By Rev. A. F. MacKay, M.A.
The Authorised Version of the English Bible has enjoyed throughout the three and a half centuries of its existence a transcendent place in the English-speaking world, and Sir Frederic Kenyon rightly says “As a work of literature, the A.V. is unrivalled, and it has been an inestimable benefit to the English people that they received the Bible in a dress of so much dignity and beauty of expression.” Many attempts have been made to account for the commanding position the A.V. occupies in our national life. Apart from the unique character of the Bible, the message of salvation it unfolds and the authoritative standard of speech and conduct it sets before men, there is no doubt that what constitutes its appeal are the literary excellence and dignity of its language.
After the Authorised Version
The English Bible is the greatest gift of the Reformation, which has profoundly influenced the history of our people. The work of translating the Scriptures into English goes back many centuries, to the time of the Venerable Bede in the 8th century, King Alfred in the 9th, down to the time of Wycliffe and others who followed him. These translations, however, were made from the Latin Vulgate, itself a translation, from which the first knowledge of the Bible in English came to these shores. This work, completed by Jerome towards the end of the 4th century at the request of Damasus, Bishop of Rome, was a translation direct from Hebrew and also from some Greek MSS into Latin and became the recognised version of Latin Christianity for centuries. The Vulgate is still the standard version of the Roman Catholic Church today. Luther had translated the Bible into German with the aid of the best Hebrew and Greek scholarship of the day, and his Bible became the most powerful weapon in the work of the German Reformation. In this country a big step forward was taken when Erasmus published his Greek N.T. in 1516 from original Greek MSS, with the hope that some day parts of it would be sung in the fields. This work fired William Tyndale, the true father of the English Bible, with the determination to give his countrymen a worthy translation of the Bible so that the lad who drove the plough might be acquainted with the Word of God in his own tongue. The widespread demand for a pure, uniform translation of the Bible, stimulated by the various editions of the Bible which successively appeared, such as the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible, was taken up by James I and the royal command bore fruit several years later in the publication of the Authorised Version in 1611, or as it is sometimes called, the ‘King James’ Version.’ This noble translation gathered together the best of the labours of earlier workers, translations of single books as well as complete versions of the Bible, including the Roman Catholic Rheims-Douai Bible, whose influence can still be traced in such Latinised phrases as ‘ provoke to emulation’ (Rom. xi: v.14); ‘wise in your own conceits’ (Rom. xii: v.16). The impress of William Tyndale’s stately and graceful English is present throughout the whole work.
Although the A.V. of the Bible approved itself at once to the people and soon outstripped every competitor as an adequate and authoritative version, the work of translation went steadily on. The next two centuries witnessed at intervals the publication of versions of the Scriptures, mainly of a private nature, designed to promote the religious beliefs of small groups, such as Whitby’s Paraphrase and Commentary on the N.T. in 1703, in which the post-millennial view of the Second Advent of Christ is advocated. As the work of evangelising the country proceeded, new translations of the Bible appeared. With the spread of Methodism, John Wesley published in 1755 his translation of the N.T. with notes which was a revised edition of the A.V. intended to make the Word of God clearer to his followers, ‘for the plain, unlettered men who understand only their own tongue.’ His revision shows that the Greek text had been carefully studied. A few years later a ‘New and Literal Translation’ of the Bible appeared, the work of a Quaker, Anthony Purver, which came to be known as the “Quaker Bible,” in which well-known Scripture phrases were dressed in highly flowery language; ‘the flowers appear on the earth,’ in Song of Solomon ii: v.12, becomes ‘Earth’s lap displays her infant flowers.’ Later, towards the end of the century, a translation by Gilbert Wakefield, a Unitarian, was published. J. N. Darby, a leader of the Brethren movement who published also translations in both German and French, produced a new translation. Since the appearance of the A.V., the R.C. Rheims-Douai Bible had undergone from time to time slight alterations, but about the end of the 18th century, Bishop Challoner gave a thorough revision to the Bible for English-speaking Roman Catholics. As Challoner was a pervert from Protestantism, and was familiar with the A.V., his work bears clear traces of his acquaintance with the idiomatic, nervous style of the A.V. It was not until towards the end of the 19th century that the demand arose among scholars for an authoritative revision of the A.V. Individual editions of the N.T. were printed, notably those of such scholars as Dean Alford, Connybears and Howson who prepared their text from the Greek MSS. Finally, a Revised Version of the complete Bible was published, the N.T. in 1881, and the O.T. in 1884, based upon the A.V. under the title, The Revised Version of the Holy Bible.
The Revised Version, 1881 and 1884
This Revision was an Anglican venture. Both Houses of Convocation of York and Canterbury in 1870 appointed a committee to draw up a scheme of revision of the A.V., and finally two companies of biblical scholars were set up to undertake the work, one responsible for the O.T. and the other for the N.T. These companies were composed of scholars from Britain, Scotland being well represented, and all shades of religious belief were enlisted; J. H. Newman, the pervert to Romanism, could not accept, though invited, but Dr. Vance Smith, a pronounced Unitarian, did join the N.T. company. The terms laid down to guide their work made clear that the A.V. and the text underlying that version should be adhered to strictly and every departure and change justified only for the strongest reasons, generous use to be made of marginal references. With this work American scholars were asked to co-operate and eventually from about 1872 American parallel companies were formed, one for the O.T. and the other for the N.T., keeping in close touch with their counterparts in this country. The Apocrypha was set on one side till the completed work was published, then the revisers were formed into committees and the Revised Version of the Apocrypha appeared in 1896. In this work the American revisers took no part. The completed work of the Revised Version of both Old and New Testaments, when it appeared, met with a mixed reception, being assailed by conservative scholars on widely different grounds.
With regard to the work of the O.T. company, the terms of reference given to them were almost literally complied with, but for reasons which lay outside the control of the revisers themselves. With the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the need for preserving the sacred text of Hebrew scripture became pressing and accordingly a body of Hebrew scholars made an intensive study of all the available Hebrew MSS, which dated from the earliest centuries before the Christian era. From these MSS a standard consonantal text was constructed about 100 A.D. Later scholars, to make easier the reading of the text composed entirely of consonants without vowel markings, in the synagogue, added vowel signs; to these notes were inserted before and after the text and longer notes in the margin. It was the practice of the Jewish scholars after fixing the true text of Scripture, to relegate the old MSS, along with those which had become unfit for use or were outdated, to a lumber room to await destruction. Thus one standard Massoretic text came to prevail in the Jewish Church, and the ancient MSS supporting it destroyed. At present archæological research has unearthed some of these documents of a fairly early date, which escaped destruction, but the revisers of the A.V. in 1611 were confined to MSS which dated no earlier than the 9th century, apart from the Massoretic text and the Septuagint, a Greek version of the O.T. made at Alexandria in the 3rd century B.C., which agrees largely with it. Dr. Driver has admitted: “The age and authorship of the books of the O.T. can be determined, so far as is possible, only upon the basis of the internal evidence supplied by the books themselves; no external evidence worthy of credit exists.” The Revisers also admitted that the state of their knowledge did not justify any attempt at reconstructing the O.T. text. They were therefore compelled to adopt the Massoretic text and as a result the A.V. has suffered at their hands to a very limited extent; obscurities and ambiguities have been removed, the Hebrew poetical passages, such as the Psalms, Job, etc., have been given poetical form. The text which in the A.V. has been broken up into individual verses has been arranged into larger paragraphs, at the same time retaining the verse numbers; the headings of the chapters and pages have been left untouched, since extended notes would be needed to replace them. To only a small degree also has the high literary standard of the A.V. suffered.
Conditions facing the N.T. company were altogether different. Great advances in the study of the Greek language, especially of the N.T. Koine, had been made in the interval since the A.V. had appeared, and a wealth of ancient Greek documents and manuscripts had come to light, many of these much older than any of those available to the A.V. translators. In particular, Codex Aleph of the 4th century and Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century, both in the British Museum, contain the greater part of the Bible; Codex Vaticanus, known as Codex B, about the same date as Codex Aleph, is preserved in the Vatican Library. With these a wealth of papyrus fragments dating from the second century to the tenth, lectionaries used in public worship and other MSS are calculated to amount to about 4,500 in all. While the original books of the N.T. in Greek had perished, these ancient documents had survived which could now be consulted in deciding the true text of Scripture.
The N.T. company who faced this task numbered among its members J. B. Lightfoot, Moulton, W. Milligan, Scrivener, and the two Cambridge scholars, Westcott and Hort. When the company began its work it became apparent that they were divided by two radically opposed views of the methods by which the work of revision should be approached. The conservative view favoured the text of the A.V. while the majority of revisers supported what is known as the Alexandrian text. The A.V. translators of 1611 depended upon a small handful of MSS which underlay the text of Erasmus’ Greek N.T. and the later edition of Beza’s Greek N.T. printed in 1598, which agreed largely with Erasmus. These Versions followed what came to be termed the Byzantine Text, regarded as the uniform text dating back to the earliest centuries of the Greek Church, adopted as the standard text of the Greek Church through the greater part of her history, the Byzantine period, 312-1453 A.D. This text represents a revision of the N.T. made in the 4th century A.D. The Byzantine text also came to be known as the “received text” which also indicates the Greek text of the A.V. This text received strong advocacy from Dr. Scrivener, who was generally regarded with Hort as the foremost N.T. scholar of his day. The main body of revisers, however, supported the liberal theories of the Westcott and Hort school. Shortly before the work of revision was undertaken, Hort, in collaboration with Westcott, had prepared a Greek N.T. on principles of criticism which he explained in his celebrated Introduction to the Edition. Hort based his principles of textual criticism upon an elaborate theory of families of manuscripts and textual readings, under which he attempted to classify the mass of early documents, which also provided a reference by which he could estimate their value. The Byzantine or Received Text, Hort dismissed as the work of some unknown Greek-speaking Christian who lived in Syria about 150 A.D. who deliberately set himself to re-write the N.T. The Westcott and Hort Edition of the N.T., based largely upon the Alexandrian Text, appeared a few days before the Revised Version, and is reckoned to differ from the Received Text in some 6,000 places. This work was known to the Revisers who consulted its readings and were greatly influenced by Westcott and Hort. Scrivener was consistently outvoted. The R.V. of the N.T. in many places agrees with the text of Westcott and Hort.
When the Revised Version of the N.T. appeared the work was trenchantly and unsparingly attacked by W. Burgon, Dean of Chichester, a textual scholar of eminence. Burgon had a biting wit and scathing tongue, and as he had already done fine work in critical research, he spoke with assurance and knowledge, and his strictures were never seriously answered. Today, Professor Bruce can say that few scholars of standing support the Received Text. Time has also modified the high estimate of the Alexandrian text so confidently asserted by Westcott and Hort, but such a statement is of little consequence in the unsettled state of N.T. critical studies at present.
The completed Bible in the Revised Version has up to the present failed to supersede the A.V. in the affections of our people, and making every allowance for the obstacles in the way of the R.V. ever doing so, there are reasons which may be mentioned which explain this failure. The glorious doctrines of the Bible demand dignified expression in language worthy of the contents of divine revelation, and unlike the A.V. which is the work of masters of English prose, the R.V. too often, especially in the N.T., falls below this standard. The O.T. fares better as far as dignity of the language is concerned, but the N.T. company were dominated by Westcott and Hort who were both at the time Professors at Cambridge, and a method of translation was adopted which prevailed at Cambridge, by which literary style and grace were sacrificed in favour of close, literal renderings. The result is often stilted, pedantic expressions which contrast strikingly with the N.T. in the A.V. Besides, the companies in both the Old and New Testaments were influenced by critical theories of the text of scripture which were defective. This is especially true of the N.T. scholars who favoured the attitude of the Westcott-Hort school whose principles of criticism were founded upon a mere handful of very ancient but thoroughly unreliable MSS. The discovery of the Sinaitic Codex in romantic circumstances in the St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sion decided Hort on a completely new translation of the N.T. in the light of this and other ancient discoveries. B. B. Warfield allows his admiration of these scholars to outrun his discretion, but even he has to admit of Hort: “He looked upon B as an infallible voice proceeding from the Vatican, and upon the combination of B Aleph as a manifest deliverance from heaven itself.” In reliance upon these unsafe guides, these passages have been omitted from the N.T. in its Revised Version: “the descent of the angel into the pool” (John v: v.4); “the woman taken in adultery” (John vii: v.53-viii: v.11), placed within brackets as though an interpolation; “the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer” (Matt. vi: v.13); the last twelve verses of Mark (Mark xvi: verses 9-20), added as an appendix; “the Three Heavenly Witnesses” (I John v: v.7), in disregard of context and of ordinary rules of Greek grammar; “the words on the Cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,'” (Luke xxiii: v.34) enclosed by Westcott-Hort in double brackets, indicating that in their view these words had no claim to a place in the text, but the Revisers had the good sense to include them. All these passages have satisfactory MS authority in their support, but their rejection was decided by B Aleph MSS from which they are absent. Burgon described these ancient documents as “products of the school of philosophy and teaching which found its vent in semi-arian and homœan opinions; they were among the most corrupt copies in existence.” Lastly, the Revisers treated their work in the spirit of pure scholarship with little awareness or reverence for the precious body of truth contained in scripture. Their decisions were taken entirely upon the text by placing documents and texts against others, with no thought of the superintending providence which must be regarded as being exercised by the Lord over the sacred text. Such a purely secular attitude disposes of the truth, for instance, of divine inspiration, for this doctrine is of little value to the Church if the original autographs which alone possess inerrancy and infallibility are lost or corrupted in transmission among a multitude of ancient documents. The handful of documents representing the “Received Text,” we believe, have a much better claim to continue the pure line of God’s inspired Word than numerous documents from which it must be elicited as a result of the industry, insight and scholarship of textual critics. The Revised Version has, therefore, been consigned a place in public regard subordinate to the A.V. whose supremacy remains unchallenged, and may serve a useful purpose in supplementing the A.V., as today is actually the case, when the R.V. is widely used in schools, colleges and universities.
Recent English Versions
The American Committee under Philip Schaff, an eminent American scholar, in their exchanges with the British revisers in 1872, desired more extensive changes in the A.V. than they were willing to allow, and accordingly when the R.V. appeared, the American revisers held aloof, and brought out their own Revised Version in 1901, known as the American Standard Version. The work is practically an American edition of the R.V., the differences between them being slight, relating to the divine name in the O.T. which becomes ‘Jehovah,’ while the British R.V. retains the titles, ‘Lord, God’; the Lord’s prayer opens with the words: ‘Our Father who are in heaven.’ The prevailing text in the N.T. is that of the Westcott-Hort Edition, the Alexandrian text. A thorough revision of the work was begun in 1938 at the instance of the churches and theological seminaries in America through the body known as The International Committee of Religious Education. The N.T. appeared in 1946 and the O.T. in 1952, when the complete Bible was published under the name, The Revised Standard Version. The use of the A.V. version of ‘Lord’ for the divine name is restored instead of ‘Jehovah’; the pronoun in the second person, ‘thou,’ ‘thy,’ etc., are dropped and replaced by the direct ‘you,’ ‘yours,’ etc., except where the divine being is addressed; this change makes for ambiguity, as when Christ before his ascension is addressed as you, but after, as thou. The work was well advertised in advance with favourable public notices which, however, did not save it from severe criticism. From the beginning of the present century, modern English translations of the Bible, no doubt given an impetus by dissatisfaction with the Revised Version, and also arising from the urge to utilise the fresh information and important evidence supplied by manuscript material turned up in the East, have come in a stream from the press. A further attempt of this kind is the Twentieth Century New Testament, published anonymously by a company of 20 translators in 3 parts between 1898 and 1901. The text followed is the Westcott-Hort Greek edition, its purpose being “the desire to mediate the word of God in plainer English idiom.”
Among English-speaking Roman Catholics the need was felt for a more adequate and uniform English version of the Latin Bible as a revision of the many corrupt Latin copies of the Vulgate and even a new translation into English were considered to be long overdue. The Council of Trent in 1546 in view of the corrupt state of the Latin versions of Jerome’s Vulgate in circulation ordered a new Edition to be prepared which after some delay appeared in 1592, known as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, still regarded today as the Authorised Version of the Roman Catholic Church. About the same time, an English translation of the Vulgate was printed, the work on the N.T. carried out at the English College at Rheims in 1582, and the O.T. at the English College at Douai in 1609-10, the well-known Rheims-Douai Version. The production of this Version was too early to make full use of Sixto-Clementine Latin text, especially in the N.T., but when the whole Bible was revised later by the Bishop Challoner, vicar apostolic of the London district, in 1749, this deficiency was repaired when the N.T. translation was brought into line with the Latin Bible, and a very much improved translation resulted. This is no more than a translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate which includes, mixed up with the Hebrew canonical books, the apocryphical writings, and the text, where it lends itself with any plausability to such a purpose, is made to favour the Romanist doctrines of the church. For example, the duty of repenting is usually translated, ‘do penance,’ as in the words: ‘Do penance for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matt. iv: v.18); ‘they had long done penance in sackcloth and ashes’ (Matt. xi: v.21); Jacob is said to have ‘adored the top of his staff’ (Heb. xi: v. 21), in support of the sacrament of penance and the adoration of relics; the Greek word for ‘mystery’ is correctly translated throughout the N.T., but rendered ‘sacrament’ in Eph. v: v.32 to uphold the view of marriage as a sacrament; copious notes are added, interpreting the text in the light of Roman Catholic doctrine and tradition.
A modern revision of the Rheims-Challoner N.T. was carried out in the United States by the Episcopal Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine and published under the title, “The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” 1941. The Vulgate Latin text was consulted in this work throughout along with the Greek text, but notes still accompany the text, somewhat modified from previous editions, as where the qualification for a bishop ‘married but once’ is explained by the information that ‘priestly celibacy as a law is of later ecclesiastical institution.’ The O.T. has also been under consideration, not as a mere revision of the Douai-Challoner, but a new translation from the original Hebrew text is contemplated. So far Genesis has been done and at periods other books have followed. The Westminster Version of the Sacred Scriptures, prepared under the late Cuthbert Lattey, S.J., is a much more finished production with introductions and commentaries upon the books. The N.T. was completed in 1935, a pocket edition in 1948, and the O.T. is in course of preparation uninterrupted by the death of Lattey in 1945. The Westminster Version is not, however, an official Roman Catholic work, but is independent. A new Latin Psalter has been printed in 1945, which is not a revision of Jerome’s work, but a new translation from the Hebrew, carried out by Papal commission and permitted for use in the services of the church.
These activities in the R.C. Church are not confined to these editions, but a greater and deeper interest in the Bible is apparent both on the other side of the Atlantic and in this country.
Individual Versions
There is little difficulty in deciding upon the name, of all the individual translators of the Bible in the twentieth century, that is best known. Professor Jas. Moffatt produced his version of the N.T. in 1913, and after an interval of years followed it with the O.T. version in 1924, and a one volume edition of the whole Bible in 1928, known as “A New Translation of the Bible.” In his Preface to the O.T. Dr. Moffatt says that his aim is to “present the books of the O.T. in intelligible and effective English,” and in this task calls in the aid of “modern research.” Moffatt’s higher critical tendencies come out in the very first verse of Genesis which begins ‘This is the story of how the universe was formed,’ which on a closer look is seen to be transferred from chapter ii: verse 4. The translation of this verse is loose and careless, the clear reference to ‘creation’ by rendering the word ‘formed’ avoids the doctrine of God’s creation of the world out of nothing. Dr. W. L. Baxter in his pamphlet “The Bible’s First Verse: Moses? or Moffatt?” severely criticises Moffatt for this change in the normal order of Genesis. Dr. Baxter was already well known for his unanswerable exposure of German rationalism in “Sanctuary and Sacrifice—A Reply to Wellhausen.” Moffatt applies higher critical theories to the authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament, indicating the different sources by a change in the printed type; whole chapters are moved out of their rightful place with no hint of the disturbance to the text; words of uncertain meaning are nevertheless given positive renderings as though correct, as “sacred lots” takes the place of “Urim and Thummim.” Moffatt asserts that he does not like ‘gaps’ in the text, and where the choice may be made, prefers to fill up the empty space with a ‘guess.’ This careless treatment of the word of God is characteristic of the whole of the O.T. Such words as “barge” for “Noah’s Ark,” and “the girls are in love with you” for “therefore do the virgins love thee” of the A.V. in Song of Solomon, chapter i: v.3, are by now familiar and degrade by their colloquialisms the Word of God.
Moffatt devoted most of his life to the study of the New Testament as Professor of Church History, and might not be expected to find himself too much at home in the O.T. His treatment of the N.T. shows no improvement on the careless and inconsistent translations of the Old. Dr Oswald T. Allis has examined Moffatt’s work to determine the merits of the N.T. in those quotations in the N.T. taken from the O.T. on which as far as concerns the question of their purity there can be no doubt, since both the Massoretic Text and the Septuagint are in agreement, and concludes that Moffatt shows “a lofty disregard of the high claims of scripture.” Dr. Allis goes on to say, “He is a law unto himself. A hundred years ago, even fifty years, such a translation as Dr. Moffatt’s would have aroused a storm of protest. How it will be received today is not yet clear. One thing is certain. If the generations that are gone had permitted themselves the same liberties with the Scriptures which Dr. Moffatt and other critics are taking today, there would now be no Old Testament, no Bible to which to appeal.” This verdict, we believe, better days will substantiate.
Mention may be made of two translations which have come from the American press and have gained a good deal of popular favour. An American scholar, Dr. Edgar J. Goodspeed of Chicago produced a translation of the N.T. in 1923, aimed at reaching the American public to whom the A.V. though familiar in England and Scotland might be strange. Dr. Goodspeed, being an eminent papyrologist, made use of the most recent results in N.T. studies to cast light upon the Greek N.T. vocabulary. A companion volume of the O.T. under the editorship of Dr. J. M. Powis Smith and a translation of the apocrypha by Dr. Goodspeed in 1938 were added to complete the American Bible. The underlying text of the N.T. is that of Westcott and Hort. The forms of address to the Most High are modernised, but the whole work, though uneven in style since more than one hand was at work in its preparation, is yet without any harsh American expressions, and is pleasant to read. Some passages are rather free as when of the virgin Mary it is said, that she was ‘about to become a mother under the influence of the Holy Spirit.’
There issued also from the American press in 1907 the ‘Modern Reader’s Bible,’ by Richard G. Moulton, a Chicago University Professor, based on the English Revised Version. Though not strictly a modern translation, Moulton’s Bible was intended as an aid to the study of the Bible, giving marginal readings and accompanied by introductions. His work was printed in 21 separate publications, before being gathered together into a single volume. The Bible is regarded as literature and in form is printed like any ordinary book in which the arrangement of chapters and verses of the A.V. has been changed, on the ground that much of the literary beauty and meaning of the Bible is lost. This freedom in the treatment of the Bible appears also in the selection and omission of parts of the O.T. according to the value set upon them by the editor. Some of the prophetic passages of Daniel, the narrative of the fish in Jonah are given sceptical handling, and doubt cast upon Christ’s reference to this incident in the N.T. as though to show that they are not the words of Christ, showing that Dr. Moulton is not free from the critical views of modernists. To give them better and more connected literary form some of the Psalms, such as Psalm xlv and xlvi are rearranged. Moulton’s Reader’s Bible is not a safe or reliable guide, however great may be Dr. Moulton’s gifts of interpretation, which have been applied with much better success to the works of Shakespeare.
One of the most popular translations to appear this century is the work of a London schoolmaster, Dr. R. F. Weymouth, whose New Testament in Modern Speech was printed in 1902 and was made from the translator’s own Resultant Greek Testament, prepared from the best critical editions of the Greek. Dr. Weymouth paid special attention to the correct and exact translation of the tenses of the Greek verb. An American edition was prepared in 1943 revised by Dr. J. A. Robertson of Aberdeen. Dr. Weymouth explains the purpose of his Bible as providing ‘a running commentary (not doctrinal) to be used side by side with its elder compeers.’ Its purpose and character follows somewhat the lines of Moulton’s Bible.
On the Roman Catholic side, the translation of the whole Bible by Ronald Knox, the son of a Church of England bishop who went over to Rome, apart from the skill and literary grace with which it is executed, has a special interest. The Roman Catholic hierarchy asked Ronald Knox in 1939 to undertake the translation of the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate into English, and in view of his notable career as a man of letters and brilliant intellect, his work was awaited with deep interest. In 1944 the edition of the N.T. appeared, and in 1945 a final edition but containing few changes from the 1944 edition, was approved, bearing the official imprimature of the R.C. authorities in England. The O.T. was issued in two volumes in 1949, forming 3 volumes in a uniform edition of the English Roman Catholic Bible. An American edition was published in 1944 with the imprimature of Francis, now Cardinal Spellman of New York. Knox’s Version is based on the Clementine Vulgate which is the standard Latin Bible of the R.C. Church. The text of this Latin Version is inferior and corrupt, an instance given by Professor F. F. Bruce points to the words of Acts xvii: v.6, where the Jews of Thessalonica speak of Paul and his companions as “turning the world (orbem) upside down.” The original Vulgate of Jerome has ‘orbem’ for world, but an error crept into the Clementine text in course of transmission, so that it had the reading ‘urbem,’ city. Knox sticks to this obviously corrupt reading, compromising to some extent by the rendering, “the men who have turned the state upside down,” and elsewhere explains that the translator has no power to alter the original. The same credulity appears in his “Belief of Catholics,” where apparently on the authority of his church he is prepared to swallow without question all the absurdities of the papal system. It is interesting also to note that he includes the verse I John v: v.7, ‘The Three Heavenly Witnesses’ in his text of the N.T. and in a note explains that the Greek MSS evidence is weak, but the Old Latin MSS give strong support. The Bible is eminently readable and rivets the attention, but for all its literary quality, Knox’s Bible suffers from the conditions under which it was produced, it is after all the translation of a translation, and gives little real help in determining the correct reading of the original text.
This year another English translation of the Bible has made its appearance, “The New English Bible,” which when completed will be in 3 volumes, of which the New Testament has appeared this year. Some 30 years ago Dr. Geo. Milligan in his Baird Lectures asked the question: Is further Revision necessary? and from his extensive knowledge of the many questions of language, grammar, vocabulary of the New Testament which were still unsettled, gave the answer: The time is not yet. The Revisers in their Introduction to the New Testament of the New English Bible confess that there is no general agreement on any one critical text of the N.T. today, which in itself is an admission that the time is still not ripe for another translation of the Bible.