essentially differing from all that followed, in the fact that He was born and they only created ; the great distinction between the yswav (or rUrsn, as it is here) and the jw§£siv, which came so prominently for- ward in the Arian controversy, being here already marked. Still, I could have no question as between it and the " first-born of every creature" of our Ver- sion, which obviously suggests an erroneous meaning, though it may be just capable of receiving a right one. It was nothing unnatural that Waterland, who in the beginning of the last century fought the great battle of the English Church against the Arianism which claimed a right to exist in the very bosom of that Church, should have been very ill-content to find a most important testimony to the truth for which he was contending, foregone and renounced, so far at least as the English Translation reached — nay, more than this, the verse not merely taken away from him, but, in appearance at least, made over to his adver-

160 ON SOME WORDS

saries.. In several places he complains of this, as in the following passage : " In respect of the words, ' first-born of every creature' comes not up to the force or meaning of the original. It should have been "born (or begotten) before the whole creation, as is mani- fest from the context, which gives the reason why He is said to be -rpwroVoxoj tfatfrjj xr'ufsug. It is because He is i before all things,' and because by Him were all things created. So that this very passage, which, as it stands in our Translation, may seem to suppose the Son one of the creatures, does, when rightly under- stood, clearly exempt Him from the number of crea- tures. He was before all created being, and conse- quently was Himself uncreated, existing with the Father from all eternity."*

Heb. xi. 29. — "Which the Egyptians assaying to do, were drowned.''1 Did our Translators prefer the reading xarstfovnc^cav ? This is not very probable, the authority for it being so small. If they did not, and if they read, as is most likely, xarsiro'^tfav, they should have rendered it by some word of wider reach ; as, for instance, " were swallowed up," or " were en- gulfed" (" devorati sunt," Yulgate ; " verschlungen wurden," Bleek). " Swallowed up," besides being a better rendering, would more accurately set forth the historic fact. The pursuing armies of the Egyptians sunk in the sands quite as much as they were over- whelmed by the waves of the Red Sea, as is expressly

* Serm. 2, Christ's Divinity proved from Creation.

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 161

declared in the hymn of triumph which Moses com- posed on the occasion: xarixisv tdraug y% Exod. xv.

12 ; cf. Diodoms Siculus, i. 32 : SV afxfxou xcw-cwriWai.

Jam. i. 26. — "If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain.'' This verse, as it here stands, must, I am persuaded, have perplexed many. How can a man " seem to be reli- gious," that is, present himself to others as such, when his religious pretensions are belied and refuted by the indulgence in an unbridled tongue ? But the perplexity has been introduced by our Translators, who have here failed to play the part of accurate synonymists, and to draw the line sharply and dis- tinctly between the verbs SoxsTv and <pa»Wc)ai. AoxsTv expresses the subjective mental opinion of anything which men form, their fo'ga about it, which may be right (Acts xv. 28 ; 1 Cor. iv. 9), or which may be wrong (Matt. vi. 7 ; Mark vi. 49 ; Acts xxvii. 13) ; (paiWdai, the objective external appearance which it presents, quite independent of men's conception about it. Thus, when Xenophon writes, spaiWo fyvia iWwv (Anab., i. 6, 1), he would affirm that horses had been actually there, and left their tracks. Had he employed the alternative word, it would have implied that Cyrus and his company tobk for tracks of horses what might have been, or what also very possibly might not have been, such at all. "AoxsTv cernitur in (ppinione, quas falsa esse potest et vana. Sed qja/vstftai

162 ON SOME WORDS

plerumque est in re extra mentem ; quamvis nemo opjnatur." Apply this distinction to the passage be- fore us ; keep in mind that SoxsTv, and not <pcuW3ai, is the word used, and all is plain : " If any man among you think himself religious (" se putat religiosum esse," Yulgate), and bridleth not his tongue," &c. It is his own subjective estimate of his spiritual con- dition which the word implies, an estimate which the following words declare to be entirely erroneous. — Let me observe here that the same rendering of SoxsTv, Gal. ii. 6, 9, gives a color to St. Paul's words which they are very far from having ; as though there was a certain covert irony upon his part in regard of the pretensions of the three great Apostles whom he met at Jerusalem (" who seemed to be something" — " who seemed to be pillars") ; whereas he does express, not what they seemed or appeared, but what they by oth- ers were, and were rightly, held- to be. The Geneva is here, as so often, correct ; correct also in making Soxovvrsg in both these verses a present, and not an imperfect, participle.

Jude 12. — "Trees whose fruit withereth." But <p6ivonrupiv6s has here a meaning ascribed to it, which it nowhere possesses, as though it were = ukE<fixap*os, the (pdivoxa^flros of Pindar (Pyth., iv. 265) ; or the ' frugiperdus' of Pliny. The pdivoVw^ov is the late au- tumn, the autumn far spent, which succeeds the o*uga, or the autumn contemplated as the time of the ripened fruits of the earth ; and which has its name, tfafa to

WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 163

(pMveadai rr,v o^wpav, from the waning away of the au- tumn and the autumn fruits, themselves also often called the oiedpa ; and (pfavoirupms is always used in the sense of belonging to the late autumn. The Latin language has no word which distinguishes the later autumn from the earlier, and, therefore, the " arbores autumnales" of the Vulgate is a correct translation, and one as accurate as the language would allow, unless, indeed, it had been rendered " arbores senes- centis autumni" or by some such phrase ; as De Wette in his German translation has it, ' ^^^herbstliche.' We, I think, could scarcely get beyond " autumnal trees," or "trees of autumn" as the Rheims version gives it. These deceivers are likened by the Apostle to trees as they show in late autumn, when foliage and fruit alike are gone. Bengel : " Arbor tali spe- cie qualis est autumno extremo, sine foliis et pomis." The <pdjvotfwpiva, cuaptfa, will then, in fact, mutually com- plete one another : " without leaves, without fruit." Tyndale, who throws together 6ivdpa yfavoirupiva. cixapfu, and renders the whole phrase thus, " trees without fruit at gathering- time" was feeling after, though he has not grasped, the right translation.

164 ON SOME CHARGES UNJUSTLY BROUGHT

CHAPTER X.

ON SOME CHARGES UNJUSTLY BROUGHT AGAINST OUR VERSION.

Some charges have been, and are still, not unfre- quently made against our Version, which I am per- suaded are unjust There is one which so nearly touches the honor and good faith of its authors, that it can hardly be passed over. They are accused, as is familiar to many, with snatching at unfair advan- tages, slurring over statements of Scripture which seemed to make for an adversary, giving to others a turn which the truth would not warrant, and compel- ling them to bear a testimony in their own favor which these passages did not properly contain. They have been charged with this from two quarters. Thus, the Roman Catholics oftentimes complain that they have made passages of Scripture to tell against Roman doctrine, which, fairly translated, would yield no such testimony against it ; while they have weakened or destroyed the witness of other passages, which, in a

AGAINST OUR VERSION. 165

more honest version, would be found on the side of Rome, in the points at issue between her and the Reformed Church. The charge, a most grave and serious one indeed, of such deceitful handling of the Word of God, does not seem to me to have any foun- dation whatever. It was, of course, free to our Trans- lators, and only natural, that in a passage like Heb. xiii. 4, they should incline to that interpretation, and adopt that rendering, which justified the abolition in the Reformed Church of the compulsory celibate of the clergy. The rendering of sv ^atf», " in all," that is, " inter omnes" (a masculine and not a neuter), was open to them ; it was the interpretation of the words adopted by many of the ancient Fathers ; grammati- cally, it can be perfectly justified ; it is accepted to the present day by many who are not in the least drawn to it by doctrinal, but purely by philological interests, and it is very idle to complain of them that they preferred it.

It would be quite impossible to go through the sev- eral passages on which this charge is grounded ; such a course would carry me too far from the main pur- pose of these pages. I may, however, just mention one or two. The first is one where this charge has been sometimes allowed by writers of our own com- munion. Thus, Professor Stanley is inclined to as- cribe to " theological fear or partiality" the render- ing of 1 Cor. xi. 27, where, in St. Paul's statement, " Whosoever shall eat this bread or drink this cup of

166 ON SOME CHARGES UNJttSTLY BROUGHT

the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord," they have substituted ' and' for 'or.' I have no suspicion that they did this " in or- der to avoid the inference that the Eucharist might be received under one kind." In the first place, there^ is authority for ' and ;' I do not think sufficient au- thority, but so much that an eminent scholar, like Fritzsche, with no theological leaning on one side or the other, even now prefers it. Moreover, such an inference from these words is so extravagantly absurd, so refuted by several other statements in this very chapter, that I can hot see how they should have cared to exclude it ; even had they been willing to sacrifice truth and honesty, they were under no tempt- ation to do so. They probably accepted *ai as the right reading.

Gal. v. 6.— " Faith which worketh by love." It was for a long time a favorite charge of the Roman- ists, even in the face of their own Yulgate, which has rightly, " fides qua3 per caritatem operatur" that we had given to sv^o^'v?) an active sense, when it ought to have a passive, and that we had done so in the fear lest there should be found here any support for their doctrine of the " fides formata," as that which justi- fies. They would have had the words translated, " faith which is wrought on, that is, animated, stirred up, by love." Other unfriendly critics have repeated the charge. There is no need, however, to refute it, as the later Roman Catholic expositors — Windisch-

AGAINST OUR VERSION. 167

man, for instance, in his valuable Commentary on this Epistle — have acknowledged the accuracy of our translation, have accepted it as the true one ; and thus implicitly allowed the injustice of this charge.

Indeed, it is not too much to say, that if, in the heat of earlier controversy, any shadow of unfair ad- vantage might seem to have been taken by the first Protestant translators after the Reformation, those of King James's Bible were careful to forego and re- nounce everything of the kind. Thus, it was a com- plaint, and, as I must needs regard it, not an unrea- sonable one, on the part of Romish assailants of our earlier versions,* that they rendered sUu\ov ' image,' and not ' idol ;' and eiSukokarpris " worshipper of im- ages" and not " worshipper of idols" or ' idolater ;' that they thus confounded the honor paid in the Ro- man Church to images with the idol-worship of hea- thenism. They urged that however Protestants might reprobate and condemn the first, yet it was confes- sedly an entirely different thing from the last ; while yet our Translators went out of their way, and de- parted from the more natural rendering of eUuXov, for the purpose of including both under a common re- proach ; that by such renderings as this, " How agreeth the temple of God with images ?" (2 Cor. vi. 16), they suggested and helped forward the destruction of these in all the churches through the land. The complaint was a just one, and our Translators seem to have so

* See Ward's Errata of the Protestant Bible, Dublin, 1810, p. 63.

168 ON SOME CHARGES UNJUSTLY BROUGHT

regarded it. They have nowhere employed the offen- sive rendering, but always used ' idolater' and ' idol.' Thus, compare 1 Cor. x. 7 ; 1 John v. 21, in our Ver- sion, with the same in the earlier Protestant versions ; in the latter passage, indeed, the Geneva had antici- pated this correction.

Then, too, it has been sometimes said, I was inclined at one time to think with some reason, that other the- ological leanings, Calvinistic as against Arminian, were occasionally to be traced in our Translation, modifying consciously or unconsciously the rendering of some passages in it. These charges, I am now per- suaded, are entirely without foundation. They mainly, though not exclusively, rest on the rendering of the two following places : Acts ii. 47 : Heb. x. 38. But what in each of these passages there is, or what some have considered there is, to find fault with, is capable of much easier explanation. It may be worth while to consider these passages.

Acts ii. 47. — Our Translators make St. Luke to say, " The Lord added to the Church daily such as should be saved." It is urged against them that in the original it is not roug tfvB'rfopdinvg, which would alone have justified this rendering ; but rov$ <rw£ofMvou£. The explanation, however, is sufficiently easy of their slight departing from an accurate rendering, without ascribing to them, or those who went before them in this translation, any dogmatic bias. They were per- plexed with a language which spoke of those as already

AGAINST OUR VERSION. 169

saved, who only became saved through being thus added to the Church of the living God. They proba- bly did not clearly perceive that by this language the sacred historian meant to say that in this act of adherence to the Church, and to Christ its Head, these converts were saved, delivered from the wrath to come ; " those that did escape," Hammond renders it. They had no wish, except to avoid a fancied dif- ficulty ; and I do not believe that the thought of pre- destination in the least entered into their minds, how- ever others may have since employed the words as a support for the doctrine. Indeed, it is well worthy of note that the Ehemish version gives precisely the same future meaning to toug tfufypivovg, and renders, " they that should be saved."

Heb. x. 38. — "Now the just shall live by faith; but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him." Here, too, it has been often as- serted, last of all by Professor Blunt, that the doctri- nal tendencies of the Translators exercised an unwar- rantable influence on the translation. No unpreju- diced person, it has been said, can read the verse in the original, and not acknowledge that the person whose drawing back is supposed possible in the sec- ond clause of the verse is ' the just' of the first clause. So Tyndale had translated it : " But the just shall live by faith ; and if he withdraw himself," &c. — Cov- erdale and Cranmer in the same way. But this verse, so rendered, would have contradicted the doctrine of

8

170 ON SOME CHARGES UNJUSTLY BROUGHT

final perseverance ; and therefore, it is said, in the Geneva version 4 any' was substituted for ' he,' and ' any man,' in our Version. No objection to the en- tire good faith of our Translators is oftener urged than this. Now, I certainly think myself that Sixaiog is the nominative to uflrotfrsiXijrai, and that the passage does contradict the doctrine of final perseverance in its high Calvinistic or necessitarian shape. But to the present day, the other view of the passage, that namely of our Translation, which would diseDgage an avfywtfos or a ris from 8'mouog, and make it the nomina- tive to uflrotf<rsiXi)rai, is maintained by scholars such as De Wette and Winer, who are certainly as remote as well can be from any Calvinistic leanings.

Leaving these passages which involve doctrine, I may just mention one other which has no such signifi- cance. In this, fault may be justly found, and has been found, with the words as they stand in our Ver- sion ; while yet I am convinced, though it is impossible to bring this to absolute proof, that the incorrectness is with the printers, and not with the Translators. I allude to Matt, xxiii. 24. " Which strain at a gnat" has been often objected to there. Long ago Bishop Lowth complained, " The impropriety of the preposi- tion has wholly destroyed the meaning of the phrase." I can not doubt, as I have expressed elsewhere, that we have here a misprint, which, having been passed over in the first edition of 1611, has held its ground ever since; nor yet that our Translators intended,

AGAINST OUR VERSION. 171

" which strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel ;" this being at once intelligible, and a correct rendering of the original ; while our Version, as at present it stands, is neither ; or only intelligible on the supposition, no doubt the supposition of most English readers, that " strain at " means, swallow with difficulty, men hardly and with effort swallowing the little insect, but gulp- ing down meanwhile, unconcerned, the huge animal. It need scarcely be said that this is very far from the meaning of the original words, oi SivXi^ovrsg <rov xwvwtfa, by Meyer rendered well, " percolando removentes muscam ;" and by the Yulgate also not ill, " excolantes culicem ;" for which use of SivKiZsiv, as to cleanse by passing through a strainer, see Plutarch, Symp.^vi. 7. 1. It was the custom of the more accurate and stri tor Jews to strain their wine, vinegar, and other pofr i ies, through linen or gauze, lest unawares they should drink down some little unclean insect therein, and thus transgress Lev. xi. 20, 23, 41, 42 — just as the Buddhists do now in Ceylon and Hindostan — and to this custom of theirs the Lord refers. A recent trav- eller in North Africa writes in an unpublished com- munication which he has been good enough to make to me: " In a ride from Tangier to Tetuan I observed that a Moorish soldier who accompanied me, when he drank, always unfolded the end of his turban and placed it over the mouth of his bota, drinking through the muslin, to strain out the gnats, whose larvae swarm in the water of that country." The further fact that

172 UNJUST CHARGES AGAINST OUR VERSION.

our present Version rests to so great an extent on the three preceding, Tyndale's, Cranmer's, and the Ge- neva, and that all these have " strain out" is addi- tional evidence in confirmation of that about which for myself I feel no doubt, namely, that we have here an uncorrected error of the press. There was no such faultless accuracy in the first edition, as should make us unwilling to suppose this ; on the contrary, more than one mistake was subsequently discovered and removed. Thus, it stood in the exemplar edition of 1611, at 1 Cor. iv. 9 : " God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were approved to death ;" yet ' ap- proved' was afterward changed for the word no doubt intended, ' appointed.' In another passage, I mean 1 Oor. xii. 28, the misprint, " helps in governments," aft.v having retained its place in several successive editions, was afterward in like manner removed, and the present correcter reading, " helps, governments'* (avriX^efe, yvf2epvi}<rsig)9 substituted in its room.

BEST MEANS OF CARRYING OUT A REVISION-. 173

CHAPTER XI:

ON THE BEST MEANS OF CARRYING OUT A REVISION.

I have thus endeavored to make as just an estimate as I could of the merits, and, where such exist, of the defects, of our Authorized Yersion. In pointing out some of these last, I trust I have nowhere spoken a word inconsistent with the truest reverence for its authors, the profoundest gratitude to them for the treasure with which they have enriched the English Church. Such word I certainly have not intended to utter ; and I can truly say that if a close and minute examination of parts of their work reveals flaws which one had not suspected before, it also discovers a more than counterbalancing amount of merits, of which one had not hitherto been aware.

A few words in conclusion. They shall be — first, on the difficulties and dangers which manifestly beset a revision ; and, secondly, on the manner in which these might be best overcome.

Among these difficulties, I will not more than touch

174 ON THE BEST MEANS OP

on that of the formation of a Greek text which the revised Version should seek to represent ; and yet it is a difficulty of the most serious character. Let it once be recognised that any change is to take place, and it will be manifestly impossible to rest content with the text which our Translators used. Take cases, for instance, where every critical edition of later times, and on overwhelming evidence, has pre- ferred some other readings to theirs. And yet these cases of overwhelming evidence will not by any means be the hardest. It might not be so difficult to deal with them ; but how determine where the authorities are at all nearly balanced ? But, satisfying myself with merely indicating this difficulty which presents itself at the very outset, I pass on to others.

We must never leave out of sight that for a great multitude of readers the English Yersion is not the translation of an inspired Book, but is itself the in- spired Book. And so far, of course, as it is a per- fectly adequate counterpart of the original, this is true ; since the inspiration is not limited to those Hebrew or Greek words in which the Divine message was first communicated to men, but lives on in what- ever words are a faithful and full representation of these ; nay, in words which fall short of this, to the extent of their adequacy. There, and there only, where any divergence exists between the original and the copy, the copy is less inspired than the original ; indeed, is not, to the extent of that divergence, in-

CARRYING OUT A REVISION. 175

spired at all. But these distinctions are exactly of a kind which the body of Christian people will not draw. The English Bible is to them all which the Hebrew Old Testament, which the Greek New Testament, is to the devout scholar. It receives from them the same undoubting affiance. They have never realized the fact that the Divine utterance w^s not made at the first in those very English words which they read in their cottages, and hear in their church. Who will not own that the little which this faith of theirs in the English Bible has in excess is nearly or quite harm- less ? On the other hand, the harm would be incal- culable, of any serious disturbance of this faith, sup- posing, as might only too easily happen, very much else to be disturbed with it.

Neither can I count it an indifferent matter that a chief bond, indeed the chiefest, that binds the English Dissenters to us, and us to them, would thus be snapped asunder. Out of the fact that Nonconformity had not for the most part fixed itself into actual and formal separation from the Church till some time after our Authorized Version was made, it has followed that when the Nonconformists parted from us, they carried with them this Translation, and continued to use and to cherish it, regarding it as much their own as ours. The Roman Catholics and the Unitarians are, I be- lieve, the only bodies who have counted it necessary to make versions of their own. With the exception of these, the Authorized Version is common ground for

176 ON THE BEST MEANS OP

all in England who call themselves Christians, is alike the heritage of all. But even if English Dissenters acknowledged the necessity of a revision, which I con- clude from many indications that they do, it is idle to expect that they would accept such at our hands. Two things then might happen. Either they would adhere to the old Authorized Version, which is not, indeed, very probable ; or they would carry out a revision, it might be two or three, of their own. In either case the ground of a common Scripture, of an English Bible which they and we hold equally sacred, would be taken from us ; the separation and division, which are now the sorrow, and perplexity, and shame of England, would become more marked, more deeply fixed than ever. Then, further, while of course it would be comparatively easy to invite our brethren of the Episcopal Church in America to take share in our revision, yet many causes might hinder their ac- ceptance of this invitation, or their acquiescence in the work as we found it expedient to do it. Thus, the issue might only too easily be, that we should lose in respect of them also the common ground of one and the same Scripture, which we now possess. Such a loss, either in regard of the English Dissenters, or American Churchmen, would not by a slight one, nor one deserving to be regarded with indifference.

Another most serious consideration presents itself, Will one revision satisfy ? If conducted with moder- ation, it will probably leave much untouched, about

CARRYING OUT A REVISION. 177

which it will still be possible to raise a question. Is it not inevitable that after a longer or shorter period another revision, and on that another, will be called for ? Will not in this way all sense of stability pass away from our English Scripture ? And to look at a mere material fact — The Bibles in the hands of our people, in what agreement with one another will they be ? It is idle to expect that the great body of our population will keep pace with successive changes, and provide themselves with the latest revision. In- ability to meet the expense, or unwillingness to do so, or a love of the old to which they have grown accustomed, a foregone conclusion that the changes are for the worse, or that they are immaterial, lack of interest in the subject, will all combine to hinder this. The inconveniences, and much more than in- conveniences, of such a state of things, assuredly will not be slight. This prospect, indeed, so little alarms the author of an article in the Edinburgh Review, " On the State of the English Bible," that he proposes the institution of a permanent Commission, which shall be always altering, always embodying in a new and improved edition the latest allowed results of Biblical criticism. It was startling enough to read somewhere else a proposal that the Authorized Yerson should be revised once in every fifty years ; but this proposal, if one could suppose there was the slightest chance that it would be acceded to, is most alarming of all. These are the main arguments, as it seems to mo,

178 ON THE BEST MEANS OP

against a revision of our Version. None will deny their weight. Indeed, there are times when the whole matter presents itself as so full of difficulty and doubt- ful hazard, that one could be well content to resign all gains that would accrue from this revision, and only ask that all things might remain as they were. But this, I am persuaded, is impossible ; however we may be disposed to let the question alone, it will not let us alone. It has been too effectually stirred ever again to go to sleep ; and the difficulties, be they few or many, will have one day to be encountered. The time will come when the inconveniences of remaining where we are will be so manifestly greater than the inconveniences of action, that this last will become inevitable. There will be danger in both courses, for that word of the Latin moralist is a profoundly true one, " Nunquam periclum sine periclo vincitur ;" but the lesser danger will have to be chosen ; and that will be in the course which I desire, not that we should now take, but should prepare ourselves for hereafter taking, should regard as one toward which vat are inevitably approaching.

In respect of the actual steps which it will be then advisable to take, I can not think that even when the matter is seriously undertaken, there should be for a considerable time any interference with the English text. Let come together, and if possible not of self- will, but with some authorization, royal or ecclesias- tical, or both, such a body of scholars and divines as

CARRYING OUT A REVISION. 179

would deserve and would obtain the confidence of the whole Church. Fortunately, no points at issue among ourselves threaten to come into discussion or debate ; so that the unhappy divisions of our time would not here add any additional embarrassment to a matter embarrassed enough already. Nay, of such immense importance would it be to carry with us, in whatever might be done, the whole Christian people of Eng- land, that it would be desirable to invite all scholars, all who represented any important portion of the Biblical scholarship in the land, to assist with their suggestions here, even though they might not belong to the Church. Of course, they would be asked as scholars, not as Dissenters. But it were a matter so deeply to be regretted, that these should revise, and we should revise, thus parting company in the one thing which now holds us strongly together, while it would be so hopeless, indeed so unreasonable, to ex- pect that they should accept our revision, having themselves had no voice in it, that we ought not to stand on any punctilios here, but should be prepared rather to sacrifice everything non-essential for the averting of such a catastrophe. Setting aside, then, the so-called Baptists, who of course could not be invited, seeing that they demand, not a translation of the Scripture, but an interpretation, and that in their own sense, there are no matters of doctrine or even of discipline likely to come into debate, which should render it impossible for such Dissenters as accept our

180 ON THE BEST MEANS OF

doctrinal articles to take a share in this work — as regarded not from its ecclesiastical, but its scholarly- point of view. All points likely to come under dis- cussion would be points of pure scholarship, or would only involve that universal Christianity common to them and us; or if more than this, they would be points about which there is equally a difference of opinion within the Church as in the bodies without it, for instance, as between Arminian and Calvinist, which difference would not be avoided by their absence.

Let, then, such a body as this, inspiring confidence at once by their piety, their learning, and their pru- dence, draw out such a list of emendations as were lifted beyond all doubt in the eye of every one whose voice had any right to be heard on the matter ; avoid- ing all luxury of emendation, abstaining from all which was not of primary necessity, from much in which they might have fitly allowed themselves, if they had not been building on foundations already laid, and which could not without great inconvenience be disturbed — using the same moderation here which Jerome used in his revision of the Latin. Let them very briefly, but with just as much learned explanation as should be needful, justify these emendations, where they were not self-evident. Let them, if this should be their conviction, express their sense of the desirableness that these should at some future day be introduced into the received text, as bringing it into more per- fect accord and harmony with the original Scripture.

CARRYING OUT A REVISION. 181

Having done this, let them leave these emendations to ripen in the public mind, gradually to commend them- selves to all students of God's holy Word. Suppo- sing the emendations such as ought to, and would, do this, there would probably ere long be a general de- sire for their admission into the text ; and in due time this admission might follow. All abrupt change would thus be avoided — all forcing of alterations on those not as yet prepared to receive them. That which at length came in would excite no surprise, no perplex- ity, or at most very little, having already in the minds of many displaced that of which it now at length took openly the room.

It is quite true that " no man having drunk old wine, straightway desire th new ; for he saith, The old is better ;" but it is on that word ' straightway' that the emphasis, in this saying of our Lord, must be laid. In those spiritual things to which we transfer this saying, a man may, and will, if he is wise, after a while desire the new. It may have a certain unwel- come harshness and austerity at the first ; the man may have to overcome that custom which is as a sec- ond nature, before he heartily affects it. But still, just as our ancestors grew gradually in love with our present Translation, Churchmen weaning themselves from the Bishops' Bible, and Puritans from the Ge- neva— just as one and the other of these versions fell quite out of use, though living on, the latter espe- cially, for some time after they had been formally

182 ON THE BEST MEANS OF

superseded by the present Version, Churchmen and Puritans finally agreeing in the decision, not that the old was better, but the new — so will it be here. What amount of difficulty those who lived in the reign of James the First found in reconciling them- selves to the change, it is hard to say. We have curiously little on the subject in the contemporary religious literature, the very absence of such notices seeming to imply that the difficulty was not very great ; but in one respect it ought to be much less now, inasmuch as, careful as our then Translators were not to change wantonly for mere change's sake, still the alterations which they made were consider- able, many times more than would be necessary or desirable now.

And even if it were never thought good that this final step should be taken, that these emendations should be transferred to the text, what an invaluable help to students of Scripture such a volume might prove ! With a little management, its more learned portions might be so separated off in notes as to leave the chief part of it accessible even to the English reader, who might thus be put in possession, though in a somewhat roundabout and less effectual way, of all which a revision would have given him. If, too, he had been shaken by rumors of the inaccuracy of his English Bible, he might here see, on the warrant of those best qualified to judge, how very little way this inaccuracy reached, in what comparatively un-

CARRYING OUT A REVISION. 183

essential matters it moved. Granting that nothing else should come of it, such a volume might prove an effectual check to wanton and mischievous agitations, if such there have been, or hereafter shall be, in this matter.

In another way it might be found that the very un- settlement of men's minds, consequent upon the stir- ring of this question, might not be itself without a compensating gain. That very unsettlement in regard of the words in which God's message has hitherto been conveyed to them, might it not prove for some a motive to a more accurate considering of the mes- sage itself, a happy breaking of that crust of formality which by long habit so easily overgrows our reading of the Scripture ? It would not be, I think, for most of us unprofitable to discover that the words in which the truth has been hitherto conveyed to us, are ex changeable for other, in some places, it may be, for better words. The shock, unpleasant as it might prove at the first, might yet be a startling of many from a dull, lethargic, unprofitable reading of God's Word ; while in the rousing of the energies of the mind to defend the old, or, before admitting, thor- oughly to prove the new, more insight into it might be gained, with more grasp of its deeper meaning, than years of lazy familiarity would have given. For, indeed, according to a profound proverb, " What is ever seen is never seen ;" and a daily familiarity with Scripture, full as it is of unutterable blessings, carries

184 BEST MEANS OF CARRYING OUT A REVISION.

its dangers with it, dangers which the course that is here urged might effect much to remove.

This much I have thought it desirable to say on this momentous subject. I am not so sanguine as to believe that, with all these precautions, great and se- rious, it might be unexpected, difficulties would not attend the undertaking. There would need no little wisdom and prudence to bring it to a successful end. Still it might be humbly hoped, that by Him who is ever with his Church this prudence and this wisdom would be granted. And, lastly, let me observe that when we make much of the inconveniences which must attend any such step, we ought never to leave out of sight their transitory character, as contrasted with the permanent character of the gain. How large an amount of inconvenience men have willingly encoun- tered with only some worldly object in view, where they have felt that the inconvenience would be only temporary, the gain enduring — as in the rectification of the coinage, the readjustment of the calendar ! And here, too, serious as the inconvenience might be at the first, and for a time, still it would every day be growing slighter : it would be but for a few years at the longest; while the gain, always supposing the work to be well and wisely done, would be for ever ; it would be riches and strength for the English Church to the end of time.

INDEX OF PRINCIPAL TEXTS CONSIDERED.

185

INDEX OF PRINCIPAL TEXTS CONSIDERED.

Matt. v. 21 page 105

" vi. 27 135

" viii. 20 148

" ix. 36 105

" x. 4 148

" x. 16 106

" xii. 23 133

'< xiv. 8 150

•' xiv. 13 151

" xvi. 15 44

" xx. 1, 11 79

" xxi. 41 76

" xxii. 1-15 88

" xxiii. 24 170

" xxiii. 25 32

" xxviii. 14 97

Mark ii. 18 127

" iii. 18 149

" vi. 20 107

" vii.4 107

" xi. 4 151

" xi. 17 98

" xii. 26 151

" xvi. 2 129

Luke i. 19 128

" i. 59 127

" ii. 49 136

" v.6 127

" xii. 25 135

" xiii. 2 129

" xiii. 7 25

" xiv. 7 126

" xvii. 21 107

" xviii. 12 125

Luke xxi. 19 page 126

" xxiii. 42 121

John ii. 8, 9 79

"• iii. 10 115

" iii. 11,32 78

" iv. 6 120

" iv.29 134

" v. 16 130

" ix.31 44

" x. 16. 93

" xii. 6 137

" xvii. 12 94

Acts ii. 47 ,...168

" iii. 1 127

" iii. 13, 26 92

" iv. 27, 30 92

" vii. 45 59

" x. 12 132

" xii. 4 34

" xii. 19 102

" xiv. 13 152

" xvii. 22 152

" xvii. 23 26

" xix. 37 27

" xxi. 15 28

" xxv. 5 153

" xxvi. 2, 7 119

" xxvii. 10, 21 78

" xxviii. 4 124

M xxviii. 15 63

Rom. i. 26, 27 138

" ii. 14 118

" ii. 22 154

186

INDEX OF PRINCIPAL TEXTS CONSIDERED.

Rom. iii. 25 page 90

" v. 15, 17 117

" viii. 21 64

" xi. 8 154

" xi. 2 152

" xv. 4 78

1 Cor. iii. 17 76

" iv. 9 172

" xi. 27 165

2 Cor. ii. 14 139

" ii. 17 141

" v. 10 131

" xi.3 122

Gal. i. 18 155

" ii. 6, 9 162

" iii. 22 77

" v. 6 166

" v. 20 156

Ephes. iv. 3 29

iv. 18 99

iv. 29 157

Phil. ii. 15 130

Col. i. 13 64

" i. J 5 158

" i. 16 129

" ii. 8 143

" ii. 18 10S

" ii. 23 143

1 THESS.iv. 6 109

v. 22 100

2 Thess. ii. 6 77

1 Tim. v. 4 29

" vi.2 116

1 Tim. vi. 5 " vi. 8	. PAGE 110 145
" vi. 9	32
" vi. 10 Heb. iv. 1 " iv. 8	119 102 59
" v. 2	110
" v. 8	43
" v. 11	133
" vi. 7	120
" ix. 5	45
" ix. 23 ". x. 38	Ill 169
" xi. 10 " xi. 13	114 101
" xi. 29	160
" xii. 16 " xiii. 4	104 165 77
" i. 26	....161
	145
" y. 9	34
1 Pet. i. 17	102
" iv. 9	34
2 Pet. i. 5-7	123
" i. 14	128
" iii. 12	112 162
Rev. iii. 2	146 73
	124
" iv. 6-9	87 33
" xvii. 14 " xxi. 12 " xxi. 19. 20..	114 46 62

INDEX OF GREEK WORDS.

187

INDEX OF GEEEK WOEDS.

"AtSns PAGE 85

dicipaios 106

(i^(po6og 151

dnelOeia 88

dlTHTTia 88

diroKapaSoKia 103

vAfiT£fjiis 55

avXf) 93

Paara^w •• ...137

0dros 152

0i6n\os 104

yitvva 85

IziGihaipwv 153

SiaKovos 88

ii^oaraaia 1 56

60KEU) 161

6o\6a 142

6ov\os 88

6v yards 154

elSos 100

eis 121

iv.... 121

'EpfjLfjg 55

ippiUjiivos 1 05

£c3o«> 86

f)\iKia 135

dnpiov 86

OpiajjiPsvu) 139

dpovos 73

hpoavXecj 1 54

IfTTOpC OJ 155

Kat'otf irvs 149

KOlirr)\eV(x) 141

KaraPpaflcvu) 1 08

Karavv^is 154

Kara.7rivw 1 60

Karapyew PAGE 82

Ka-acicfivaxns 148

kXivti 107

Kotywos 91

Kraofiul.t 125

Kvptos 68

Xoyog 51

~\oyi$ojj.ai 72

ixayos 67

jxerdvoia. ,, 52

jjerpioiraOcu) 110

h/ju}ioTraQrjs 152

irals Qeov * 92

■rrap&K'XriTOS 68

napsois 90

*£j 151

7TOl|U»/7J 93

irpo0tJ3a$<o 150

ttp<i)tot6ko$ 1 58

ncopotxris 99

adpSiog 63

adpdivos 63

ff'0aa-jxa 26

aKCTracrjxa 145

crofos 89

criTvpis 91

avXnyojyso) 143

G0VTT)pi0} 107

rripeo) 94

far, 146

inoSeiyna Ill

(paivonat 161

(pXvapos 103

(pdivonojpivds 162

ippovifxog 89

fv'Xdaaoi 94

188

INDEX OF OTHER WORDS.

INDEX OF OTHER WORDS.

Alms page 43

Apollo, Apollos 61

Beast 87

Bribery 32

By-and-by 33

Canaanite 149

Carriage 28

Cherubim 45

Church 27

Chrysolite 62

Chrysoprasus 62

Comforter 68

Cretes, Cretians 61

Cumber 25

Depart. 31

Devotion 26

Diana 55

Easter 34

Elias, Elijah 58

Endeavor 29

Goodman 79

Grudge 33

Idol 167

Image 167

Its 41

Jesus 59

Jewry 35

Joshua page 59

Miletus 61

Mercurius 55

Nephew 29

Noisome 32

Often 43

Pergamos 62

Poenitentia 52

Pattern Ill

Eeligious 153

Resipiscentia 52

Pviches 42

Sardine stone 63

Sardius 63

Sedition 156

Sermo 51

Thought 24

Timotheus, Timothy 61

Three Taverns 63

Trouble 95

Urbane 60

Verbum 51

Which 47

Wizard 68

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jBCISTORY and biography

Ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs. By John Keneiok,

M. A. In 2 vols., 12mo. Price $2 50.

Newman's Regal Rome. An Introduction to Roman

History. By Francis W. Newman, Professor of Latin in the University College, London. 12mo, cloth. Price 63 cents.

The Catacombs of Rome, as Illustrating the Church of

the First Three Centuries. By the Right Rev. W. Ingraham Kip, D. D., Missionary Bishop of California. Author of " Christmas Holidays in Rome," "Early Conflicts of Christianity," &c, &c. With over 100 Illus- trations. 12mo, cloth. Price 75 cents.

The History of the Crusades. By Joseph Irai*cois

Michaud. Translated by W. Robson. 3 vols., 12mo, Maps. Price $3 75.

Napoleon in Exile ; or, a Yoice from St. Helena. Being

the Opinions and Reflections of Napoleon, on the most important Events in his Life and Government, in his own words. By Barry E. O'Meara, bis late Surgeon ; with a Portrait of Napoleon, after the celebrated picture of Delaroche, and a view of St. Helena, both beautifully engraved on steel. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth. Price $2 00.

Jomini's Campaign of Waterloo. The Political and

Military History of the Campaign of Waterloo, from the French of Gen eral Baron Jomini. By Lieut. S. V. Benet, U. S. Ordnance, with a Map. 12mo, cloth. Price 75 cents.

Napier's Peninsular "War. History of the War in the

Peninsula, and in the South of France, from the Ynar 1807 to 1814. By Major Gen. Napier, C. B. Complete in I vol., 8vo. Price $2 50.

The History of the War in the Peninsula. By Major Gen.

Sir W. F. P. Napier, from the author's last revised edition, with fifty-five Maps and Plans, five Portraits on Steel, and a complete index, 5 vols. 12mo, cloth. Price 7 50.

Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Yalley.

With the Original Narratives of Marquette, Allouez, Membre, Hennepin, and Anastase Douay. By John Gilmart Shea. With a fac-simile of the Original Map of Marquette. 1 vol., 8vo, cloth, antique. Price $2.

Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of Ameri- ca, in the Years 1811-12-13 and 1814; or, the First Settlement on the Pacific. By Gabriel Franciere. Translated and Edited by J. V. Hunt- ington. 12mo, cloth. Plates. Price $1 00.

Las Cases' Napoleon. Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon. By the Count Las Cases. With Portraits on steel, woodcuts, &c. 4 vols., 12mo, cloth, $4 00 half calf or morccoo extra, $8 OO.

REDFIELD'S PUBLICATIONS. HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Life of the Rt. Hon. John Philpot Curran. By his Son,

Wm. Henry Curran ; with Notes and Additions, by Dr. R. Shelton Mao kenzie, and a Portrait on Steel. 12mo, cloth. Price $1 25.

Sketches of the Irish Bar. By the Right Hon. Richard

Lalor Sheil, M. P. Edited, with a Memoir and Notes, by Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie. Fourth Edition. In 2 vols. Price $2 00.

Barrington's Sketches. Personal Sketches of his Own Time. B-- Sir Jonah Barrington, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty in Ireland; with Illustrations by Darley. Third Edition. 12mo, cloth. Price $1 25.

Moore's Life of Sheridan. Memoirs of the Life of the

Rt. Hon, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By Thomas Moore; with Por- trait after Sir Joshua Reynolds. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth. Price $2 00.

Men of the Time, or Sketches of Living Notables, Au- thors, Architects, Artists, Composers, Demagogues, Divines, Dramatists, Engineers, Journalists, Ministers, Monarchs, Novelists, Politicians, Poets, Philanthropists, Preachers, Savans, Statesmen, Travellers, Voyagers, War- riors. 1 vol., 12mo. Containing nearly Nine Hundred Biographical Sketches. Price $1 50.

Lorenzo Benoni ; or, Passages in the Life of an Italian.

Edited by a Friend. 1 vol., 12mo. $1 00.

The Workingman's Way in the "World. Being the Au- tobiography of a Journeyman Printer. By Charles Manbt Smith, Author of " Curiosities of London j^ife.*' 12mo, cloth. Price $1 00.

Classic and Historic Portraits. By James Bruce.

12mo, cloth. Price $1 00.

Ladies of the Covenant. Memoirs of Distinguished

Scottish Females, embracing the Period of the Covenant and the Perse- cution. By Rev. James Anderson. 1 vol., 12mo. Price $1 25.

Tom Moore's Suppressed Letters. Notes from the Let- ters of Thomas Moore to his Music-Publisher, James Power (the publica- tion of which was suppressed in London), with an Introductory Letter from Thomas Crofton Croker, Esq., E. S. A. With four Engravings on steel. 12mo, cloth. Price $1 50.

Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres ; or, Reminiscences of

a Merchant's Life. By Vincent Nolte. 12mo. Price $1 25. (Eighth Edition.)

Men and Women of the Eighteenth Century. By

Arsene Houssate. With beautifully-engraved Portraits of Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour. 2 vols., 12mo, 450 pages each, extra super- fine paper. Price $2 50.

Philosophers and Actresses. By Absene Houssate.

With beautifully-engraved Portraits of Voltaire and Madame Parabere. 2 vols., 12mo. Price $2 50.

Life of the Honorable William H. Seward, with Selec- tions from his Works. Edited by George E. Baser. 12mo, cloth Portrait. Price $1 00.

REDFIELD'S P JBLICATIONS —HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

The History of Texas, from its Settlement in 1685 to its Annexation to the United States. By H. Yoakum, Esq., of the Texas

?™?» W1iu C ^ai?' Maps' and Plans' 2 vols-> 8vo> clo* Price

$5 00. bneep $5. 50.

The History of Louisiana— Spanish Domination. By

Charles Gayujbe. 8vo, cloth. Price $2 50.

The History of Louisiana — French Domination. By Chaeles Gataebe. 2 vols., 8vo, cloth. Price $3 50.

The Life of P. T. Barnum, written by himself; in which he narrates his early history as Clerk, Merchant, and Editor, and his later career as a Showman. With a Portrait on steel, and numerous Illustra- tions by Darley. 1 vol., 12mo. Price 50 cents.

A Memorial of Horatio G-reenough, consisting of a

Memoir, Selections from his Writings, and Tributes to his Genius bv • JRT T„- TucKEBMAN, Author of " Sicily, a Pilgrimage," "A Month in England," &c, &c. 12mo, cloth. Price 75 cents.

The Private Life of an Eastern King. By a member of the

Household of his Late Majesty, Nussir-u-deen, King of Oude. 12mo, cloth. Price 75 cents.

Doran's Queens of England. The Queens of England, of

the House of Hanover. By Dr. Doban, Author of " Table Traits," "Habits and Men," &c. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth. Price $2 00.

Autobiography of a Female Slave. 12mo, cloth. Price

$1 oo.

Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith. Being Selec- tions from his Writings, and Passages of his Letters and Table-Talk. With Notes and a Biographical Memoir by Evebt A. Duyckinck ; a Portrait on Steel after G. Stuart Newton, and an Autograph Letter. 12 mo, cloth. Price 1 25.

Sinai and Palestine, in connection with their History, by

Abthub Penbhyn Stanley, M. A., Canon of Canterbury, with Colored Maps and Plates. 8vo, :loth, $2 50; half calf or morocco, $4 00.