Purslain. See Mallows ; White of an Egg.
Purtenance (-?£, he'reb, midst, or inner part) stands improperly in one passage of the A. V. (Exod. xii. 9) lor the riscera, or "inwards" (as elsewhere ren- dered), of a sacrificial victim.
Puru, in Hindu: mythology, was the son of Jajadu and of Devajani, the daughter of a Brahmin. He was the boldest warrior in the army of the Devas during their struggles against the daemons and giants : he dis- tinguished himself by the terrible use he knew how to make of his war-hatchet. There was another Puru— the first king of India from the family of the Children
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of the Moon: his father, Buddha, was the son of the Moon. He is the forefather of the whole dynasty of the Children of the Moon, who were all celebrated rulers, and seemed to have founded on the upper Ganges an eternal empire. The kings Dushmanta, Kuru, Drita- rashtra, Pandu, etc., belonged to this family, in which Krishna was born several times. — Vollmer, Wurterb. d, Mythol. s. v.
Purus, in Hindu mythology, was the name of the first man created, the Adam of the Indians. The name of his wife was Pargute. See Puru.
Purver, Anthony, a Quaker preacher of great note for his remarkable literary attainments, especially his exegetical knowledge, was born at Up Hurstbourne, in Hampshire, about 1702. He was originally appren- ticed to a shoemaker, but later he was employed in keeping sheep. Though his early education was very limited, his capacity and inclination for the acquisition of learning were very great. He round leisure for study, and his curiosity being excited by the perusal of a tract in which some inaccuracies of the A. V. were pointed out, he determined to study the original languages of the Scriptures. He secured the assistance of a Jew in the acquisition of Hebrew, Chaldee, etc., and other aid for learning Greek and Latin. He joined the Society of Friends, and preached among them. While labor- ing as a schoolmaster at Andover, he occupied him- self in preparing a new version of the Scriptures ; and this, after spending more than thirty years over it, he published by the aid of Dr. Fothergill, who gave him £1000, and carried it through the press at his own ex- pense. It appeared in 1764, entitled A New Transla- tion of the. Old and New Testaments, with Notes, Critical and Explanatory, in two volumes folio, beautifully got up. Notwithstanding the enormous labor bestowed upon it by its author, and though there is now and then a better rendering to be found in it than in the A. V., Purver's translation, as a whole, is not of much critical value. The style is crude and bombastic, the very reverse of what might have been expected from a member of the society whose language is so simple; while the notes, though containing much valuable mat- ter, abound in contemptuous expressions about the la- bors of others in the same department. Purver's Bible is therefore deservedly scarce. He died in 1777. See Orme, Biblioth. Bibl. s. v. ; Kitto, Bible Diet. s. v. ; Alli- bone, Diet, of Brit, and A mer. A uthors, s. v. (J. H. W.)
Purvey, John, the friend and fellow - laborer of Wycliffe, with whom he lived in his latter years. His denunciations of the errors of the Romish Church, as well as his endeavors to make the Bible accessible to the people at large by translating it into English, drew upon him the severest penalties which it was in the power of the hierarchy to inflict. He was forbidden, by a mandate of the bishop of Bristol, dated August, 1387, to preach in the diocese where he officiated after the death of Wycliffe ; his books were declared to be errone- ous and heretical, and were among those which the bish- ops of Worcester, Salisbury, and Hereford were author- ized to seize (May 29, 1388 , Jan. 18, Dec. 16, 1389). Some years after, however, he made a recantation at St. Paul's Cross (Sunday, March 6, 1401), and was admitted (Aug. 11, 1401), on the presentation of the archdeacon of Can- terbury, to the vicarage of West Hy the, in Kent, which he resigned Oct. 8, 1403. He then returned to the sim- ple teaching of the Bible, denouncing the erroneous doc- trines of the Church, for which he was again imprisoned, and in 1421 recanted a second time, at Saltwood, before archbishop Arundel. He is supposed to have died about 1427. Purvey immortalized his name through his translation of the Scriptures into English. As the Bible of late translated by Wycliffe required correction, he tells us, in the general introduction, that he undertook to make the version more faithful, intelligible, and pop- ular. The plan which he adopted to effect this, ac- cording to his own description, was as follows : With
ITKVEYOR
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the assistance of several fellow-laborers he (1) corrected the Latin text by comparison ol Bibles, doctors, and glosses; (2) studied the text thus corrected with the gloss and other authorities, particularly De Lyra on the OKI I'est; I • made special reference to the works of grammarians and theologians for I he meaning of dif- ficult words and passages; and I I i did nol translate lit- erally. I'm ai cording to the mux- and meaning as clear- mld, taking '-arc to have many persons of ability present at the correction of the translation. He numerous textual glosses in the < >ld Test., and isionally omitted those of WyclifFe's version, but made no such insertions in the NewTest.,and care- fully excluded all the glosses which were introduced into the former version. That he improved upon \\ j c- lifFe's translation is beyond doubt, as may be seen from a comparison of the following passages in the respective versions: Gen. ix, 13; Exod. xxix, 2; Deut. xxxii, 2 ; xxxiii, 7 ; Josh, v, 15 ; vi,25; Jobx,l; \i. 1-: xiv,12; Matt. xii, 5 ; xiii. •">■_•; 1 Cor.iii,13 15; which are point- ed out by the erudite editors, the Rev. Josiah Forshall and sir Frederic Madden, who for the first time publish- ed this early English version, together with Wycliffe's translation, in an entire form, in parallel columns, 4 vols, tto, Oxford University Press, 1850. Purvey's translation of the New Test, was first published by Lewis (Lond. 1731, fol.) as Wycliffe's translation: ii was then erroneously reprinted as Wycliffe's by Bauer (Lond. 1810, 4to), and by Bagster in the English Hex- opla. Comp. Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, Towns- end's ed. I Lond. 1844), iii, 285, 292, 822, 826; and the elaborate preface by Forshall and Madden to their edi- tion of WyclifFe's and Purvey's translations ol the Bible.