In endeavouring to form a just estimate of the merits of the RV, it will be convenient to take the component parts of it in the order in which they appeared. The NT, moreover, challenges our attention first, because of its surpassing import- ance, because the changes made in revising it were relatively much more numerous than in the case of the OT, and because the attack and defence were here the most strenuous. As was not un- natural, the strife grew fiercest about the form in which the Lord’s Prayer was now set forth. In both its forms (Mt 6°", Lk 1124) alike it was now without the doxology. The form in Luke was much curtailed. For ‘Our Father which art in heaven’ it had simply ‘Father.’ It lacked alto- gether two petitions—‘ Thy will,’ ete., and ‘ Deliver us from evil.’ These changes were made on MS authority, believed to be the highest; and the clauses omitted were duly noted in the margin. So far, the Revisers were within their rights. But a further alteration of ‘from evil’ to ‘from the evil one’ could not be so easily defended. It was understood to have been accepted mainly through the influence of Bishop Lightfoot. A chief argu- ment for the change, the alleged fact that picac@ar amd, as distinguished from picacba éx, denotes deliverance from a person, not a state, was con- troverted by other scholars; and we cannot but wish that, in this instance, the renderings in the text and margin could have changed places. *
* See, for an outline of the controversy, the Bishop of Dur- ham’s three letters in the Guardian of Sept. 7th, 14th, and 21st, 1881, reprinted in A Fresh Revision of the NT, 3rd ed. 1891, and Canon F, ©. Cook’s A Second Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, 1882.
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VERSIONS (ENGLISH)
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Fault was also found with the change—the uncalled-for change, as it seemed to many—in the order of the words in the familiar Song of Simeon. What was gained, men would ask, by thus re-group- ing the well-remembered lines—
‘ Now lettest thou thy servant depart, O Lord According to thy word, in penoe't : ;
A more perfect parallelism, it might be replied, and a closer adherence to the order of the original. But. the. further question might be pressed: How far is this latter quality essential to a good idiom- atic translation ?
_ More irritating, however, than such changes in important passages as we have noticed, were the incessant alterations in small particulars, which tripped up the reader at every turn.* One accus- tomed to ‘Jesus stood on the shore,’ in Jn 214, could not take kindly to ‘ Jesus stood on the beach,’ even though assured that the rendering of aiyiadds was thus kept uniform. Nor would one who knew how deeply the phrase ‘vials of wrath’ was em- bedded in our language, fail to demur, if he read Rev 15, at having ‘bowls of the wrath of God’ substituted for the familiar expression. The Re- visers of 1611 and those of 1881 both equally admitted that no two words in different languages cover precisely the same ground. But from this common axiom they proceeded to opposite con- clusions. The older translators felt justified by it in varying the rendering of the same word in the original. They even made a merit of doing so. ‘We have not tied ourselves,’ they say in their Preface, ‘to an uniformity of phrasing or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. ... That we should express the same notion in the same particular word ; as, for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by purpose, never to call it intent . . . thus to mince the matter, we thought to savour more of curiosity than wisdom.’
The liberty thus claimed is freely used in the AY, and, it must be admitted, deserves at times rather to be called licence. The translation may gain in spirit and buoyancy, but at the cost of losing other qualities yet more precious. How much is lost, for instance, by the capricious altera- tion of ‘destroy’ to ‘defile,’ in 1 Co 3?—‘If any man destroyeth the temple of God, him shall God destroy.’ Nothing but the love of variety for its own sake could have prompted the double render- ing of dcaupéces in 1 Co 12** by ‘differences’ and ‘diversities,’ and of évepynudrwy and its cognate verb by ‘operations’ and ‘worketh.’ Hardly less injurious to the sense, in many passages, 1s the converse fault of using the same English word to translate different words in the original. Thus ‘light’ serves as the equivalent of ¢as, pwornp (Ph
20), dwricpds (2 Co 44), péyyos (Lk 11”), Adxvos (Mt 6); ‘know’ of olda, ywdoKw, emvywooKkw, and éricra- yar. The Revisers of 1881 were fully alive to the difficulties placed in their way by this peculiarity of their predecessors’ labour, and speak in their Preface of the principles on which they en- deavoured to solve the problem thus presented to them. They discriminated, as far as possible, between ‘varieties of rendering which were com-
* Professor Plumptre computes the number of variations in rendering from the AV of the NT to be more than 35,000. Others make them 36,000. See Canon Cook's Second Letter, p.-6andn. Cook further estimates that the deviations from the Greek text of 1611 in that adopted by the Revisers exceed 5000. Edgar (The Bibles of England, 1889, p. 342) agrees, making the exact number 5002. The Greek text used by king James's translators, so far as it could be ascertained, was published at Cambridge by Scrivener, and had, as footnotes, the readings preferred by the Revisers. A similar work, but with converse arrangement of text and notes, was published at Oxford by Archdeacon Palmer. The calculation was thus made easy.