Revision of the New Testament.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3940, 15 August 1881, Page 2

Revision of the New Testament.

The Eev. Mr Neill delivered his second lecture on the above subject in the Presbyterian Church last evening. He introduced the subject as follows :—

" We have glanced at some of the most external features of the new revision. To-night we shall attempt to point out a few things whicb may be useful to you in regard to the body of the work. Three principal points must be studied by the translator : Ist, he must endeavor to get the very words of the author; 2nd, he must try to understand thoroughly the language from which the translation is to be made ; 3rd, he must be master of his own language, or, in this case, he must have a pure Greek text, a correct knowledge of Greek, and also of Knglish. To these may be added, that he should be able to enter into the spirit ot the author. To unite these four qualities requires something more than mere scholarship ; it requires what we call genius. All good translations, even of ordinary books, require this quite as much as accurate scholarship, else they will be dry dead things. Now we may see what a difficult task the translation or revision of the Bible must be. And to endeavour to put one's self in the place of the revisers is a necessary step to our appreciating correctly their work; otherwise we cannot know either their merits or their failures. The revisers must have often felt thoughts like these : We must admit no reading unless it has the weight of authority in itp favor, and wo must reject no reading which has this weight of authority, no matter how unpopular it may be. Still, as the Bible is a book for the people quite as much as for the learned, we must labor to give the Greek idiom in a plain, simple, popular form, without departing from pure, and strong English. Then we must take great care in rendering words or passages which are the stronghold of sects or churches, such as the words for baptise, or immerse, baptise in, or with water; Church and congregation, bishop and overseer, and many others. Still further, a careful translator should be guarded in these points, but how is he to be guarded against his own bias ? In a theological book like the Bible, the very understanding of or entering into the spirit of a passage is conditioned by our own theological training or insight; the words for miracle and eternal may be taken as examples. Our own mental standpoint affects our view of the Bible. Or, to put the truth more broadly, the way iv which the thought or language of one nation is received by people of a different nation or language depends on the aptitude of the recipient. We can see in our own country how inadequate the native language is to receive the force and fulness, and varied beauties ot our tongue. Again, I suppose some of the Germans would think that our English language is inadequate to receive the philosophical thoughts of the German tongue ; and the students of Sakya Muni may think that our conception ot his .Nirvana shows the inadequacy of our ideas to receive his. As it is in an highly important sense true that we measure our neighbours, and even our God, by ourselves, so it is true that we measure the language, the ideas of other people, by ourselves. But all these difficulties must be met and overcome, or we shall not have any translation at all. Before our present version was begun, several versions already existed, and King James' committee started upon their work tied down by very much the same conditions that our present revisers have been bound, i.e., they felt bound to start upon a model, aud to keep to that model pretty closely. This is the .rule which they laid down for themselves in this matter : " The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit." Afterwards they agreed to use Tyndale's, Matthews', Coverdale's, Whitchurch's, or the Genera where these agreed with the text better than the " Bishop's Bible." A new revision, or version of the Bible, seems to us a very notable thing, but from the time of Tyndale's translation iv 1531 till the issue of King James' version in 1611, a new vei'sion ot the Bible was no common thing. All these versions or revisions were very much the same, all being based on Tyndale's, which was based on Luther's even to the mistakes and Germanisms, some of which still remain. Now it is on this that our new revision is based, only there is a vast difference between it; and any of the versions which followed Tyndall's. Nearly three centuries have produced all the materials for a more trustworth version than any of those produced in the 16th or 17th centuries. And our revisers, while basing the general cast of their work upon the ordinary Bible, are fully determined not to follow any reading simply because it appears in what is erroneously called the " Authorised Version," seeing it never received any such sanction from Parliament, Privy Council, King, or Convocation —in fact, it exemplifies what Mr Darwin would call " the 'survival of the fittest."