* A good summary of the steps finally leading to the revision of 1881, so far at least as the year 1863, is given in Professor Plumptre’s article on the Authorized Version in vol. iii. of Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible. A list of works, bearing more or less directly on the revision of the AV, beginning with Robert Gell’s Essay, fol., 1659, will be found in the App. (pp. 216-9) to Trench’s On the AV of the NT, 1859.
+ It is almost a slaying of the slain to quote Dr. Edward Harwood (4 Liberal Translation of the NT, 2 vols. 8vo, 1768), who thus begins the parable of the Prodigal Son: ‘A gentle- man of a splendid family and opulent fortune had two sons. One day the younger approached his father, and begged him in the most importunate and soothing terms to make a partition of his effects betwixt himself and his elder brother. The in- dulgent father, overcome by his blandishments, immediately divided all his fortunes betwixt them.’ Ja 22-3 appears thus : ‘For should there enter into your assembly a person arrayed in a magnificent and splendid dress, with a brilliant diamond sparkling on his hand, and should there enter at the same time a man in a mean and sordid habit; Your eyes being instantly attracted by the lustre of this superb vest, should you immediately introduce the person thus sumptuously habited into the best seat,’ etc. A revised version of the Bible by J. T. Conquest, M.D. (2nd ed. 1846), purports to contain ‘nearly twenty thousand emendations.’ The following are a few brief specimens :— ;
Is 91:3 ‘ Nevertheless the darkness shall not be such as was in
her anguish ;
When at first he rendered contemptible ‘
The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
So shall he confer honour upon them f ;
By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.
The people who walked in darkness, have seen a great light :
Those who dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them the light shineth.
Thou hast multiplied the nation,
Whose joy thou didst not increase... . ;
1 Co 1512 ‘ How say some among you, that there is no resur-
rection and future existence of the dead?’
He 72 ‘Without recorded father or mother, without descent,
having neither predecessor or successor in office... .
?
VERSIONS (ENGLISH) 259
laying the attempt.?* On March Ist, 1856, Canon Selwyn brought the matter before the notice of the Lower House of Convocation, and followed this up, in the autumn of the same year, by the pamphlet just cited. In July 1856° Mr. James Heywood, M.P. for North Lancashire, moved in the House of Commons an address to the Crown, ‘praying that Her Majesty would appoint a Royal Commission of learned men, to consider of such amendments of the authorized version of the Bible as had been already proposed, and to receive suggestions from all persons who might be willing to offer them, and to report the amendments which they might be prepared to recommend.’+ After a short discussion the motion was withdrawn. But its author did not let the subject drop; publishing The Bible and its Revisers in 1857, and the State of the Authorized Bible Revision in 1860. In 1857 a good pattern of what such a revision should be was set in the publication of The Gospel according to St. John... revised by five clergymen. In 1863 a remark by the Speaker of the House of Commons (J. Evelyn Denison, afterwards Lord Ossington), suggested the undertaking of the ‘Speaker’s’ Commentary, one express object of which was ‘a revision of the translation.’
Not to dwell longer on preliminary matters, by the spring of 1870 things were ripe for action. On February 10th of that year, the Bishop of Winchester (Dr. 8. Wilberforce), anticipating a motion which Canon Selwyn had prepared to intro- duce into the Lower House, moved in the Upper House of Convocation of the Southern Province, ‘that a Committee of both Houses be appointed, with power to confer with any Committee that may be appointed by the Convocation of the Northern Province, to report upon the desirable- ness of a revision of the AV of the NT’, whether by marginal notes or otherwise, in all those pas- sages where plain and clear errors, whether in the Hebrew or Greek text originally adopted by the translators, or in the translation made from the same, shall, on due investigation, be found to exist.’ The Bishop of Llandaff (Dr. A. Ollivant) carried an amendment, to include the OT in the terms of the motion. When the motion, thus amended, had been agreed to, it was sent down to the Lower House (Feb. 11), where it was accepted without a division. In pursuance of it, a joint Committee, consisting of eight members of the Upper House and sixteen of the Lower, was formed. The Convocation of the Northern Province had in the meantime declined to co-operate. They admitted the existence of blemishes in the AV. They were ‘favourable to the errors being cor- rected.’ But they ‘would deplore any recasting of the text.’ Notwithstanding, the work went on; and on May 3rd a Report of the joint Com- mittee, embodied in five Resolutions, was laid before both Houses of the Southern Convocation. The Resolutions affirmed—