people shall be alike pledged only to a common pursuit of truth, and a common recognition of veracity as the first requisite of worship. To such a goal the path is long and difficult. A thousand obstacles of association and affection, of anxiety and apprehension, threaten it. Which of the great historic Churches in this country will make the first step? Of one thing they may be assured by those who have trodden it through toil and obscurity for more than two hundred years. Though they should suffer loss, obloquy, and exclusion, they will never wish to turn back.

LECTURE II.

THE REVISED VERSION

THE movement in favour of freedom of Biblical study within the Church of England secured its immediate end by the decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. But its consequences were not limited to the withdrawal of all barriers from the historical investigation of the Scriptures. Its indirect issues were also highly significant. It produced an urgent call for the relaxation of the terms of Subscription imposed on all candidates for orders in the Anglican Church, and it gave a powerful impetus to the growing demand for a revision of the Authorised Version of the Bible. Before proceeding to sketch the effects of modern investigation on our conception of the chief constituents of the Old and New Testaments, it seems desirable to describe the general conditions which created this demand, and the answer which it received. What after all was the Bible? Where was it to be found, and why was the representation of it by King James's translators no longer adequate?

An attempt to answer these questions carries us at once into the heart of intricate and laborious studies. But they cannot be neglected by anyone who desires to realise the full significance of the changed aspect of the books of his religion.

I.

In an appendix to his edition of the Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians (1855) Stanley had enumerated various defects in the received translation from the original Greek. There were obscurities arising from want of care in punctuation; neglect of the original order frequently led to a false emphasis; and positive inaccuracy sometimes perverted the apostle's real meaning. Such errors might occasionally be ascribed to theological fear or partiality; sometimes they were caused by retaining the Greek or Latin words of previous translations (such as 'heresies' for 'sects,' 'charity' for 'love,' and even 'church' for 'congregation'); in great part they resulted from an imperfect attention to the apostle's language,-to the meaning of tenses, to the insertion or omission of the definite articleor from carelessness in rendering the same Greek word by different English words (very often in the same context). Both he and his colleague in the enterprise, Jowett, found it necessary, therefore, again and again to correct the Authorised Version. It was of course obvious that more than two centuries of toil on the classical writers had ren1 Vol. ii., appendix B. See Lect. I., ante, p. 26.

1

dered the knowledge of Greek far more exact than was possible in the days of King James. The study of language had assumed a new phase early in the century as the classification of its great families had been made possible by the accumulation of new material, and in particular by the discovery of Sanskrit, so that philology had entered on its scientific stage. When George Benedict Winer, therefore, proposed in 1822 'so far as the case admitted, to apply the results of the rational philology, as obtained and diffused by Hermann and his school, to the Greek of the New Testament,'1 he really inaugurated a new era in the interpretation of the New Testament records. Grammatical in

accuracy was no longer tolerable. Winer's treatise supplied the linguistic basis for the best German and English work, and became, as the Bishop of Gloucester has recently remarked, 'the true, though remote fountain-head of revision, and, more particularly, of the revision of the New Testament.' 2 A similar influence on Old Testament study, of an even more far-reaching kind, was exercised by the great Semitic philologist of Halle, Gesenius, whose Hebrew Dictionary (1812) and Grammar (1813) opened a new phase in the treatment of the literature of Israel, while his Commentary on the book of Isaiah (1821-29) showed how the criticism of language might be plemented by the criticism of history.

sup

1 Preface to the sixth German edition of the Grammar of New Testament Greek, 1855.

? Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture, 1901, p. 8.

But behind the necessities of grammar and lexicography, the distinction between prose and poetry, the sensibility to differences of style, the perception of the fitness of words no longer in common use or limited to some special theological meaning,—all of which are serious elements in the translator's problem, there lay in the background a much larger and more difficult question. What was he to translate? The original autographs of the Biblical authors had long ceased to exist. The Authorised Version of the New Testament was made from a printed text1 the pedigree of which could be traced back to the first edition of Erasmus in 1516, and substantially identical with that afterwards described in the Latin preface to the Leyden edition of 1633 as the textus ab omnibus receptus, the 'text received by all,' or 'the received text.' The printed editions were of course founded on the hand-written copies (manuscripts) which had been in use before the invention of printing in 1454. What was the value of these copies, and of the texts founded upon them?3 Once more, the experience gained in the treatment of classical literature provides the answer on behalf

1 The word 'text' is here used in the technical sense of the Greek form of the several books.

* Through Beza's fourth edition (1588) and the Editio Regra of Stephens (1550).

'It must always be remembered that the work of Erasmus was that of a pioneer. It was executed in great haste at Basle in 1516 in order to anticipate the publication of the great Complutensian edition of Cardinal Ximenes. He had few MSS. at hand, and they were of very late date. In his first edition their defective state compelled him actually to retranslate a few verses in the book of Revelation from the current mediæval Latin back into Greek!