The Translation of the New Testament here offered to
English-speaking Christians is a bona fide translation made
directly from the Greek, and is in no sense a revision. The plan
adopted has been the following.
1. An earnest endeavour has been made (based upon more
than sixty years' study of both the Greek and English languages,
besides much further familiarity gained by continual teaching) to
ascertain the exact meaning of every passage not only by the
light that Classical Greek throws on the langruage used, but also
by that which the Septuagint and the Hebrew Scriptures afford;
aid being sought too from Versions and Commentators ancient and
modern, and from the ample _et cetera_ of _apparatus grammaticus_
and theological and Classical reviews and magazines--or rather,
by means of occasional excursions into this vast prairie.
2. The sense thus seeming to have been ascertained, the
next step has been to consider how it could be most accurately
and naturally exhibited in the English of the present day; in
other words, how we can with some approach to probability suppose
that the inspired writer himself would have expressed his
thoughts, had he been writing in our age and country. /1
3. Lastly it has been evidently desirable to compare the
results thus attained with the renderings of other scholars,
especially of course witll the Authorized and Revised Versions.
But alas, the great majority of even "new translations," so
called, are, in reality, only Tyndale's immortal work a
little--often very litLle--modernized!
4. But in the endeavour to find in Twentieth Century
English a precise equivalent for a Greek word, phrase, or
sentence there are two dangers to be guarded against. There are a
Scylla and a Charybdis. On the one hand there is the English of
Society, on the other hand that of the utterly uneducated, each
of these _patois_ having also its own special, though expressive,
borderland which we name 'slang.' But all these salient angles
(as a professor of fortification might say) of our language are
forbidden ground to the reverent translator of Holy Scripture.
5. But again, a _modern_ translation--does this imply
that no words or phrases in any degree antiquated are to be
admitted? Not so, for great numbers of such words and phrases are
still in constant use. To be antiquated is not the same thing as
to be obsolete or even obsolescent, and without at least a tinge
of antiquity it is scarcely possible that there should be that
dignity of style that befits the sacred themes with which the
Evangelists and Apostles deal.
6. It is plain that this attempt to bring out the sense
of the Sacred Writings naturally as well as accurately in
present-day English does not permit, except to a limited extent,
the method of literal rendering--the _verbo verbum reddere_ at
which Horace shrugs his shoulders. Dr. Welldon, recently Bishop
of Calcutta, in the Preface (p. vii) to his masterly translation
of the _Nicomachean Ethics_ of Aristotle, writes, "I have
deliberately rejected the principle of trying to translate the
same Greek word by the same word in English, and where
circumstances seemed to call for it I have sometimes used two
English words to represent one word of the Greek;"--and he is
perfectly right. With a slavish literality delicate shades of
meaning cannot be reproduced, nor allowance be made for the
influence of interwoven thought, or of the writer's ever
shifting--not to say changing--point of view. An utterly ignorant
or utterly lazy man, if possessed of a little ingenuity, can with
the help of a dictionary and grammar give a word-for-word
rendering, whether intelligible or not, and print 'Translation'
on his title-page. On the other hand it is a melancholy spectacle
to see men of high ability and undoubted scholarship toil and
struggle at translation under a needless restriction to
literality, as in intellectual handcuffs and fetters, when they
might with advantage snap the bonds and fling them away, as Dr.
Welldon has done: more melancholy still, if they are at the same
time racking their brains to exhibit the result of their
labours---a splendid but idle philological _tour de force_ --in
what was English nearly 300 years before.
7. Obviously any literal translation cannot but carry
idioms of the earlier language into the later, where they will
very probably not be understood; /2 and more serious still is the
evil when, as in the Jewish Greek of the N T, the earlier
language of the two is itself composite and abounds in forms of
speech that belong to one earlier still. For the N.T. Greek, even
in the writings of Luke, contains a large number of Hebrew
idioms; and a literal rendering into English cannot but partially
veil, and in some degree distort, the true sense, even if it does
not totally obscure it (and that too where _perfect_ clearness
should be attained, if possible), by this admixture of Hebrew as
well as Greek forms of expression.
8. It follows that the reader who is bent upon getting a
literal rendering, such as he can commonly find in the R.V. or
(often a better one) in Darby's _New Testament_, should always be
on his guard against its strong tendency to mislead.
9. One point however can hardly be too emphatically
stated. It is not the present Translator's ambition to supplant
the Versions already in general use, to which their intrinsic
merit or long familiarity or both have caused all Christian minds
so lovingly to cling. His desire has rather been to furnish a
succinct and compressed running commentary (not doctrinal) to be
used sidc by side with its elder compeers. And yet there has been
something of a remoter hope. It can scarcely be doubted that some
day the attempt will be renewed to produce a satisfactory English
Bible--one in some respects perhaps (but assuredly with great and
important deviations) on the lines of the Revision of 1881, or
even altogether to supersede both the A.V. and the R.V.; and it
may be that the Translation here offered will contribute some
materials that may be built into that far grander edifice.
10. THE GREEK TEXT here followed is that given in the
Translator's _Resultant Greek Testament_.
11. Of the VARIOUS READINGS only those are here given
which seem the most important, and which affect the rendering
into English. They are in the footnotes, with V.L. (_varia
lectio_) prefixed. As to the chief modern critical editions full
details will be found in the _Resultant Greek Testament_, while
for the original authorities--MSS., Versions, Patristic
quotations--the reader must of necessity consult the great works
of Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, and others, or the numerous
monographs on separate Books. /3 In the margin of the R.V. a
distinction is made between readings supported by "a few ancient
authorities," "some ancient authorities," "many ancient
authorities," and so on. Such valuation is not attempted in this
work.
12. Considerable pains have been bestowed on the exact
rendering of the tenses of the Greek verb; for by inexactness in
this detail the true sense cannot but be missed. That the Greek
tenses do not coincide, and cannot be expected to coincide with
those of the English verb; that--except in narrative--the aorist
as a rule is _more_ exactly represented in English by our perfect
with "have" than by our simple past tense; and that in this
particular the A.V. is in scores of instances more correct than
the R.V.; the present Translator has contended (with arguments
which some of the best scholars in Britain and in America hold to
be "unanswerable" and "indisputable") in a pamphlet _On the
Rendering into English of the Greek Aorist and Perfect_. Even an
outline of the argument cannot be given in a Preface such as
this.
13. But he who would make a truly _English_ translation
of a foreign book must not only select the right nouns,
adjectives, and verbs, insert the suitable prepositions and
auxiliaries, and triumph (if he can) over the seductions and
blandishments of idioms with which he has been familiar from his
infancy, but which, though forcible or beautiful with other
surroundings, are for all that part and parcel of that other
language rather than of English: he has also to beware of
_connecting his sentences_ in an un-English fashion.
Now a careful examination of a number of authors
(including Scottish, Irish, and American) yields some interesting
results. Taking at haphazard a passage from each of fifty-six
authors, and counting on after some full stop till fifty finite
verbs--i. e. verbs in the indicative, imperative, or subjunctive
mood--have been reached (each finite verb, as every schoolboy
knows, being the nucleus of one sentence or clause), it has been
found that the connecting links of the fifty-six times fifty
sentences are about one-third conjunctions, about one-third
adverbs or relative and interrogative pronouns, while in the case
of the remaining third there is what the grammarians call an
_asyndeton_--no formal grammatical connexion at all. But in the
writers of the N.T. nearly _two_-thirds of the connecting links
are conjunctions. It follows that in order to make the style of a
translation true idiomatic English many of these conjunctions
must be omitted, and for others adverbs, &c., must be
substituted.
The two conjunctions _for_ and _therefore_ are discussed
at some length in two Appendices to the above-mentioned pamphlet
on the _Aorist_, to which the reader is referred.
14. The NOTES, with but few exceptions, are not of the
nature of a general commentary. Some, as already intimated, refer
to the readings here followed, but the great majority are in
vindication or explanation of the renderings given. Since the
completion of this new version nearly two years ago, ill-health
has incapacitated the Translator from undertaking even the
lightest work. He has therefore been obliged to entrust to other
hands the labour of critically examining and revising the
manuscript and of seeing it through the press. This arduous task
has been undertaken by Rev. Ernest Hampden-Cook, M.A., St. John's
College, Cambridge, of Sandhach, Cheshire, with some co-operation
from one of the Translator's sons; and the Translator is under
deep obligations to these two gentlemen for their kindness in the
matter. He has also most cordially to thank Mr. Hampden-Cook for
making the existence of the work known to various members of the
OLD MILLHILIANS' CLUB and other former pupils of the Translator,
who in a truly substantial manner have manifested a generous
determination to enable the volume to see the light. Very
grateful does the Translator feel to them for this signal mark of
their friendship.
Mr. Hampden-Cook is responsible for the headings of the
paragraphs, and at my express desire has inserted some additional
notes.
I have further to express my gratitude to Rev. Frank
Baliard, M.A., B.Sc., Lond., at present of Sharrow, Sheffield,
for some very valuable assistance which he has most kindly given
in connexion with the Introductions to the several books.
I have also the pleasure of acknowledging the numerous
valuable and suggestive criticisms with which I have been
favoured on some parts of the work, by an old friend, Rev. Sydney
Thelwall, B.A., of Leamington, a clergyman of the Church of
England, whom I have known for many years as a painstaking and
accurate scholar, a well-read theologian. and a thoughtful and
devout student of Scripture.
I am very thankful to Mr. H. L. Gethin. Mr. S. Hales, Mr.
J. A. Latham, and Rev. T. A. Seed, for the care with which they
have read the proof sheets.
And now this Translation is humbly and prayerfully
commended to God's gracious blessing.