Introduction

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James Moffatt introduction to his traslation of the Bible c. 1913-1924

V

The authors of the New Testament all wrote in Hellenistic Greek, which was understood far and wide throughout the Roman Empire. Some of the sources they used, that is, some of the sources for the gospels and the book of Acts, were in Aramaic, the language in which some sections of the late books of Ezra (iv. 8-vi. 18, vii. 12-26) and Daniel (ii. 4-vii. 28), for some inexplicable reason, happen to survive. But Aramaic was a mere Semitic dialect, and the audience for which the New Testament books were written required the international language of Greek. Presently, however, as the mission developed east and west, translations came to be required. Of these the most significant for our present purpose was the Latin translation. The beginnings of it were spontaneous, and they remain dim; they lie in the province of North Africa, where Latin, not Greek, was the official and popular language of educated people. Christianity had to make itself at home within this environment, and during the second half of the second century partial and unauthorized efforts were made to put the New Testament into Latin. Then came other efforts on the European side of the Mediterranean, until the bewildering variety of these translations induced Damasus, the bishop of the Roman church in the last quarter of the fourth century, to try to supersede them, if possible, by one official version. He commissioned Jerome, who issued first the gospels and then the rest of the New Testament between A.D. 383 and 385. This revision of the earlier Latin versions eventually became authoritative.

But Jerome went on to translate the Old Testament as well, from the original Hebrew. When his work was published after fifteen years' labour (from 390 to 404), it was received with derision and denunciation in many quarters. He was accused of forgery and sacrilege. Had he not dared to lay hands upon the sacred text, to cast suspicions upon the inspired Septuagint, to imply that a version good enough for our Lord and his disciples, was not good enough for him? The usual storm of abuse from clericals and conservatives broke out. Even Augustine allowed himself to side with the alarmed reactionaries. But the version outlived its detractors and became the official translation of Western Christendom. The entire Bible, thus rendered into Latin, was eventually termed the "current" edition, or the Vulgate.

Which leads us to look at the Vulgate, on which our older English versions of the Old Testament as well as of the New depend. Even its own text became corrupted, in the course of transmission, altered by careless scribes or for a deliberate purpose. The French expert, M. Berger, declares soberly that "les alterations dogmatiques ne sont pas rares dans le texte de la Vulgate . . Les doctrines les plus chéres aux théologiens du moyen age exercent toutes leur influence sur le texte de la Bible." The Vulgate, indeed, suffered, owing to its very dogmatic importance to the church. This was all the more to be regretted, as its vogue led to vernacular translations being almost invariably made, not from the original Hebrew and Greek, but from this Latin fourth-century translation, which, with all its merits, was itself based upon an inadequate knowledge of the materials for a true text. For various reasons, vernacular translations in Europe were indeed discouraged. The mediæval official attitude to such efforts is fairly represented by a letter of Pope Gregory VII to Vratislaus the King of Bohemia in 1079. "It is clear to those who reflect often upon it," says the Pope, "that not without reason has it pleased Almighty God that holy scripture should be a secret in certain places, lest, if it were plainly apparent to all men, perchance it would be little esteemed and be subject to disrespect; or it might be falsely understood by those of mediocre learning, and lead to error." It would be superfluous here to summarize the rise and reasons of the European demand for vernacular versions, in the interests of missionary propaganda and of private devotion. A time came when the tide of this demand swept over the reactionary barriers raised either to cheek it or to divert it, and England shared in the influx of the new movement for popularizing the Bible.

It was. only after a long and severe struggle that the English secured a vernacular version. The Roman church was for various reasons hostile and suspicious. In 1408 a provincial council at Oxford explicitly forbade any project of the kind; "we decree and ordain that no one shall in future translate on his own authority any text of holy scripture into the English tongue or into any other tongue, by way of book, booklet, or treatise." This checked unauthorized efforts like those of the Wycliffites. But no authorized version ever appeared to take their place, and punishment was meted out even to people caught in possession of a translation. The popular craving, however, could not be stifled, and the sixteenth century saw the pioneering works of Tyndale and Coverdale; then, two years after Coverdale, the real "authorized version" appeared in 1537, when a mysterious translator called "Thomas Matthew" had his work not only dedicated to but licensed by Henry VIII. In the long run, what put the Bible into the hands of the common people was the influence exerted on public opinion and authority by the re-formation of the church.

Of all these early English versions, the only one which made any serious attempt to reach back to the original text was that of Tyndale in 1525, and even Tyndale, though a notable linguist, had to depend upon a Greek edition of the New Testament by Erasmus, which, as we shall see in a moment, was by no means up to the mark. His direct knowledge of Hebrew, in the Old Testament part of his work, is not beyond question.

So versions in our language began. Tyndale always insisted that the language was a good medium. "The Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin, and the proportion of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin." However this may be, none of our early versions, for all their high merits, commanded unbroken homage. Repeated attempts were made to translate the Bible afresh. The popularity of the Genevan Bible, issued in 1560 by a group of Calvinistic English churchmen, stirred the English bishops at home to produce the Bishops' Bible of 1568, which had its own vogue. Even the Roman Catholics felt obliged to publish a version of their own, by some members of the English college at Douai and later at Rheims. Their translation, in 1582, suffered as well as gained, in point of textual accuracy, from its bondage to the mediæval Vulgate, and its English renderings were sometimes as uncouth as they were often felicitous. The translators of the 1611 version drily criticized their Latinisms, "whereof their late translation is full, and that of purpose to darken the sense, that since they must needs translate the Bible, yet by the language thereof it may be kept from being understood." This is unkind: the obscurity and pedantry of the Douai version were unintentional. Nevertheless, it was as sectarian as the Genevan Bible. Therewas still room for an impartial English version, and the personal interest of James VI helped to launch a project which ended in the English version of 1611. This is the so-called "authorized version." But it was never authorized, by king, parliament, or convocation, and in reality it was not so much a version of the original Greek as a revision of the Bishops' Bible, which it was designed to supersede. The translators, a group of Oxford and Cambridge scholars, followed their instructions to adhere as closely as possible to the Bishops' Bible. Their aim is modestly and frankly stated in their own preface: "truly, good Christian reader, we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavour, that our mark." The translators used Tyndale, Coverdale, and even the Genevan and Douai versions. They managed to avoid the provincialisms of their predecessors and to incorporate many of the happy renderings already struck out. Their prose had force, simplicity, and dignity. Mr. Andrew Lang, writing as a literary critic, reminds us that "the Wycliffite biblical translations look like a canvas embroidered on by the authors of King James's authorized version, that immortal monument of English prose," but this metaphor is not intended to suggest that the 1611 version was more flowery than its predecessors. The biblical prose of 1611 carried on the directness and realistic power of the Wyciffite versions. What distinguished it was the tact with which the translators instinctively avoided uncouth and pedantic expressions. It is, one must confess, more easy to say this honestly about the New Testament than about the Old, for the state of the Old Testament text in some books made it almost inevitable that a literal rendering should be now and then obscure, if not actually unintelligible.

Gradually but steadily the English version of 1611 won the power and prestige of a classic. For one thing, it was literature, as none of its predecessors were, not even Tyndale's nor the Douai version. "How real a creation," says 'Newman, in envy and admiration, "how sui generis, is the style of Shakespeare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson! Even were the subject matter without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid's elements or a symphony of Beethoven. And, like music, it has seized upon the public mind." Yes, the style of the English version has been creative as well as a creation. It has entered into the literature and language of the English-speaking race. For once, a committee produced a classic. Nowadays, even literary persons who have no special belief in its spiritual message pay generous homage to its qualities of style and rhythm; but it was written by and for people who had a supreme interest in its religious contents. The majority of those who, since 1611, have learned much of it by heart or read it daily have not been held by any æsthetic appreciation of its literary merits. These may have affected them unconsciously, but what such readers have been most sensible of has been the truth of its message. To them this version brought what they understood to be the direct words of God. Their absorbing interest in its pages was an interest in reality. And this interest is vital; no change of generations can displace or diminish it, so long as the religious sense survives. But the mental attitude varies, and when historical and literary criticism raises new questions, or old questions in a new form, about the sacred books of any religion, it is imperative that these should be answered frankly and adequately. A new situation is created, in which the first essential is to understand the meaning of the Bible as exactly as possible and to possess it in a form corresponding as closely as possible to the original. The religious interest in accuracy and reality will not be put off by suggestions that a version like that of 1611 has acquired associations which it is a pity and a loss to disturb, or that the language of that version is too sacred to be altered. Let the version remain an English classic. But let us be certain about the truth of what it translates. There is a truth in beauty of style, but there is a beauty in truth, and, whatever we may lose in parting with an English classic, we gain more by contact with the actual meaning of the original, of which this classic seems to be not quite a perfect representation. Besides, the Bible was originally written for common people in their own language. There may be something in the plea that a translation ought to be slightly archaic, in order to be impressive, that it is no harm, but rather the reverse, for a version to speak in language which is venerable, just because it is not the language of ordinary life. Yet the aim and the spirit of the Bible itself were essentially popular. This did not prevent its language from being effective; in most parts it reaches a level of style and diction like that of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in English, and for the same reason; even literary books like Job and Ecclesiastes or like those by Luke and the author of Hebrews are neither technical nor artificial. No, the Bible was not deliberately written in style above the common language of the day. Why, then, should it be translated so?

The rise of a certain dissatisfaction with the version of 1611 came to a head during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when semi-official revisions of it had to be issued in England and in America. The reasons were threefold. (a) The archaisms of a masterpiece in Elizabethan prose had become either unintelligible or misleading. (b) The advance of scholarship, which in the sixteenth century was quite immature, had opened up fresh methods of studying the diction and syntax of the dialects in which the Bible had been originally composed. (c) And, finally, the progress of textual criticism had reset the entire problem of the text. A translation depends largely upon its text for its permanent value. No literary qualities quite make up for a defective text of the original. Since 1611 the materials for ascertaining the original text of the New Testament in particular had increased richly, and the methods of study had improved; the early versions, especially the Syriac and the Latin, were being studied with surprising and novel results, the quotations in the early fathers were being verified upon the basis of more accurate texts, and a number of fresh, important manuscripts had been discovered. The English revision of the Bible, completed in 1885, was fairly successful in (a), less successful in (b), as scholars have already proved, and most open to criticism in (c). In recovering the original Greek text of the New Testament, for example, the revisers were largely guided by Dr. Hort, the most learned and acute textual critic of his day. But his theories have not commanded assent in every quarter, and even those who agree with him in the main are disposed nowadays to qualify some of his principles and positions. As for the Old Testament, the conservative policy of adhering to the massoretic or traditional text, except in "exceptional cases," handicapped the version seriously. The same criticism applies to the American Revised Version of 1900-1, and to the modern Jewish version of The Holy Scriptures, issued in 1917 by the Jewish Publication Society of America; the latter rests naturally on the text as fixed by Jewish tradition for the synagogues. In the English revision good scholars on the Committee were often unable to get their proposals past the margin, where much of their best work is to be found.

This problem of text is so crucial that a further word must be said upon the general outline and issues of the question. Any new translation, which is not a mere revision of its predecessors, must justify itself partly upon the ground that it seeks to recover and present a purer text. Of the Old Testament in this connexion I have already spoken. Here there are no new manuscripts for us; the better text is to be gained partly by the use of the versions, partly by means of conjectural emendations. It is otherwise with the Greek New Testament. Here the Vulgate is important, on two grounds. (a) In the first place, as it was made before any of our extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, and made from materials that in some cases go back to the second century, perhaps even from some Greek manuscripts which no longer exist, it is indispensable as an aid to the task of ascertaining the original Greek text as that was read in North Africa at any rate during the second century. A translation will often show what the text of its original must have been, in a case of dispute. This Latin version of Jerome, then, along with the Syriac versions which go back to the third century at least, must be reckoned of first-rate importance. Unfortunately it is an intricate task, not only to know the Vulgate text, but to reach its sources. Which is in part (b) due to its very success. For Jerome's version became the standard and popular edition; for centuries the Latin Church of the West owed its knowledge of the New Testament almost entirely to this translation, when Europe was still ignorant of the Greek language or indifferent to it. The vogue of the Vulgate tended to suppress the earlier efforts which it was meant to supersede; they could not flourish in its stately presence, and yet it is in these very efforts that we often get closer to the original Greek than in the Vulgate itself.

So far as the writers of the 1611 version used a Greek text for their New Testament work, it was an extremely imperfect one. The version current in the Middle Ages was in Latin, the so-called "Vulgate" prepared by Jerome, as we have seen, and regarded by the Roman Church as authoritative. To go behind the Vulgate was to subvert faith and authority altogether! In fact, the Douai translators claimed that the Vulgate was "not only better than all other Latin translations, but than the Greek text itself, in these places where they disagree." The Douai version, therefore, was an English rendering of Jerome's translation, and not even of that in a pure form. The depreciation of the original Greek, or, at any rate, the easygoing treatment of it, appears in two previous attempts to print a Greek edition of the New Testament. Cardinal Ximenes, the distinguished Spanish scholar, issued one in 1514-20, as part of his Complutensian Bible, but it was based on only a few inferior manuscripts. Erasmus almost simultaneously hurried an edition through the Basle press in 1516, which was compiled also from no more than a handful of inferior manuscripts. It was something to get a Greek edition at all, but not even that of Erasmus was by any means adequate. These two editions were employed by Stephanus the Paris publisher (1546-50), by Beza in Geneva (1582), and by the Elzevir press at Leyden (1624-78), in their improved editions, but the traditional Greek text, popularized by Stephanus, remained substantially the same in its defects. As Professor Souter puts it, "the text which was to enslave the Greek Testament student for two hundred years and more, was based really on Erasmus's last edition, the Complutensian Polyglot, and a handful of manuscripts - in fact, on something like a hundredth part of the Greek evidence now at our disposal, not to speak of versions and citations." This "received text," or Textus Receptus, as it came afterwards to be called, lay before the revisers of 1611. It was, it could not but be, notoriously corrupt. Any translation based upon it must share its defects, and subsequent research in textual criticism has not only exposed them fully, but put us in possession of evidence which enables us, if we choose, to secure a text much nearer to what the writers of the New Testament originally wrote.

The text from which the present translation has been made approximates to that of H. von Soden of Berlin, whose critical edition of the Greek New Testament, based upon unprecedented researches, appeared during the first decade of this century. Von Soden made a fuller survey of the extant materials than had as yet been attempted, and, although even his estimate of the evidence is by no means final, his edition represents an advance in the right direction. I have added a few notes, principally in order to explain my departures from it. But they are deliberately few. Surely nothing is more calculated to deaden the interest of the public in any classic than the cult of various readings. There is a place for them, but their place is in technical works for scholars. The text of any classic, whether ancient or modern, ought to be presented without notes upon differences in reading, except where these are absolutely needful. This applies in a special degree to translations.

Quotations or direct reminiscences of the Old Testament are printed in italics. I hope this will be found convenient and not inartistic. The books are also arranged, as in the case of the Old Testament, in the order of the English Bible, for the sake of convenience. Now and then, as again in the case of the Old Testament, verses or even paragraphs and chapters will be found transposed; anyone who desires to look into the critical reasons for such changes will find them, so far as the New Testament is concerned, in my Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.

VI

The translation now offered of this text is an attempt to represent the gains of recent research and at the same time to be readable. Thus I have endeavoured to translate the New Testament exactly as one would render any piece of contemporary Hellenistic prose, hoping to convey to the reader something of direct homely impression made by the original upon those for whom it was written. This is desirable. It is also possible, for while Hellenistic Greek may have its own defects, from the point of view of a classical scholar, it is an eminently translatable language, and the evidence of papyrology tends to show that it was more flexible than was once imagined. But the enterprise of such a translation has to face a double ordeal. Some of its readers know the original, some do not, and both classes have to be met. "The English reader," as Dr. Rouse remarks, "may be quite competent to judge of a translation as literature and as intelligible or not intelligible, but be cannot judge of its accuracy. The scholar alone can judge of its accuracy, but (granting that he has literary taste) he knows the original too well to be independent of it, and hence cannot judge of the impression which the translation will make on the minds of those who are not scholars." If this is true of Homer, it is three times true of the New Testament. Any new translation starts under a special handicap. It appears to challenge almost in every sentence the rhythm and diction of an English masterpiece like the 1611 version, and this may disturb or even irritate many who have no knowledge of the original. The old, they say, is better. They are indifferent to the changes which recent grammatical research has necessitated in the translation of the Greek article, tenses, and particles. Yet there are others who do not greatly value a so-called dignity which does not belong to the original, and to whom intelligibility means more than associations, To atone for the occasional loss of the latter I have honestly tried to make the New Testament, especially St. Paul's epistles, as lucid and intelligible to a modern English reader as any version that is not a paraphrase can well hope to make them.

My last word to the reader is this. Do not rest content with curiously noting the differences between this version of the Bible and its predecessors, especially the Authorized English version, but try to understand and to appreciate their common aim. The object of any translation ought to resemble the object of its original, and in this case it is not mere curiosity, not even intellectual interest. Our English Bibles always reprint the dedication of the 1611 version to King James; it is a somewhat fulsome piece of writing, nearly as fulsome as some of Bacon's references to that monarch. Why does nobody reprint the preface of "the translators to the reader," which breathes an ampler air? Here are the concluding sentences of that neglected preface. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, but a blessed thing it is, and will bring us to everlasting blessedness in the end, when God speaketh unto us, to hearken; when he setteth his word before us, to read it; when he stretcheth out his hand and calleth to answer, Here am I, here we are to do thy will, O God. The Lord work a care and conscience in us to know him, and serve him, that we may be acknowledged of him at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with the Holy Ghost be all praise and thanksgiving." These words put nobly the chief end of reading the Bible, and the object of any version; it is to stir and sustain present faith in a living God who spoke and speaks. Three hundred years lie between the Authorized Version and the version printed in these pages, but I hope there is nothing in the execution, certainly there is nothing in the aim, of the modern translation which would be out of keeping with the tone of these searching words which preface its great predecessor.