^&^%. 
 
 E.S. Buchanan 
 
 9^: 
 
 The Search for the Orifrinal Words 
 of the Cros^^ei 
 
'mar 16 1960 ^' 
 
 BS2.385 
 
The Search for the Original 
 Words of the Gospel 
 
 /^Lecture delivered by 
 E. S. BUCHANAN, M. A., B. Sc, 
 
 Editor of 
 
 OXFORD OLD LATIN BIBLICAL TEXTS, No8. V and VI; 
 
 SACRED LATIN TEXTS, Nos. I, II and III; 
 
 THE RECORDS UNROLLED; 
 
 AN ENGLISH VERSION OF THE IRISH GOSPELS; etc. 
 
 AT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 New York 
 
 on 
 
 Thursday, December 3d, 1914 
 

The Search for the Original 
 Words of the Gospel 
 
 MAR 6 1916 
 
 A- 
 
 /Lecture delivered by 
 E. S. BUCHANAN, M. A., B. Sc, 
 
 Editor of 
 
 OXFORD OLD LATIN BIBLICAL TEXTS, Nos. VandVI; 
 
 SACRED LATIN TEXTS, Nos. I, II and III; 
 
 THE RECORDS UNROLLED; 
 
 AN ENGLISH VERSION OE THE IRISH GOSPELS; etc. 
 
 AT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 New York 
 
 on 
 
 Thursday, December 3d, 1914 
 
 >^^ 
 
Gopyrifiht, 1914 
 
 by 
 
 E. S. BUCHANAN 
 
 Extra cupies of this Lecture may be obtained from 
 the Paget Literary Agency, 36 Weal 46th Street, 
 New York. 
 
 PRICE 25c PER COPY POSTPAID 
 
 Enclose remittance with order 
 
'The Search for the Original 
 Words of the Gospel" 
 
 by 
 
 E. S. Buchanan, M.A., B.Sc, 
 
 At the Union Theological Seminary, Broadway and 120th 
 
 Street, New York City, at 5 p. m., 
 
 December 3d, 1914 
 
 President Brown in the Chair. 
 
 THE CHAIRMAN : There is no subject more inter- 
 esting to intelligent Christian people than that of the 
 endeavor to get behind our earliest manuscripts of the 
 Bible, and especially the New Testament, and recon- 
 struct, as far as possible, the originals, as they were 
 first written down. We have with us this afternoon 
 one of the experts in this pursuit, in this country for a 
 time, and able therefore to our great satisfaction to 
 give us to-day, and report from his own original obser- 
 vations and work what results, as to the Gospels, it 
 seems to him possible to announce at the present time. 
 I have much pleasure in introducing the Rev. E. S. 
 Buchanan of Oxford. 
 
REV. E. S. BUCHANAN : Mr. President, ladies and 
 gentlemen, I do not propose this afternoon to be at all 
 formal. As far as I can I wish to speak in a simple, 
 humble and direct manner, and I wish to give, as far 
 as possible, not other men's discoveries, but what I 
 have myself seen, what I have myself been so fortunate 
 as to discover, and what I think this audience will 
 be the first public audience in the world to hear. 
 
 I may be pardoned as a visitor to this great country 
 if I say a few words about myself, not that I wish to 
 make myself in any way the object of this talk, but I 
 think the experience of my own mind under the his- 
 torical discoveries, and especially the textual discov- 
 eries which came to me, may be of interest. I had the 
 very great privilege of being associated with Bishop 
 John Wordsworth of Salisbury. It was owing to him 
 that I entered the ministry of the Church of England, 
 and as long as he was living I had a friend and a 
 patron, and one who encouraged me, and who was al- 
 ways kindly, and placed his knowledge and his friend- 
 ship, and in some cases his money, at my service. 
 
 When in the summer of 1911, he died quite suddenly, 
 so suddenly that one afternoon after saying he felt a 
 little tired, he laid down on the sofa in his palace at 
 Salisbury, and died, it was a great shock to many be- 
 side myself. I felt that I had lost the one man in 
 Europe who had really started me on this work, and 
 had helped me and supported me. I turned to some 
 of the other Bishops in the English Church, and I 
 found them — I was going to say like ice-bergs — per- 
 haps that would be the most vivid description. They 
 thought that the work was a specialist's work, and had 
 no direct bearing or value upon church questions. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to say that it is my 
 profound conviction that before we can arrive at any 
 estimate of the teaching of Jesus Christ, we must have 
 
the exact words, as far as we can, that He spoke. Now, 
 there have been a great many very conflicting views 
 as to the state of the Gospels or the state of our New 
 Testament. I am going to speak on the New Testa- 
 ment only. We know that if we look into the past 
 history of the world, there was a tremendous struggle 
 in the Middle Ages for liberty. The human spirit 
 was gradually entangled in a net work of ecclesiastical 
 traps, stratagems, teachings and systems which 
 squeezed all the spiritual heart-blood out of it. That 
 state of things continued, we might say, in England 
 from the time of the Norman Conquest until the time 
 of Wycliffe. John Wycliffe began to see that if ever 
 his countrymen were to be set free from a cruel dom- 
 ination he would have to translate the Scripture into 
 his mother tongue. 
 
 Wycliffe was the first and perhaps the greatest of 
 our English reformers; and he translated in 1380 
 from the Latin Vulgate the whole New Testament. Of 
 course, printing had not yet come in. We today can- 
 not imagine the world without printing. It is very 
 hard for us to reconstruct those centuries of the Mid- 
 dle Ages when men lived without the printing press, 
 and when they lived very much at the mercy of the 
 few people who had privileges, and especially the 
 ecclesiastics. Ecclesiastics ruled the world; they ex- 
 empted themselves from all penalties,, and they im- 
 posed fines and penalties ad libitum upon the other 
 people whom they called the laity. 
 
 Of all the tyrannies that we have ever read of, the 
 ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages has been the 
 worst. It was not until the Scriptures came to be 
 put in the hands of the people, that they saw that 
 this ecclesiastical tyranny, which was chained upon 
 them or riveted upon them in the name of God and 
 
 5 
 
of Christ, was really a misrepresentation of the teach- 
 ing of Christ, 
 
 Following Wycliffe, the great name, the name that 
 shook all Europe, and that still shakes Europe to-day, 
 to those who earnestly read him, was Martin Luther. 
 I may say that spiritually I owe more to Martin 
 Luther than to any of my own countrymen, and am 
 under a greater debt to him for his bravery, for his 
 courage, for his truth, for his humanity, and for his 
 total absence of all hypocrisy. If you ask me what 
 was the grand thing about Martin Luther, it was that 
 the man had not a line, not a trace of hypocrisy in his 
 whole composition. I think that can scarcely be said 
 truly of any other great ecclesiastic, but Martin Luther 
 was a Christian and a man — a very great man, who 
 brought Europe face to face with this question, "Are 
 we to follow this ecclesiastical system, this man-made 
 system, of which the Pope is the head, or are we boldly 
 and resolutely to throw ourselves upon God? Are we 
 still to crave these human mediators, or are we to say, 
 "God has given me enought light by His Word and by 
 His Spirit, and, therefore, I can dispense with this 
 system." 
 
 Martin Luther's work crossed over to England, and 
 was powerful in such men as William Tyndale. I do 
 not know whether you know it or not, but it is a fact 
 that our English Bible, King James' Bible, which was 
 issued in 1611, is practically the translation of Wil- 
 liam Tyndale, five-sixths of its renderings are those 
 of William Tyndale. William Tyndale produced his 
 first New Testament in 1525, and in 1536 he was 
 strangled and burnt for having dared to do such a 
 monstrous act. But although they burnt him, they 
 could not burn his books ; and it is owing to him, more 
 than to any man, that our English Bible which has 
 
been such a power in the English speaking race, has 
 its poetry and pathos and spiritual charm. 
 
 Tyndale completed the work of Wycliffe, and he did 
 it by the aid of the printing press, for whereas Wy- 
 cliffe could only produce some thirty copies altogether, 
 Tyndale in his first edition struck off 4,000, but his 
 enemies succeeded in destroying 3,999 out of those 
 4,000, and only one solitary copy has survived; then 
 he struck off another 4,000, and of those I have seen 
 in the British Museum several copies that survive, and 
 there are two in New York and more elsewhere. 
 
 As long as men could only write books, all manu- 
 script books could only be limited in number, and the 
 ecclesiastical powers could hunt those down ; but when 
 the printing press threw out thousands, it was im- 
 possible to stop them and impossible to burn them. 
 William Tyndale's work was completed by the preach- 
 ing of the Reformers, and the weapon of the Reforma- 
 tion was an appeal to the Word of God, an appeal from 
 the teaching of man to the teaching of God's Word. 
 That appeal may seem to us the final step in the eman- 
 cipation of the human spirit, and we may think that 
 all we have to do to-day is to carry forward the work 
 of the Reformation. But we are face to face today 
 with another problem, which does not seem to have 
 ever entered the heads of the Reformers. This Word 
 of God has been made into a dead legal code. Men's 
 souls have been put under it; and their own aspira- 
 tions, and their own instincts, and their own power 
 of love and hope have been crushed by this unalter- 
 able code into which the Bible has been made. 
 
 I was brought up by my father to believe that every 
 word in the English Bible was inspired by the Spirit 
 of the living God. There was not one word in it but 
 had the power and authority of God behind it. I dared 
 not question one of the Bible texts lest I should go 
 
into "everlasting torture." I heard my father say with 
 his knowledge of Greek that the word translated 
 "punishment" was really "torture" ; and he taught his 
 family, he taught his neighbors, that God had pre- 
 pared for those who were reprobate an eternal tor- 
 ture. Whatever seemed to crush his spirit when he 
 thought it, he always escaped from by saying that 
 God was greater than we were, that we must not 
 measure the mind and the love of God by our own 
 imperfect and fallen and corrupt natures. And yet 
 I used as a boy to be dissatisfied with this teaching 
 which made God so stern and so terrible, which made 
 him so vindictive, and it seemed to me that to paint 
 God as having prepared an eternal torture for mil- 
 lions of his creatures, was to make him a God from 
 whom men must shrink. 
 
 This Calvinistic code continued, and my father be- 
 lieved it up to his death, held through everything to 
 the belief that God was all, God's Word was all; our 
 life here nothing; our human intellect benighted; our 
 human nature corrupt; and that our only hope was 
 an acquiescence, a complete acquiescence in the eternal 
 will of God. 
 
 "Jacob have I loved" — I have often heard him say — 
 "Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated." God's 
 ways were that some people He loved and elected to 
 eternal life; but others for some inscrutable reason 
 God hated and chose to reprobate and condemn to 
 eternal loss. And the conclusion of it was this, If I 
 did not believe this system, then I should go into 
 eternal torment, because my non-believing it would 
 prove that I was a reprobate. 
 
 That was the teaching which followed in the wake of 
 the Reformation, and erected the Bible, or the Word 
 of God as it defined it, into a hard and terrible system, 
 and then brought that system with all the force of the 
 
 8 
 
lawyer and logician to bear upon the human mind 
 and the human understanding. 
 
 When I met the Bishop of Salisbury and told him 
 that the Calvinistic faith was such that I could not 
 accept it, and that rather than believe it I would have 
 no outward religion at all, he said to me that he him- 
 self was just as much opposed to all such teaching, 
 and that Calvinism had by its interpreters inflicted a 
 deep wound on the Church of England; and he as- 
 sured me that it was folly to speak of every word of 
 the Scripture as being fixed. He added, "In my edi- 
 tion which I am bringing out of the Vulgate, I have 
 already collected thousands of variant readings, and 
 this very reading which you tell me about, 'These shall 
 go into the eternal torture,' you will find it in the 
 oldest Latin manuscripts, as 'These shall go into the 
 eternal fire.' " Immediately I saw that there was an 
 escape. He said to me, "Here is the facsimile of 
 Codex Sinaiticus, edited by Tischendorf, which be- 
 longed to my father. Here is the Codex Bzae, a copy 
 of the Graeco-Latin Gospels." And he placed them 
 in my hands. 
 
 You can imagine the enthusiasm kindled in me as 
 a young man eighteen years ago. I went back to my 
 college room and thought to myself, "Here is a man 
 of God who can deliver me from this death." For I 
 had been brought up very seriously, and my nature 
 had been so stamped by the personality of my father 
 and his religion, that I felt myself unable to deliver 
 myself from it. 
 
 I believe it is possible to take a child and to impress 
 such a sombre coloring upon that child's nature, to 
 make hell so vivid to that child, and God so terrible, 
 that it will take years to erase the impression that 
 you will make on that child's mind. Therefore I say, 
 let us be careful how we teach children. 
 
 9 
 
I owe a great debt to Bishop Wordsworth. It was 
 through him that I joined the number of young men 
 associated with him in textual study, and since that 
 time I have pursued, always with supreme interest, 
 this one quest, to find out what was really written; 
 that I might thereby find an escape from some of 
 these dogmas, from some of these teachings, which 
 had weighed so heavily upon me; that I might dis- 
 cover for myself whether Christ ever said some of 
 the words attributed to Him or not. I say the prob- 
 lem now before us is this. 
 
 Here I will anticipate a little and confess that I 
 have come now to believe myself, and to knoiu myself, 
 that the text of the New Testament has been more or 
 less revised since it left the hands of the original 
 writers. I do not mean that new miracles have been 
 added or new parables have been added, I do not mean 
 that ; but I believe and am sure that eyes behind which 
 was an ecclesiastical brain — if you know what an 
 ecclesiastical brain is — went over the Gospel manu- 
 scripts in the 2d century, and altered a good many 
 verses to bring them into conformity with the 
 schemes and ideals of the hierarchy which had al- 
 ready begun to develop. For example, when I was 
 taught at Salisbury Theological College, I was taught 
 the necessity (for salvation) of baptism by water; 
 and the text was, "Except a man be born of water 
 and the Spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom of 
 God." 
 
 When the Sinai Syriac Palimpsest was discovered 
 in 1892, to our astonishment we saw that in that man- 
 uscript the words were, "Except a man be born of the 
 Spirit and of water — " the cart had been put be- 
 fore the horse, or vice versa — ." That made some of us 
 think; and now there is a Latin manuscript which I 
 have just edited in the British Museum, that was 
 
 10 
 
copied in Armagh in Ireland, and that has got this 
 reading first-hand: "Except a man be born of the 
 Spirit" (leaving out water) "he cannot enter into the 
 Kingdom of God." 
 
 Bishop Wordsworth, although a great man, allowed 
 the practice of confession. The doctrine of confes- 
 sion is based on our Lord's words, "Tell it to the 
 Church, if thou has aught against thy brother." And 
 also there is that verse in St. James' Epistle where 
 we have to confess our sins one to another. I was 
 taught that, as it would be very inconvenient for us to 
 confess to the general public, the wisdom of the 
 Church had appointed certain men (to wit, priests) to 
 hear confession. Now, I am bound to tell you that 
 the words "Tell it to the Church" are not found in 
 the Corbey Gospels in Paris which is one of the earli- 
 est Latin manuscripts. The Corbey Gospels know 
 nothing about this "Tell it to the Church"; and the 
 question is. When our Lord was speaking where was 
 the Church? It is really an anachronism to repre- 
 sent Jesus Christ as saying to St. Peter and St. 
 John, "Go and tell it to the Church." Furthermore 
 St. James in a Spanish manuscript of his Epistle, 
 which I have copied at Oxford and which is now in 
 the press, tells us, "Confess your sins to the Lord," 
 instead of "Confess your sins to one another," — which, 
 as you will agree, is a vastly different proposition. 
 
 Again, I was taught a very high sacramental view 
 of the Holy Communion, and the authority for this 
 was the work by Dr. Pusey on the Real Presence. Dr. 
 Pusey summed up his position as that of St. Paul 
 who (so he declared) regarded the Sacrament as "the 
 Lord's body." When I came to examine the oldest 
 Latin manuscripts I found out that instead of "not 
 discerning the Lord's body," the words were "not 
 
 11 
 
differentiating the substance," and nothing at all said 
 in the text about "The Lord's body." 
 
 Another illustration, and this will be my last illus- 
 tration, although I could give you many more, is 
 from the Latin copy of the Gospels I have mentioned, 
 the work of Irish scribes. In the beginning of St. 
 Mark we read that St. John the Baptist was in the 
 wilderness "preaching the Baptism of Repentance 
 for the remission of sins." This little book gives us 
 this wonderful statement, "John was in the wilder- 
 ness preaching Repentance for the Forgiveness of 
 Sin." And I suggest to you that "preaching Repent- 
 ance for the Forgiveness of Sin" is considerably diff- 
 erent from preaching Baptism for the Forgiveness of 
 Sin. 
 
 You will say to me, "Now that you have discovered 
 textual changes made in one direction, tell us if there 
 is anything else, tell us if there are other lines of recen- 
 sion where you can see the subjective mind at work 
 upon the primitive records." 
 
 The personality of the Holy Spirit is clearly shown 
 in the earliest form of the Gospels known to us, the 
 Old-Latin form, and while I am speaking now about 
 this earliest form I may just say that I know there 
 are some here, I have met some people already, who 
 say to me "Were not the Gospels written originally 
 in Greek?" St. Mark I believe was written originally 
 in Latin. I cannot set forth here the evidence, but I 
 have convinced myself that St. Mark originally ap- 
 peared in Latin, although I dare say it came out almost 
 at the same time in Greek. We know it was written 
 in Rome, in Italy, and we know from the early cata- 
 combs that the Latin and Greek characters were in- 
 extricably intertwined. In the second century we 
 get Latin words spelled with Greek characters and 
 Greek words spelled with Latin characters, which in 
 
 12 
 
Rome I have seen with my own eyes; and I believe 
 myself that the Roman Legionaries, the men who 
 served under Caesar and the men who served under 
 Augustus, did not speak Greek, I believe they spoke 
 in Latin, and I believe that St. Mark — Marcus is a 
 downright Latin name — I believe that St. Mark 
 wrote in the Latin tongue for these ordinary people 
 of Roman Italy. 
 
 In the days of the Apostles there was frequent com- 
 merce between Rome and Britain. You remember 
 how in the early centuries Roman soldiers constantly 
 crossed from Gaul and Spain into Britain, when Spain, 
 Gaul and Britain — Hispania, Gallia, Britannia, all 
 Roman names — were occupied by the Roman legions. 
 Now, these Roman soldiers were the means, or the 
 routes which they took were the means, by which the 
 Gospel very early got into the west of Europe in the 
 Latin form. It got into Spain; it got into France; it 
 got into Britain; it got north into Scotland, and 
 finally it crossed over the Irish Sea, sixty miles of 
 rough sea, to Ireland. 
 
 This Irish text differs in thousands of places from 
 the Greek form and the so-called Vulgate form 
 of the Latin New Testament which we know was 
 stereotyped in the year 382, the Vulgate of Jerome. 
 But the year 382 is far too late. The horse was out of 
 the stable-door by that time, and had gone some way, 
 had galloped "some" by that time, as you would say 
 in this country. 
 
 At any rate it is idle to attempt to make us believe 
 that the form of Gospels stereotyped in 382 A. D,, can 
 be a final resting place for any thinking man. It cannot. 
 We are able to go back, to go behind 382, and are able 
 to ask ourselves what was the form of Gospels which 
 was used by these Roman Legionaries, and which 
 came into Spain and into Gaul in the second century. 
 
 13 
 
Can we reconstruct that Gospel? Well, it is very 
 marvellous, but I believe that we can. I believe that 
 we have enough Spanish and Irish manuscripts ex- 
 tant in different fragments, to enable us to recon- 
 struct in the main this form of Gospels which was* 
 used in Britain, in Gaul and in Spain, shall I say be- 
 tween the years 122 when the Emperor Hadrian came 
 in and the year 180 or 170 when Tatian the harmon- 
 izer consolidated the four gospels under one head? 
 
 This Irish Text is in Latin, and this text I have 
 now for the last six or seven years been spending my 
 time trying to recover ; and I say that this Latin-Irish 
 text or Spanish text or British text — I do not care 
 what you call it, has very distinctive elements in it; 
 and one of these elements is that it has a great many 
 verses which speak definitely of the work of the Holy 
 Spirit. Some eight or ten I have collected already, 
 which are suppressed in all the Greek manuscripts 
 and suppressed in the Roman Catholic Vulgate. For 
 example, "No man can come unto Me except the 
 Father draw him," as seen in the Irish text is, "No 
 man can come unto Me except the Father and the Holy 
 Spirit draw him," which is a very remarkable verse. 
 
 "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted, and 
 whose soever sins ye retain they are retained." Very 
 well, if that is so there is the end of it. But what 
 does the Irish text say, "Whose soever sins ye shall re- 
 mit, it is the Holy Spirit that shall remit them, and 
 whose soever sins ye shall retain, it is the Holy Spirit 
 that shall retain them" — which I submit to you, ladies 
 and gentlemen, puts that verse in rather a new light; 
 and we are not quite sure now that we have got the 
 original form of it. 
 
 Then again you will remember there is a remark- 
 able passage, or saying of the Lord Jesus, in St. John's 
 Gospel, where He says: "I am one that bear witness 
 
 14 
 
of Myself and the Father that hath sent Me beareth 
 witness of Me." Now the Irish text reads, "I bear wit- 
 ness of Myself, and the Father that has sent Me 
 beareth witness of Me, and the Holy Spirit" — where 
 you have once more very definitely a claim for the 
 work of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Again in our English Bible it says, "If a man love 
 Me he will keep My word and My father will love 
 him, and We will come to him and make Our abode 
 with him," which in this form is a stupendous say- 
 ing. According to that, Jesus Christ says that God the 
 Father and God the Son will come to a man and make 
 their abode with this one man. What does the Irish 
 text say? — "If a man love Me he will keep My word 
 and My Father will love him, and We will come to 
 him, and the Holy Spirit will make with him a dwell- 
 ing place." "Oh, make our hearts thy dwelling 
 place," has been the age-long Christian prayer to the 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
 I can illustrate my thesis further from the Epistles 
 of St. Paul in the Irish text, and show you there that 
 St. Paul says, "It pleased God to reveal His Son in 
 me that the Holy Spirit might preach Him among the 
 nations," whereas the Greek text and the Roman Vul- 
 gate text say : "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me 
 that I might preach Him among the nations." Instead 
 of "I" (the apostle), the Irish text has "the Holy 
 Spirit." 
 
 Again St. Paul says to the Corinthians, "When ye 
 are met together and my spirit." The Irish text says, 
 "When ye are met together and the sanctifying Spirit 
 Himself," which is a very different thing. 
 
 Now, I have just mentioned these texts which come 
 to my memory, and there are others, to show you that 
 there was a definite purpose in the minds of these re- 
 visers to suppress the Holy Spirit, and therefore they 
 
 15 
 
just took their knife, or whatever it was, and cut the 
 words out of the original documents — quite easily 
 done in those early days when men like Marcion 
 lived ! 
 
 Then again we think, for example, that such a won- 
 derful teaching as the Lord's Prayer has come down 
 to us absolutely in the original words in which it was 
 given. So we have always believed. But alas, for hu- 
 man beliefs! When I was in the British Museum last 
 April, in looking at the copy of the Lord's Prayer, in this 
 Latin Irish manuscript, I saw that the words "Give us 
 this day our daily bread" were written over some other 
 words — I saw that a knife had been taken, something 
 had been written down and then the knife of the copy- 
 ist had cancelled the words written and put something 
 else on the top of them. I have now been for seven- 
 teen years at this textual work, and a great deal of 
 what I have discovered has been through these first 
 readings cancelled, and my interest was at once 
 awakened. I thought to myself. Now I am on the 
 verge of some extraordinary discovery probably; I 
 must wait for a bright day, and I must read, at all 
 cost, what is written underneath. I knew that I could 
 do it by photography if not by my unaided eyes. So 
 I came to the Museum after a day's rest on one of our 
 brightest April days in England and was happy 
 enough to read what was originally written. What 
 was originally written was this in Latin : "Panem ver- 
 bum Dei celestem da nobis hodie." Give us today for 
 bread — Verbum Dei — the Word of God. Give us to- 
 day for bread the Word of God, and then it goes on, 
 "Forgive us our sins . . . " — Well, I looked at the 
 Ms. in utter astonishment. I thought, Can I be dream- 
 ing? So I went home. I thought of the text a great 
 deal, and I said to myself, "I must go back and look at 
 the Ms. again; perhaps I have made some mistake." 
 
 1« 
 
So I went back, and I looked at it again, and there 
 I saw quite plainly what was written before the era- 
 sure ; and I have not a shadow of a doubt of it ; and I 
 tell you what the scribe put on the vellum first was, 
 "Give us today for bread the Word of God from 
 Heaven," which makes the Lord's Prayer from begin- 
 ning to end a prayer for spiritual blessings. Our 
 Lord's promise is: "Seek the Kingdom of God, and 
 all other things shall be added unto you." 
 
 I hope in your own minds you are gathering up what 
 I might call an induction from all these separate in- 
 stances which I have given you as illustrations. I hope 
 you are piecing them all together, and are reaching 
 what I reached in my mind after discoveries extend- 
 ing over a period of thirteen or fourteen years. I 
 reached the conclusion, I was forced to it, that not even 
 the Lord's Prayer had been handed down in such a 
 fixed form that we could be absolutely certain that we 
 had the words as they left the lips of the Master. 
 
 I am going to give you two little parables, two of 
 our Lord's parables. One is the parable of the Prod- 
 igal Son; the other is a little parable added to the 
 Lord's Prayer about the friend who came to his 
 friend's house at midnight, and asked him for some 
 bread. 
 
 Now the parable of the Prodigal Son, which has 
 been called the Parable of Parables, begins: "A cer- 
 tain man had two sons ; and the younger of them said 
 to his father, Father give me the portion of the goods 
 that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his liv- 
 ing. And not many days after the younger son 
 gathered all together, and took his journey into a far 
 country, and there wasted his substance with riotous 
 living." The Latin is "Viverido luxuriose" — "luxurious 
 living." "And when he had spent all, there arose a 
 
 17 
 
mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in 
 want." 
 
 The word "mighty" is not found in the oldest man- 
 uscripts. The scribe probably thought that "a mighty 
 famine" was a little more impressive than a mere 
 famine. "He began to be in want" we have got, but 
 the Old-Latin gives us a very sweet variation, "he be- 
 gan to be hungry and to be in want." It is really the 
 hunger which is the great thing. 
 
 "And he went and joined himself to a citizen of 
 that country." Now, I have always had a suspicion 
 that that word "citizen," being a non-Jewish word and 
 strictly a Roman word, somehow got in there through 
 Jerome, or about his time, and so we find in the Verona 
 Gospels: — "He went and flung himself before a man 
 of that country." He went and flung himself before 
 a man of that country in abject despair and misery. 
 He flung himself down at his feet, and implored mercy 
 — a very different thing from joining himself to a cit- 
 izen. "And he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 
 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks 
 that the swine did eat." Some of our revisers have 
 changed that into what is not the oldest text, but is 
 found in Westcott and Hort's text — "And he would 
 fain have been filled with the husks that the swine did 
 eat" — which is a little change for the sake of supposed 
 refinement. 
 
 "And no man gave unto him. And when he came 
 to himself, he said. How many hired servants of my 
 father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish 
 with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I 
 will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against 
 heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to 
 be called thy son." That is what our English Bible 
 says he did say to his father, but you will see that 
 what he did say according to the Irish text was some- 
 
 18 
 
thing rather different. I will tell you presently what 
 he did say. Meanwhile, "And he arose and came to his 
 father. But when he was yet a great way off his 
 father saw him," and the Vulgate adds "and had com- 
 passion." But the Old-Latin omits the words "And 
 had compassion." The old scribe forgot that the 
 father had compassion all the time, and therefore by 
 adding that when he saw him he had compassion 
 he virtually denied that he had it before, or im- 
 plied that having lost it, he must needs find it again, 
 "He saw him and ran," — this is I believe the orig- 
 inal. "The father saw him and ran and fell on his 
 neck and kissed him; and the son said to his 
 father. Sir, I have sinned against heaven and be- 
 fore thee and am not now fit to be thy slave." That 
 is what the Irish text tells us he said. What our Eng- 
 lish Bible states he said is: "Father, I have sinned 
 against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more 
 worthy to be called thy son," according to his first in- 
 tention. 
 
 Can we not see how, in the presence of his father's 
 love, without a word said, how being received with his 
 father's kiss, he feels there is a gulf between them ; he 
 had forfeited his filial relationship, and he says, "Sir — 
 (Domine) I am now not fit to be thy slave." Notice 
 how wonderful is the reply. In our English Bible it 
 says: 
 
 "But the father said to his servants. Bring forth 
 the best robe." But the narrative is heightened again 
 in the Irish form of text, where it says, "But the 
 father said to his servants, Bring forth quickly for 
 my son" — ^these are the words given the emphasis — 
 "Bring forth quickly for my son that best robe and put 
 it on him." 
 
 The son says, "I am not fit to be thy slave." But 
 the father says: "Bring forth quickly for my son 
 
 19 
 
the best robe and put it on him." You see how im- 
 measurable the love of the father is here pictured, 
 and how the whole of the love proceeds from the 
 father, and it is the love of the Father which strikes 
 us with its power and might in this parable. 
 
 The rest of it goes on as in our Bible until we come 
 to the elder brother. Now his elder brother called a 
 servant and wanted to know why the music and danc- 
 ing were proceeding. I suppose he thought penance 
 ought first to have been exacted. And the servant said, 
 "Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed a 
 fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and 
 sound." And he was angry, and would not go in ; there- 
 fore came his father out, and entreated him. And he 
 answering said to his father, "Lo, these many years 
 do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy 
 commandment ; and yet thou never gavest me a kid," — 
 which is much smaller, we all know, than a calf — "that 
 I might make merry with my friends; but as soon as 
 this filius diaboli, as soon as this son of the devil came, 
 thou hast killed for him a fatted calf." 
 
 Now, I ask you if it is not truer to human nature, 
 that this self-righteous man should have called his 
 brother the son of the devil than that he should have 
 said, "as soon as this thy son" — our Bible says "as 
 soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured 
 thy living with harlots," — but the Irish text says, and 
 what I believe our Lord Jesus Christ said was, "as soon 
 as this son of the devil came, who has wasted thy sub- 
 stance with fornicators, thou hast killed for him a 
 fatted calf." "My friends," the elder brother implies, 
 "are highly respectable men; his friends, this son of 
 the devil's, are all men of utterly immoral life." 
 
 The time is gone. I must pass over the other parable 
 to-night because I want to sum up for two or three 
 minutes the conclusions I have reached. I wish to 
 
 20 
 
say in these two or three minutes what I think the re- 
 sult is. New light has shaken us forever out of our 
 complacency that we have got absolutely every word 
 of the Gospels fixed. We have still a search to make. 
 There are thousands of documents which are lying in 
 our libraries unpublished. You say to me, Cannot 
 they be published? Yes, they can be published if 
 people take the matter to heart. But you know that 
 I have found it the hardest thing to interest people in 
 England in this subject. Textual criticism is caviare 
 to the general. People say, "I have got the Bible, what 
 more do I want? You cannot teach me anything I do 
 not know." And so they forget, "The little more and 
 how much it is, and the little less and what worlds 
 away." 
 
 In conclusion, I want to impress upon you who are 
 strangers to me as I am a stranger to you, I want 
 to impress upon you that what has come to me after 
 years of unsparing work, during which I have felt this 
 quest simply absorbing, is this conviction — If there is 
 any new light to be got, in God's Name let us get it. To 
 satisfy our own mind, to satisfy the minds of other 
 men, we must have the ultimate truth. 
 
 A man said to me recently in London. "Sir, you 
 are unsettling people's faith." I said, "We must have 
 the truth, no matter whose faith is unsettles." It is 
 no good building upon untruth however authoritative ; 
 it is no good building upon foundations which will not 
 bear the strictest scrutiny and examination. It is no 
 good reposing blindly and passively upon the authority 
 of the Church. Who is the Church, and what author- 
 ity does she possess unless she is in line with the 
 Truth? We must have truth at all costs, even if we 
 should discover that in the ultimate Gospel were a 
 good many things which give no support to certain 
 long-accepted forms of worship. Cost what it may, let 
 
us have the truth ; let us have the primitive Gospel 
 which v^^ill unite us all together in one faith, a simpler 
 faith, a faith which lays the stress upon the inward 
 life, a faith which sweeps away these foolish outward 
 things which men have fought for, and unites us in a 
 common hope, in a common endeavor, in a common as- 
 piration for the universal good. Men are becoming too 
 enlightened to quarrel over narrow ecclesiastical dis- 
 tinctions ; and as we have studied more deeply we find 
 that these ecclesiastical distinctions have for the most 
 part been based upon texts which modern investiga- 
 tion shows us not to have been spoken by Christ or 
 written by His Apostles. 
 
 THE CHAIRMAN : We have been led into a large 
 subject by an unaccustomed path. We are grateful 
 to Mr. Buchanan for all new facts which he has 
 brought us, and we hope that some time he and the 
 rest of us will know more fully all the facts and all 
 the opinions to be drawn from them, and in the mean- 
 time be able to live in simple confidence by the truth 
 we have. 
 
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