03 Chapter III The Translation of the Bible

Chapter III The Translation of the Bible WHEN the modern American Christian reads the sermons of John Wesley, he is reading the sermons of John Wesley; when he reads the religious essays of G. K. Chesterton, he is reading what Chesterton wrote. But when he reads the Bible, he is not reading the Bible but a translation of the Bible into English. He knows the Scriptures only at second hand; he does not know the Bible itself. Some scholar has come between him and the original; for the meaning of that original, he is at the mercy of a translator or a group of translators. He is held at this distance from the original by his ignorance of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek the languages in which the books of his Bible were written.

REASONS FOR TRANSLATING

O) MISSIONARY The rapid expansion of the Christian religion created situations in which the need of translations of the Scriptures was felt strongly. The twentieth century Christian can sympathize with his predecessors in their recognition of this need. The Christian religion has come a long distance in time and territory from the cities of Corinth, Philippi, and Rome cities in which Christian churches read the letters that Paul wrote to them in Greek. It has come still farther away from the background and language of the books of the Old Testament. This expansion of the cult to groups that did not know the language of its sacred writings demanded the production of translations. The work of supplying this need of the expanding cult began long before Christianity came to Birmingham and Chicago. Before the Christian church was two hundred years old, its missionaries had gone beyond the limits of the Greek-speaking centers of the Mediterranean world. This was partly due to a decrease in the use of Greek and an increase in the use of the old national languages during the period of the church’s expansion. Christian penetration into the back-country sections of Africa and Syria called forth translations of the gospels into Latin and Syriac. Ever since then translation has been a recognized missionary activity in the Christian church. The great Bible societies of the present day publish the Scriptures in literally hundreds of languages. b) LINGUISTIC CHANGE

Another element that called forth translations of the Bible was change in linguistic usage. The only certain thing that can be said about the future of any language that is being spoken is that it will change. It is equally certain that they have all changed and that all living languages are in constant process of change. The changes occur in form, in the mechanics of sentence structure, in the meaning of words, etc. The changes in the meanings of words are often so great that they make the tracing of etymologies a fascinating sport. “Sincere” comes from two Latin words meaning “without wax”; “treacle” (“molasses” in the United States) goes back to a Greek adjective meaning “pertaining to a wild beast.” There is little rhyme or reason to some of these changes, but the student may be able to understand why all words that mean “at once” today will mean “after a little while” tomorrow. In Shakespeare’s day the word “presently” meant “at once,” as the following example from Hamlet shows. As Polonius urges the king and queen out of the way with the words, “I’ll board him presently,” Hamlet enters and is at once addressed by Polonius (11,2). But when the modern husband who is asked by his wife to fix the curtain in the dining-room mutters, “I’ll fix it presently,” she knows and he knows that he has not promised to fix it “at once.”

Words that refer to odors inevitably come to mean bad odors, no matter how neutral their origin.

Dry den could speak of “clouds of savory stench” without being humorous, but the modern poet cannot. That Spenser whose Faerie Queene is so delightful to some scholars and so boring to the college undergraduate wrote of his bride in the Epithalamion (1. 148), “Loe, where she comes along with portly pace!” Yet she was not a large woman, nor did he mean to imply that she was stout. The word “portly” in. his day meant among other things dignified, stately; today it always implies stoutness of girth.

Similar changes in the meaning of English words make much of the King James Version of the Bible obscure today. The obscurity in the following passages is due to linguistic change in the English language, not to any obscurity in the original: “My eyes prevent the night watches” (Psalms 119:148); “... a valley with running water, which is neither; eared nor sown...” (Deuteronomy 21:4). “Prevent” no longer means “anticipate,” nor does “eared” today mean “plowed.” When the makers of the King James Version asked, “Who can find a virtuous woman?” (Proverbs 31:10), they were no more cynical about women than the Revisers, who said “A worthy woman who can find?” or the maker of the American Translation, who said, “If one can find a good wife, she is worth far more than corals.” The word “virtuous” when applied to a woman had a much broader meaning in the days of King James than it has today. These examples give an indication of the way in which change in language makes the sacred text obscure. Over longer periods of time, or in periods of sudden linguistic change, the need for a new translation is even more manifest. Thus Hebrew became a dead language for the Jews in the period following the Exile, although its prestige as the language of the Scriptures gave it a limited existence, especially in Palestine. But the majority of the people needed a translation, which was supplied in Palestine in oral translation into Aramaic, the contemporary language; and in the Dispersion by a translation into Greek. This translation was begun in Alexandria three centuries before the Christian Era. The Jews of that city were familiar with Greek as the spoken language of the metropolis; many of them were bilingual; some probably knew Greek alone. But the Hebrew Bible was unintelligible to the vast majority of them; they needed a new translation. The translations into Anglo-Saxon are of no use to the English speaking Christian today for the same reason; they are written in a dead language. The changes in the English language especially the changes that occurred from 1525 to 1900 have been influential in creating new translations: the revised versions and the modern-speech translations of this century. A student of translations has observed that the language of a translation ages more rapidly than does the language of works that are native to the tongue. What in an original composition is an ornament (the quaintness of language now become archaic, etc.) is a defect in a translation whose primary function is to convey meaning. Hence no translation of any classic is ever final, and periodic translation is the intelligent ideal.

C) COMPETITION AND STRESS

New translations of the Bible spring not only from the missionary needs of the church and the aging of language but also from the confusion and stress caused by the presence of rival translations, or by the presence of translations that clash with contemporary faith. One of the important elements in the situation that produced the Latin translation of Jerome was the presence of a large number of varying earlier Latin translations. Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus (Jerome to us) may have exaggerated slightly when he insisted that there were as many different Latin translations of the Bible as there were Latin manuscripts of the Bible, for it must be remembered that he was the champion of yet another translation. Yet the support given the undertaking by the pope shows that official Christianity regarded these contradictory versions as a liability; the hierarchy was anxious to reduce variety in translation to uniformity. In the earliest decades of Christian history, Christians and Jews alike used the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek as the authoritative Bible. It was, in fact, from the Jews that the Christians received this version. The welcome they gave it was too warm to please the Jews; for the rivalry between the two cults was bitter, and the use of allegorical interpretation made it possible for the Christian Fathers to baptize the Septuagint itself. Its language was appealed to in support of Christian doctrine until the pious Jew in desperation demanded another, more accurate version. In Isaiah 7:14 the Septuagint prediction that a “virgin” would bear a son was hailed by the Christian as proof that Jesus was the Messiah; while the Jew cried for a translation that would more accurately represent the Hebrew word “maiden.” The second century saw several such translations prepared to meet this need; the most famous of these is the one attributed to a certain Aquila.- In the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States there was a strong and sometimes bitter debate between various Protestant denominations as to the mode of baptism which was scriptural. Some denominations permitted baptism by immersion, by sprinkling, or by pouring; others permitted baptism by immersion alone, claiming that this was the sole scriptural method. The intensity of feeling aroused can be seen in the following title: Immersionists against the Bible, or the Babel Builders Confounded, in an Exposition of the Origin, Design, Tactics and Progress of the New Version Movement of Campbellites and Other Baptists. This work was published by N. H. Lee at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1856.

Through the verbiage of this polemical title one can clearly see that the authority of the Scriptures was important to this dispute, and that it was inevitable that sooner or later a version of the New Testament would appear which would translate the Greek word “baptize” by “immerse.” A revision of the King James Version which changed the translation at this point as well as elsewhere was undertaken by the American Bible Union in 1860; the Gospels appeared in 1862, the entire New Testament in 1865. In these editions (as also in the second edition, 1866), not only is the verb baptizo translated “immerse” but John the Baptizer appears as “John the Immerser” in Matthew 3:1, etc. In later editions the verb alone is translated with “immerse.” This is the case in the “edition with immerse,” a revision of the Bible Union Version, published by the American Baptist Publication Society at Philadelphia in 1885.

It may be that the intensity of the debate weakened in the rank and file of the believers with the passing of time, for at the same time and place the Baptist Society published an edition with “baptize” as the translation of the Greek baptizo. The two editions were otherwise identical; they are distinguished by a label on the title-page; one is marked “Edition with Immerse,” the other “ [Baptize].” In Elizabethan England the Protestants especially the more zealous reformers were able to read the Bible at home in one of several translations made into the English from Greek, Hebrew, and other sources. Preachers read these vernacular versions in the pulpit and quoted them copiously in their sermons. In the stress of that era of change, many of these sermons were attacks on Rome. It is not, therefore, strange that champions of the Roman faith found this use of the English versions trying. The popularity of these new translations especially the Geneva Bible among the masses of the people probably led some of the Roman Catholics to an unauthorized reading for themselves. Further stress was introduced into the situation by the recent decree of the Council of Trent (1546), which had established the Latin version of Jerome (the Vulgate) as the authoritative form of the Roman Catholic Bible. But none of the English translations in use then was translated from the Vulgate. Under the pressure of these “heretical” versions (as the translators say in their Preface), a translation of the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate was made at Reims, and later the Old Testament was translated at Douai. Thus missionary activity and natural change in language have been joined by cult needs in times of competition as causes of new translations of the Bible. THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR The production of a new translation always leads the translator into difficulties and problems. His first task and not his easiest one is to define the work he is about to do. Is he going to make a new translation from the best editions of the Bible in the original languages? Or is he to be content with a revision, a polishing, of an earlier translation? The latter ideal has controlled most English translations of the Scriptures, and in most of them the rule has been not to make as many improvements as possible but rather to make only those improvements which could not be avoided. But, even if the natural conservatism of all religions is overcome and a new translation is decided on, the most difficult problems still await solution.

O) DEFINITION OF THE TASK The most baffling problem of all is: What is translation? How does it differ from paraphrase? Is it, in any sense, interpretation? What is an accurate translation? Is a translation literal when it translates word by word, or phrase by phrase, or sentence by sentence? Must poetry be translated into poetry? Is it possible to translate the “spirit” or “feeling” of a work without translating its words? How many words.in one language are the exact equivalent of similar words in another? What should the translator do with proper nouns that have lost significance? What should be done with ancient weights and measures? Can a translation be twice as long as the original and still be a translation?

It is generally agreed that a translation must be faithful to the original; agreement vanishes when this fidelity is defined. The sanest ideal is summed up in the adage: “As literal as possible, as free as is necessary.” Some freedom is a necessity for idiomatic and intelligible translation; the translation of units smaller than sentences or independent clauses seldom permits the attainment of clarity or idiomatic treatment. But the freedom of the translator is intolerable when it produces “libertine” translations. The twenty-fourth book of the Iliad ends with the line, “Such was the burial of Hector, master of horses.” Alexander Pope, master of the heroic couplet in English, translated this as follows:

Such honors Ilion to her hero paid And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade. Who said anything about Ilion? What has become of the horses? And how does Pope know that Hector’s shade slept peacefully? This is something more than translation. The doubling of the quantity in the process of translation is here seen for the dangerous thing it is. Fidelity in translation includes fidelity to the amount of the original. The introduction of proper names not in the text is still another misleading feature of too-free translation. Fortunately, there is almost no translation of this kind in the English versions of the Bible. The innate conservatism of the religious has kept the translator closer to the text. The outstanding fault of translations of the Bible is that they are too close to the original too literal. The ideal of absolute fidelity may lead the translator as far astray as too much love of freedom. In Hebrew the pronoun “I” has a longer and a shorter form, and the verb is frequently omitted in such simple affirmations as “I (am)’ the king.” The Septuagint translator of some of the Former Prophets was led by these facts and his desire for fidelity to translate these two forms of the pronoun consistently in two ways. Where the longer form occurred, he translated it as “I am”; while he regularly translated the shorter form with “I.” This causes no difficulty in sentences like “I am thy God” but is disastrous in “I am said unto him “ Every student of this version has been exasperated at some time or other by the translator’s refusal to perform his function: in the substitution of transliteration for translation. Transliteration may be faithful, but it does not glow with meaning. ’ The English versions of the Bible have produced literalisms as unintelligible as any in the Septuagint. The obscurity that results from an unintelligent fidelity to each word of the original can be seen in the American Revised Version of Ephesians 1:3-14, where participial phrases alternate with relative clauses through a sentence of two hundred and sixty-eight words that conveys the minimum of meaning. But the champion of champions in literalness is the Douai version (also called the Reims). The translators’ conception of their task is expressed in the following lines from their Preface:

We presume not to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them word for word, and point for point, for fear of y missing or restraining the sense of the Holy Ghost to our fancy.

Such a principle applied to the Latin Vulgate produced incredible English. This translation is much clearer in the Gospels than it is in the rest of the New Testament; this is due, at least in part, to the greater simplicity of the original in the gospel section. The following passages from the Epistles give some idea of the degree of unintelligibility that can be attained by literal translation. Romans 1:28 f, “God delivered them up into a reprobate sense: to do those things that are not convenient: replenished with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness,... detractours, abominable to God, contumelious.” Romans 2:11, “... for there is no acception of persons with God.” Romans 2:14-16, “For when the Gentiles which have not the Law, naturally do those things which are of the Law: the same not having the Law, themselves are a law to themselves: who shew the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience giving testimony to them and among themselves mutually their thoughts accusing, or also defending, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men “ Romans 5:14, “... that sinned not after the similitude of the prevarication of Adam “ Titus 3:1, “Be subject to Princes and Potestates to obey at a word “ Philemon 1:6, “... that the communication of thy faith may be made evident in the agnition of all good that is in you in Christ Jesus. For I have had great joy and consolation in thy charitie, because the bowels of the sainctes have rested by thee, brother. For the which thing having great confidence in Christ Jesus to command thee that which pertaineth to the purpose, for charitie rather I beseech, whereas thou art such an one as Paul being old and now prisoner also of Jesus Christ.” This cannot be read without a Latin lexicon. Even with the help of such a lexicon, one cannot easily grasp its meaning. The excessive fidelity of the translators has betrayed the reader. This extreme literalness as an ideal sometimes holds the translators to a text which makes no sense whatever, when the use of conjectural emendation or a little more freedom in translation would solve the difficulties. Note the increase in intelligibility in the following verse (Psalms 45:5) as it moves from translation to translation. The Bishops’ Bible: “Thyne arrowes are sharp: a people the king’s enemies shall submit in heart themselves unto thee.” The King James Bible: “Thine arrowes are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies; whereby the people fall under thee.” The Douai Bible: “Thy sharp arrowes, the peoples underneath thee shall fal into the hartes of the king’s enemies.” The American Revised: “Thine arrows are sharp; the peoples fall under thee; they are in the heart of the king’s enemies.” The American Translation: “May your sharp arrows be in the midst of the king’s foes! May peoples fall under you!” A passage famous for its obscurity is Ecclesiastes 12:11. The King James Version loses none of the obscurity in its rendering: “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.” The dangers implicit in obscure or ambiguous translation are very real; naturally, they are greater for the pastor or layman who must rely on his English version alone for his understanding of the Scriptures. There is no more dangerous passage in the so-called “standard versions” (King James, English Revised, and American Revised) than Matthew 26:27. These versions agree in rendering this verse, “And he [Jesus] took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them saying, Drink ye all of it “ A recent inspirational article in a denominational weekly expounds the words “Drink ye all of it’ “ through six columns. The author takes these words as a command to the disciples to drink all of the wine in the cup. “If they drank only part of the wine they were only partially consecrated, while if they drank all of the wine they were completely consecrated. So Jesus said, ’Drink ye all of it!’ “ But the “ye all” of these versions is the ancestor of our modern southern idiom “you all.” It means “all of you”; there is no ambiguity whatever in the Greek, which says plainly, “all of you drink of it.” b) SELECTION OF A TEXT The translator cannot escape the problems of textual criticism outlined in the preceding chapter.

He must select a text to translate. The best translation in the world best in fidelity and in idiomatic result will not be satisfactory if it translates a text repudiated as inaccurate by the world of scholarship. Water from a tainted reservoir may be delivered through the most modern of distribution systems and yet not meet the approval of the board of health. The inaccuracy of the Greek and Hebrew texts behind the King James Version makes it impossible for the modern student to use that version in any serious study of the Bible. The fundamental cause of the making of the Revised Version was the increase in the knowledge of the manuscript tradition of both Testaments, but especially of the New Testament. The discovery, publication, and study of one ancient manuscript was followed by that of another throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Tischendorf’s discovery of the famous Codex Sinaiticus brought the attention of the pious public to the progress that was being made in improving the accuracy of the Greek New Testament. No Greek manuscript behind the King James Version was older than the eleventh century; the Greek text upon which the Revisers worked rested on more manuscripts earlier than the eleventh century than the total number employed in the making of the King James Version. Admirers of Elizabethan prose will still cherish the King James Version for its English style; the unintelligent will still regard it as the Bible by which all other versions are to be evaluated; but the student who wants to know what the Bible actually says will turn to more modern and accurate translations.

Most of the translations made in the last fifty years rest on texts of comparable quality. In the New Testament the Greek texts translated are all fairly close to the edition of Westcott and Hort. This is true of the English Revised Version, the American Revised Version, the Twentieth Century New Testament, Weymouth’s New Testament in Modern Speech, Goodspeed’s American Translation, and others. There are some striking exceptions. A West Coast group in 1919-24 produced a translation made from the three oldest manuscripts (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus), translating their agreements as the “Concordant Version.” We have discussed the futility of such a method of selecting a text in the preceding chapter; its futility is further indicated by the discovery of still older manuscripts of the New Testament, notably the Chester Beatty papyri. *** Another exception is the translation of the New Testament made by Professor Moffatt, who translated the Greek text of von Soden. This Greek text is somewhat closer to the old King James type than any other of recent vintage; von Soden’s faulty method has led gradually to the repudiation of his Greek text by the world of scholarship, and it is not used for scholarly purposes today. “*- A third exception is the Westminster Version. This was begun by Roman Catholic scholars in 1928 as “A New Translation from the Greek and Hebrew Texts.” It makes no statement as to what text is used as the basis of the translation, but it differs from Westcott and Hort, e.g, in the inclusion of Matthew 16:2-3, of the words “Son of God” in Mark 1:1, of the long ending of Mark, and of the interpolations at the end of Luke. In the Old Testament the variation between the several modern translations is much higher than is the case in the New Testament. This is due to two factors, both growing out of the large number of obscure passages in the extant Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Translators vary in the positions they take (i) as to the number of conjectural emendations which should be accepted and translated and (a) as to the extent to which the evidence of the ancient versions should be used to correct and illuminate the Hebrew text. The American Revised Version, for example, is quite close, almost slavishly close, to the Hebrew text. Theological students have discovered this and use this version as a “help” in translation courses in Hebrew. Several of the modern-speech translations have used the ancient versions, notably the Septuagint, in a number of passages where the Hebrew is meaningless or obviously corrupt. For example, the first edition of the American Translation of the Old Testament printed at the end of the work a list of passages in which the reading of the Septuagint had been preferred to that of the Hebrew. c) DIFFICULTIES IN BIBLE TRANSLATION The scholar who works on the translation of the Bible has to overcome some difficulties which are not faced by any and all translators. Thus, in the Old Testament, he faces the special difficulty of the vowelless character of the Hebrew original. This made mistakes in translation almost inevitable. Suppose, Gentle Reader, that you were faced with the task of translating vowelless English into some other language. What, for example, would you make of the following?

PRSDNTGRFLDSLDNSPPRSSFRRPTDNFRTN This might be “President Garfield sold newspaper issue for reputed new fortune,” or “pursued, N. T. Ogriflud sailed, newspapers say, for Europe today on Fauretania.”

It is no wonder that translators of the Old Testament have made mistakes in translation. Some of these were made as far back as the first translation of the Old Testament. In the Hebrew of Genesis 47:13 we read, “Jacob leaned back on the head of his bed.” In the Septuagint translation of this into Greek, we read, “Jacob bowed upon the head of his staff.” The Hebrew for “the bed” as written without vowels is Hmmtth; “the staff” is identical, the difference appearing entirely in the vowels. “The bed” is Hammittah; “the staff” is Hammatteh. The possibilities of confusion in the translating of the vowelless text are obvious. Interestingly enough, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes the passage with the word “staff,” for he used the Septuagint version and not the Hebrew. Thus the modern Bible contains both readings of the word: “bed” in Genesis 47:31 and “staff” in Heb. ii:ai.

Another example of the difficulty caused by the vowelless character of the Hebrew text is found in Jeremiah 2:23. Our Hebrew text contains a phrase which is now commonly read as “ [thou art] a swift dromedary traversing her ways.” But the Septuagint translators, working on the same text, supplied a different set of vowels, with the result that their version read, “Her voice cried traversing her ways.”

Since the translator of the Bible is translating an ancient document, he faces all the problems raised by the translation of a document from a different culture. Weights and measures, coins, measures of time, the names of days and months, official titles, and dozens of technical terms face the translator with the challenge, “Will you translate us or transliterate?”...

Transliteration is the easier and (from one point of view) the more accurate method; but all will agree that it is not the more luminous solution of the task. The reader who learns that the water jars at Cana held two or three metretes apiece has not learned much until someone tells him what a metretes is. If there is to be any translation of measures, it should certainly be into contemporaneous measures^ The average American gains little information from the statement of the American Revised Version that the waterpots held two or three “firkins” apiece. Since a large part of the significance of the miracle is the lavish fashion in which the wine was bestowed by Jesus, it is important that the reader should know that each jar held twenty to thirty gallons. In other of these areas it is harder to set up a rule. Are the modern equivalents really equivalent? Does the word “church” adequately represent the Pauline ekklesia? The translator’s mastery of English idiom should ideally be equal to his knowledge of Hebrew or Greek idiom. That this is ever the case is doubtful, but it is not always realized that the deficiency exists as often in knowledge of English as of the original languages. The translator should see the English language as objectively as he sees the Greek or Hebrew; he should be able to estimate accurately the extent to which his English phrases will produce effects equivalent to the effects produced by the language of the original. For the ideal of fidelity in translation includes the preservation of those qualities of the original which determined its effect upon its first readers.

PROGRESS IN TRANSLATION

Although the translators of the Bible face such manifold problems, they have made significant progress. At times this progress has been made possible by the discovery of better texts to translate. We have already noted that it was increased knowledge of the manuscripts that led to the making of the English Revised Version. The great advantage which the Revised Versions English and American hold over the King James Version springs from the increased accuracy of the Hebrew and Greek texts which they translated. The repudiation of the Greek text of the New Testament which lies behind the King James Version has been absolute. In the study of the Greek New Testament in our denominational seminaries and graduate schools, it is nowhere in use today.

Again, the translators of the Bible have been helped from time to time by increased knowledge of the original languages of the Bible. The Renaissance made its contribution to the improvement of the English versions by turning the spotlight on Greek and Hebrew, by developing the study of ancient languages and manuscripts, and by sending scholars back past the Latin translations made in the medieval period to the original languages of ancient documents. By A.D. 1516, both the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Greek text of the New Testament had been printed. Translators now turned in increasing numbers to these languages and away from the Latin Vulgate. The ultimate gain in the accuracy of the text translated and the quality of the translation cannot be overemphasized.

Although the centuries that followed A.D. 1516 saw the Greek New Testament studied as well as translated, they often saw the students bewildered by the peculiarities of the Greek in which the New Testament was written. It was early noted that in vocabulary and usage it was a very different language from that in which the great writers of ancient Greece produced their masterpieces. The new and strange words bothered the translators; so, also, did the “unusual” constructions. A study of the sources of New Testament Greek printed as late as 1895 contains a somewhat padded list of five hundred and fifty “biblical” words words found only in the New Testament or in the Greek Old Testament. These once-only words, or New-Testament-only words, very naturally baffled the translators. For, while the highschool Sophomore believes that the way to find the meaning of a word is to look in a vocabulary or lexicon, the more advanced student knows that the maker of the lexicon has nothing reliable to put in until he has a reasonable number of occurrences of the word.

Lack of comparable material is equally embarrassing to the man who writes the grammar. If a certain preposition always meant “into” when used with a certain case in the Greek of the fifth century B.C, must it be translated that way in the New Testament in passages where that meaning seemed unsuitable? In the earlier Greek, one preposition meant “concerning” when used with the genitive case; a similar one meant “on behalf of.” Should each occurrence in the New Testament be translated in accordance with this usage? For users of the “proof-text” method of Bible study, the doctrine of the atonement hung on the answer. But the scholar can give a definite answer only on the basis of adequate contemporary parallels.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a German pastor, Adolf Deissmann, read a publication of some private papers written in Greek in the Roman period and dug up by archeologists working in Egypt. As he read, he was constantly reminded of the vocabulary and construction of the Greek Bible, both in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and also in the New Testament. With aroused curiosity and increased interest, he made a serious study of the language of these papyri (Egyptian papers) to see what light would be thrown upon the idiom of the Greek Bible. The result has revolutionized the linguistic study of both Greek Testaments, for he first convinced himself and then the world of scholarship that the “biblical” Greek was essentially the Greek in which these nonliterary documents were written. That Greek was a simple language, the conversational language of ordinary people. In it the farmer’s tax receipt was written; in it petitions were sent to Roman officials. Its vocabulary supplied the missing parallels to the long list of New Testament words, until the number now without parallel has been reduced to considerably less than fifty. Even to those words that were already known, increased clarity and significance have come from their appearance in these contemporary documents. The New Testament exhortation to be reconciled to God gains meaning for the student when he hears a dissolute youth away from home implore his mother in a letter, “Be reonciled to me!” The illumination cast by the study of these documents upon the problems of New Testament grammar has been as helpful as that shed on the meaning of words. The anomalies, the “exceptions” to classical rules, have become regular in our increased knowledge of the Greek of the New Testament period. Many a construction which bafHed the student in the days before Deissmann’s discovery now became normal and luminous. In view of all this it is not strange that grammars and lexicons of the Greek New Testament have been remade in a flood of new editions since 1900.

All this had tremendous significance for the translation of the New Testament and, indirectly, for that of the Old Testament too. For the first time scholars knew in what kind of language the original New Testament was written. Now it was possible to translate it into an English approximately equivalent in cultural level to the language of the original. Moreover, the translator now knew the meaning of the original much more clearly than his predecessors had done. The result has been a flood of modern speech translations, which render the New Testament in English of a nonliterary level analogous to that of the Greek original. The vast majority of these are new translations, not revisions of older translations. Their advance upon earlier translations was made possible by an increase in linguistic knowledge not by an increase in the accuracy of the Greek and Hebrew texts such as called forth the revised versions of 1881 and 1901. Their excellencies are greater clarity of language, more contemporary language, and a more accurate representation of the language of the original. To compare these translations at least in the New Testament with the stately flow of the Tudor translations, as though these more recent translators were striving to match that diction, is a serious error. They must be measured against the original. That many devout persons would today prefer that the New Testament should have been written in a literary Greek cannot alter the fact that it was not. Those whose primary demand upon a version is fidelity will welcome these attempts to take the English reader back into the very quality of the original language. This is not to argue that such translations as those of Goodspeed and Moffatt are the final word in English versions of the New Testament, or that Moffatt or the makers of the “American Translation” of the Old Testament have translated the Hebrew Scriptures for the last time. On the contrary, it is to be hoped that within fifty years all these translations will either be remade or vanish, so that the path leading to the making of contemporary translations for our children’s generation may be free from the obstacles raised by emotional attachments to these present versions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSLATION GENERAL KENNEDY, A. G. Current English. New York: Ginn, 1935.

MCKNIGHT, G. H. English Words and Their Background. New York: Appleton, 1923.

Either or both of these books will, help the student to become conscious of linguistic problems in English. Their bibliographies will lead to additional data.

POSTGATE, J. P. Translation and Translations: Theory and Practice. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1922..

Copiously illustrated, especially from the classics, this work presents a sane definition of translation.

GOODSPEED, E. J. The Making of the English New Testament.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925. A history of the making of English versions of the New Testament from 1525 to 1925.

(ed.). The Translators to the Reader: Preface to the King James Version of 1611 A.D. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. The King James translators here state their own opinion of the King James Version.

PRICE, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible (gth ed.). New York: Harper & Bros, 1934.

Especially chapters xix-xxvi. Good Bibliography.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. How We Got Our Bible. New York: James Pott & Co, 1912.

Especially chapters iv-viii. Brief survey of the English translations, somewhat out of date.

MILLIGAN, G. A. Here and There among the Papyri. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1922. A readable manual on the nature and content of the papyri in relation to New Testament studies.

TRANSLATIONS 1 The American Revised Version or American Standard Version. The title-page reads: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments Translated Out of the Original Tongues, Being the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611, Compared with the Most Ancient Authorities and Revised A.D. 1881-1885, Newly Edited by the American Revision Committee A.D. igoi: Standard Edition. New York: Thomas Nelson 82 Sons, 1901. This is closer to the Greek text of Westcott and Hort (and the other modern critical editions) than was the English revision of 1881. It is more modern and, consequently, clearer in diction than the English Revised Version. It is accepted in America as the best of the “standard” versions.

Yet it remains essentially a revision of the King James Version of 1611; it is not a new translation.

1 The more popular of the modern translations are listed here.

MOFFATT, JAMES. The Bible: A New Translation. New York, Harper & Bros. The New Testament was first translated in 1913 from the Greek text of von Soden (see p. 86); the Old Testament in 1925. In some areas Mr. Moffatt has edited as well as translated; e.g, in rearranging the contents of the Fourth Gospel to suit his theory of the original order.

SMITH, J. M. P, AND GOODSPEED, EDGAR J. (eds.). The Bible, An American Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The New Testament was translated from the Westcott and Hort text by Mr. Goodspeed in 1923; the Old Testament was translated by A. R. Gordon, T. J. Meek, J. M. Powis Smith, and Leroy Waterman (ed. by J. M. P. Smith) in 1927.

WEYMOUTH, R. F. The New Testament in Modern Speech (ed. and rev. by E. HAMPDEN COOK, M.A.). Boston: Pilgrim Press. This was first published in 1903, from a Greek text very similar to that of Westcott and Hort. The Twentieth Century New Testament: A Translation into Modern English Made from the Original Greek (Westcott and Hart’s Text} by a Company of About Twenty Scholars Representing the Various Sections of the Christian Church. New York, Revell.

First published in three parts: 1898-1901. A revised edition appeared in 1904.

FENTON, FERRAR. The Holy Bible in Modern English. London, Oxford University Press. In this translation the New Testament was completed in 1895; the Bible in 1900. No statement is given as to texts used other than that the translation was made from the original Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek. The Holy Scriptures according to the Massoretic Text: A New Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917. A scholarly and stimulating version of the Old Testament.

TRANSLATORS’ TOOLS

TEXTS For Greek and Hebrew texts see bibliography for chap. ii.

GRAMMARS 0) FOR THE BEGINNER

MOULTON, J. H. An Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek (4th ed.). London: Epworth Press (J. A. Sharp), 1926. With this is bound “A First Reader in New Testament Greek.” The best of the introductions.

MACHEN, J. G. New Testament Greek for Beginners. New York, Macmillan, 1923. A useful book, almost too rigorously limited to the elements.

HARPER, W. R. Elements of Hebrew by an Inductive Method (new rev. ed. by J. M. Powis SMITH). New York: Scribners, 1921.

. Introductory Hebrew Method and Manual (new rev. ed. by J. M. Powis SMITH). New York: Scribners, 1921.

DAVIDSON, A. B. An Introductory Hebrew Grammar (23d ed.; rev. by J. E. MCFADYEN). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1930. A good introduction, which does not use the inductive method. b) FOR THE SPECIALIST MOULTON, J. H, AND HOWARD, W. F. A Grammar of New Testament Greek. Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1908.

Only two volumes have appeared. The first is a general introduction which rambles over the field in the most stimulating fashion. The second discusses accidence and word formation. The third will deal with syntax.

Vol. I is the most valuable general discussion of New Testament Greek in print in English today.

BURTON, E. D. New Testament Moods and Tenses. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1898. A thorough and stimulating study but pre-Deissmann in methods and materials. Burton relied more heavily on classical patterns than he would today; his work was not revised after 1 898.

DEBRUNNER, A. Friedrich Blass’ Grammatik desneutestamentlichen Griechisch (6th ed.). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1931. The best of the formal grammars of the Greek New Testament.

RADERMACHER, LUDWIG. Neutestamentliche Grammatik: Das Griechisch desNeuen Testaments imZusammenhang mit der Folks sprache (2d ed.). Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1925. This is not a formal grammar but a most interesting discussion in essay form, which integrates New Testament usage in the popular language of its period.

MAYSER, E. Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemaerzeit mit Einschluss der gleichzeitigen Ostraka und der in Agypten verfassten Inschriften. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter deGruyter & Co, 1923-34. In two volumes; the second volume in three parts. An invaluable work for the student of biblical Greek in either Testament.

BAUER, HANS, AND LEANDER, PONTUS. Historische Grammatik der Hebraischen Sprache desAlten Testaments. Halle a.S., Niemeyer, 1922.

BERGSTRASSER, G. Hebrdische Grammatik mit Benutzung der von E. Kautzsch bearbeiteten 28. Auflage von Wilhelm Gesenius hebrdische Grammatik. I. Teil, Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1918; II. Teil, i. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926; II. Teil, 2. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929. This is the twenty-ninth edition of Gesenius; it is the best of the advanced grammars but, unfortunately, is not yet complete.

Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar as Edited and Enlarged by E. Kautzsch (trans, from 25th German ed. by REV. G. W. COLLINS, the translation revised and adjusted to the 26th ed. by A. E.

COWLEY). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898.

Quite old but yet the best advanced grammar in English.

MARTI, K. Kurzgefasste Grammatik der biblisck-aramaischen Sprache (3d ed.). Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1925.

LEXICONS

BROWN, F, DRIVER, S. R, AND BRIGGS, C. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament: Edited with Constant Reference to the Thesaurus of Gesenius, as Completed by E. Rodiger, and with Authorized Use of the Latest German Editions of Gesenius Handwb’rterbuch. Boston, New York, Chicago: Houghton Mifflin; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1906.

GESENIUS, W. Hebraisches und aramdisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament (i6th ed. by F. BUHL). Leipzig, F. C. W. Vogel, 1915.

KONIG, E. Hebraisches und aramaisches Worterbuch zum Alten Testament mit Einschaltung und Analyse aller schwer erkennbaren Formen Deutung der Eigennamen sowie der massoretischen Randbemerkungen und einen deutsch-hebraischen Wortregister.

Leipzig: Dieterich, 1931.

ABBOTT-SMITH, G. A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (id ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1923. Does not make full use of new material.

BAUER, WALTER. Griechisch-deutsches Worterbuch zu den Schriften desNeuen Testaments und der ubrigen urchristlichen Literatur (3d ed.). Berlin: Topelmann, 1936.

Best of New Testament lexicons.

SOUTER, A. A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916.

Fresh, clear definitions; no helps for locating forms.

MOULTON, J. H, AND MiLLiGAN, G. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other Non-literary Sources. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914-29. A most stimulating work, unsurpassed in its field.

PREISIGKE, F. Worterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden.

... Berlin, 1924-27.

LIDDELL, H. G, AND SCOTT, R. A Greek-English Lexicon: New Edition, Revised and Augmented by H. S. Jones and R. McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. This work is made more valuable to the New Testament student than former editions by inclusion of the nonliterary sources.

PAPYRUS STUDY MITTEIS, L, AND WILCKEN, U. Grundzuge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1912. The classic introduction to this area of study.

DEISSMANN, A. Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (trans, from 4th German ed. by L. R. M. STRACHAN).

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927. A dramatic and stimulating exposition of the significance of the new discoveries, valuable illustrations. Not as technical or inclusive in design as Mitteis and Wilcken.

WINTER, J. G. Life and Letters in the Papyri. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1933.

More inclusive than Deissmann, presents what has been learned from the papyri in all fields of knowledge. The bibliography in the footnotes is a valuable feature of the book for students.

GOODSPEED, E. J, AND COLWELL, E. C. A Greek Papyrus Reader with Vocabulary (ad printing). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936. Has eighty-one representative texts for class use.

CONCORDANCES MANDELKERN, S. Veteris Testamenti Concordantiae Hebraicae atque Chaldaicae. Berlin: F. Margolin, 1925.

HATCH, E, AND REDPATH, H. A. A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament Including the Apocryphal Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897.

MOULTON, W. F, AND GEDEN, A. S. A Concordance to the Greek Testament y according to the Texts of Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf and the English Revisers. New York: Scribners, 1897.

GOODSPEED, E. J. Index patristicussive clavis patrum apostolicorum operum. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907.

. Index apologeticussive clavis Justini martyris operum aliorymque apologetarum pristinorum. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912.