ON THE AUTHOEIZED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OP THE NEW TESTAMENT: m COJ^NEHON WITH SOME EECENT PKOPOSALS EOE ITS KEVISION. BY RICHAED CHENEYIX TRENCH, D.D, DEAN OF WESTMINSTER. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND. 1858. [2%e Author reserves the right of translation.'] <^^ V LONDON : SAVILIi AND EDWAKDS, PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET, COVENT GARDEN. PREFACE. i 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 certainly prefer to follow in their disposition that simpler arrange- ment 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 observations as seemed to him desirable, without attempting any more ambitious arrange- ment. 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 without the strongest conviction that a book, well and happily arranged on the scheme of rather bringing 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 VI PREFACE. sequence. But this arrangement is very difficult to attain. I cannot 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 result. Some things indeed already, as they escape the confusion of MS., and assume the painful clearness of print, I see might be in fitter place than they are ; but much refuses still to group itself in any satisfying combina- tion. This acknowledgment is not made with the desire to anticipate and avert the censure 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 endeavour to attain it might perhaps take for granted. Vf ESTMINSTEE, June 24, 185^ TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE INTEODUCTORY REMARKS . I CHAPTEE II. ON THE ENGLISH OF THE AUTHORIZED VERSION ... 9 CHAPTER III. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION 34 CHAPTER IV. ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED ... 47 CHAPTER V. ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED 62 CHAPTER VI. ON SOME BETTER RENDERINGS FORSAKEN, OR PLACED IN THE MARGIN 72 CHAPTER VII. ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR IN OUR VERSION . 85 CHAPTER VIII. ON SOME QUESTIONABLE RENDERINGS OF WORDS . . . . I03 Vlll CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. PAGE ON SOME WORDS WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED II 3 CHAPTER X. ON SOME CHARGES UNJUSTLY BROUGHT AGAINST OUR VERSION 126 CHAPTER XI. ON THE BEST MEANS OF CARRYING OUT A REVISION . . 1 33 CHAPTER I. INTKODUCTOKY REMARKS. TT is clear that the question, Are we, or are we not, to -■- have a new translation of Scripture ? or rather, — 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 famiharly to the minds of men. This, indeed, is not by any means the first time that this question has been earnestly discussed ; but that which differences the present agitation of the matter from preceding ones is, that on all former occasions the subject was only debated among scholars and divines, and awoke no interest in circles beyond them. The present is apparently the first occasion on which it has taken the slightest hold of the popular mind. But now indications of the interest which it is awakening reach us from every side. America is sending us the instalments — 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 working 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 Convocation. Our Reviews, and not those only which are specially dedi- B a INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. cated to religious subjects, begin to deal with the ques- tion of revision. There are, or a little while since there were, frequent letters in the newspapers, urging, or re- monstrating 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 importance, the issues depending on a right solution of it are so vast and solemn, that it may well claim a temperate 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 supported 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 Papists — Socinians who hoped that, in another translation, 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 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 remained. As little is the matter advantaged, or in any way brought nearer to a settlement, by sentimental appeals to the fact that this, which it is now proposed to alter, has been the Scripture of our childhood, 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 argument 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 ap- INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 6 peals to the religious passions and prejudices of the day, apart, too, from feehngs which in themselves demand the highest respect, will have to be dealt with in that spirit of seriousness and earnestness which a matter affecting so profoundly the whole moral and spiritual life of the English people, not to speak of nations which are yet unhorn, abundantly deserves. In the pages which follow, I propose not mainly to advo- cate 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 demanded, — the inconveniences, difficulties, the dangers it may be, which would attend such a revi- sion ; and thus, so far as this lies in my power, to assist others, who may not have been able to give special atten- tion 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 per- suaded 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 ahke. Nor certainly do I underrate the other difficulties which would beset such an enterprize ; 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, ]ike 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 b2 4 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. this work with earnest prayer for the divine guidance, her conscience bearing her witness that in no spirit of idle inno- vation, 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 pre- sent his Word, whereof she is the guardian, in all its sin- cerity to her children, she has undertaken this hard and most perilous task, and in some way or other every diffi- culty will be overcome. Whatever pains and anxieties the work may cost her, she will feel herself abundantly re- warded 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 outward form, — for we shall have God's treasure in earthen vessels still, — but with some of these blemishes which she now knows of removed, and altogether approach- ing 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 suspense and debate, while it occupies, as it needs must, the anxious thoughts of many, it cannot 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 dispassionate judgment, and one founded upon evidence, in egard 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 accomplish- ing 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 they bring has long ago INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5 been brought forward by others, or must be set aside from one cause or another, yet that something will remain, and will survive 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 thankful. It is in that intention, with this hope, that I have ventured to publish these pages. The work, indeed, which I thus undertake, cannot 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 its 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 recognition, and then stopping short and urging some single blemish or incon- sistency, and dwelling upon and seeming to make much of this, which often in itself is so little. For the flaws pointed out are frequently so small and so slight, that it might almost seem as if the objector had armed his eye with a microscope for the purpose of detecting that which otherwise would have escaped notice, and which, even if it b INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 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 unwelcome 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 impiety to dwell on errors in that to which we for ourselves 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 ourselves to this course by such considerations as the following; — and first, that a passing by of the very much which is excellent, with a dwelling on the very little 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 com- paratively little matter for observation. It is easy to exhaust the language of admiration, even when that admi- ration 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 objections made are small and trivial, it can only be replied, that nothing is really small or trivia], 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 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. T a dignity to everything connected with it. The more deeply we are persuaded of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, the more intolerant we shall be of any lets and hindrances 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 Trans- lators be noted in any spirit of irreverence or 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 supply ; even as it was ; but more than this it would be absurd and unfair to demand. If other of their mistakes might have been avoided, as is plain from the fact that predecessors or cotemporaries did avoid them, and yet were not avoided by them, this only shows that the marks of human weakness and infirmity, which cleave to every work of men, cleave also to theirs. Let me also observe, further, that he who may under- take in any matter to correct them does not in this pre- sumptuously affirm himself a better scholar than they were. He for the most part only draws on the accumulated stores S INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. of tlie 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 elucidation of the meaning of Holy Scripture during this period. It would be little to the honour of these ages if they had made no advances herein ; little to our honour, if we did not profit by their acquisitions. This much premised, I shall proceed to consider our Authorized Version of the New Testament under certain successive aspects, devoting a chapter to each. CHAPTER 11. ON THE ENGLISH OF THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. nPHE 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 befel the rhetorician of old, who, having made a long and elaborate oration in praise of the strength of Hercules, 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 occa- sional weaknesses and blemishes, the spots upon the sun's face, which impair its perfect beauty. When 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 grammar. Now I should not hesitate in express- ing 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. 10 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. In respect of words we recognize that true delectus vev- horum 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 removed 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 vocables. No undue preponderance of the latter makes the language remote from the understanding of simple and unlearned men. Thus we do not find in our Version 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 *impu- dicity' (Gal. v. 19), nor 'longanimity (2 Tim. iii. 10), nor ' co-inquinations' (1 Pet. ii. 1^, 20), nor ' comessations' (Gal. V. 21), nor ' contristate' (Ephes.iv. 30), nor ' zealatours' (Acts xxi. 20), nor * agnition' (Philem. 6) , nor ' suasible' (Jam. iii. 1 7), nor ' domesticals' ( i Tim. v. 8), nor * repro- pitiate' (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 derivation, where there are not, as very often there could not be, sufficient equivalents for ^ De Or at. 3, 37. 2 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' (i 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), ' cogitation' where we have ' thought' (Luke ix. 46), ' fraternity' where we ' brother- hood' (i Pet. ii. 17). ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 11 them in tlie homelier portion of our language ; no affecta- tion 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 'hundreder' for ' centurion,' ' freshman' for ' proselyte,' ' gainbirth' i.e, 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 Translators have attained their happy felicity in diction, while it must diminish to a certain extent their claims to absolute origi- nality, enhances in a far higher degree their good sense, moderation, and wisdom. I allude to the extent to which they have availed themselves of the work of those who went before them, and incorporated this work into their own, everywhere building, if possible, on the old founda- tions, and displacing 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 cotemporaries ; and though much of his work has been removed in the succes- sive 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 \iE,ig very much sur- vives. To him we owe such phrases as " turned to flight 1^ ON THE ENGLISH OP OUR VERSION. the armies of the aliens/'^ " the author and finisher of our faith ;'' to him, generally, we owe more than to any single labourer 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 were thus indebted to those who went before them in the same sacred office, to Tyndale above all, for innumerable 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 become, on account of their beauty and fitness, " household words '' and fixed utterances of the religious life of the English people, we owe to them, and they first appear in the Version of 1 6 1 1 ; such, for instance, as " the Captain of our salvation " (Heb. ii. lo), " the sin which doth so easily beset us '' (Heb. xii. i), "the Prince of life'' (Acts iii. 15). But in passing, as I now propose to do, from generals to particulars, it is needful to make one preliminary obser- vation. He who passes judgment on the English of our Version, 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 subsequent changes or modifications in the mean- ing of words. Few, I am persuaded, who have studied our Translation, and tried how far it will bear a strict compa- * 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. 13 rison with the original which it undertakes to represent, but have at times been tempted to make hasty judgments here, and to pass sentences of condemnation which they liave afterwards, on better knowledge, seen reason to recall. Certainly, in many places where I once thought our Trans- lators had been wanting in precision of rendering, I now perceive that, according to the English of their own day, their Version 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 circumstances quite beyond their control, — namely, through those muta- tions 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 recognized authority, by an influence working silently, but not the less pro- foundly 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 sometimes 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 translation in our present English of /x?) fxepLjuvaTe. The words seem to exclude and to condemn that just forward-looking care which be- longs to man, and differences him from the beasts which live only in the present ; and " most English critics have lamented the inadvertence of our Authorized Version, which, in bidding us ' take no thought' for the necessaries of life, prescribes to us what is impracticable in itself, and would 14 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. be a breach of Christian duty even were it possible."^ But there is no ' inadvertence' here. When our Translation was made, " take no thought'' was a perfectly correct rendering of juri juEpiiuvaTe. ' Thought' was then constantly used as equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care ; as let witness this passage from Bacon :^ " Harris, 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 child- birth. Queen Catherine Parr died rather of thought.'^ ^ A better example even than either of these is that occurring in Shakespeare's Julius Ccesai^ (" 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 cumhereth it the ground ?" ' Cum- bereth' seems here too weak and too negative a rendering of KarapyeLy which is a word implying active positive mis- chief; and so no doubt it is in the present acceptation of " to cumber ;" which means no more 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 trouhleth 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 Translators were. The em- ployment by these last of ' cumber,' at Luke x. 40, (the 1 ScEiVENEE, Notes on the New Testament, vol. i, p. 162; and cf. Alford, in loco. ? Sistory of Senry the Seventh. ^ Vol. i, p. 172. '^ Act 2, sc. I. " Worlcs, vol. 2, p. 40. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 15 only other place in the Authorized Version where the word occurs) is itself decisive of the sense they ascribed to it. UEpiaGTrcLTo (literally "was distracted") is there rendered by them, "was cumbered/'^ Acts xvii. !2,^. — * Devotions.' This was a perfectly correct rendering of Gz^acTiiara at the time our Translation 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 to which these were rendered, as tem- ples, altars, images, shrines, and the like ; ' Heiligthiimer' De Wette has very happily rendered it ; cf % Thess. ii. 4, the only other passage in the New Testament where the word occurs, and where we have rendered iravra XeyofjiEvov Qeov rj (ji^a(Tfia, " all that is called God or that is worship- ped." It is such, — not the ' 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" (avaOewpoJv) : yet the following 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, swear- ^ I have no doubt that most readers of that magnificent passage in Julius Ccesar, 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 mischief. J 6 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. ing by no mean devotions that the walls should not keep the coward from him/' Acts xix. 37. — " Ye have brought hither these men, who are neither robbers of churches, nor blasphemers of your goddess." I long counted this " robbers of churches," as a rendering of kpodvXovg, 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 aiTay of proofs, but two will suffice. In the first, which is from Holland's Pliny, ^ the term is applied 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 Choke's translation 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 do w.n wards" (Matt, xxvii. 51). Acts xxi. 15. — "After three days we took up our car^nages 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 pro- bable 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 car- riages, when there is no road for wheels, nothing but a mountain track, between Csesarea and Jerusalem ? But ' carriage' is a constant word in the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth century^ 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 ^ Vol. 2, p. 502. 2 gee North's Flutarch, passim. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUE VERSION. 17 our Translators here^ as also in one or two other passages where it occurs, in this sense (Judg. xviii. 21 ; i Sam. xvii. 22); and while so understood, the words " took up our car- riages" are a very sufficient rendering of the kiriGKevaad/uLivoL of the original. The Geneva has it correctly, though some- what quaintly, " trussed up our fardels.'' Ephes. iv. 3.—" Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.'' Passages like this, in which the verb ' endeavour' occurs, will sometimes seem to have been carelessly and loosely translated ; when, indeed, they were rendered with perfect accuracy according to the English of that day. " Endeavour," 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 cannot 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 ' endeavour;' as 2 Pet. i. 15, and this from the Ephesians still more. If we attach to ' endeavour' its present 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 recognizes the possibility of our being defeated in the attempt. He does no such thing ; he assumes success. ^irovdaZovTtg means "giving all diligence," and 'endea- vouring' meant no less two centuries and a half ago. I Tim. V. 4. — " If any widow have children or nephews." But why, it has been asked, are kyova, or descendants, translated * nephews' here ? and why should ' nephews' be specially charged with this duty of supporting their relatives? ^ Lincoln's Inn Sermons, by F. D. Maurice, p. 156. C 18 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. The answer is that 'nephews', (= 'nepotes') was the constant word for grandchildren and other lineal descendants, as witness 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 freckles of fathers, not appearing at all upon their own children's skin, begin afterwards 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 circum- stance that in the apostolic times the duties of piety extended so far, that not 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 warn-ed of their presence, and there is little danger of our making shipwreck upon them. But words like those which have been just cited, as familiar now as when our Yersion was made, but employed in quite dif- ferent meanings from those which they then possessed, are like hidden rocks, which give no notice of their presence, and on which we may be shipwrecked, if I may so say, ^ Ecclesiastical Polity, b. 5, c. 20. 2 Plutarch's Morals, p. 555. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 19 without so much as being aware of it. It would be mani- festly 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 fugiunt, vocabula manent" — this is the law of things in their relation to words, and it renders necessary at certain intervals a readjustment 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 evi- dently contemplated as part of their task the removing from their revision of such words as in the lapse of years had become to their cotemporaries unintelligible or mis- leading. For instance, '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' ("depart us from the love of God'") at Rom. viii. 39. 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 apirayri ; the ' bribour' or ' briber' was not equivalent 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 c2 20 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. fall into temptation and snares, and into many foolish and noisome (p\a(5Epag) lusts/' ' Noisome/ that is, when those translations were made, was simply equivalent to noxious or hurtful -^ but in the beginning 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 actual 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 their revision con- sistently and to the full. For instance, 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. 2 J ; only one in the new, Rev. xvi. 2 ; where kukov cXkoc 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 bye/ This, when they wrote, was ceasing to mean immediately. The invete- rate 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 * by and bye ' as a rendering of evOiwg and tvOvg ; but they would have done still better, if they ^ " 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. 21 had removed it in every case. In four places (Matt. xiii. 31 ; Mark vi. 25 ; Luke xvii. 7 ; xxi. 9) they have suffered it to remain. Again, * 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 utter ^ ance of discontent and displeasure at the dealings of another,^ but a secret resentment thereupon entertained. It was only proper, therefore, that they should replace ' to grudge' by ' to murmur,' and a ' grudge ' by a ' murmuring,' in such passages as Mark xiv. 5 ; Acts vi. i. On two occa- sions, however, they have suffered 'grudge' to stand, where it no longer conveys to us with accuracy the meaning of the original, and e^en in their time must have failed to do so. These are i Pet. iv. 9, where they render avev yoyyvajLiwv " without grudging ;" and Jam. v. 9, where ^17 (rreva^^ere 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 appropriate 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 faster to bring him fo]?th to the people." They plainly felt that ' Easter,' which had designated first a heathen, and then a Christian festival, was not happily used to set forth a Jewish feast, even though that might occupy the same place in the Jewish calendar which Easter occupied * " Yea, without gimdging Christ suffered the cruel Jews to crown Him with most sharp thorns, and to strike him with a reed." — Exa- mination of William Thorpe, in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. QO ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. in the Christian ; and they therefore removed ' Easter ' from places out of number, where in the earlier version it had stood as the rendering of Udcrxa, substituting '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 reader. ' Jewry' in like manner, which has been replaced by ' Judsea' almost everywhere, has yet been allowed, I must needs believe by the same over- sight, twice to remain (Luke xxiii. 5 ; John vii. i.) In dealing with obsolete words, the case is not by any means so plain. And yet it does not seem difficult 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 l^tojTai 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 is it with ' taches/ ^ouches,' ' boiled," * ear' (arare), 'daysman/ in the Old Testa- ment, words dark even to scholars, where their scholarship 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 inconsiderable 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 reverence 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 thankfully accepted and carefully preserved. For, indeed, it is good that the ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. ' 23 phraseology of Scripture should not be exactly that of our common life ; should be removed from the vulgarities, and even the famiharities, of this ; just as there is a sense of fitness which dictates that the architecture of a church should be different 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,' '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 Testament appeared in 1764, has an enormous list of expressions that are " clownish, barbarous, base, hard, technical, misapplied, or new coined/' and among these are 'beguile,' 'boisterous,' 'lineage,' 'perseverance,' 'potentate,' 'remit,' 'seducers,' 'shorn,' 'swerved,' 'vigilant,' 'unloose,' 'unction,' 'vocation;' for each of these (many hundreds in number) he proposes to substitute some other. This retaining of the old diction in all places where a higher interest, that, namely, of being understood 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 24 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 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 conscious of them, would be pained by a sense of incongruity, 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 reverence and honour. 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, is a danger altogether new, one which did not at all beset the former revisions. From Tyndale's first edition 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 portions by Cranmer's, Coverdale's, the Geneva, the Bishops' Bible, which were published in the interval between 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, ON THE ENGLISH OF OUK VERSION. 25 has in many ways immensely complicated the problem, has made many precautions necessary now which would have been superfluous then.^ 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 immeasurable 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 sug- gested 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 " (Wemyss). 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 ^ It is an eminent merit in the Revision of the Authorized Version hy Five Clergymen, of which the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Eomans have already appeared, that they have not merely urged by precept, but shown by proof, that it is possible to revise our Version, and at the same time to preserve unimpaired the character of the English in which it is composed. Nor is it only on tliis 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 built up again, these find only the need of here and there replacing a stone which had been incautiously built into the wall, or which, trustworthy material once, has now yielded to the lapse and injury of time, 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 recogni- tion of the Church. 26 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. come" we may well be contented to retain, though we are offered " impending vengeance '' in its place. " In cham- bering and wantonness '' would not be improved, even though we were to substitute for it " in unchaste and im- modest gratifications." Dr. Campbeirs work " On the Four Gospels " contains dissertations 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 Herodias' resentment^ who would have killed John ; but could not, because Herod respected him, and, knowing 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 newspaper, 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 infemals" (PhiL ii.>|i^ ; " Ye have put on the young man" (Col. iii. ] o). Of Harwood's Liberal Translation of the New Testament (London, 1768) and the follies of it, not far from blas- phemous, 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, undoubtedly, inaccuracies and neg- ligences here. Bishop Lowth long ago pointed out several faults in the grammatical construction of sentences '} and although it must be confessed that now and then he is hypercritical, and that his objections will not stand, yet ^ In his Short Introduction to English Grammar. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 27 others which he has not pressed would be found to supply the place of those which must therefore be withdrawn. 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 ignorantly, 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 Newcome^ taking them to task for using 'his' or 'her,"* where they ought to have used ' its / as in such passages as the following : " But if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted V (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 circumlocutions, as by the use of ' thereof.' Nor, moreover, 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. ^ Sistorical View of the English Biblical Translations. Dublin, 1792, p. 289. 2 I have elsewhere entered on this matter somewhat more fully {English Fast and Fresent, 3rd ed. p. 124 sqq^^, and have there observed that ' its' nowhere occurs in our Authorized Yersion. Lev. xxv. 5 (" of its own accord") has been since urged as invalidating my assertion j but does not so really; for reference to the first, or indeed 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 * itsj' for we have exactly the 28 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. Others have in other points found fault with the grammar of our Version, where, in Hke manner, they " have con- demned the guiltless,'' their objections frequently serving only to reveal their own un acquaintance with the history and past evolution of their native tongue — an unacquaint- ance 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^ complains 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 belonging 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 Wielif 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 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" (Acts iii. 3), and suggests, " asked some alms," in its room, evidently on the same assumption that ' alms' is a plural. Neither can he same " by it own accord" in the Geneva Yersion, Acts xii. 10 j and in other English books of the beginning of the seventeenth century, which never employ 'its.' There is a fuller treatment of this word and the first appearance of it, in Mr. Craik's very valuable work, On the English of ShaTces;peare, p. 91, and I should desire what I have written on the matter to be read with the corrections which he supplies. ^ Biblical Gleanings, ^. 212. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. ^9 tolerate our rendering of i Tim. v. 23 : " Use a little wine for tliine 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 "o/i^times," " oftenimiQ^," 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 improvement. In general the very smallest alteration will set everything right. These are some : — Heb. v. 8. — " Though He luere 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. 35), is without fault. But here, on the contrary, he is assuming a certain conceded fact, that Christ luas a Son, and that being such, and though He was such, yet in this way of suffering He learned obedience. * Though' is here a concessive conditional particle, the Latin '* etsi' or ' etiamsi' as followed by an indicative, and should -have itself been followed by such in our Version. It ought to be, " Though He tuas 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 instead 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 30 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. indicative ' doeth/ in the second clause of the sentence, to follow the subjunctive ' be' in the first, both equally depend- ing upon 4f ;' one would gladly, therefore, see a return to " do his will,'' which stood in Tj^ndale's version. Matt. xvi. i^. — ' ' Whom say ye that I am V The English is faulty here. It ought plainly to be, " Who say ye that I am :" as is evident if only ' who' be put last : " Ye say that I am who ?" The Latin idiom, "Quern me esse dicitis ?" probably led our Translators, 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, " Whom say ye me to be ?" then the Latin form would have been a true parallel, and also a safe guide ; the accusative ^ whom' not, indeed, as governed by ^say,' but as corresponding to the accusative ^ me,' 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 occa- sions; thus at Matt. xvi. 13 ; Mark viii. 37, 29 ; Luke ix. 18, 20 ; Acts xiii. 25. Heb. ix. 5. — "And over it the Cheruhims of glory." But * Cherubim' being already plural, it is excess of expres- sion 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. " CherubiTis of glory," as it is in the Geneva and Rheims 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 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 31 enough, we find this in Jerem}^ 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 geniis ; and it is exactly this sort of error into which our Translators have here fallen. Rev. xxi. 1%. — "And had a wall great and high." The verb ' had ' is here without a nominative. All that is neces- sary is to return to Wiclif s translation : " And it had a wall great and high." Again, we much regret the frequent use of adjectives ending in ' ly,' as though they were adverbs. This termina- tion, 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 i 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 ' unseemfily' 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 unfre- quent in the Prayer Book. Thus we find it in the thirty- sixth Article : " We decree all such to be rightly, orderly, and lawfully consecrated." ^ 1 It is curious to note how frequent the errors are arising from the same cause. Thus I remember meeting in Foxe's Book of Martyrs (I 32 ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VERSION. 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 necessity should provoke alteration. Thus there can be no question that our old English praeterites, ' 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 difference 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 opposi- tion 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 ; Kev. xxii. 2 ; I 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 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 have not the exact reference) the words, " if this be perj)end" Here it is clear that Foxe was for the moment deceived by the termination of ' perpend/ so like the usual termination of the past participle ; 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. ON THE ENGLISH OF OUR VEESION. 33 ' which' would be to mark by its aid the distinction between ocTTig and oc, 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 Sg and 6(7Tig employed *who' and 'which' quite promiscuously. But upon this part of my subject that which has been said must suffice. CHAPTER III. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. TTOW 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 genius, the Divina GomTYiedia, for instance, and how many problems, at first sight seeming insoluble, and which only genius can solve, even it being often content 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 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 failure, with the far- reaching issues which will follow on the one or the other, sinks in each other case into absolute insignificance as compared with their importance here. Thus the missionary translator, if he be at all aware of ^ 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 {£Jp. 33) : Quasi captivos sensus in saam linguam victoris jure transposuit. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 35 the awful implement which he is wielding, of the tre- mendous 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 interests 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 translators of the Scriptures into Chinese for expressing the true and the living God.^ As many of us as are ignorant of the language can be no judges in the controversy which on this matter is being carried on, but we can all feel how enormous the in- terests 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 holier meaning than any which, before its adoption into this sacred service, it knew. Sometimes, when the transfer 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 inadequate, yet each with its own advantages, so that it shall be exceed- ingly difficult for the most skilful master of language to 1 See the Eev. S. C. Malan's Who is God in China, Shin or Shang-te ? D 2 36 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. determine which ought to be preferred. Thus it was not indifferent whether Aoyoc should be rendered in ecclesiasti- cal Latin ^ Sermo' or ' Verbum.' The fact that ' Verbum' has from the beginning been the predominant rendering, and that ' Verbum" is a neuter impersonal, possessing no such mysterious duplicity of meaning as Aoyog, which is at once the ' Word' and the * Eeason," has, I do not hesitate 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 ' Yerbum' are lost, would have been secured by the choosing of ' Sermo' rather ; any gains from this would have been accompanied by more than countervailing losses. I cannot, 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 existed 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 ' poenitentia,' or the ^ resipiscentia,' which some of the Reformers sought to introduce in its room, the better rendering of fxeravoia'^. should fjieravoetre be ren- dered ^ poenitete' or 'resipisciteT ^ The Roman Catholic theologians found great fault with Beza, that instead of the ' poenitentia,' hallowed by long ecclesiastical usage, and having acquired a certain prescriptive right by its long employment in the Yulgate, he, in his translation of Scrip- ture substituted ' 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 ^ See Petavius, De Trin. vi. i. 4. * See Fred. Spanheim's Dub. Evangelica, pars 3% dab. vii.; Campbell, On the Four Gosjpels, vol. i. p. 292, sqq. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 37 part at his past life is an important element in all true lueravoia or repentance, still ' poeniteDtia' 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, more- over, 'resipiscentia'' was no such novelty, Lactantius having already 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 /u^rdvoia, even before it had been assumed into scriptural usage, and much more after, had acquired a superadded sense of regret for the past, or 'hadiwist' (had-I-wist), as our ancestors called it; which, if ' poenitentia' seemed to embody too exclusively, his ' resipiscentia,' making at least as serious an omission, hardly embodied at all. On the whole, I cannot but think that it would have been better to leave ' poenitentia' 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 pre- ceding solutions of these difficulties, 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 translation 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 the j3aroc and Kopog of Luke xvi. 6, 7 ; the fjLtrgrjTtig of John ii. 6 ; coins, such as the 38 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. ^iSpaxf-iov of Matt. xvii. 24 ; the (TTarrjp of Matt. xvii. 27 ; the ^paxjuri of Luke xv. 8 ; titles of honour and authority which have long since ceased to be, and to which, at best, only remote resemblances now exist, as the -ypo/zjuartuc ^^^ vEijjKopog of Acts xix. ^^ ; the ^Acnapx^ii of the same chapter, ver. ^l; the avOvTrarog 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 "ApBiog Trdyog, "Mars' hiir' (Acts xvii. 22), AidocrrpMrov, 'the Pavement' (John xix. 13); when Sir John Cheke rendered l/carov- Tapx<^^} 'hundreder' (Matt.viii. 5), o-EXrjym^o/x^voc, 'mooned' (Matt. iv. 24). But the number of words which allow of this reproduction is comparatively small. Of many the etymology 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 neces- sity 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, and without attempting any more accurate designation, to employ this. Our Translators have frequently taken this course; they have done so, rendering [3drog, Kopog, x**^^'?? alike by ' measure' (Luke xvi. 6, 7 ; Rev. vi. 6), with no endeavours to mark the capacity of the measure ; ^paxjurj by " piece of silver" (Luke xv. 8), (Trarrip by " piece of money" (Matt, xvii. 27), avOvwarog by ' deputy' (Acts xiii. 8), orjjarrjyoi ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 39 by * magistrates'* (Acts xvi. 22), fxayoi by "wise men" (Matt. ii. i). A manifest disadvantage which attends this course is the want of a close correspondence between the original 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 ypaij,juaTEvg (Acts xix. ^^)j 'Easter' as that of Uaaxa (Acts xii. 4). The turning of "Apre/ztc iiito ' Diana' (Acts xix. 24), of 'Epjurig 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 latter, was unknown even to scholars. This method of translating has its own serious drawback, that, although 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 Ko^pavrrjg is not a 'farthing' (Mark xii. 42), nor Srivapiov a ' penny' (Matt. xx. 2), nor fierptiTrjc a ' firkin^ (John il 6) ; not, I mean, our farthing, or penny, or firkin. So, too, if "piece of money" is a vague translation of ^pa^r) (Luke xv. 8), Wiclif s ' bezant' and Tyndale's ' grote' involve absolute error. Add to this the danger that the tone and colouring of one time and age may thus be substituted for that of another, of the 40 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. modem 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 strangeness of it to disappear, and that its meaning will gradually 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,' ' shekel,' ' cherub,' ' seraphim,' 'cor,' 'bath,' ' ephah ;' and with some Greek in the New, as ' tetrarch,' ' proselyte,' ' Paradise,' ' pentecost,' ' Messias ;' or by adopting these words from preceding translations have acquiesced 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 becomes, so to speak, transparent wdth its own meaning. It is impossible to adhere rigidly and constantly to any one of these devices for representing the things of one con- dition 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 Translators 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 preferable, as in their rendering of avOinrarog by ' deputy' (Acts xiii. 7, 8, 12), 'proconspl' being ready made to their hands, with Wiclif's authority for its use. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 41 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 dijSerent from their original on the lips of Greek- speaking Jews, and 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 'RXlag in the Greek text, should they render it ' Elias' 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 'HX/ac, for instance, should Lave been translated into that which is not merely its Hebrew, but also its English equivalent, * Elijah,' and so with the others. Let us just seek to reahze to ourselves the difference in the amount of awakened attention among a country congregation, which Matt. xvii. lo would create, if it were read thus, " And his disciples asked him, saying. Why then say the Scribes that Elijah must first come V 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 pro- phets, and other personages of the earlier Covenant. Not to speak of 'Elijah' and 'Elias,' we have ' Elisha' and * Eliseus," ' Hosea' and ' Osee,' ' Isaiah' and ' Esaias,' ' Uzziah' and ' Ozias,' ' Hezekiah' and ' Ezechias,' ' Korah' and ' Core' (commonly pronounced as a monosyllable in our National 42 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. Schools), * Rahab' and ' Rachab/ and (most unfortunate of all) 'Joshua' and ' Jesus/ t/K^'^-'^' V '' ^" It is indeed hardly possible to exaggerate the confusion of which the ' Jesus' of Heb. iv. 8 must be the occasion to the great body of unlearned English readers 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 every- where in the Old Testament by the name of ' Joshua,' the perplexity to many becomes hopeless. It is in vain that our Translators have added in the margin, " that is Josuah ;" 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 cannot 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 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/ '^ So it ouglit to be printed in our modern Bibles, not * Urbane,' which ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 43 which by the same rule should be * Sylvan/ and * Mercurius/ retain it. This inconsistency is prevalent in all books which have to do with classical antiquity. There is almost no Koman history in which 'Pompey' and 'Antony' do not stand side by side with ' Augustus' and ' Tiberius/ Meri- vale's, who always writes ' Pompeius' and ' Antonius/ is almost the only exception 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 without so much violence done to usage as to make it doubtful whether the gain exceeded the loss.^ 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 ' 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 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 * Marcus' (Col. iv. lo; Philem. 24; i 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'^ (i Cor. iii. 22 ; iv. 6) ; now " Simon, son of Jona" (John i. 42), is now deceptive, though it was not so according to the orthography of 1 61 1; it suggests a trisyllable, and the termination of a female name. It is Ovp^avov in the original. ^ See an article with the title, OrthograpJiic Mutineers, in the Mis- cellaneous Essays of De Quincey. 2 This latter form, which was manifestly inconvenient, as confounding 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. 44 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. and now " Simon, son of Jonas'' (John xxL 15, 16, 17); now ' Timotheus' (Acts xvi. 1), and now ' Timothy' (Heb. xiii. 21) ; but in the same chapter we have Tifiod^og rendered first ' Timothy' (3 Cor. i. i), and then 'Timotheus' (i6.ver.19). In like manner the inhabitants of Crete (KpriTeg) are now ' Cretes' (Acts ii. 1 1), which cannot be right,, and now * Cretians' (Tit. i. la). There are other inconsistencies in the manner of dealing with proper names. Thus, "Aptfoc Tlayog is 'Areopagus' at Acts xvii. 19, while three verses further 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, ' Ephesits,' ' Miletus,' ^ not ' Ephesos,' ' Miletos,' they should have done this throughout, and written ' Ass^ts' (Acts xx. 13, 14), and ' Pergamus' (Rev. i. 1 1 ; ii. 12), not * Assos' and ' Pergamos.' In regard of this last, it would have been better still if they had employed the form 'Pergamum;' for while no doubt there are examples of the feminine nipyajuog in Greek authors,^ they are excessively rare, and the city's name is almost always written Uipyafjiov in Greek, and ' Pergamum' in Latin.^ It is the carrying of one rule through which one desires ^ A singular mistake, the use of ' Miletwm' at 2 Tim. iv. 20, has been often noted. This is one of the errors into which our Translators 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.' ^ Ptol. V. 2, cf. Lobeck's Fhrynichus, p. 422. ^ Xenophon, Andb. vii. 8, 8 ; Strabo, xiii. 4 ; Pliny, S. JV. xxxv. 46. ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. 45 in these matters, and this is not seldom exactly what we miss. Thus, seeing that in the enumeration of the precious stones which constitute the foundations of the New Jerusa- lem (Eev. 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 ' chryso- lithus,' ^jacinth' and not 'jacinthus,' we might fairly ask that these should not be exceptionally treated. It should therefore be ' chrysoprase/ and not ' chrysoprasus.' Sap^toc is somewhat more difficult to deal with ; but the word is as much an adjective here as adp^ivog at Rev. iv. 3, XiOog, which is there exprest, 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 ; (rap^iovy not aap^iog, is the Greek name of this stone, and ^ sarda' the Latin, which last Holland has natu- ralized in English, and written '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 favour. 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 Tabernse" untouched (I observe DeWette does so), we should then have only dealt as the sacred historian has himself dealt with it, who has merely written it in ^ Mis-spelt ' chrysol^f^e/ and the etymology obscured, in all our modern editions, but correctly given in tbe exemplar edition of 161 1. 46 ON SOME QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION. Greek letters, not turned into equivalent Greek words. As little should we have turned it into Enghsh. Sometimes our Translators have carried too far, as I cannot but think, the turning of qualitative genitives into adjectives. Oftentimes it is prudently done, and with a due recognition of the Hebrew idiom which 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" (ih.) ; " unjust steward" than "steward of injustice" (Luke xvi. 8). Yet at other times they have done this without necessity, and occasionally with manifest loss. " Son of his love," which the Rheims version has, would have been better than "beloved son"^ (Col. i. 1^), and certainly "the body of our vileness," or "of our humiliation," better than "our vile body ;" " the body of his glory" than " his glorious body" (Phil. iii. 21). " The uncertainty of riches" (i Tim. vi. 17), would be better than "uncertain riches" (1 Tim. vi. 17), " children of the curse" than " cursed children" (2 Pet. ii. 14). " The glorious 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 translation assumed its present shape ; but still, when higher interests are at stake, such awkwardness must be endured, 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 genitive, (Filius caritatis ejus nullus est alius, quam qui de substantia Ejus est genitus) but this may be questioned. CHAPTER lY. 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 observed that the advantages doubtless were great, of coming, as our Trans- lators 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 construct- ing, 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 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, espe- cially when he comes to the task of revision with a confi- dence, here abundantly justified, in the general excellency 48 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 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 himself have originated, had he been thrown altogether on his own resources. I cannot but think that in this way the watchfulness of our Translators, or revisers rather, has been sometimes remitted ; and that errors and inaccuracies, which they would not themselves have introduced, they have yet passed by and allowed. A large proportion of the errors in our Translation are thus an inheritance from former versions. 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 text. I would not by any means affirm that such varieties 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 inflexible 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 elasticity, 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 dififerent languages have enclosed on dif- ferent schemes, and words in different languages which are precisely co-extensive with one another, are much rarer than we incuriously assume. ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 49 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 messengers and earthly, with only the context determining which is intended. There was no choice, therefore, but to render ayyeXot by 'mes- sengers ' at Luke vii. ^^4 ; 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 juayog has in Greek, of being used at will in an honorable sense or a dishonorable. There was no help^ therefore, but to render fxdyoi by ' wise men,' ^ or some such honorable designation. Matt. ii. i ; and fxayoq by * sorcerer,' Acts xiii. 6. Thus, again, it would have been difficult to represent YlapdK\r)TOQ, applied now to the Holy Spirit (John xiv. 16, 26), and now to Christ (i Johnl, -^i), by any single word. * Paraclete ' would alone have been possible ; and such uni- formity of rendering, if indeed it could be called rendering at all, would have been dearly purchased by the loss of ' Com- forter' and 'Advocate,' — both of them Latin words, it is true, but much nearer to the heart and understanding of English- men than the Greek ' Paraclete ' could ever have become.^ So, too, it would have been unadvisable to render Kvpii. ^ Milton, indeed, speaks of these wise men as the " star-led wizards" and ' wizard' is the word which Sir John Cheke employs in his transla- tion of St. Matthew ; but the word is scarcely honorable enough for the /Aa-yot of this place, nor opprobrious enough for the fxayos of the Acts. 2 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 ' Strengthener,' and not ' Consoler ;' even as the 7rapdK\r]TOs is one who, being summoned to the side of the accused or im- perilled man (advocatus), stands by to aid and to encourage. See the admirable note in Hare's Mission of the Comforter, pp. 521 — 527. E 50 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED* as the compellation of one person by another, always ' Sir/ or always ' Lord/ The word has a wider range than either of these two ; it is only the two together which cover an equal extent. * Sir/ in many cases would not be respectful enough ; 'Lord' in some would be too respectful (John xx. 15). Our Translators 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 conversation of our Lord with the Samaritan woman (John iv.), they should not have changed the ' Sir," which is perfectly in its place at ver. i ] , 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 ' Lord ' at ver. 15 ; and thus delicately indicates the growing reve- rence 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 variation was inevi- table ; or, if not inevitable, yet was certainly the more excel- lent way; but that they have done this where it was wholly gratuitous, and where sometimes the force, vigour, and pre- cision of the original has 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 how they defend what * Their " pedantic and uncouth preface" Symonds calls it. There would certainly be pedantry in any one now writing with such richness and fulness of learned allusion, a pedantry from which our comparatively scanty stores of classical and ecclesiastical learning would effectually ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 51 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 every where), 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 travelling ; 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 savour more of curiosity than wisdom, and that rather it would breed scorn in the atheist, than bring profit to the godly reader. For is the kingdom of God become words oi 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 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," concluden. E 2 52 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. great philosopher, that he 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 insufficient 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 understand- ing 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, doctrinal 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, 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 resource. 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. ii), and of course is unaware that in other passages where he meets ^ reconciling,' and ' recon- ciliation,' (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 doctrince, one regrets, above all, variation and uncertainty in rendering. ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 53 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 argument, 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. AoyiZofxai occurs eleven times in this chapter. 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 theo- logical. But our Translators have no fixed rule of rendering it. Twice they render it ' count,' (ver. 3, 5 ;) six times * impute,' (ver. 6, 8, j i, 22, 23, 24;) and three times ' reckon,' (ver. 4, 9, 10 ;) while at Gal. iii. 6, they in- troduce a fourth rendering, ' account.' Let the student read this chapter, employing everywhere ' reckon,' or, which would be better, everywhere ' 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 ob- scured, but still the change is uncalled for and injurious. Take, for instance, Rev. iv. 4 : " And round about the throne (Opovov) were four-and-twenty seats" (Opovoi). 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 encroaching on the dignity of the Creator, and it is clear that he was not, — on the con- trary, he has, in the most marked manner, brought the throne of God and the thrones of the elders together, — cer- tainly the Translators 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 54 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. New Testament, each in its twelve heads; but how much is lost by turning their ^ thrones' into 'seats ;' for example, the connexion 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 (TvvOpovoi with Him (Rev. iii. 21), this little change ob- scuring the truth that they are here set before us as o-u/x- ftacnX^vovrag (t Cor. iv. 8 ; 2 Tim. ii. 12), as kings reign- ing with Him. This truth is saved, indeed, by the mention of the golden crowns on their heads, but is im- plied 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 Apocalypse, 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 pos- sible, 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 Yersiou. Of those who en- countered 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 KarayycXcvc ; and he, remembering and taking up this word, retorts it upon them : " Whom, there- ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 55 fore, ye ignorantly worship, Him set I forth (icarayycXXw) unto you " (ver . 23). He has their charge present in his mind, and this is his answer 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 ^ preacher' and ' preach,' after theYulgate ' annuntiator' and * annuntio,' has been careful to retain and indicate the connexion. 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 devotions, I found an altar with this inscription. To the Unknown God (ayvworw Qetf). Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly (dyvoovvreg) worship. Him declare I unto you." But if anything is clear, it is that St. Paul in dyvoovvTeg intends to take up the preceding ayvujartt)', the chime of the words, and also, probably, the fact of their etymological connexion, leading him to this. He has spoken of their altar to an " Unhnovjn God," and he proceeds, " whom, therefore, ye worship unknowing, 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 uttermost, intended. In other passages also the point of a sentence lies in the recurrence and repetition of the same word, which yet they have failed to repeat ; as in these which follow : 1 Cor. iii. 17. — " If any man defile (({iOeipu) the temple of God, him shall God destroy ((pSepu)/' It is the fearful law of retaliation which is here proclaimed. 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. 56 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. ' 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 Translators 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 kokovq kqkwq of the origiual ought, in some way or other, to have been preserved ; as in this way it might very sufficiently be : " He will TTiiserably destroy those miserable men/' — Neither would it have been hard at 2 Thess. i. 6, to retain the play upon Avords, and to have rendered rolg OXlJ^ovcflv vfiag OXl^piv^ " affliction to them that afflict you," instead of " tribula- tion to them that trouble you,"" there being no connexion in English between the words 'tribulation' and 'trouble,' though something of a likeness in sound : while yet the very purpose 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, awiKkHa^v is translated, ^iiath conchided,' (jvyKXuofi^voL in the next verse, which takes it up, should not be rendered ' shut up.' The Vulgate has well, ' conclusit' and ' conclusi.' Let the reader substitute ' hath shut up' for ' 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 (tTriOviuiav) except the law had said. Thou shalt not lust {ovk liridvfxnauq) ;" or Phil, ii. 13 : " It is God which worketh (6 Iv^pytov) in you both to will and to work {to Iv^pyetv) ;" and the passages will ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTEODUCED. 57 come out with a strength and clearness which they have not now. So, too, if at a, Thess. ii. 6, to Karix^v is rendered "what vjithholdeth/' 6 fcartx^v in the verse following should not be "he who letteth." While, undoubtedly, there is significance in the impersonal to Karexov exchanged for the personal 6 Karlxwv, 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 connexion between XetTro/xcvot and XdireTui at Jam. i. 4, 5, reproduced in our Version. ' Lacking' and ' lack' which our previous versions had, would 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 irapaKXnGig : but there is a slight obscuration of the connexion between the 'comfort' and the Author of the 'comfort' in our Version, which, on the second occasion, has for ' comfort' needlessly substituted ' consolation.' How many readers have read in the English the third chapter of St. John, and missed the remarkable connexion between our Lord's words at ver. Ii, and the Baptist's taking up of those words at ver. 32 ; and this because fiapTvpia is translated ' witness' on the former occasion, and 'testimony' on the latter. — Why, again, we may ask, should vj3pig koI Z^np-ia be " hurt and damage" at Acts xxvii. 10; and "harm and loss," at their recurrence, ver. ;a I ? Both renderings 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 58 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. readier hearing now, of that neglected warning 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 forth of the Word of God. Thus, in the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt. xx. i,) oiKo^Eo-TroVrjC is ' householder,' ver. I, 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 conversation, occur in the original, the identity should have been expressed by the use of exactly the same words in the Enghsh. This continually is not the case. Thus, Matt. xxvi. 41, and Mark xiv. 38, exactly correspond 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 willing, 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 ought to be reproduced in the ^ Scholefield {Hints, p. 8) further objects to this last rendering as having " a qiiaintness in it not calculated to recommend it." But it had nothing of the kind at the time our Translation was made. Compare Spenser, Fairy Queen, iv. 5, 34 : "There entering in, thej found the goodman self Full busily upon his work ybent." ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 59 Yersion. 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. 5; 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 60-^17 evw^iag, occurring twice in the New Testament, has so fixed, and I may say, so technical a sig- nificance, 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 savour'' (Eph. v. 2), on the other, " an odour of a sweet smeir' (Phil. iv. 18), Sometimes interesting and important relations between different parts of Scripture would come out more strongly, if what is precisely similar in the original had reappeared as precisely similar in the translation. The Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians profess to have been sent from Rome to the East by the same messenger (cf. Eph. vi. 2,1, 22; Col. iv. 7, 8); they were ^vritten there- fore, we may confidently conclude, about the same time. When we come to examine their internal structure, this exactly 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 remarkable 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 evidence for the truth of those statements which these Epistles make about them- selves. This internal evidence doubtless exists even now for the English reader; but it would press itself on his attention much more strongly, if the exact resemblances in the originals had been represented by exact resemblances in the copies. This oftentimes has not been the case. Striking coincidences in language between one Epistle and 60 ON SOME UNNECESSARY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. the other, which exist in the Greek, do not exist in the EngHsh. For example, evipyeia is 'working,' Eph.i. 19; it is 'operation,' Col. ii. 12 ; Tairuvoippoavvr] is 'lowliness', Eph. iv. 2; "humbleness of mind," Col. iii. 12; (Tu/x/3f/3a^o/x£vov is * compacted,' Eph. iv. 16; " knit together," Col. ii. j 9, 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 short-comings 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, however, sufficiently illustrate the matter in hand. 'A0£rfw, 'to reject' (Mark vi. 26); 'to despise' (Luke X. 16); 'to bring to nothing' (i Cor. i. ig)) 'to frustrate' (Gal. ii. 21); 'to disannul' (Gal. iii. 15); 'to cast off' (i Tim. V. 12). 'AvaoToroo), ' to turn upside down' (Acts xvii. 6) ; 'to make an uproar' (Acts xxi. 38); 'to trouble' (Gal. v. 12). ^ kiroKakv^LQ, * revelation' (Rom. ii. 5) ; ' manifestation' (Rom. viii. 19); 'coming' (i Cor. i. 7); 'appearing' (iPet. i. 7). AeXeaJw, 'to entice' (Jam. i. 14); 'to beguile' (2 Pet. ii. 14); 'to allure' (2 Pet. ii. t8). Zocpog, 'darkness' (2 Pet. ii. 4); 'mist' (2 Pet. ii. ij); * blackness' (Jude 13). * Duties of tlie Parish Priest, p. 71. The whole section (pp. 47 — 76) is eminently instructive. ON SOME UNNECESSAEY DISTINCTIONS INTRODUCED. 61 Karapyeo), Ho cumber* (Luke xiii. 7); 'to make without 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* (i Cor. xiii. Jo); 'to put away* (i Cor. xiii. 11); 'to put down* (r Cor. xv. 24) ; ' to abolish* (2 Cor. iii. 13). Add to these, Karapyiofjiaij 'to come to nought* (i Cor. ii. 6); 'to fail* (i Cor. xiii. 8); ' to vanish away* (ibid.) ; ' to become of none effect* (Gal. V. 4) ; ' to cease* (Gal. v. 11); and we have here seventeen different renderings of this word, occurring in all twenty- seven times in the New Testament. KarapTiZd), '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. i) ; 'to prepare* (Heb. x. 5) ; * to frame* (Heb. xi. 3) ; 'to make perfect* (Heb. xiii. 21). Kavxaojuai, 'to make boast* (Rom. ii. 17); 'to rejoice* (Rom. V. 2); ' to glory* (Rom. v. 3) ; ' to joy* (Rom. v. 11); 'to boast' (2 Cor. vii 14). Kpariu), ' 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.) UapaKoXia), 'to comfort* (Matt. ii. 18); 'to beseech* (Matt. viii. 5); 'to desire* (Matt, xviii. 32); 'to pray* (Matt, xxvi. ^;^) ; ' to entreat* (Luke xv, 28) ; 'to exhort* (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. CHAPTER V. ON SOME EEAL 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 translation, 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 subtle-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 express the distinction, oftentimes very significant, between avrjp and avOpwTTog ? — the honour which lies often in the first (Acts xiii. 16 ; xvii. 'ZO,), 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 own. In like manner the differences, oftentimes instructive, occasionally important, between hp6v and vaog, f5iog and $0)77, aXXog and erepog, viog and Kaivog, aXrjOrjQ and aXriOivog, (piXeoj and dyawaw, 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. ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. 63 To take an example of this, the obliteration of distinc- tions, 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^rjg, the under- world, the re- ceptacle of the departed, and ji^vva, the place of torment, quite disappears in our Version. They are both translated 'heir, otSrjc being so rendered ten times, and ykwa twelve ; the only attempt to give a^rtg a word of its own, being at i Cor. xv. 55, where it is translated '^rave." The confusion of which this is the occasion is serious ; though how it could have been avoided, or how it would be possible now to get rid of it, I do not in the least perceive. It would not be possible to render a^rjg, wherever it occurs, by ' grave," thus leaving ' helF as the rendering of yievva only ; for see Matt. xi. 1^3 ; xvi. 18, the two first places of its occurrence, where this plainly would not suit. On the other hand, the popular sense links the name of ' helF so closely with the place of torment, that it would not answer to keep ' heir for ^8rjc, and to look out for some other rendering of ykvva, to say nothing of the difficulty or impossibility of finding one ; for certainly ' gehenna," which 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 cannot in any sense be said to be an English word. It is much to be regretted that ' hades' has never been thoroughly natu- ralized 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 illustrates, it is evident that the forces and capacities of a language should be stretched to the uttermost, th« riches of its synonyms thoroughly searched out ; and not till this is done, not till 64 ON SOME EEAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. 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 disappearance, they have done all that lay in them to do. More assuredly might have been here accomplished than has by our Translators been attempted, as I will endeavour 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 Ortpiov and Zioov by the same word ' beast/ Both play important parts in the book ; both belong to its higher symbolism ; but to portions the most different. The Zioa or "living creatures,'' which stand before the throne, in which dwells the fulness of all creaturely life, as it gives praise and glory to God (iv. 6, 7, 8, 9 ; v. 6 ; vi. i ; and often) form part of the heavenly symbolism ; the Or^pm, the first beast and the second, which rise up, one from the bottomless pit (xi. 7), the other from the sea (xiii. i), of which the one makes war upon the two Witnesses, the other opens his mouth in blasphemies, these form part of the hellish symbolism. To confound these and those under a common designation, to call those 'beasts' and these * beasts,' would be an oversight, even granting the name to be suitable 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 Yulgate renders ^wa by ' animal ia' ('animantia' would have been still better), and only dr}piov by ' bestia.' If ^wa had always been rendered "living creatures," this would have had the additional ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. 65 advantage of setting these symbols of tlie Apocalypse, even for the English reader, in an unmistakeable connexion with Ezek. i. 5, 13, 14, and often ; where "living creature'" is the rendering in our English Version of HTT, as ZCjov is in the Septuagint. In like manner, in the parable of the Marriage of the King's Son (Matt. xxii. i — 14), the dovXoi who summon the bidden guests (ver. 3, 4), and the ^lclkovol 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 SovXol are men, the ambassadors of Christ, those that invite their fellow-men to the blessings of the kingdom of heaven ; but the diaKovoi 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 angels, in the parable of the Tares (Matt. xiii. 27, 30). In the Vulgate the distinction which we have lost, is preserved ; the ^ovXol are ' servi,' the ^LttKovoL ' ministri ;' and all our early translations in like manner rendered the words severally by 'servants' and ' ministers ;' the Eheims by ' servants' and ' waiters.' There is a very real distinction between aTnaria and aTreidua. It is often urged by our elder divines ; I remem- ber more than one passage in Jackson's works where it is so ; but it is not constantly observed by our Translators. 'Awiaria is, I believe, always and rightly rendered, ' un- belief,' while a-n-dOeia is in most cases rendered, and rightly, ' disobedience ;' but on two occasions (Heb. iv. 6, 1 1) it also is translated * unbelief.' In like manner, oTrt orfTv is properly F bb ON SOME REAL DISTINCTIONS EFFACED. ''to refuse belief," airuBuv "to refuse obedience;" but dTreiBaLv is often in our Translation allowed to run into the sense of clttlgtuv, as at John iii. 36 ; Acts xiv. 2 ; xix. 9 ; Rom. xi. 30 (the right translation in the margin) ; and yet, as I have said, the distinction is real ; airuBua or dis- obedience is the consequence of airidria or unbelief ; they are not identical with one another. Again, there was no possible reason why o-o^oc and ^joovtjuoc should not have been kept asunder, and the real distinction which exists between them in the original maintained also in our Version. We possess 'wise' for aoc^iOQ, and 'prudent' for when the Apostle had said ' that as the offence of IN OUR VERSION. 89 one was ujpon all men {dg Trdvrag dvOptoirovg) to condem- nation, so the righteousness of one was upon all men to justification ; for/ adds he^ ' as by the one man's {rov ivbg) disobedience the mxiny (pi woXXoi) were made sinners ; so by the obedience of the one (rov hog) the many (ol ttoXXol) 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 iravrtg, all, in the i8th. But bur Translators when they render it, ' onany were made sinners, many were made righteous," what do they do less than lead and draw their unwary readers into error V ^ 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 English 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. iL 14, where we make St. Paul to say, " For when the Gentiles, 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. Yet it is not TO. Wv7], but Wvri, 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 exaggeration in declaring that "the love of money is the root of all evil" (i Tim. vi. 10) ; and there have been attempts to mitigate the strength of the assertion, as that when he said A Sermon upon Pojpery. Works, vol. iii. p. 245; cf. p. 129. 90 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR "all evil/' he only meant "mt(c^ evil/' The help, how- ever, 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 affirm 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 inser- tion 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 admitted 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 accused " 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 proselyte, and therefore capable of understanding him, the monstrous self-contradicting absurdity, that for cherishing 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 ('Ej3|oaToc £^ 'Ej3/oatwv), 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 rather, " by the IN OUR VERSION. 91 weir' (eirl ry Trr^yy), in its immediate neighbourhood. On two other occasions, namely, Mark xiii. 29 ; John v. 2, they have rightly gone back from the more rigorous rendering of £7rt with a dative, to which they have here adhered : cf. Exod. ii. 15, LXX.1 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 alternative ; of ^L ovQ (not ^L a)v), it is the only rendering which can be admitted. The rendering which has been preferred, besides being faulty in grammar, disturbs the spiritual image which underlies the passage. The heart of man is here the earth ; man is the dresser ; 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 ^l ovg, instead of ^L ov, need not trouble us, nor remove us from this, the only right interpretation. The earlier Latin version had it rightly ; see Tertullian, De Pudic. c. 20 : " Terra enim quae .... peperit herbam aptam his, propter quos et colitur, &c. ;' but the Vulgate, " a quibus" anticipates our mistake, in which we only follow the English translations' preceding. Lukexxiii.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 Him- self the centre of the kingdom, and brings the kingdom with Him ? The passage will gain immensely when, leaving that strange and utterly unwarranted assumption that ilg, a preposition of motion, is convertible with h, a pre- position of rest ; and thus that ev ry (5acnXdq, which ^ Yet it ought to be said that Winer {Gramm. § 52, c.) is on the side of our Version as it stands. 92 ON SOME ERROKS OF GREEK GRAMMAR stands here, is the same as elg tyjv jSaaiXdav, we translate, " Lord, remember me when Thou comest in thy kingdom" that is, " with all thy glorious kingdom about Thee,'' as is so sublimely set forth. Rev. xix. 14; cf. Jude 14; 2 Thess. i. 7 ; Matt. XXV. 31 {Iv n) ^o^nj). It is the stranger that our Translators should have fallen into this error, seeing that they have translated Ip^o^^vov Iv rij ^aaikua avrov (Matt. xvi. 2,8) quite correctly ; " coming in his Icing dom." The Yulgate has " in regno tuo'' there, although it shares the error of our Translation, and has "in regnum tuum" here. The exegetical tact of Maldonatus overcomes on this, as on many other occasions, his respect for his 'authentic' Yulgate, and he comments thus : " Itaque non est sensus, Cum veneris ad regnandum, sed. Cum veneris jam regnans, cum veneris non ad acquirendum regnum, sed regno jam acquisito, quemadmodum venturus ad judicium est.'"' The same faulty rendering of Iv, and assumption that it may have the force of uq, occurs, 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" {cltto Trig cnrXoriiTog tyiq elg rov Xpiarov). Here again the injurious supposition that dg and Iv may be confounded, has been at work, and to serious loss in the brino^ins^ out of the mean ins: of the passage. The airXorrig here is the simple undivided affection, the singleness of heart, of the Bride, the Church, ug XpicjTov, toward Christ. It is not their "simplicity in Christ" or Christian simplicity, which the Apostle fears lest they may through addiction to worldly wisdom forfeit and let go ; but, still moving in the images of espousals and marri- ^ See Winer's Grramm. § 54, 4, where he enters at length into the question whether ets is ever used for iv, or iv for ets, in the New Testament. He denies both. IN OUR VERSION. 93 age, that they may not bring a simple undivided heart to Christ. If after a7r\6Tr\Tif\Q we should also read kol r^c ayvoTTiTOQ, which seems probable, it will then be clearer still what St. Paulas intention was. 2 Pet. i. 5 — 7. — " Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to tem- perance patience, and to patience godliness, &c." (linxopr]- yriaar^ Iv rrj tticttel vfiCjv rrjv ap^rriv, k.t. X.) Tyn dale 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 Godli- ness, b. 8. c. 3) has well expressed the objection to the present version : " Grotius would have iv to be redundant here ; so that his suffrage is for the English translation. But, for my own part, I think that iv is so far from being redundant that it is essential to the sentence, and interposed that we might understand a greater mystery than the mere adding of so many virtues one to another, which would be all that could be expressly signified if iv were left out. But the preposition here signifying causality, there is more than a mere enumeration 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 another.'^ See this same thought beautifully ca. "ed out in detail by Bengel, in loco. III. Our Translators do not always give the true force of tenses, moods, and voices. Oftentimes the present tense is used in the New Testa- ment, 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 considered 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 94 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR lightnings, and thunderings, and voices/' But it is mucti more than this ; not merely at that one moment when St. John beheld, but evermore out of his throne 'proceed (EKiropevov- Tai) these symbols of the presence and of the terrible 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 present 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 (5ap[5apoi, the 'natives,' 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 one already dead, and in this sense use a past tense ; he is one whom "Vengeance suffered not {ovk uaaEv) 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 16 11. These islanders, in their simple but most truthful moral instincts, did not contemplate 'Vengeance' or Aiky} 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. IN OUR VERSION. 95 Elsewhere there is confusion between the uses of the present and the perfect. There is such, for example, at Luke xviii. 12: "I give tithes of all that / possess." But oaa KTiofiai is not, " all that I possess," but, " all that I ac- quire" (" quae mihi acquire, quae mihi redeunt'') . The Yulgate, which has ' possideo,' shares, perhaps suggested, our error. In the perfect KiKTrijuai the word first obtains the force of " I possess," or, in other words, " I have ac- quired"^ The Pharisee would boast himself to be, so to say, another Jacob, such another as he who had said, "Of all that T?tou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto Thee" (Gen. xxviii. 22 ; cf. xiv. 20), a careful performer 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 ' possess,' and how much of this we lose. We must associate with this passage another, namely 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 Ausdauer 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, ex- changed this for the more accurate 'provide' (icr?)cr7j(70£), or, as it is in the margin ' 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 See Winer's Gramm. § 41, 4. 96 OX SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR 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 lueve choosing out (f^fXtyovro) the chief rooms" — the sacred historian j)lacing the Lord's utterance 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, " luere going up" {aviPaivov) . Again, Mark ii. 18: " And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast" Read, " were fasting" (^o-av vvarEvovreg) namely, at that very time ; which gives a special vigour to their remonstrances ; they were keeping a fast while the Lord's disciples were cele- brating 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 allow this name to be given him ; but with the true force of the incomplete imperfect tense, "they iveve calling (cKaXofv) 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 break- ing," or " was at the point to break" {^leppy^ywro). 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 ^ See Jelf's Kuhner's Grammar,^ 398, 2. IN OUR VERSION. 97 aorist, are John iii. 22; 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 aweaTaXrjv is translated as though it were aTrearaXfjiai, " 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 presence 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 moment in the Apostle's life, to John xxi. 18, 19, which would at once come out, if i^riXcocri fxoi had been rendered, " shewed me." Doubtless there are passages which would make difficult the universal application of the rule that perfects should be translated as perfects, and aorists as aorists ; thus Luke xiv. 18, 19, where one might hesitate in rendering iiyopaaa ' I bought,' instead of * I have bought/ and some at least in the long line of aorists, sSo^ao-a, erfXetwaa, EifiavEpuxra, cXajSov (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 dis- tinction.^ Again, the force of the aorist is missed, though in another way, at Mark xvi. 2, where avardXavTog rov rjXiov is trans- lated, " 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. I ; Mark xvi. 2) modify the translation here ? ^ See Winer, Gramm. § 41, 5. H 98 ON SOME EREORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR 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 Gali- leans, because they suffered such things V Rather, "because they have suffered (TrtirovOamv) such things." Our Lord contemplates the memorable catastrophe 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 iKTiaOri 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 iKTicrOr} for the perfect eKridrai. And why ? Because he is no longer looking at the one historic act of creation, but at the permanent results 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 ;'' 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 1 The fact that we almost all learn our grammar from the Latin, and that in the Latin the perfect indicative does its own duty and that of the aorist as well, renders us very inohservant of inaccuracies in this particular hind, till we have been specially trained to observe them. 2 What these conditions are, see Winer's Gramm. § 41, 5. m OUR VERSION. 99 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. i6), read, "because He did (eiroUi) these things on the sabbath." And, again, in the same chapter read, " for Jesus conveyed Himself away" (e^ivevcrev) ; that is, so soon as this discussion 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 Yersions of the English Hexapla, St. Paul ought to have written (paivere^ and not (paiveaOe, as he has written, ^aivuv, indeed, is to shine (John i. 5 ; 2 Pet. i. 19 ; Rev. i. 16) ; but (paivsaOai to appear (Matt, xxiiii. 27 ; i Pet. iv. 18 ; Jam. iv. 14). It is worthy of note, that while the Vul- gate, 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 quibus 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" (Travrag rjuxag (pavepwOrivai Set), "exhibited as what we indeed are, displayed in our true colours, 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 100 ON SOME ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR influence on our Translators. Here it might have done so with benefit ; for commenting on these words (in Cor. HoTYh. lo) he says: oi> yojo irapaarrivaL r]jiaQ cnrXuyg ^ei, aXXa Kal (j>avepu)Orivai, showing that he would not have been satisfied with what our Translators have here done. With one or two miscellaneous observations I will con- clude this chapter. It would be very impertinent to sup- pose that our Translators, who numbered in their company many of tbe first scholars of their time, were not perfectly at home in the use of Trag, and 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. 1%. — "Wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth."' But wavra ra reTpairoda cannot pos- sibly have the meaning ascribed to it here. Translate rather : " Wherein were all the four-footed beasts of the earth" — " omnia animalia," as the Vulgate rightly has it. Here probably, as Winer observes, they were tempted to forsake the more accurate rendering from an unwillingness to ascribe something which seemed to them like exag- geration to the sacred historian : how, they said to them- selves, 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 trans- lator 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 protection. It is remarkable how little careful our Translators are to note the difference between the verb of being and that IN OUR VEHSION. 101 of becoming ; between uixl and yiyova. It would not be easy to find the passage in the New Testament where these are confounded, but they confound them frequently, and often to our loss. Thus, at Heb. v. II, the Apostle com- plains of the difiBculty of unfolding 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'' (cttei vu)6poi yeyovars ratg aKoaig). 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 spiritual apprehension which once they had (see Chrysostom). The Vulgate has it rightly : " Quoniam imbecilles 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 summer. 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 careless 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 trans- lations, they rendered the words, /llyitl ovrog 1(ttiv 6 vloc AajStS, with perfect accuracy : " Is this the Son of David V fully understanding that, according to the different idioms of the Greek and English, the negative particle of the original was not to re-appear in the English ; cf Acts vii. 42 ; John viiL 22. I am unable to say when the reading, which appears in all our modem Bibles, " Is not this the Son of 102 ON ERRORS OF GREEK GRAMMAR IN OUR VERSION. 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 Translators should yet have fallen into it in the exactly similar phrase at John iv. 29, ju?jrt ovtoq lariv 6 XpicTTog ; where they do render, " Is not this the Christ V 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 negative, but an affirma- tive answer. CHAPTER VIIL ON SOME QUESTIONABLE RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 'T^HERE 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 passages where, to me at least, it seems there is a greater probability, in some a far greater, in favour of some other translation rather than of that which they have admitted. Matt. vi. 37 (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 ren- dering of TiXiKia not by ' stature,' but by " length of life ;" and this his suggestion has since found acceptance with a large number of interpreters; with Hammond, Wolf, Olshausen, Meyer, and others. While the present trans- lation 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 demanded, "Which of you with all your carking and 104 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE caring can add an inch or a hair's breadth to his stature ?" j3. 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 there- fore most appropriate, when compared to his length of life, that life being contemplated as a course, or dpo/uLOQ, 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 cannot add a cubit, no, not a hand's breadth, more than God has apportioned to it. Luke ii. 49. — " Wist ye not that I must be about my Fathers business V But Iv Tolg rov Ylarpog will as well mean, " in my Father's house :" and if the words will mean this as well, they will surely mean it better. 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 sorrow- ing " to which He answers, " How is it tjiat ye sought Me ?" — that is, in any other place ? " Wist ye not that I must be in Tny Fathers 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 hare what was put therein." I cannot but think that ii RENDERINGS OF WORDS. 105 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 appear- ance of a tautology to say that he " had the bag, and hare 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 ^aaraZuv 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 the use of it here. We note that already in Augustine's time the question had arisen which was the right way to deal with the words; for, commenting on the 'portabat' which he found in his Italic, as it has kept its place in the Vulgate, he asks, " Portabat an exportabat ? Sed ministerio portabat, furto exportabat.'' Here he might seem to leave his own view of the passage undecided ; not so however at Ep. 108. 3: "Ipsi [Apostoli] de illo scripserunt quod fur erat, et omnia quse mittebantur de dominicis loculis aufe- rebat" 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 favour of that version which I observe that the " Five Clergymen" have also adopted. Rom. i. 26, 27. — I speak with hesitation, yet inchne strongly to think that in this awful passage where St. Paul dares to touch on two of the worst enormities of 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 106 ON SOME QUESTIONABLE should wish to see substituted ' males' and ' females \ apaeveg and OrtX^ai are throughout 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 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 ex- plicitness 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 Trans- lators 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 Yulgate, when it rendered OpiafijBsvwv v/^ag, " 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. Opia/j.- jSfvttv occurs but on one other occasion in the New Testa- ment (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 Rotyi. iv. : (5aaLv^adai plerumque est in re extra mentem ; quamvis nemo opinatur.'' Apply this distinction to the passage before us; keep in mind that Sojcetv, and not (paiveaOai, is the word used, and all is plain : "If any man among you think hmiself religious ("se putat religiosum esse,'' Vulgate), and bridleth not his tongue, &c." It is his own subjective estimate of his spiritual condition which the word implies, an estimate which the following words declare to be entirely erroneous. — Let me observe here that the same rendering of ^ofcav, Gal. ii. 6. 9, gives a colour 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 he pillars";) whereas he does express not what they seemed or appeared, but what they by others were, and were rightly, held to be. The Geneva is here, as so often, correct ; correct also in making ^oKovvreg in both these verses a present, and not an imperfect, participle. Jude 12. — " Trees ivhose f omit withereth/' But (jtOivo- TTW/otvoc has here a meaning ascribed to it, which it no- where possesses, as though it were = wXeaiKapTrogj the WHpLLY OR PARTIALLY MISTRANSLATED. 125 ^OivoKapirog of Pindar, Pyth. iv. 265; or the 'frugiperdus' of Pliny. The (pOtvoirwpov is the late autumn, the autumn far spent, which succeeds the oTrivpa, or the autumn con- templated as the time of the ripened fruits of the earth ; and which has its name irapa to fOlvedOai rrjv oirwpav^ from the waning away of the autumn and the autumn fruits, themselves also often called the oiriLpa ; and (jiOivo- ir(t)piv6g 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, there- fore, 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, ' sj^a^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 shew in late autumn, when foliage and fruit alike are gone. Bengel : "Arbor tali specie qualis est autumno extremo, sine foliis et pomis."' The (l)6ivoTrwpLva, aKapira, will then, in fact, mutually complete one another : " without leaves, without fruit.'' Tyndale, who throws together ^iv^pa j iii. 5 5> V •9 I Pet. i. 17 55 iv. 9 2 Pet. i. j — 7 „ i- 14 - „ iii. 12 JuDE 12 . Rev. iii. 2 . „ iv- 4 • „ iv. 5 V „ iv. 6 — 9 „ xvi. 2 . „ xvii. 14 „ xxi. 12 „ xxi. 19, 20 INDEX OF GREEK WORDS. "Ai^Tjs Paffe 63 OKepaios 79 a.iJL(podos . . . . . . 11^ direiOeta 6^ cLTnaTia 6^ anoKapaboKia , .... 77 "Aprefiis 3p avXrj 69 ^aardCa lOj ^dros ....... X16 ^ePrjXos 77 yeevva 6^ 8€i^ XoyiCopat 53 p,dyos . 49 perdvoia . . . . . . ^6 fjL€Tpi07radiai 83 6po(.o7ra6r]s HO TTOis Qeov 68 TrapdKXijTOs 49 Trdpeais 66 ^^Cfi 115 7roi.p,vT] 69 7r/3o/3i/3a^a) 1 1 5 TTpatTOTOKOS 12 1 TTcopcoa-Ls 74 )ioy 4S )ivos 45 cre^acrpa I^ (TK€Tracrp,a Ill (ro(N ^^ ST. AUGUSTINE '^v ■<<> FLA.