A HORRIFYING TRANSLATION.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3933, 6 August 1881, Page 3

A HORRIFYING TRANSLATION.

How is " Pop°ry " going to be reproved foowy we should like to know? Why this will never do: it is nothing short "of letting loose the rein altogether and allowing. Rome to do as it likes undismayed ; something pise must he invented on the spot. " Search the Scriptures" said the Authorised Version (St, John v., 39); •• Search the Scriptures " repeated a hundred thousand million tracts ; " Search the Scriptures" shouted a successive legion of controversialists of both sexes. These three hundred years have the words " Search the Scriptwres " been piled upon

the heads of Catholics, with all the confidence >--dence that they were a.weight beneath which sooner or later the "Popery " must be crushed out of us, and now it turns out

that they were all a mistake, and that rv .the "Word " contains no such sentence.

•lS(ihe Revised Version, we are told on the ■'"*i|ath6rity of a Protestant contemporary, £ives a , translation. which exp-esses a ' totally different meaning. It contains no . command, but states a simple fact: "You search the Scriptures," and what is more, so translated the passage conveys a rebuke. This, we have no doubt, is one the severest blows that have been dealt to our " Evangelical " friends by the conclusions of modern scholarship, and we are at a lossfito conceive how they will ever reconcile themselves to it. There is cer tainly one of the instances here in which " Holy Original will be adhered to. Not , however, that the " Holy Original" affords the least advantage against Catholic „ .teaching;; even had a command been given to the Jews to search the Scriptures it would have been a command to search

them so as to prove a certain doctrine

given to them to prove, that is the Messiah- * ship of Jesus of Nazareth, and it would not have been lawful for them to place any priy.ateinterpretation upon the textsjthey were referred to. The meaning was laid down for them by our Lord, supposing Him to have given the command, and their part was that only of finding it to be supported by Holy Writ. Mean time, the Douay Version translates the, passage, as the Authorised Version does, but it give the other rendering in a note with the; following explanation : —lt is not a command for all to read the Scriptures, but a reproach to the Pharisees, that, reading the Scriptures as they did, and thinking to find everlasting life in them, they would not receive Him, to whom all those Scriptures gave testimony, and through whom alone they could have that true life." But only faDcy the scholarship of the Protestant world, as the result 6f iits j three centuries of study and experience, giving a translation of the passage that can only bear just such a meaning as that long ago explained by Catholic theologians. It is enough to bring the Greek codex into total disrepute —and as for Exeter Hall, it will be driven frantic. It will swear these translators are all Jesuits in disguise.—Tablet.