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LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

Presented to

..Y.ale.. CQlies.e.

New. Haven. Conn,

t'tlj %t autJjot's ffiontpltments.

63, Elm Park Gardens,
London, S.W.

ESSAYS

THE LAIGUAGE8 OF THE BIBLE

BIBLE-TRMSLATIONS.

EOBEET KEEDHAM OUST, ll.d.,
HI
HONORARY GOVERNOR OF BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY, MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF
ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, HONORARY SECRETARY OF ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY.
AUTHOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES OF EAST INDIES, MODERN LANGUAGES
OF AFRICA, LANGUAGES OF OCEANIA, LANGUAGES OF THE
CAUCASUS, LANGUAGES OF THE TURKI BRANCH
OF THE URAL-ALTAIC FAMILV,
LANGUAGES OF AMERICA
(z« Preparation).

LONDON:
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATEENOSTEE EOW.
1890.

HERTFORD :
PRINTED BY STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS.

M^V3Z ?9o C

PREFACE.

A FEW months ago I published Three Lists of Bible-Translations
Actually Accomplished (Elliot Stock, 1890). By itself this book
would be to some dry reading, consisting as it does merely of names
and statistics : to others it would reveal the marvellous story of
the Grace of God poured down in suoh fulness on this generation.
Unquestionably it represents only a skeleton, which I propose in
a series of Essays to clothe with a little flesh : this book is the
first instalment. ' I may not Uve to carry out my plan to its final
completeness : so I publish portions as they are ready.
Eirst comes the consideration of the Languages, iu which the
inspired Books were written, and of the particular vehicle of human
ideas honoured by the use of the Lord of Glory duriug his earthly
Pilgrimage. I approach the subject quite simply, and fearlessly,
as a Linguist, and not as a dogmatic Theologian : i£ wrong in my
views, I shall be glad to be set right by those who are conversant
with linguistic problems ancient and modern. I doubt whether
the early Fathers, who lived several centuries after the Christian
Era, and were divided from the Jewish world of ideas by an abyss
of prejudice, and a narrow view of things in general, were in as
good a position to form a judgment as the men of this generation.
Their utterances also must not be taken literally. "When Jerome
writes, " Sermone Grseco, quo omnis Oriens loquitur," he meant no
more than the expression of a modem writer, "All the world
knows French." Jerome could have known very little of the

languages spoken in Asia and Africa, and must have forgotten the
notice in the Acts of the languages of the strangers assembled in
Jerusalem at the time of the Pentecost-Miracle, if he meant his
words to be taken literally, either for his own epoch, or for that of
our Lord's earthly sojourn.
I propose, if life and health be spared, to pass under review the
different groups of Language-Translations, such as India, Africa,
China, Oceania, North America, the Eussian dominions, etc., etc.,
in the same manner that I have now dealt with the Latin and
French translations. They offer subjects of extreme fascination,
and the story of the translations of the Bible, and the conversions
wrought by these translations has an evidential value all its own.
Did any book ever appear in such a number of translations as this
book ? Did any book ever work such a marvellous effect upon
nations, whether ia the pride of their civilization, or in their un
sophisticated simplicity, as this book ? Nor is its Mission completed.
It goes on like the Sun at mid-day : conquering, and to conquer.
EOBEET NEEDHAM CTJST.
London, Decembek i8, 1890.

CONTENTS.

I. Languages oe the Bible in three Chapters :
1. The Language Spoken by Our Lord and His Apostles 3
2. The Languages oe the Old Testament  18
3. The Languages Spoken and Written by the Evan
gelists, AND THE Writers op the Acts, the Epistles,
AND the Eevelation  26
II. Translations of the Bible in three Chapters :
1. The Translation op the Bible in Ancient and Modern
Times  45
2. Latin Translations op the Bible  61
3. French Translations op the Bible  79

I.
THE LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

Chaptee 1. The Language Spoken .bt Oue Loed and His
Apostles.
Chaptee 2. The Languages of the Old Testament.
Chaptee 3. The Languages Spoken and "Weitten by the
Evangelists, and the Weitees op the Acts,
THE Epistles, and the Eevelation.

CHAPTEE I.— THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BT OUE LOED AND HIS
APOSTLES.
"What was the language spoken by our Lord ? It was supposed
that this question was settled, but in the pages of the Guardian,
February, 1889, it has been re-opened. At the foot of the page '
I notice the leading special treatises on the subject, but proceed to
handle it independently. I regard the question as one of linguistic
science, evidence, and careful analogy, free from all bias of theology,
and excluding anything that is supernatural, or out of the ordinary
current of human affairs. I am a sincere believer in the inspira
tion of the Holy Scriptures, but not in a narrow sense.
In the Gospel of Luke we are told that the superscription on
the Cross was in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew. In the
Gospel of John it is stated that it was written in Hebrew, Latin,
Greek. The expressions are :
'^pafifiaaiv "EXXj^ViKOts Kal 'PiofiaiKoTs ical 'E^paiKoTs.
r^etypa^fievov ''K^paitXTi, 'Pu)/u,atffTi, EWyvitnt.
It is fair to state, that the Eevised Version of the New Testa
ment rejects the words of Luke altogether, so the fact rests on
• I. "The Language employed ty our Lord and His Disciples," by Dr.
Egberts. Second Edition, i86g.
2. Mgr. Clement David, Eoman Catholic Archbishop of Damascus : " La
langue parl6e par Jesus Christ." 1885.
3. "Dialects of Palestine in the Time of Christ," by Ad. Neubauer, of
the Bodleian, Oxford. " Studia Biblioa," 1885.
4. Professor Cheyne. ' The Expositor,' 1889, pp. 238-40.

4

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

the evidence of John alone ; but he was an eye-witness. It
would thus appear that the Hebrew style of writing came first,
then the Eoman, and lastly the Greek. This implies a threefold
form of written characters, as well as of language. It may be
taken as a fact, admitted beyond doubt, that the Hebrew language
had long before been superseded in the mouths of men by the
Aramaic vernacular. The chief priests objected to the wording
of the superscription ; it was Pilate's own order, to which he
adhered. The languages and characters were as follows :
Line i. Aramaic in the square Hebrew character lately intro
duced {eircA 100 B.C.).
,, 2. Latin in the Eoman capital letters, so well known.
,, 3. Greek in the uncial characters represented in the
monumental inscriptions of the period, which are
abundant.
Now, in one of these languages our Lord must have spoken :
possibly, though not probably, in two, Aramaic and Greek ; and
words belonging to the third language, Latin, are reported as
having fallen from His mouth, e.g. "census," "tribute-money,"
etc. ; iDut the real question is betwixt Aramaic, a Semitic language
of Asia, and Greek, an Arian language of European origin, but
spoken extensively by Hellenists in Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Now, a judgment can only be formed on a question of this kind,
the data of which go back to nearly two thousand years, and the
venue of which is in a distant land, by a careful consideration
of certain analogies, aided by a certain experience in linguistic
phenomena. In Great Britain practically there is one para
mount language, spoken by our rulers, the leading educated
classes, and the common people. But there are few countries,
where it is so ; and as a fact, within the islands of Great Britain.
there are four other vernaculars, Welsh, Gaelic, Erse, and French
(the latter in the Channel Islands).
In the Baltic provinces in Europe, Eussian is the dominant
language of the rulers, German is the vernacular of the immigrant
landowners and merchants, but the agriculturists and the indigenous
inhabitants speak Liv of the TJgro-Altaic family. In Algeria in
Africa French is the dominant language of the rulers ; Arabic, a
Semitic language, is not only the language of the immigrant
superior classes, but the religious language ; but the indigenous
inhabitants speak exclusively Kabail or Tuwarik, Hamitic lan
guages. In Asia, in the Central Provinces of British India,
English is the dominant language of the rulers ; the superior
immigrant classes speak Hindi, or Bangali, of the Arian family,
or Teiugu, of the Dravidian family, while the indigenous inhabi
tants speak, according to their particular tribes, Gond, or Khond,
or Maler, of the Dravidian family, or Sontal and Kol, of the
Kolarian group.

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

5

In the Panjab in Northern India, when we conquered it in
1846, I was one of the first British officers employed. An
amnesty was proclaimed for all political offences ; but, if I had
had occasion to try a native for murder or violent crime, and he
was sentenced to death by hanging, had it been necessary or
desirable to do so, I could have placed a superscription over the
gallows in three languages in three different written characters, as
follows :
Line I. English in the Eoman character of the day, the lan
guage of the rulers.
,, 2. Persian in the running Arabic character, the language
at that time of the Judicial Courts, and of all official
correspondence.
,, 3. Hindi in the Nagari character, the language of the
mass of the people, and the only one understood
by them.
And if the offender were a Sikh, and if there were numerous
Sikhs in the neighbourhood, whom it was desirable to awe, a
fourth language would possibly have been added :
Line 4. Sikh or Panjabi in the Gurmukhi character, the language
of the Sikh religionists, and the people of the villages.
Now, all these languages and characters I myself could read and
understand, and give orders in, though in the three latter languages
the orders would have to be engrossed by native writers, embodying
my meaning in their own words, and reading them out to me before
I signed them' with my name in the ordinary English character;
the official seal, in one, two, or three characters, was then stamped
on the paper. This was the ordinary routine, and caused no great
exertion or remarkable knowledge, and we thought nothing of it.
But if in conversation in a good-sized village or small town like
Nazareth (which I have twice visited), with the shopkeepers, or
artisans, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, I had addressed them
in English or Persian, they would have understood nothing ; yet
Persian had been the dominant language of the Panjab, and, until
the arrival of the British, the sole vehicle of literature and corre
spondence for more than seven hundred years, A long residence,
in the midst of a mixed population, such as the one described,
generates a kind of sympathetic intelligence, for one has to talk
down to the level of each particular person : an educated person,
or a villager, who would like to be addressed in patois ; a Hindu
or a Mahometan ; a mountaineer or a leligious devotee. The vocal
chord has to be tuned to be acceptable and intelligible to each ear.
'J"o a chief, who came across the river Indus to visit me, I should
speak Persian ; to my own countrymen and English-speaking clerks,
English ; to the educated people, Hindustani ; to the rough villagers
or mountaineers, their patois ; to the learned priests, pure Hindi.
The population amounts to seventeen millions, and is far more

6 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
enlightened than similar classes in Palestine, either in the present
or past centuries. There are magnificent walled towns, great
wealth of commerce and manufactures, highly developed agri
culture, a constant stream of foreigners passing to and fro, and yet
I repeat that the dominant language of culture, either of the
Mahometan or Christian rulers, was totally unknown to the portion
of the population analogous to the class, out of which our blessed
Lord appeared in the flesh. A Chinese Missionary thus describes
his own linguistic environment : " I have experience of a multi-
" lingual state of things, reading in two forms of written character,
" and two or more distinct styles, speaking in two distinct lan-
" guages, and understanding utterances in four or flve dialects."
It is an extraordinaiy mistake to suppose, that the domination of
foreigners or strangers alters the vernacular of the people ; we can
learn this from the domestic history of Eussia and Austria, in each
of which twenty languages at least are spoken ; and of France and
Great Britain, in each of which flve languages are spoken, in spite
of the overweening influence of French and English literature.
I have brought these considerations conspicuously forward in front
of my argument, so as to prepare my reader for the appreciation of
the arguments to be adduced by writers, who clearly have never
had experience of the phenomena presented.
In all humility I venture to express an opinion on this great
subject. I have carefully examined the works of late writers, such
as Alford, Wordsworth, Westcott, and Farrar. They all seem to
avoid the great difficulty : admitting that our Lord and His twelve
Apostles spoke Aramaic only (for I cannot admit the hypothesis of
their being capable of addressing a multitude in two languages at
pleasure), how did it come about that the records of His life and
teaching have exclusively come down to us in Greek ? It does not
follow that no contemporary records in Aramaic ever existed, and
most probably, or perhaps most certainly, they did exist, but none
have come down to us. Of all other religious teachers, the sages
of the Veda, Buddha, Kabi'r, Baba Nanak, the Jain teachers, Con
fucius and Mahomet, we have their dicta in the words which they
uttered. Bishop Wordsworth sadly records his convictions : "In
" strictness of speech, not one of the Evangelists gives us the exact
"words of Christ: Se conversed in Syro-Chaldaic ;. they wrote in
" Greek." Some go so far as to say that the Greek fails to convey
the entire spirit of the words of the Lord, which can be found only
in the Peshito Syriac, which to the Aramaic was cognate, while
the translation from the Greek was nearly contemporary. My onlv
qualification for intruding on this subject is that, having just
completed a survey of the languages of the world, I have some
familiarity with linguistic phenomena, and for a quarter of a
century in Northern India I conducted important business daily
in three or four languages at the same time.

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. y
It is true that Jerome writes : " Sermone Grseco, quo omnis
Oriens loquitur." My only reply is that Jerome must have made
a mistake. If such had been the case, what possible occasion
could there have been for a Pentecostal miracle, whatever inter
pretation is accepted of that great event ? We know as a positive
fact that all prophets, and teachers, and reformers, and inaugurators
of new religions, have made sole use of the vernacular of the
people whom they addressed, and made this an article of their
faith, and a necessity of their practice. Our missionary experi
ence of modern times convinces us, that the only way to get at
people's hearts is through the vulgar tongue, spoken by the women,
children, and least- educated persons of the community.
Now, if, for argument's sake, we admitted, that our Lord and
His Apostles had acquired a power of speaking Greek, and the
educated men could understand His words, no one, who knows
anything of Oriental women, would dare to say that, such a pheno
menon existed as "bilingual " women, and yet the women were as
deeply converted by our Lord as the men. Then it is clear, that
our Lord possessed the power of writing, as it is recorded that He
stooped down and wrote with His finger on the ground. The
written characters of the Aramaic and Greek languages are essen
tially different, though they have both descended from the old
Phoenician ; but our Lord clearly, indicated the written character,
of which He had cognizance, by the remark, that not one jot or
one tittle of the Law would pass away, which applies accurately
to the square Hebrew alphabet, which was in use at that time,
but not to the uncial letters of the Greek alphabet, used in the
current copies of the Septuagint. These letters exhibit none of
the varieties of shape so common to the Hebrew ; there are
neither vowel-accents nor diacritical points, as any one, who
places a leaf of the Hebrew Old Testament side by side with a
photograph of the Sinaitic, Vatican, or Alexandrine texts, can
satisfy himself.
The strange assertion has been made, that the Greek language
would be adopted willingly by conquered people, because it is so
beautiful and powerful. This idea exposes a strange misconception
of the raison d'Stre of the two thousand forms of speech, mutually
unintelligible, spoken at this moment in the world. It may be
questioned, whether Greek is more beautiful than other languages ;
it is certainly much more complicated by grammatical rules than
English, and the great army of non-Arian languages which, like
English, are free from the bondage of inflections ; yet who would
venture to say that in any village or market-town of the great
, Province of Banaras, which has been under British rule for more
than a century, he would flnd any one, except by a mere chance,
who spoke a word of English, in spite of a free press. State-schools,
missionaries, courts of law, and men of commerce ? The distribution

8. LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
of the Bible and of missionary tracts is exclusively in the vernacular
of each province. English printed matter would be useless.
I must decline to admit in this argument any miracle not re
corded in Scripture. Modern criticism of the ordinary operations
of man can no longer be silenced by the unwarranted assertion of
verbal inspiration. The writers and speakers in the Bible were
not impersonal machines; but, as Paul said at Lystra, "men of
" like passions as their hearers." One clergyman consulted by me
suggested that the power of the two Galilean fishermen, Peter and
John, to write Greek epistles was part of the Pentecostal miracle.
My reply was that that miracle related to the power of uttering
sound with the tongue {r^Xwaaa), not to the power of recording
thoughts on writing materials with the fingers {SaicTvXoc). It
appears to me that all the phenomena incidental to the purely
human contingencies of the human art of writing must be expected,
as each step is purely human, the outcome of the effort of man,
under the influence, indeed, of spiritual aspirations in the same way
as men and women are influenced now. The Holy Spirit speaks
to our hearts, not to our tongues and hands.
y I wish to clear away some misconceptions which seem to make
a difficult subject more difficult. It is a mistake to suppose that
the Eoman soldiers in sueh provinces as Syria were " Eomans of
Italy " in the strict sense, any more than the Sepoys of the army
in British India are Britons. There is, however, a fair presumption
that Cornelius, the first Gentile convert, was an Italian, as he
dwelt in Csesarea, which was simply a Eoman fortress on the sea
shore, as its ruins testify to this day :' his band or Eegiment is
called the Italian, and there can be little doubt that like Gibraltar
this fortress was occupied by a force composed of soldiers of the
Euling Nation ; and we have to ponder by what means Peter com
municated with him, and in what language. A captain of the
Queen's army knows as little of Persian and Hindustani as Cornelius
presumably did of Greek and Aramaic. We have to imagine an
Indian or Chinese catechist trying to communicate ideas on the
most solemn subject to British officers stationed at Hong Kong or
Calcutta. Our Lord is reported to have uttered a certain number
of Aramaic words, and, in fact; no less than twenty-nine words, or
brief sentences, of Semitic origin are found in the New Testament,
and even in the Eevelation the words " Hallelu Jah " are retained.
The retention of these words may be quoted both for and against
the Greek language theory. Some maintain that they were the
words of the ordinary language of our Lord ; and others, with great
show of justice, urge that they were quoted because they were
exceptional. It is impossible to say why some of our Lord's
utterances are given in Aramaic, and some in Greek : infenious
suggestions have been made, but none are satisfactory : even in His
last moments on the Cross we might have expected that the words

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,

9

to John and His Mother would have been reported at least by
John in the very words, and that the last words, "it is finished,"
would have been recorded as they were uttered : but such is not
the case. Again, on one hand Paul says distinctly that our
Lord spoke to him on the road to Damascus in the Hebrew lan
guage ; on the other hand, John heard Him in the Vision of
the Eevelation calling Himself Alpha and Omega, which apply
solely to the Greek language, although the phrase "Aleph to
Thau " appears in Hebrew books as a proverbial expression for the
" First and the Last."
To both the Apostles was manifested a vision of the Eisen
. Saviour. A Divine Voice was heard by them alone, and the human
rendering of that voice was impressed on their perception in the
language, with which they were at the time familiar. To take
the analogy of dreams, how often we hear friends speaking other
languages than our own, and ourselves replying in them, if we are
in the habit of using those languages in our waking hours. As
time went on, the legends at Eome pretended, that our Lord
appeared to Peter and addressed him in Latin. The humble
Christian may indeed believe, that the Holy Spirit speaks to each
believer in words that are comprehended, but only clothed in human
vocables, when their purport is recounted as an experience to others.
The Spirit speaks to the heart of each one of us, but we should
hardly presume to say that the words of the Spirit were English.
We know as a fact, that no Palestinian Jew during the existence
of the second Temple produced a book in the Greek language.
The original of such of the Apocryphal books as were written in
Palestine was not in Greek. Aramaic translations of the Old
Testament, or Targams, were used in Palestine. Josephus remarks,
that the things told by the Jews, who surrendered in the siege of
Jerusalem, only he understood. Many knew Greek in the Eoman
Camp, but the Jews spoke Aramaic. St. Paul no doubt could
speak Greek, but the captain of the guard of the Temple was
surprised, that he was able to do so, because he took him for an
Egyptian. Now, an Egyptian was just as open to Hellenic infiu-
ence as a Syrian or a Cilician, upon the theory that the conquest
of Alexander and the rule of his successors had altered the ver
nacular of the provinces of Western Asia ; but Paul is described
as addressing the Sanhedrin in Aramaic {iv 'EfipaiSi ScaXeKTw), and
these were not the Jews of the villages, but of the capital city,
the very classes who, if any parties of the community understood
Greek, could have understood it. Moreover, when they heard that
he spoke in the Hebrew, i.e. Aramaic, tongue, they maintained
greater quiet: this implies two facts: (1) that they could have
understood Greek, if Paul had spoken in that tongue ; (2) that
their proper and national language was Aramaic, and they pre
ferred it. If the introduction of military garrisons into a country

10 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
leads to an alteration of the vernacular, Latin influence ought
to have been felt, which is not pretended. In fact, the Jews of
Palestine had in them a religious element, which made the retention
of their language a necessity, a pride, and a Palladium. Syria
may possibly have been Hellenized and Arianized, and Egypt no
doubt felt the influence also ; but Judea resisted the process to the
last, and Jerusalem perished as the centre of a Hebrew polity, and
speaking a Semitic language. If under the rule of the Antiochi
there had been any taint of Hellenism, the revolt of the Maccabees
would have effaced it. The legends on coins do not go far as
evidence to prove a vernacular, as the rupee of British India has
an English superscription totally unintelligible to the people who use
the coin. The names of places, if of great antiquity, give valuable
traces of extinct languages, but modern names of places are of
doubtful value. In Palestine, Csesarea, Dekapolis, or Tiberias^ tell
the tale of foreign conquest, just as Alexandria in Egypt, and
Victoria all over the world, Abbotabad, Canningtown and Barrack-
pur in British India; but they have not the faintest evidential
value of the language spoken by the residents of these towns or
districts. When however we are told by St. Luke (Acts i. ig)
that the people of Jerusalem called the Potter's fleld in their proper
tongue " Hakal dama," " Aceldama," we learn two facts, (i) that
the people spoke Aramaic, (2) that he did not, for he translates it
into Greek.
There was, indeed, a large section of the Jewish nation, who
were Hellenized and knew the Greek language, and adopted some
of the Greek customs, and there may have been a Judeo-Greek
colony in Jerusalem. But the majority of the Hellenists lived
in foreign lands, coming to Judea from time to time for the feasts.
The translation known as the Septuagint had done a great work
in extending a knowledge of the great tenets of Judaism to the
heathen world. But it had done something more. It had
appropriated the Greek language for the expression of Hebrew
thought, adapting the most exact machinery of word-formation
to the most spiritual mode of conception. Something of the same
kind has been done for the stored-up intellectual wealth of the
Hindu by the touch of the English language. The position of
Palestine geographically was most remarkable. It was just at
the point, where the Semitic world of Asia, the Hamitic world
of Africa, and the so-called Arian world of Europe, came into
contact. The coasts of Asia Minor and North Africa were fringed
with Greek colonies, and the Archipelago was studded with them.
Some of the Gods of the Greek Idea had sprung from these islands.
Greece had to thank Phcenicia for its alphabet, the same that was
used hy the Hebrews from its earliest days. But admitting all
this rapprochem.ent between the two races, there is. no more reason
to suppose, that the villagers of Samaria and Galilee spoke Greek

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. II
than that the inhabitants of the Greek islands, in which clusters of
Jews had settled, spoke Aramaic. Our Lord's parables, illustra
tions, and eschatological conceptions, were thoroughly Hebrew and
Asiatic. His human knowledge did not extend beyond His native
Province. As regards the Septuagint, there is reason to believe,
that it was unknown iu Palestine except to scholars and Hellenist
settlers, and it does not follow, because the Evangelists in their
record of the events of our Lord's life more or less accurately
quote the Septuagint, that our Lord Himself quoted it. More
over, all the quotations in the Gospel may probably have been
quoted from traditional (possibly written, possibly unwritten)
Targams, current at the time, the translation of which into
Greek by the Evangelists has caused the literal divergence of
expression. ,
How came it, then, that from the very earliest days this Semitic
religion, orally pronounced in Aramaic, has come down to us,
without any exception, entirely in Greek documents ? The
reason is, simply, that it was the Divine will, that it should
spread westward to the people of Europe, and be thence handed
on to the rest of the World. The early Church was essentially a
Greek Church ; all the early Fathers wrote in Greek. Imperial
Eome was in some respects a Greek city, and Greek was^ the
alternative language; the poorer classes, the "illuvies gentium,"
the " Grseculus esuriens," were Greeks in descent, culture, and
speech. It might have been different : Paul of Tarsus was the ''
selected agent to guide the spread of the new Idea ; had he. been a
Syrian of Edessa, or a Mesopotamian of Babylon, or an Elamite
from Susa, or a Mede from Ekbatana, or a Parthian from the
Caspian (and all these nations were represented on the day of
Pentecost), the Light to lighten the Gentiles, that sprang up in
Galilee, might have flashed eastward, and the good tidings have
remained in an Asiatic mould and language. The Jews had had
constant relations in past centuries with Assyria, and Babylonia,
and Persia, all of which were mentioned in their sacred books,
but little or nothing with Greece and Italy. But Saul of Tarsus, x
a Koman citizen, a Greek scholar, a Hellenized Jew, was the
chosen vessel to bear the Lord's name before the Gentiles; he
called himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews on account of his zeal
for the law, but there was a great gulf between him and the
Hebrews of Jerusalem, sueh as James and Jude. Nobody, who
studies the Epistles, can doubt this ; and his great personality and
gifts, and his environment, settled once for all, that Jesus should be
known as " Christ," not as " Messiah," and His followers not
as "Messihi," but " Christians." One of the leading features of
the new tenets was, that they were to be understood by the people,
that the poor should haven the Gospel preached. This necessity
led to the Greek language being the fir.st vehicle of communication,

12 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
to be followed speedily by the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Gothic,
Abyssinian, and eventually by every language of the World.
Two linguistic considerations suggest themselves here : one is
the singular mode, in which two at least of the sacred terms of
the Jewish religion are Grecized, instead of being reserved in their
Semitic form, as so many words, or even phrases, have been, e.g.
Hallelujah and Pascha. I allude to the word , k//3iutos, used for
the Ark of the Covenant in the Eevelation, and the word irepi-rofur^
and a.Kpo^'vati.a for circumcision and the contrary. By Mahometans
this old-world custom, so offensive to modem notions, is veiled by
the euphemism of "sunnat" and " bi-sunnat," which means no
more than a religious ceremony. The second consideration is, that
it seems to persons unaccustomed to such phenomena impossible,
that the Heads of a Church should persistently address the laity
(women and men) in a language, which they cannot possibly
understand, till explained to them in the vernacular by the
priests. And yet such is the practice to this day of the Church
of Eome, and in 1888 a Latin letter, forbidding boycotting, was
read in the Eoman Catholic chapels in Ireland. One of the chief
arguments brought' forward to prove that the humbler clas§es of
Palestine spoke and understood Greek, is that the Gospels and
Epistles are in Greek. We can only suppose that the Epistle
of St. Paul to the Galatians, who spoke a Keltic language, and
not Greek, was translated to the humbler members of the Church,
in the same way as the Keltic Irish were made to understand the
Pope's Latin epistle.
Another argument brought forward to support the theory of our
Lord and His hearers using the Greek language is based on the
fact, that so many conversations are given, as well as 'addresses,
which appear to be fresh, and not translations. In the history of
Thucydides nothing is so remarkable as the set speeches, which he
places in the mouths of his characters ; no one could charge him
as a dishonest fabricator. But these speeches are, in fact, as regards
form, his own essays based on the rules of rhetoric of his age, and
as regards matter they are so far dramatic, that the sentiments are
such as he conceived to be suitable to the supposed speaker, and
his readers have in all times accepted this as such. Be it far from
me to assert, that the writers of the Old and New Testament took
such a license as this, but it is the custom of the East to write in
the ordinary familiar style, as if they were speaking; the lower
classes in Europe do the same to this day. Educated people use
the vhlique sentence to express what they see or hear, but Orientals
repeat a conversation, as if they were standing behind the curtain,
or sitting at a shorthand reporter's table. We are told what
Abraham said to Isaac, when they were quite alone, and the
very words of Abraham's conversation with the Creator are
recorded. We are told what Herod said in his private chamber

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

13

and the remarks of other persons about John the Baptist having
come to life. The conversation of evil spirits is given totidem
verbis. This is only the style of writing of the nation and the
age. The truthfulness of the narrative is not impugned, but
the ordinary inference as regards the particular language used
cannot be inferred. When King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Baby
lonia, and King Darius, a Mede, spoke to Daniel, though the
very words uttered by them are repeated in Hebrew,' as if the
reporter had heard them, it must not be presumed that these two
Kings spoke the Hebrew language. When our Lord conversed
with the Syro-Phoenician woman or the ten lepers, or the maniac
in the country of the Gadarenes, it is unreasonable to argue that
He spoke Greek, because hond-fide Greek sentences are placed in
His mouth by the compiler of the Gospel.
Let us approach with reverence the account of our Lord's
temptation : there was no human witness to the interview of
our Lord with Satan : it is noteworthy that at least one-half of
the words uttered were quotations from the Old Testament : it
must be presumed that our Lord informed His Apostles of what
had happened : Matthew, who alone records the utterances of our
Lord and of Satan, was not at the time an Apostle : he was not called
till some time after. Are we to believe that our Lord and Satan
quoted the Septuagint, or the inspired Hebrew text ? Can we
believe that they spoke Greek ?
The Aramaic language has been alluded to ; the question naturally >
arisen. What is that language ? It is sometimes called Judeo-
Aramean, in contradistinction to the Syriac or Christian Aramean.
There were three dialects in the time of our Lord : i , Judaean ;
2, Samaritan; 3, Galilean ; the peculiarities of the latter betrayed
the country to which Peter belonged. It was different from, yet
cognate with, Hebrew. It is sometimes called Syro-Chaldaic,
indicating that it was the vernacular of the region on both sides
of, the Euphrates, from Lebanon to the river Tigris. East Aramaic
would be Chaldaic, and west Aramaic would be Syriac. It is
stated by one scholar, and a very competent one, that another
vernacular- was also concurrently used, a modernized Hebrew,
specimens of which we flnd in the Mishnah, and the Hebrew parts
of the Talmud and Midrashim. In one or other of these variations
of speech the Hebrew nation spoke after their return from captivity.
There were, moreover, written Targams of parts of the Old Testa
ment in this vernacular, from which in all probability our Lord
quoted, and this may account for the diversity in the renderings.
His quotation from Psalm xxii. on the Cross has been preserved.
The reading of the sacred text was necessarily accompanied ,by
a vernacular paraphrase, oral indeed, but cast in a conventional
mould handed down from father to son. The- introduction of such
paraphrases dates as far back as the time of Ezra, and there is

H

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

reason to believe, that written translations existed as early as the
first century before Christ. When our Lord, in the synagogue at
Nazareth, read the verses from Isaiah, he probably used such a
translation. It may have been possible that our Lord and His
Apostles read the text in Hebrew, and then explained, but it
is more probable that he used an Aramaic Targam. The written
character . used may, upon independent palaeographical grounds,
be safely determined as the square Hebrew character, called
"Hebrew," which had about one century before Christ super
seded the old Phoenician character, specimens of which last
survive in stone monuments, and the pages of the Samaritan
Pentateuch. I add a few lines on the subject of these Targams :
In Nehemiah viii. 8, we flnd, " So they read in the book
" in the Law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused
" them to understand the meaning." The Speaker's Commentary
says timidly : " either by rendering the Hebrew into the Aramaic
" language, or perhaps simply by explaining obscure words or

Emanuel Deutsch writes with justice : " There was one thing
" wanting to Ezra, when he tried to found a lasting Commonwealth
" on the ruins of Zion, which neither authority, nor piety, nor
" School, nor Synagogue, could restore to its original power and glory,
' The Hebrew Language.'
" So it became necessary to translate the National Books, in order
" that the Nation, from whose midst they had sprung, might be
" able to understand them : if for the Jews in Alexandria a Greek
" translation was required, an Aramaic Targam was required for
" those in Judea. To Ezra himself is traced the custom of adding
" translations to the Aramaic on the occasion of the weekly readings
" of the Scriptures in the Synagogue. Those, who came back from
" exile, brought the Aramaic with them, with which they had be-
" come familiar in Babylon : all the decrees issued by the Kings
" of Persia, quoted in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, must have
" been either in Persian, or Aramaic : to the translation was added
" an explanation, and both were included in the word Targam."
One thing is clear, that the common folk, who had been born in
Babylon, were entirely and grossly ignorant of the Law at the time
of their return from the Captivity ; and of the language of the Law.
Deutsch further states : "If the common people had thus
"gradually lost all knowledge of the language, in which were
" written the books to be read to them, it naturally followed (in
" order that they might understand them) that recourse must be had
" to a translation into the language, with which they were familiar,
" the Aramaic."

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 1 5
A translation could not in all cases suffice, so it was necessary to
add an explanation of the difficult and obscure passages. Both Trans
lation and Explanation were designated by the term "Targam,"
and there sprang up a guild, whose special office was to act as
translators or interpreters or both : they were called Metargamin.
The Talmud prescribed that this official was not to use a written
Targam, but to deliver his translation vivA voce, that it might
appear that he was reading out of the Torah itself, and that the
Scripture might be responsible for what were his dicta.
The word Targam still survives in Persia and India as the well-
known "Tarjama" or translation, and the word Metargamin also
survives in the well-known " Dragoman " of the East.
Those who are hardy enough to assert that because the text of
the Synoptic Gospels is in Greek, therefore all the actors of the
events recorded therein must have spoken Greek, either solely
or bilingually, and that all the utterances of our Lord are
recorded with the accuracy of ipsissima verba, had better reflect
to what conclusions that theory would lead them, if applied to
the Old Testament narrative. We are so habituated to use the
Bible in the English translation, that we sometimes forget, and
still oftener have failed to realize, that both the Old and New
Testament texts, in the form in which they have come down to us,
comprise narratives of conversations, which took place in totally
different languages : for instance, the words uttered by Potiphar's
wife, by the Chief Butler when he addressed Pharaoh, by Balaam
and Balak, and by the Queen of Sheba. It is obvious, that none
of these Scripture-personages could have spoken in Hebrew, and
yet the uninstructed reader might suppose, that it was so, as the
very words, which they are supposed to have uttered, are recorded,
as if they had been written down by a bystander.
It must be admitted, that we are at a disadvantage. The last
verse of John presses home the fact, which can be proved by
careful comparison of the four Gospels, that during twelve-thirteenths
of the Ministry His words and deeds are not recorded ; and, when
the question of the language which he spoke from his tender years
up to his death, is discussed, we feel a great want of evidence.
He began His Ministry at the age of 30, and it lasted at the most
four years. It will scarcely be asserted, that when at the age
of twelve he sat in the midst of the Doctors in the Temple,
hearing, and asking questions. He spoke Greek. No other event
is recorded till he began His Ministry. We hardly realize how
little of the story of our Lord in these four years we know :
about 15 months includes the whole period traversed by the
Synoptists. All the Evangelists are sometimes very diffuse, writing
every detail like Newspaper-Eeporters, but they leave long periods
totally unnoticed. The day in the com-fleld, Matt. xii. i , occupies
one-tenth of that Gospel : the Sermon on the Mount one-eighth :

1 6 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
a day in the Temple, Matt, xviii. occupies one-fifth : and the day
of the blighted fig-tree occupies one-seventh of Mark's Gospel.
In Luke xx. five days occupy one-fourth of the Gospel. In the
Gospel of John this feature is still more marked; Chapters xiv. to
xvii. occupy a few hours only of the Ministry.
The linguistic history of the Old Testament is a study of extreme
fascination. We have nothing to compare with it in the World. I
shall discuss it in a separate chapter, as it has an important bearing
on the question of the language of the New Testament, for the
Aramaic spoken by our Lord was, if not the same, at least a
similar form of speech to that which was spoken by the " Syrian
(Arami)," who, 1921 years earlier, had crossed the Euphrates,
and " who rejoiced to see His day." It died away from the
lips of men when Jerusalem fell, foi: the Nation, who spoke it,
had completed the task which it was given to do two thousand
years before.
This, then, is the language in which, in the opinion of the most
judicious scholars and sound theologians, words were uttered by
Him who spake as no man spake, words which turned the world
upside down, closing the long catena of past expectations, opening
out the vista of a heavenly future. With the exception of the few
words scattered through the Gospels, or in the Epistles and the
Eevelation, above alluded to, no word has come down to us in
that particular variety of Semitic speech. We can approach to
it in reading the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has survived, and
the Mishnah and Midrashim ; but for some Divine purpose this
language, in which the new Idea was given birth to, has, like
the phoenix, utterly perished, while the lives of so many other
languages have been prolonged : the Greek, Arabic, and Persian,
to be the vehicles of modern thought, and the Syriac, Coptic,
Armenian, and Ethiopic, to be the earthen vessels of dead rituals,
though of great value in the infancy of the new Faith. The
Hebrew language, indeed, died, leaving the one imperishable
evidence of its existence in the Old Testament; at the best it
was but an inferior vehicle of speech. A kind of survival of it
exists in the Judeo-German and Judeo-Spanish jargons, in which
the basis of the language is Arian with Hebrew phrases inserted.
It is fortunate for the World that Greek was chosen for the task
allotted to it, for as a written language it can never die, and as a
vernacular it seems to be receiving new strength, for I heard it
spoken at Athens in a style approaching its ancient purity.
No language has had such a history. If any one asks. What is
the Aramaic language ? let him be told, that it is the language, in
which the Lord of Life made known to man the way of Salvation ;
in which He gave us our daily prayer ; in which He instituted the
Lord's Supper, and with His Apostles sang a hymn (the Hallel
from a Targam) before He went down to Grethseman6; it is the

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

17

language in which some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shouted
" Hosannah ! " and others "Crucify Him!" in which He spoke
to His Mother and the women who met Him in the Via Dolorosa;
in which He spoke His last word to His Mother and John, while
hanging on the Cross; in which He spoke to the women who
came early to His sepulchre on Easter-morn ; in which He ex
pounded to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus all the
Scriptures concerning Himself, beginning at Moses and all the
prophets ; in which He gave His last commands on Mount
Olivet ; in which He spoke to Paul after His Ascension ; in which,
as we read in the Eevelation, on the sea of glass is sung the song
of Moses and the Lamb.
List of Aeamaic Words, which ocoue in the New Testament
IN a Geeek Fokm.

1.

<iapiaa.-to'S.

17.

appa.

2.

SaTctj/a-s.

18.

GtKepa.

3.

'^fthhovKo.co'^.

19.

K.rj<j)a-s.

4.

paKa.

20.

Meo-ffi'a-s.

5.

r^eevva.

21.

jBf^Oeuha.

6.

fiafifitcva.

22.

"AxeX Safia.

7.

BeeX-^e/BovX.

23.

TafiiOd.

8.

Q/ravvd.

24.

A^abhtijv.

9.

pappl.

25.

'Ap-fiarjeSwv. 'HXl 'Ha,( Xafia aaj3a')(0avl.

10.

7raG')(a,

26.

11.

r^oX^oOa.

Or 'Wkuii, etc.

12.

'Boavepf^i<3.

27.

^aXiOa KOufiL.

13.

Koppav.

28.

'AXXtjXoii-'ba.

14.

KopPavav,

29.

Mapav-aOa.

15.

€.(p(l)a9a.

30.

AfiTjy.

16.

pa^povvi*

31.

r^d^/SaOa.

Add to these proper names.

specially those compounded of the

ard " bar," or son.

List of some op the Latin Woeds which, occue in the New
Testament in a Geeek Foem.

Sicarius.
Preetorium.Membrana. Census,CsBsar.
Augustus. Christianus.Colonia.
Niger.

Gaza.
Libertinus. Sudarium.
Legio. Speculator.Custodium.
Paulus.Marcus.

Titus.
Aquila.Priscilla. Cornelius.
Festus.Pontius Pilatus.
Felix.Denarius. 2

1 8 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

CHAPTER II.— THE LANGUAGES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
Before discussing the languages written by the Apostles a,nd the
Evangelists, which will form Chapter III. of this series, it will help
the reader, desirous to obtain a full grasp of the subject, if we cast
a glance back on the annals of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages,
and mark the contact, which Abraham and his descendants had
with individuals and nations speaking other languages. It is one
of the most remarkable evidences of the absolute truthfulness and
genuineness of the Old Testament Eecord, that no modern philo
logical or palaeographical discovery shakes the credibility of the
record," if erroneous conceptions, based upon imperfect knowledge
of linguistic phenomena, are removed, and the subject is regarded
in the same spirit, and from the same point of view, that other
records of antiquity are examined. The reader must bear in mind
that I write, not as a theologian (for which I have no capacity),
but as a linguist. I accept, as an undoubted fact, the inspiration
of the contents of the books of the Old Testament, but my remarks
apply solely to the linguistic vehicle of words and sentences, and
forms of written character.
A Syrian (Abraham), 1921 b.c, crossed from Mesopotamia into
the land of Canaan. He spoke Aramaic ; he came into contact
with kindred Semitic tribes, who inhabited the land. He was
aged seventy, and not likely to change his language ; he was
accompanied by his wife Sara and his brother's son, and the large
number of upwards of 300 purchased, or home-bred, slaves. He
went down into Egypt, at that time ruled over by a powerful
dynasty, and the existing documents of stone and papyri certify,
that the language was totally different from Hebrew or Aramaic,
being Hamitic. Pharaoh is described as conversing with Abraham,
presumably through interpreters, unless this Pharaoh was one of
the Hyksos Dynasty, who are presumed to have been Semites ; the
words of the conversation are given in Hebrew. Canaan was,
invaded by Chederlaomer, who spoke a totally different and Altaic
language ; but no conversations are recorded. In Melchisedek we
have a Semite beyond doubt, as, if any one wished to express the
idea of a King of Eighteousness, he would use those very words
to this day in Arabia, Persia, and India. The King of Sodom
conversed with Abraham ; we may presume that he also was a
Semite. Hagar was an Egyptian girl, who had probably accom
panied Sara from Egypt, and adopted the language of her mistress,
but her son Ishmael married an Egyptian, and used some early
form of the Arabic language, which his descendants speak to this
day. Eebecca came to Isaac from Aram, speaking the language of
her. country. Their son Jacob, at the age of seventy-seven, went
across the Euphrates, and married four Aramean wives, and his
father-in-law and he himself are described as " the Syrian."

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

19

The language had even then differentiated, for when Jacob and
Laban raised a heap of stones, Laban called it Jegar-^aAadiitha,
and Jacob " Galid." The word used by Laban for "witness" is
still used in a kindred form in Persia, and India, and Arabia,
" shahid," as a " witness and a martyr to the faith." The whole
of Jacob's large family must have spoken the language of their
respective mothers, when they returned to Canaan, and with the /
exception of Joseph they must have found wives among the people /
of the land. The Hebrew language thus began to form itself.
The Ishmaelites from Gilead, to whom the sons of Jacob sold
Joseph, were, if descendants of Ishmael, their own first cousins.
They are called also Midianites, but if descendants of Ketura,
they stood in the same relationship, and probably spoke mutually
intelligible languages. But Joseph, when he arrived in Egypt, had
to learn an entirely new language, and he did so, for it is par
ticularly mentioned, that he spoke to his brethren through an
interpreter. He had married an Egyptian wife, and his children
were certainly bilingual. The descendants of Jacob dwelt a long
time in Egypt, and during that period, free from all Aramaic
infiuenoes, and singularly free from Egyptian taint, the Hebrew
language acquired the form, which is known to us. Still, they
must have acquired some knowledge of Egyptian, as at any rate
they could understand the orders of their taskmasters, and they
were able to borrow gold and silver and raiment from their
Egyptian neighbours.
It is admitted that we are left in the utmost uncertainty on this
subject, and in the absence of documents must resign ourselves to
give up all hopes of ever arriving at more than vague theories as
to the origin of the Hebrew language : it is noteworthy that the
language is never called in the Old Testament " Ibri," but the
language of " Canaan," and " Jehudiah " or " Jew," in contra
diction to Aramaic. Upon the above facts it came into existence
"in Egypt before 1500 B.C., and died in Babylon one thousand
years later.
Moses was brought up in Pharaoh's daughter's house, as her
son, and an Egyptian. He was learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians ; if he had picked up Hebrew from his nurse, it was his
second, or alternative, language. At the age of forty he fled to
Arabia, and was introduced to Jethro, as an Egyptian, probably
from the style of his dress, or his 'language. He spent forty years in
the desert, speaking the language of the Midianites. The Kenites
were a band of people of Midian, and therefore descendants of
Abraham, and spoke probably a Semitic language, but we know
not what it was ; Moses was able to understand them. At the age
of eighty he led the Hebrews out of Egypt, 1491 b.c, and, for the
first time in his life, lived in familiar intercourse with his relations,
using the Hebrew language. Forty years more he spent in the

20 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
desert in their midst, having his wife and her relatives with him : his
children must have been bilingual, while he himself was trilingual.
In his old age he married a Cushite (Ethiopian)^ woman, who must
have spoken a Hamitic language, akin to Egyptian. A few words,
and some proper names, in Exodus record his knowledge of the
Egyptian language. But he was chosen to be the historian of his
people, and must have collected the traditions, and teledoth, of his
ancestors from the graybeards and recorded them in the language
then used by the Hebrew people. The grave question now arises.
What written character did he use ? The Hieroglyphic and Hieratic
characters were both in existence, and must have been known
to Moses, who was a learned man ; on the other hand, no allusion to
the art of writing occurs in the Book of Genesis. In Exodus xxxiii.
32, occtir the words : " Blot me out of thy book which thou hast
written." This incidental expression implies that Moses could write,
that he knew what a book was, and that the art of writing was so
too, familiar, that the phrase could be used allegorically. We find
the consonants KTB applied to the writing then, and they have
the same meaning in Arabia, Persia, and India to this day. The
oldest surviving, or at least discovered, record of the Phoenician
alphabet, which was the one used by the Hebrews, dates 500 b.c,
or 600 after the Exodus. There is little doubt, that the
PhoBuicians derived their famous alphabet, the mother of all the
alphabets in the world, from the Hieratic ideograms of Egypt;
but with our present limited information we cannot explain,
how Moses, with his antecedents of forty years in Egypt, and forty
in the desert, became acquainted with it. No document of stone
or p;ipyri, so abundant in Egypt, has survived, or at least
has been found as evidence. It is most unfortunate, that,
while the surrounding nations, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, the
Moabites, the Phcenicians, and the Hittites, have all left stone in
scriptions, the Hebrews were at no period of their hi.story a monu
mental people. It need scarcely be said, that all manuscripts have
perished : the oldest Hebrew MS. in existence is not earlier than
800 A.D. Still, in this age of wonderful discoveries, we may
anticipate the production of earlier stone-monuments, and must
hesitate before we arrive at final opinions. Within the last few
years some fragments of pottery have been found in the Fayum
with marks upon them, and which open out a new vista of specula
tion, but nothing is yet certain.
It has often been wondered, how the Hebrew language, from
145 1 B.C., the date of the death of Moses, to 500 b.c, the time of
Ezra, exhibits no material change, such as would be expected in the
lapse of oue thousand years. How diff'erent is the language of the
age of King Alfred from that of Queen Victoria ! It is supposed that,
as time went on, the Hebrew language, as known to us, stiffened
into a written language (an instance of which process we have to

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 21
this day in Latin), while the vernacular underwent gradual
changes from century to century ; at any rate Ezra and Daniel
used both languages. In the Book of Ezra Aramaic commences
chapter iv. verse 8, and ends chapter vi. verse i8. The letter of
Artaxerxes (chapter vii. 12-26) is also in Aramaic. In Daniel
Aramaic commences chapter ii. verse 4, and extends to the end of
chapter vii. The prophet Jeremiah also uses Aramaic forms, and
one verse, chapter x. 1 1, is in that language : some say that it is
a verse of the Aramaic Targam, which has inadvertently been
entered in the text : others imagine that it is a proverb, which the
Prophet writes down as he heard it spoken : the evidential value
is the same under both theories, and amounts to this, that the
people were in a state of linguistic transition.
Emanuel Deutsch remarks that a certain change is noticeable in
the Old Testament, due either to influence of time, or of the
idiosyncrasy of each writer, or to the difference of style of com
position, prose, or poetry : there are important differences between
the earlier and later books of the Old Testament. Certain forms
and words common in the Pentateuch do not appear again until
very late. Words, and forms, in prose, lose their meaning in poetry.
There is a higher style of diction in the time of David and Solomon.
The Assyrian invasion corrupted the purity of the language,
blunted its sense of grammatical nicety, and caused those, who
clung to the ancient style, to introduce dead archaisms.
Eeturning to the time of Moses, to consider the vernacular
spoken, it is clear, that Balaam and Balak could not have been
acquainted with the Hebrew language, and yet the gleaming words
of the former reach us in that vesture. From a linguistic point of
view the Book of Job has no interest, as, admittedly, it is a beau
tiful dramatic poem, such as Milton's Paradise Lost. When the
spies entered Jericho, they were kindly treated, though in secret,
by Eahab : there could have been no interpreter there. Women in y
the East are not often bilingual. The spies had been forty years in '^
the desert, and their ancestors centuries in Egypt ; yet somehow or
other they held familiar communication with a Canaanitish woman.
Soon after the occupation of Canaan, we find a divergence of pro
nunciation betwiit the dwellers on the east side of Jordan, betray
ing the residence of the speaker, in the Shibboleth story. Euth
the Maobitess could hardly have acquired Hebrew, living among
her own people ; it is more probable, that Naomi, who spoke Hebrew
naturally, acquired the Moabite language. In that case, the beauti
ful expression of love to her mother-in-law is only a translation
from Moabite ; but the words are as musical in English, the second
translation, as they are in Hebrew, the first. It is a matter of un
certainty, who the Philistines were, but they could scarcely have
been Semites : they were probably from Egypt. It is obvious that
Delilah did not speak to Samson in Hebrew ; and when the giant

22 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
Goliath taunted David, a mere shepherd lad, he could hardly have
used Hebrew, as he treated the whole nation with scorn, and swore
by his own gods ; and no interpreter was possible on suoh an occa
sion, but David understood the drift of his boasting threats, and
answered him. Among David's servants was Uriah the Hittite ;
this language is still an unrevealed secret, but it was not Hebrew.
It is probable that, as a mercenary soldier, he knew Hebrew, and
he married a Hebrew woman. With Hiram, King of Tyre, David
contracted a friendship, and the Phoenician language, being closely
allied to the Hebrew, was no doubt mutually intelligible. With
Solomon we flnd an Egyptian wife, followed by Egyptian-speaking
attendants, settled at Jerusalem. And to Solomon came the Queen
of Sheba from the uttermost parts of the earth, as One, who cannot
err, tells us ; and, if the map of the known world of that period is
examined, it is literally true ; but we have no hint as to the language
she spoke, and by what means she conversed with King Solomon.
And the memorable words, uttered by her, could not have been
spoken by her in Hebrew. Jeroboam, the first King of Israel, had
been a sojourner in Egypt, and Shiskak, king of that country,
came and plundered Jerusalem in the time of Eehoboam. If we
are to believe the Egyptian Chronicles, these invasions were
frequent ; and the Egyptian language must have been known to
individuals. Ahab, King of Israel, married Jezebel, daughter of
the King of Tyre, speaking the Phoenician language : she was
accompanied by the priests of Baal. The cries of these priests to
their gods on Mount Carmel must have been in Phoenician ; and the
language of Elijah, "the Tishbi," from Gilead, east of the Jordan,
must have been something different from Hebrew, probably
Aramaic. According to the universal practice of all Oriental
chroniclers, all the sayings, both of Elijah and the priests, are
recorded in the conventional Hebrew of the Book of Kings. When
we come to refiect upon the language spoken by Jezebel, we have
to face new phenomena. She was the daughter of Ethbaal, King
of Tyre, and priest of Astarte : of the same family, in the next
generation, came Belus and Dido, also called Elissa, who founded
Carthage. We .have to thank these two women for the names of
Isabel and Elisa. We know what the Phoenician language was
from inscriptions, such as that on the sarcophagus of Esmunazar
in the Gallery of the Louvre. If any one were to doubt, that
Carthage was a Phoenician Colony, the stones with Punic inscrip
tions would ¦ cry out to correct him. Some such language was
spoken by Jezebel and her followers ; and it was not Hebrew.
Athaliah, her daughter, probably took it with her to Jerusalem.
The discovery of the Moabite Stone has revealed to us the language
of Moab ; it is the oldest specimen of alphabet- writing in the world,
900 B.C. ; and it records the defeat of King Ahab by the King of
Moab. In the time of Elisha we find the conversations of the

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

23

King of Syria at Damascus, and Naaman the Syrian, and a letter
to the King of Israel, all in Hebrew, as if textually quoted ; but
we feel instinctively, that the language of the Hebrews could not
have been used by these speakers, whose vernacular was Aramaic.
The servants of Naaman the Syrian begged him to wash in Jordan
and be clean : they could hardly have spoken Hebrew, though the
little maid may have done so.
The prophet Jonah wrote about 862 B.C. He went to Nineveh,
and our Lord tells us that the men of Nineveh repented at his
preaching : we have to ponder as to the language which he used,
for we know the language, in which his prophecies are written,
and we know the language which the King and people of Nineveh
used : it is not obvious how Jonah acquired a facility of speech in
a totally different language of a remote country.
The prophet Isaiah wrote about 750 b.c In chapter xix.
verse 18, he writes : "In that day shall five cities in the land of
" Egypt speak the language of Canaan," or, in other words, the
Jewish settlers in Egypt shall speak the language once spoken by
the Canaanites, but " which " (to quote the Speaker's Commentary)
"had been sanctified by being employed as the vehicle for the
" commemoration of God's purposes to mankind, and was called
"Hebrew." _ _ ,
The power of Assyria, with its capital Nineveh, on the Tigris, ''
began now to be known ; and in the reign of Hezekiah Jerusalem
was besieged, about 725 b.c We find the servants of Hezekiah
upon the walls of the beleaguered town, beseeching Eabshakeh not
to speak in the Jews' language, or Hebrew, but in Aramaic, the
language of Damascus, in order that the common people might not
understand his words. The language of Assyria itself has now
been revealed by inscriptions as Semitic, but distinct from both the
above. Then came the captivity at Babylon, 588 b.c, and the
Jews had to listen to another Semitic language, the Babylonian, of
which we have ample information from Cuneiform inscriptions ;
and the Hebrew language, which had been formed during the
captivity in Egypt, received its death-stroke during the captivity
at Babylon. Here, however, they were destined to come into
contact with a new people, speaking an Arian language, the
Persian. One word of that language crept into the Song of
Solomon, "pard^s," which has become one of the notable words of
the Eastern and Western worlds as "fardus," or " Paradise." The
Persian is one of the most illustrious of the Arian languages, as it
passed from Zend into Pahlavi, and from Pahlavi into Persian. _ If
on the one hand it was strengthened by contact with, and absorption
of, Semitic elements from the Arabic, on the other hand it has,
from its own resources, lent strength to the Arian Hindustani, and
the Altaic Turki. It stands by the side of the English as one of
the two Arian languages, which have had the strength in them-

24 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
selves to free themselves from the tyranny of inflections and
grammatical gender. We know the language, in which Cyrus and
Darius spoke to Daniel, from the inscriptions upon Cyrus's tomb
at Persepolis, and the stately tablets of Darius's inscriptions at
Behistun : we must however recollect that the popular language of
a nation runs as it were underground, leaving scant traces of its
existence in literature, which has a separate life of its own.
Persian words are found in the Books of Ezra, and Daniel, and
the appearance of such strangers in the latter seems an argument
against those, who assign to the Book of Daniel a Maccabean date,
just as the appearance of Egyptian words in Exodus shows that
that book was written by some person who had sojourned in Egypt.
Take the analogy of the Anglo-Indian, who after his retum home
unconsciously uses Indian phrases, or words, unintelligible to his
friends, who have never visited India, and to his grown-up children,
who have forgotten the words used by them in childhood.
The remnant of the Jews returned, under Zerubbabel, to
Jerusalem in 536 b.c. The prophets Haggai, Malachi, and
Zachariah still wrote the conventional Hebrew. Artaxerxes,
467 B.C., sent Ezra to Jerusalem. In 445 b.c Nehemiah arrived
at Jerusalem. His book lets side-lights in upon the language
spoken by the people : he saw Jews apparently at Jerusalem,
who had married wives of Ashdod (Philistines), of Ammon and
Moab, and their children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod,
and could not speak in the " language of the Jews, but according
"to the language of each people." The teaching of the prophets
had ceased : the Hebrew language was no longer spoken. Like
Sanskrit and Latin, it had done its great work, and died away.
In the Book of Esther, of the same period, we read of the one
hundred and twenty-seven provinces, to the inhabitants of each of
which the great King wrote according to their writing and their
language, from India in Further Asia to Ethiopia in Africa. All
have passed away, language and written character, save Hebrew
and Greek, for to them were committed the oracles of God. As
time went on, the Jewish nation had to receive its orders in Greek,
and then in Latin, and under the fiat of the latter ceased itself to
exist, A.B. 70 ; for the nation also had completed the task, which
was given it to do, when Abraham was called two thousand years
before. But we must recollect that, when the Jews returned from
Babylon, they left a large colony of their brethren behind them,
and they flourished : we read later on of Tobit at Ekbatana : they
had copies of the Books of Moses with them, and thus it was
providentially arranged, that any tampering by Ezra or others with
the text would not be possible to take place undetected.
In Chapter I. it was stated that it was not the same Aramaic
which was spoken by Abraham, and by our Lord, but it was similar.
This cannot be brought home more strongly than by considering

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 2$
in a reverential spirit what is told us with regard to the Trans
figuration. Luke tells us, on the authority of Peter and John
and James, who were eye-witnesses, that Moses and Elijah
talked with our Lord, and spake of His decease (e'^oSov), which He
should accomplish at Jerusalem. Now the epoch, at which Moses
lived, is distant from that of Elijah by the interval of five
centuries, and that of Elijah from that of our Lord by an interval
of nine centuries. The Apostles heard with their ears and com
prehended with their understanding, and recognized the solemn
purport, of the words uttered by each speaker, all of whom used
the Aramaic language. But we cannot shut our eyes to the great
fact that, judging human phenomena in the ordinary way, the form
of Aramaic words and sentences used by Moses must have differed
materially from that of Elijah, and that of Elijah from that of
our Lord, and the Apostles, who understood them. It is difficult
to suggest a solution.
One word on the subject of " bilingual " individuals and
populations. In the new Oxford English Dictionary it is inter
preted as speaking, reading or writing, in two languages, but
in linguistic works it has a narrower sense. Every young girl
who learns French in the schoolroom, and boy, who learns Latin
at school, is, according to the Dictionary, "bilingual." Every
inscription with the text translated into a second language is
biling-ual. But, when a traveller reports that the uneducated
inhabitants of an island, or region, are bilingual, or in a linguistic
work we read that a belt of country is occupied by a bilingual
population, something very different is intended to be implied.
It means that the men, women and children, without receiving
instruction, but under the influence of the circumstances, which
surround them, unconsciously get into the habit of speaking
(not necessarily writing or reading) two languages. In Switzer
land, overlapped by their great French, Italian, and German
neighbours, nearly every one is bilingual. On the borders of
England and Wales we find the same phenomenon. In large
belts of country in British India, which lie betwixt great linguistic
regions, such as Tamil-land and Telugu-land in the one case, and
Bangal and Behar in the other, the populations speak indifferently
both languages. This is Provincial, or National, bilinguaUsm.
But there may be also "Family or Tribal" bilinguaUsm, the
result of intermarriages betwixt persons speaking naturally
different languages. Purchased slaves learn to speak the languages
of their masters, without forgetting their own. The same thing
is happening with regard to immigrants into a strange country ;
the first generation in such cases is bilingual ; the second adopts
exclusively the new language. There is no rule absolute. Many
Persian immigrants into India centuries ago still speak Persian

26 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
in their families, and to the outer world, the languages of India.
The Jews, wherever settled, have an alternative jargon in reserve.
On the other hand, the French Huguenots, who went out to the
Cape Settlement, became blended with the Dutch Boers, and
have lost their French, as the Huguenot families have in England ;
while Scotch settlers in Canada have lost their English, and
adopted French.
I wish to maintain that our Lord and His twelve Apostles luere not
"¦bilingual;' either on account of their Province or Family. It
will hardly be asserted, without actual proof, that there were
schools for teaching Greek in Nazareth or Capernaum, and that
our Lord, and the twelve, attended them. No doubt they used
Latin and Greek loan-words, the names of particular places, such
as Dekapolis, or of particular things, such as Ki]vaoi, Srjvdpiov,
just as to this day the English-speaking populations use French
and Latin words, but nothing more.

CHAPTER IIL— THE LANGUAGES SPOKEN AND "WB.ITTEN BT
THE EVANGELISTS, AND THE WEITEES OF THE ACTS,
THE EPISTLES, AND THE EEVELATION.
I now turn to the language in which the New Testament was
written. There is a considerable interval betwixt the Ascension
of the Lord and the appearance of the first written document
connected with the new faith. Our Lord, like Elijah and John the
Baptist, left behind Him nothing in writing. His work was oral,
and we have no indication, that His companions and casual hearers
caught up and recorded His words at the time. In Luke xvi. 6 we
read that the Lord in the parable of the unjust steward used the
following words : " Take thy bill and write fourscore." The word
" write " is not attributed to Him save in that parable. He knew
how Jeremiah had written, " Write all the words that I have
spoken," but He Himself gave no such orders. The eyes of His
followers were darkened. One Evangelist, who had special know
ledge, tells us that there were many other things which Jesus did,
of which we have no record ; and Paul hands down one sentiment
attributed to the Lord which is not found in the Gospel, and he
tells us also in the Epistle to the Galatians, that the Gospel which
he preached was not by him " received of man, but by the revela
tion of Jesus Christ." This does not preclude the idea that he, like,
the other Christians, had information of the events of our Lord's
life from oral or written statements as described in Chapter I.
Our Lord' no doubt made other communications to His Apostles
after His Resurrection, besides those narrated ; but the neglect of
the two disciples (one of whom was Cleopas, possibly Alpheus)

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,

27

who accompanied Him to Emmaus, to record on paper the wonderful
communication made to them, explaining to them the whole raison
d'etre of His sufferings and glory, seems to pass all conception, and
it is remarkable, that Luke, who had had the advantage of living
so long in intimate connection with Paul, and would therefore
appreciate the extreme importance of this discourse, should have
failed to collect and record the details, which, coming from His own
lips, would have set so many questions at rest. We have to
recognize a period of oral teaching and preaching at first by eye
witnesses, who had no conception of the magnitude of the move
ment which they we^e initiating. They rather expected a speedy
end of the world, and the second appearance of their Lord, and the
¦idea of writing books to edify future generations never occurred to
them. This is to be deplored : an early authoritative Gospel would
have saved much quarrelling : if Paul had had one to refer to and
quote from, it would have been better : he seems to minimise the
earthly life of the Saviour : his Church is an ideal : in the Gospels
it is very real. The art of writing was rare among the simple
peasants of Galilee. The commands of the risen Saviour were
fjLaO'TjTe'uaaTe, icrjp-v^aTe, and they took Him at His word. Their aim
was to convert their own people only. Oral handing down of
legends, ballads, and traditions is common in the East to an extent
which we cannot conceive in Europe.
A notable miracle is reported. On the tenth day from the
Ascension, the disciples, with the women and the Virgin Mary, were
all in one place, when the Pentecostal miracle took place, and the
Holy Spirit fell upon all, male and female. This is supposed to
have affected the language spoken. There are many interpre
tations ; it is not recorded, that all made use of the gift, whatever
was its nature, either at Jerusalem, Samaria, Caesarea, or elsewhere.
Some of them certainly obtained a wonderful boldness to speak the
Word of God, and to speak it effectually, so as to convince the
intellect and convert the hearts of their hearers. Paul states, that
he received the same gift, and he certainly had the power of
preaching and convincing to a marvellous extent, but on the only
occasion recorded, when he came into contact with people, who did
not speak Greek or Aramaic, but used the speech of Lycaonia, he
did not seem to understand them until they carried their words
into action. We are told that Peter readily conversed with
Cornelius, the centurion of the Italian band in the fortress of
Csesarea, the key of the country. He was probably a Eoman, or
at least one of the Latin race, and knew little of Greek and
Aramaic. He and his kinsmen and friends, probably military
men, or camp followers, were heard to speak with tongues and
magnify God. We may believe that these men, on their return to
Eome, laid the foundation of the Christian Church which Paul
found in existence, by their earnest teaching and preachings. If

28 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
they did so, they made full and beneficial use of the talents
entrusted to them.
Preaching in Aramaic must have been the employment of the
disciples at this period, telling over and over again the same wonderful
story, but necessarily varying in details, as all had not had the
same experiences. Some had seen miracles and listened to parables ;
others had been cured of diseases. From the first there must have
been some quasi-authoritative formula, in which were the germs of
the Creed, which each Christian Missionary preached, and which
each neo-Christian accepted before his baptism. A careful perusal
of Paul's Epistles, especially the Pastoral, show clearly, that there
were in existence authoritative confessions of faith and summaries
of doctrine, not necessarily the same everywhere, quoted totidem
verbis by Paul : we must recollect that Paul, I. Cor. xi. 23, gives
the earliest in date written account of the institution of the
Lord's Supper that has come down to us. The services of
the deacons, who were Hellenists, would be valuable to address
the Hellenist strangers from Alexandria and Cyrene in Africa,
and Cilicia, and Asia Minor in Asia. But as the eye-witnesses
passed away by death or dispersion, it was felt that this or(d
teaching had its disadvantages. There was danger of additions
being made, omissions of important doctrines, and inaccuracies. We
have an exact parallel in our missionary deputations of this day.
The missionary comes home, and tells his story, from his own point
of view solely, what he saw and heard ; the speaker at secondhand
gets up the story, or arms himself with notes : he is less fresh, but
has a larger grasp of the subject. At length an official history of
the mission is compiled, in the same way, but under authority.
Oral Gospels gradually came into existence, definite in general
outline, uniform to a certain extent in language, quoting freely
from the Aramaic Targams of the Old Testament and sometimes
from the Septuagint, when Hellenists were addressed. It is
asserted that a Palestinian version of the Septuagint existed. The
oral grew oh into written accounts, to the existence of which Luke,
in the first verse of his Gospel, alludes. We must recollect, that
the oral Gospels were doubtless not in Greek, but iu the Vernacular
of the people, Aramaic, and the notes made to help the memory
were also in Aramaic ; if this be conceded, it is clear that Matthew
in his Aramaic Gospel incorporated such notes in their Semitic
form : Mark and Luke translated them into Greek, as they Compiled
their Greek Gospels : the different renderings of the same Aramaic
word by the different authors may account for some of the strange
discrepancies. Each Apostle and each speaker naturally laid stress
npon the particular portion of the great story, which impressed him
most. At last, when the number of adherents increased, and the
men, who had known the Lord in the flesh, disappeared, it became
necessary to have some authoritative Gospel, which might be

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

29

appealed to in case of divergence of statement, as different sects
were coming into existence, and thus we arrive at the time a.d. 60,
when the Gospel of Matthew is supposed to have appeared, twenty-
seven years after the Ascension. It was composed by an Apostle,
by a man, whose business, as collector of taxes, satisfies us that he
could write : it was written for the benefit of his countrymen, the
people of Galilee, for he was called from his seat of office in our
Lord's own city of Capernaum. There is a direct statement of the
early Fathers, Papias, Origen, and Jerome, that he wrote his
Gospel in Aramaic, and the probability coincides with the state
ment: he must have spoken Aramaic- to be able to manage his
office ; there was no more priitid facie necessity for his knowing
Greek than for a Hindu village-accountant, who keeps the accounts
of his village in Hindi, to know Persian or English. He collected
the Customs on the little lake of Galilee. Like the books of Livy
and many of the most valuable Greek works, this Aramaic Gospel
has disappeared ; but there is credible evidence of the genuineness
and authenticity of the Greek Gospel attributed to Matthew which
lias come down to us ; it has never been disputed that the Aramaic
Gospel once existed, and the Greek is in our hands. It is not
necessary to assume that the Greek "replica" (the term used by
painters who paint the same picture twice over) has not the force
and authority of an original Gospel. Up to the fall of Jerusalem,
A.n. 70, the Aramaic version may have met the wants of the
Palestine Church : after that event a Greek version was required :
some illustrious books of antiquity exist only in translations, or
Matthew himself may have superintended the work of translation
into Greek, so as to supply the needs of Hellenists residing in
Palestine. Of this we have remarkable illustration in the case of
a writer of the same epoch, also a Jew. Josephus wrote his works
originally in Aramaic, and admits his weakness in Greek composi
tion. In the preface to the " Wars of the Jews," § i, he writes:
"I have proposed to mjse]£ for the sake of such as live under the
" Government of the Eomans, to translate these books into the Greek
" language ; " it is a fair inference that Matthew may have done the
same. Nor is it anything out of the way for an author to publish
a book in two languages for two different classes of readers. In
the Empire of Austria, to this day, authors publish books at the
same time in German and Slavonic languages ; the Life of Frederick
the Noble" was published last year at London and Berlin in German
and English. I have published books at Agra in India, in English
and Hindustani at the same press, the same day, being responsible
for every word in either language. After the lapse of centuries,
copies of portions of the Scripture in Samaritan, Koptic, Abyssinian,
Gothic, and Syriac have been recovered. The Aramaic Gospel of
Matthew in this wonderful age may some day gladden our eyes.
Before alluding to Paul's Epistles, I must try and throw some

30 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
light upon the duties of an amanuensis in Eastern countries, and
specially in bilingual countries. In Paul's Epistles we find phrases
like this: "I, Tertius, who wrote this Epistle, salute you in the
Lord;" "Ye see how large a letter I have written with my own
hand ; " " The salutation of the hand of me, Paul.'' To the official
of British India such remarks come home with peculiar force.
Jerome writes, " Habebat ergo Paulus Titum interpretem." If
Paul employed an amanuensis, it was because of the weakness of
his sight, not on account of his inability to compose grammatically,
and write legibly, a letter in Greek, for he was a competent Grecian.
An English statesman or man of business at the present time
dictates a letter " totidem verbis " to his private secretary, or gives
him the purport, and leaves the skilled and trusted secretary to
produce the proper phraseology. In unimportant matters this
answers ; but when a different language is used, and a French or
German clerk is employed, greater caution is necessary, and the
draft letter has to be read and corrected and approved. Such is
the necessity of office-life in British India. The British official
has native clerks sedated on the ground near him, quite capable ,of
rendering his brief, ungrammatioal verbal orders into grammatical,
courteous, official, elegant language in Persian, Hindustani, or
any other language required. 1 think that I state a fact, that
not a single British official throughout India, either in my time,
before or since, could engross his own judgments or orders in suoh
a form, that they could be issued and understood. But none the
less, the orders issued are accurate and faithful, for they are read-
over, and, if need be, corrected, before the seal and English signa
ture are attached. In the thousand documents, to which I have
attached my name, I have never been tripped tip once ; of course
the style of the particular amanuensis, who draws up a particular
proceeding, is evident. When these facts are considered; many
difficulties with regard to the Greek Epistles ascribed to the
Galilean fishermen, Peter and John, are cleared away. The differ
ence of style in the Epistle of John, and in the Eevelation, may be
explained by the fact that he had a different amanuensis. Should
it be argued that Peter was not responsible for the wording of his
Epistle, this objection cannot be maintained. Jerome writes :
"Denique duse Epistolse, qua) feruntur Petri, stylo inter se et char-
" actere discrepant, structuraque verborum. Ex quo intelligimus
" diversis eum usum interpret ibus."
It is well known to all those, who for many years have been
dictating lengthy judgments, or executive detailed orders, in a
foreign language, that when the fair copy comes up for perusal;
and signature, the dictating officer soon perceives which of his
subordinates has drafted the paper from the recurrence of certain
expressions or words, and the absence of others, for each man has un
consciously his own style. Now in the Eevelation John's amanuensis

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

31

uses the word popixpala for "sword" sixteen times, though it never
occurs in the Gospel of John or his Epistles, nor in fact anywhere
else in the New Testament except at Luke ii. 35 : "a sword shall
pierce through thine own soul."
But another consideration forces itself on those familiar with the
mode in which India is governed. The Viceroy has occasion to
write a letter, possibly complimentary, possibly of most serious
import, rebuking him, fining him, perhaps dethroning him, to a
native Hindu Raja. Neither the Viceroy, nor the Eaja, has the
least elementary knowledge of the Persian language ; but in that
language, in courteous phraseology, a letter is indited by a skilled
official penman, signed and sealed by the Viceroy or his Chief
Secretary. On arrival at the Native Court, it is read and explained
to the Eaja by his own bilingual official. The letter- writer, so
familiar in the streets of an Italian town, is unknown in England ;
but in India, among the unlettered people, I have known letters on
the ordinary details of life indited in Persian. Neither the sender
nor recipient knew any language at all. I remember one of my
grooms, who was with me in camp far from his home, bringing me
a long letter in Persian, the meaning of which he wished to know.
It was couched in high-flown language, and common-form ex
pressions, but the object was to announce the birth of a baby, and
the well-doing of the mother.
When it is objected that the Epistle to the Hebrews could not
" have been intended for the Jews of Palestine, or the Epistle to the
Galatians for the Galatians, as they did not know Greek, the cir
cumstances above stated must be borne in mind, especially the
patent fact already alluded to, that the Papal rescripts to the Irish
people are still to this day published in Latin.
About Paul being bilingual there can be no doubt. He could.^V
speak Aramaic and Greek, and write Greek ; as to his power of
writing or reading Aramaic we have no evidence. In a spirit of
antagonism to the 'Jews, the early Christians west of Palestine
' adopted .the use of the Septuagint. Stephen was bilingual ; his
' dying speech to the Sanhedrim was in Aramaic. Paul's compan
ions, -Barnabas, Mark, Luke, Apollos, Aquila, and Priscilla, Titus,
Timothy, Philemon, were all Hellenists. Something may be
collected ' as to the degree of literary culture to which Paul had
attained. He quotes four Greek poets : it is true that one of the
quotations occurs in the works of two poets, Aratus and Kleanthes.
Euripides puts into the mouth of Heracles the odious Epicurean
sentiment of the ancients, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die," and recognizes the fiction of Fortune as if evangelical truth :
" eti(f>paive aavTov, irlve, rov KaO rjfiepav
fiiov Xor^i^ov a'ov, rd B' aXXa t^? rvx}]^.
Paul writes, " Some {rive^) of your own poets say so." He puts

32 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
the words of JEschylus in the Play of Agamemnon into the mouth
of our Lord as the Greek rendering of his Aramaic utterance : irpo's
Keinpa fii.i] XaKtl^e. However, in the Eevised Text this passage is
struck out. Apparently Paul did not know Homer, although an
Ionian ; he had visited Troas ; his eyes must have looked at
Pergamus and Mount Ida, and across the sea to Samothrace, yet the
religio loci had not stirred him. A man of Macedon had appeared
to him, and he could not possibly have been ignorant of that greater
man of Macedon, who had, three centuries before, come to fulfil the
prophecies of Daniel, had conquered the Eastern world, had been
welcomed by the High Priest at Jerusalem, had destroyed Tyre,
and founded Alexandria. At Athens Paul must have been aware
of the existence of the theatre of Dionysos under the Acropolis,
where the plays of Euripides were still repeating the old Homeric
story so dear to the Athenian people ; he stood ou Mars' HiU (as I
have done repeatedly), and looking at the Propylseum, he had
beheld the colossal statue of the Virgin Goddess, with her helmet
and shield glittering in the sun, and visible to sailors, as they
doubled the distant Cape Sunium.
His travels and experiences must have taught him lessons, which
no Jew of the old time could ever learn ; as he stood on Mars' Hill
in front of the Temple of Athene, at his feet was the Temple of
Theseus, further to the right the great Temple of Jupiter Olympius ;
on the Promontory of Sunium was another Temple of Athene ; on
his left through the pass of Daphne was the Temple of Eleusis ; over
the waters of the Mgewa. was the Temple of ^Egina ; the fragments,
which remain of these wonderful buildings, still chain mankind.
Paul saw them in their noonday splendour. He had resided at
Ephesus, and knew too well the Temple of Artemis, one of the
wonders of the world, on the columns of which we gaze with awe
in the British Museum. He had seen the Temple of Daphne at
Antioch, and heard of the gigantic Temple of the Sun at Baalbec in
Coele-Syria, on the road to Damascus, the columns of which astonish
the modern traveller. He must have heard from Apollos of the
Serapeum at Alexandria, and dimly of the wonders of Om, and
Memphis, and Thebes, in Egypt. His eyes were opened, and
contrasting temple with temple, nation with nation, city with city,
he knew how utterly insignificant as regards to size, and
architectural magnificence, in comparison with them was the Lord's
House at Jerusalem, the City of Zion, and the few sheep of the.
Lord's chosen flock in the land of Canaan; but to them were
committed the oracles of God ; to them in the fulness of time had
come that Jesus, whom he (Paul) preached, and, while in his heart
he gave the preference to the glory of the Latter House, still,
on Mars' Hill he repeats in the Greek language the sentiments
which years before he had h^ard in the Aramaic from the lips of
Stephen, to whose death he had consented, that "the Lord of

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 33
heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands,"
echoing words spoken by the Lord to the woman of Samaria, who
had seen nothing but Gerizim, and had heard of nothing but Zion.
Paul fully comprehended the meaning of our Lord's parting orders
to preach the Gospel lo all nations, to every creature, to the uttermost
parts of the earth, when Jerusalem was no longer the centre of the
universe, the joy of the whole earth. Admitting that he wrote in-x
Greek, he thought in Aramaic ; here is the difference betwixt the
Epistles, which bear his name, and the anonymous Epistle to the
Hebrews, the writer of which was entirely a Greek in his logic,
as well as his expressions. All his quotations of the Old
Testament are from the Septuagint without exception ; it looks as
if he knew nothing but Greek, and had never been in Jerusalem.
Paul and John quote sometimes the Septuagint, and sometimes
oral legends of particular passages, which differ materially from
the Septuagint. If the question be asked, whether Paul spoke or
wrote Latin, we have no evidence whatsoever ; he got on well with
Julius of the Augustus' band, presumably a Eoman ; he addressed
the crew and the soldiers on board the ship, and they understood
him ; but they may have been the seafaring men of the Mediterranean,'
who had a sailor's patois. It was easy for him to communicate
with the Punic inhabitants of the island of Malta. As regards
intellectual culture he stood just on the dividing line of Oriental
and Occidental knowledge. His successors, and even some of his
companions, for instance, Apollos, had profited from a knowledge
of Philo, and perhaps a greater one than Philo, Plato ; a generation
later the early Fathers were not ignorant of the works of Tacitus
and Pliny, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Asiatic and
European literature had come into contact with each other. The
very salutation of some of Paul's Epistles indicate a man, in whom
two cultures met: xa/ats Ka'i elpijvrj. In the first word we have
the Greek x«V^; ^"d in the latter the Hebrew " Shalum," which
still lives in the Oriental salutation " Salam," or Peace.
Two questions may fairly be asked as regards this remarkable
man. Had he ever seen Jesus during His earthly pilgrimage, or
even heard of Him ? In his defence (Acts xxvi. 9) Paul says, " My
" manner of life from my youth, which was at the first among my
" own nation at Jerusalem, know all the Jews." This looks as if
he had been some time at Jerusalem : he was only a young man,
when Stephen was stoned. His companion Luke is surprised, that
even a stranger in Jerusalem should not have known the things
which had lately come to pass (Luke xxiv. 18). Could he have
been ignorant of the veil of the temple being rent, the darkness at
midday, the appearance of men, that had been dead, walking in
the streets ? We cannot find any allusion in his writings to his
personal knowledge. He tells us, that Jesus appeared to him on
the road to Damascus; that Jesus spoke to him, II. Cor. xii. 9, and

34 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,
again Acts xviii. g; that Jesus appeared to him, Acts xxiii. ii.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the spiritual conception, which he had
grasped of his Lord, was clearer than that of any of the other
Apostles at that time, though they had known Him in the flesh.
Christ had appeared to him as the Crucified, Eisen and Ascended
Lord : of His earthly sojourn among men he had only hearsay
reports : he had never, like the Jews, looked upon Jesus as a great
prophet, nor, like the Apostles, had wondered when His Temporal
Eeign would begin : from the first time that he liad known Him
at all, it was as God. Many of the Eoman Emperors, such as
Adrian, Trajan, etc., in the course of their military career, had
been Centurions, or linperatores, before they attained the Purple :
but of their early life History tells little : they appear for the first
time before our minds as Emperors. So before Paul's mind Jesus
had never appeared except as the Eisen Saviour, the very Son
of God, who had communicated this fact directly to his intelligence.
Thus he was able to see and take in clearly, that old things had
passed away, and that the World was on the threshold of a new
departure : he refused to know Christ after the flesh, as He
appeared in His earthly pilgrimage : he knew Him only as the
Son of God and after the Spirit. Eenan remarks that Paul had
not tasted of the ambrosia of the Galilean preaching : he had only
the after-taste. The question cannot but arise in the devout mind :
Was the Christ, whom he saw at Damascus, and whom he at once
recognized ("Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?"), the
historic Jesus of Galilee, whom Paul had never seen, or the
Christ of Paul's own imagination? It is doubtful, whether the con
version of the Gentiles was part of the original plan. Paul seems
to have forced it : otherwise the new Sect would have died like
many other Sects : he went into Arabia after his call, not to
Jerusalem : he sought no commission from the Twelve, or casting
of lots to fill the vacancy made by the death of James the Apostle :
a French author made the remark, that the new Eeligion might in
one sense be called the Pauline.
The second question relates to his knowledge of the Old
Testament: whether he read it in Greek or the Hebrew text, it
must have been k tedious operation from our point of view. We
can judge what a Hebrew MS. was from the Synagogue rolls,
which are in many Museums : but the difficulty of reading Greek
MSS. is not always realized : we have fair specimens in the famous
MSS. of the New Testament, known as the Sinaitic, Alexandrine,
and Vatican. No separation of chapters, paragraphs, or verses ; no
punctuation, and words divided at the end of a line : it is true
that the Hindu and Mahometan to this day have their MSS. in
the same state, and Sanskrit has the additional difficulty of the
words being, as it were, glued together, and letters changed by the
laws of euphony : yet we do manage to read them : such a thing

LANGUA GES OF THE BIBLE. 3 5
as a Concordance was unknown, and reference to passages must
have been very difficult, and generally each book was on a separate
skin : Paul had some little alleviation in the use of papyri ; for
in II. Timothy iii. 13, we read how he sends for the books
TO pifiXta, and the parchments /jie/iftpdva (a Latin word). We
may suppose that the parchments represented the Hebrew Old
Testament, and " the books " either a copy of the Septuagint, or
the materials collected for Luke's Gospel during his two years'
stay at Csesarea. He had picked up one utterance of our Lord,
not recorded by any of the Evangelists, "It is more blessed to
" give than to receive." , It is to be regretted, that he does not
give in detail the conversation, which passed between him and
Peter, John, and James, when they met at Jerusalem : it must have
been one of the most remarkable meetings of all, that have been
recorded in history, secular or ecclesiastical.
Turning to the other frontier of Paul's knowledge, we know
that he had seen the great Statue of Minerva at Athens, and we
wonder whether he had read the Homeric Poems, or the discourses
of Plato. If he had done so, in the Iliad and Odyssey he cannot
•have failed to remark the triad of the Greater Divinities, as repre
sented in the solemn oath,
" Nat fid Zeure irdTep, Kal 'AOrjvaitj, Kal 'A'JroXXov,"
the Father Zeus, and the Son Apollo, the Lord of Light,
Life, Poetry and the Healing Art, and that third mysterious,
Sinless Deity, Athene ; pure, holy and chaste in the midst of a
sinful crew of Gods ; ever watching over, and present with her
votaries, such as Odysseus, and incapable of evil thoughts, and insus
ceptible of stain. No one can ponder over the attributes of Athene,
as disclosed in the Homeric Poems, without feeling, that the human
intellect in the conception of the Virgin-Deity had reached its
highest level. And as regards Plato, the author of the Epistle
to the Hebrews certainly was acquainted with the writings of
Philo, and' perhaps of Plato. In the School of Tyrannus, at
Ephesus, where St. Paul disputed daily, something must have
been taught, and most probably the Philosophy of the Platonic
'School. It is difficult to imagine, how Paul could have escaped
the contact, living as he did among the educated GentUes. It
is difficult to understand how a writer, who handled the Greek
language with such marked facility, could have been ignorant of
Greek literature, and therefore of its great Masters, who have
influenced the human intellect to the present time : but, if he
had known some of the utterances of Homer and Plato, which
move generation after generation with ever living power, would
he not have fortified his argument, addressed to residents at
Corinth, Ephesus, and Eome, by reference to authors, who must

36 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,
have been familiar with them ? The writer who quoted Aratus
" To'u'^ap r/evof) eafiev " might well have quoted,
" ZeDs ^PXV> "^"^ Zeus to fieijov, Zeus ea'xa.Tos a-ine.
I now approach the subject of the Epistles of James and Jude.
I must ask my readers to accept, for argument's sake, that they
were the Lord's brothers (Matt. xiii. 55), and not the Apostles,
who bore these names. They were thus carpenters like the Lord,
and probably first cousins to the fishermen, the sons of Zebedee, whose
mother, Salome, was probably sister to the Virgin Mary. It goes
without saying, that they spoke Aramaic, and we have no evidence,
that they had learnt Greek. Accepting these facts, it is note
worthy, that out of the twelve Apostles only two, Peter and John,
have left behind them any writings at all ; the other ten no doubt
preached and preached, and went forth to the Eastern regions, but
they had no recorded dealings with Europeans or Hellenized Jews,
and as far as the spread of the Gospel was concerned, their work
was nil : the champion of the dogma of the apostolical succession
should bear this in mind, that the evangelization of the world
came from Paul and Barnabas, and not from the Twelve
exclusively. The Lord had chosen a new army for the European
campaign under the leadership of Paul. It is clear, that there was
little sympathy betwixt Paul and James ; their antecedents,
experiences, and convictions, were totally different. Paul claimed
to have received a special revelation, and was a travelled man.
James, as far as we know, had never left Palestine, or shaken
himself free of his Judaizing environment. There is no doubt, that
James either wrote his Epistle solely in Aramaic or allowed it
to be translated by an amanuensis into Greek under his own
superintendence for the benefit of the Jews of the Dispersion.
In the first view of the case the Greek version has no more
original authority than the early Syriac version which has come
down to us. In the second it is like the Gospel of Matthew in
Greek. In the first and second verse of James' Epistle there is a
play on the words x'^lpeii/ and x"/""". which could not be expressed
in the Aramaic. Both James and Jude, in their style, betray
their Semitic origin and Jewish education : their Greek expressions
are sometimes peculiar. It has been remarked, that the word-
store of Jude is more real and powerful than its grammatical
construction ; the number of words which are his, and his alone, as
far as the New Testament is concerned, is remarkable.
With Luke we have to deal with a Gentile and a Greek scholar
of no ordinary power. It is not faultless. In Acts xxvii. 14, he
writes of the ship as amii, "she," forgetting the gender of irXolov
in the preceding verses. Like the other writers of the New
Testament, he found a dialect of Greek ready to hand more suitable
to convey Oriental conceptions, and better supplied with word-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE. 37
moulds for representing the Monotheistic idea than the Greek
of the Athenian schools ; for the Septuagint-Greek had been
elaborated by six generations of Jews in Alexandria. He could
never have seen the Lord, but he had all the qualifications of
a conscientious historian. He was the companion of Paul, and
dwelt two years with him at Csesarea. During that period he had
inquired, sifted and weighed evidence ; he gives his opinion on
facts stated ; e.g. following Mark in his account of the Trans
figuration, he gives his own opinion, that Peter knew not what he
said. No doubt he had access to fragmentary tvritten accounts,
and took down from the lips of competent persons oral
accounts, collated them, and transferred the matter thus
collected in Aramaic to his own limpid Greek. He seems to use
the word " eTncTaTa," not Eabbi, or " SiSdaKaXe." Nothing in the
Greek language can surpass in beauty the first two chapters of his
Gospel. We sometimes wonder from what source he obtained
not only some of his facts, but the purport and sentiments of
some of the utterances recorded. Let us take, for instance, the
beautiful words of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and of
old Simeon ; they must have passed away sixty years before Luke
took up the pen, and probably long before his birth. They had no
connection of any kind with the Lord's ministry. Then a long
speech of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah is recorded, who was even
then in extreme old age, and must have died long before his son
John commenced his Ministry. The same remark applies to the
Magnificat, and to the words uttered by the angel Gabriel to the
Virgin at Nazareth. It is a bold assertion, that the Virgin herself
was Luke's informant, for she must have been in extreme old age,
when he began his inquiries, if indeed she were still alive, or if he
ever met her ; had he done so he would have recorded the fact.
The theory requires a succession of unsupported assumptions.
Some go further, and assume that the Virgin left documentary
evidence, for it is recorded, that she kept all these things in her
heart, and her recollections may have formed parts of an oral or
written Gospel. We certainly know that Elizabeth could read, for
her husband, though dumb, had communicated to her the name of
her son, and we may fairly presume that he did so to her, as he
did later on to his kinsfolk, by writing. The hymn itself is but an
echo of the beautiful prayer oi Hannah on the occasion of the birth
of Samuel more than one thousand years before, and it is comforting
to think that women even then knew passages of the Bible by heart.
In the words uttered by the angel to the Virgin occur the following :
X^ipe Kexapnw/jievTi, a play of words of extreme elegance. It may
be presumed, that the words of the angel found their way to Mary's
understanding in the only language, which she could have under
stood, and that was Aramaic, andinthe Syriac version, dated 200 a.d.,
and Delitzsch's Hebrew version of the present time, no such play

38 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
of words can be supplied from the word- store of those kindred
languages ; for how much, then, of these beautiful Christian hymns
the world is indebted to Luke's inspired touch can never be known.
At any rate, they were translations of precious Aramaic fragments,
which had survived either in the memories, or the note-books, of
some of the second generation of Christians. To those who accept
inspiration as an illuminating influence, not a physical or intellec
tual coercion, there will be no difficulty in facing these difficulties.
At any rate, if the Virgin was the informant, from whose lips or
writings Luke gathered this wonderful chapter, it is strange that
John, who took her to his home, and no doubt lived with her tiU.
death, never alludes to these details.
\ With regard to Peter and John, the Galilean fishermen who led
the great crusade, it is distinctly stated that they were reputed to
be " ar^pafifiajoi Kal ISiiirai," which certainly means ignorant of
letters. The Pharisees had, however, said the name of our Lord :
"How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Here
they erred, as our Lord read from the EoU of Scripture at Nazareth,
and on another occasion wrote with his finger on the ground. Of
neither of His apostles,. Peter and John, have we any such evidence.
Jerome tells us: "(Habebat) Petrus Marcum intprpretem, cujus
Evangelium Petro narrante, et illo scribente compositum est." If
Peter helped Mark with the matter of his Gospel, it is possible,
that Mark helped Peter in the composition and writing of his
first Epistle ; at any rate, his name appears in a very marked way
in the concluding verses of the last chapter, and he is described as
fi,a6rjTr)i Kal ^pfii^vevrys HeTpov. The question naturally arises,
liow an old fisherman of- Galilee, past the prime of life, was
able to write Epistles in good grammatical style in a foreign
language. Old fishermen, who take up a different kind of business
in middle life, are generally unable to write a decently expressed
and spelt letter in their own language, much less in a language,
which they had never seriously learned. We must all feel that,
however quickly we may pick up the power of talking a foreign
language in middle life, we fight shy of writing a letter, especially
on a subject of grave importance. Is there a single ordained
minister of any church in England, who, unless of French extrac
tion or education, would venture to publish a written sermon in
French, though there are many who can converse with tolerable
accuracy ? We are told that Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in the
fourth century, with all the advantages of his station, epoch, and
environment, shrank from the difficult task of mastering Greek,
though we know what a master he was of the Latin language, one
so closely allied in structure and word-store to the Greek, and yet
we are asked to believe that somehow or other Peter, a fisherman,
between forty and sixty years of age, managed to write two Epistles
in excellent Greek, though his native vernacular, the Aramaic, was

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

39

totally different in every particular, and he himself was uneducated
and untrained in literary subjects. Now we may assume that Peter
dictated the matter of his Epistles to " his son " Mark, who was a
Hellenist of Cyprus, as public officers in India dictate elaborate
judgments on suits, decided by them in the courts in India, to the
trained native clerk, who carefully draws up the draft for the
perusal and correction of the judge, who is responsible for every
point of the argument, and for the turn of every expression. It is
noteworthy he calls himself Xii-rpo^; Paul spoke of him as K.rj(^a.^ ;
James as iv/newi/ (Acts xv. 14). Let us consider the story told in
Acts ix. 36-41. The woman at Joppa was named " Tabitha " in
Aramaic, and "Dorcas" in Greek: both words mean " a doe, or
roe." When Peter went up into the upper room, he addressed the
dead body as ".Tabitha," using his own and presumably her own
language : the widows, who wept, showed the garments, which
" ij SopKai " had made, because Luke in his Greek narrative called
her so, though, when he quotes the words of Peter, he writes
"Tabitha." The inference is that Peter spoke in Aramaic, and
Luke wrote in Greek.
The case of John is, in some respects, more difficult, and in some
respects easier than that of Peter. He was quite a young man
when our Lord left the earth. He appears to have lived a long
period at Ephesus, in Ionia, amidst a Greek population, in ease and
dignity. All the disciples, who knew the Lord sixty years before,
had passed away, and many also of the second generation, who had
had intercourse with the Apostles and Disciples. John's state
ments are quite free from the possibility of contemporaneous
criticism. Everything had changed. The Temple had disappeared,
the Christian Church was separated from the Jewish ; we feel in
John's Gospel, that we are entering another world as regards
language, style, and ideas.
Written documents of the kind described before may have been
handed down and been current in the Church. The aged Apostle
may, over and over again, in his discourses at Ephesus, have re
peated the conversations of his Lord, but the time had come, when
it was felt necessary to close the record of the inspired writings
absolutely, for spurious gospels were coming into existence, and
diverse heresies were springing up. Explanations are given by
John of Jewish customs and Aramaic words, which shows, that
a different class of readers was addressed in a different state of
culture, and with a different environment of knowledge, prejudices
and preconceptions. Sometimes the manner, in which the Apostle
expressed himself, or rather in which his amanuensis took down
his words, causes ambiguity ; for instance, evpr'/Ka/iev tov M.eaalav,
0 e'lTTt fieOepju.'Tjvevoiu.evov XpicTTos, John i. 41. In this passage, and
John iv. 24, the word " Messiah" appears, and nowhere else. The
meaning of the Hebrew vvord had been forgotten, when John

40 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
wrote ; but when the Synoptists wrote, there was no necessity for
explanation. Again, in John i. 43, our Lord remarks : " Thou
shalt be called Kephas ; " the amanuensis adds, " which is by
interpretation a stone." So also : " Go, wash in the pool of
Siloam, which is by interpretation ' sent.' " It would scarcely be
believed that these two passages are pressed into the service of the
argument, that our Lord spoke Greek to His Apostles, and that the
woman of Samaria spoke Greek to Him, and that the two fishermen
of the Sea of Galilee, Andrew and Peter, communicated to each
other in ordinary conversation in Greek. All that it shows is, that
a period of time had elapsed, which rendered an explanation of the
word necessary, but not so great a period as cansed the word to be
forgotten. The word Xyoi'o-Ttai/ot is never used by John, and in fact only
occurs twice in the Acts and once in the Epistle of Peter ; in all
three times. It is a hybrid word : a Greek root with a Latin
suffix. It was probably a term of reproach, or used in a hostile
sense. Events repeat themselves, for in British India it was, in
my time, a term of reproach. In visiting a native Christian
village, I happened to ask in Hindustani an aged convert, when he
became a " Christian." The missionary checked me, and asked me
not to use that term, but " Masihi," and I remark, that in the
Hindustani Bible, in Acts xxvii. 28, Agrippa says to Paul, " Almost
thou persuadest me to be a Masihi;" but St. Peter, iv. 16, ac
cepting the term as one of abuse, is represented in the Hindustani
Bible as stating, " if any suffer as a Kristian, let him not be
ashamed." Perhaps the Church at Ephesus had the same feelings,
and we can understand them. To call a man " a Turk " in London
is an insult ; it is an honour to be so called in Constantinople.
In considering the language used by John in his writings, I
must assume, and ask my readers to accept, for sake of argument,
the theory propounded by judicious scholars, that the Eevelation
was written at least a quarter of a century before the Epistles and
Gospel. No one can fail to be struck by the serious grammatical
errors in the Eevelation. Iu Eev. i. 5, we read, otto 'Iiyo-oS
X/9tiTToS, o fidpTv^ 6 TTiffTOi ; thorc are many more errors of grammar
of a kind, which cannot be attributed to inaccuracy of the text.
The English translation in a language free from the trammels of
number, case and gender, does not exhibit these defects. Dr.
Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, remarks: "This book studiously
" disregards the law of ' Gentile' syntax; it Christianizes Hebrew
" words and clothes them in Evangelical dress, and consecrates
"them to Christ." And again : "'The reader is to be prepared for
"combinations independent of the ordinary rules of grammar, and
"having a grammar of their own, the grammar of inspiration"
I cannot agree with this style of commentary ; it seems a degra
dation of the Scriptures, a total misconception of the meaning of

J.ANGUAQES OF THE BIBLE. 4 1
Grammar, which is the method, unconsciously adopted by past
generations of expressing their sentiments by articulated sounds
and sentence-moulds. To say that inspiration has anything to do
with the structure of sentences, or observance of grammatical
rules, is as absurd as the remark of a certain king, " Ego sum rex
" Poloniae, et super Grammaticam."
I have taken the trouble of comparing all the verses, in which
these errors occur, with the version into Latin by Jerome, into
German by Luther, and into Sanskrit by Carey, these three being
languages, which are analogous in their rules of structure and
concord, and I do not find that these translators have in any single
instance paid attention to the grammar of inspiration.
The explanation must be sought for elsewhere. The Eevelation
was written in Patmos, a small and sparsely inhabited island ; the
Apostle himself was then a tyro in the knowledge of Greek- written
composition, and in that out-of-the-way spot he had not the
assistance of a skilled amanuensis, which could be supplied to, him
at Ephesus, when he commenced his later labours, which, as Greek
compositions, are above criticism; the errors are just such as a
Semite would make in first dealing with an Arian language, of
.which, with the exception of English and Persian, gender, case,
and number are a chief feature. ' We all know what blunders
Englishmen make, who attempt to write French and German. Tlie
British official in British India, when out upon some expedition of
political or police importance, finds himself compelled to make use
of the best amanuensis, whom he can lay hold of in an out-of-the-
way village, to communicate with his subordinates at a distance,
who know not a word of English ; and the production, when it
finds its way into the head-office, raises a pitying smile in the
countenance of the skilled draftsman.
It is a fatal mistake to claim infallibility for subjective con
siderations in matters of pure Science, and to improvise miracles to
account for the inaccuracy of a Greek sentence or the unexplained
knowledge of a foreign language by an unlettered man. The
servants of the Lord are quite as well equipped, and vice versd, to
maintain His honour now, as they were in the first century. If
from purely linguistic, and, therefore, scientific grounds, we are
drawn to a particular conclusion, it would be cowardly to say, that
theology is above grammar. We in this way add an additional
poison to the shafts of an adversary. Our cause is a good one,
and non egit tali auxilio.
John clearly thought in Aramaic, and we recognize a Semitic
mind in an Arian dress. His Gospel is the most distinctly Hebraic
of all four, i.e. tinged with the phenomena of a Semitic language
in the construction of sentences ; thus often in the judicial decisions
of an Anglo-Indian judge, though grammatical, the Anglo-Saxon
origin can be traced by the turn of tho sentences, the form of the

42 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE,
argument, and the going direct to the point. Two strong points
used to be urged in favour of the argument, that the Lord con
veyed His message in the Apocalypse to John in the Greek
language. I. That He calls Himself Alpha and Omega, which clearly
apply solely to the Greek alphabet.
2. That in Eev. xiv. i8 the Apostle indicates the number of the
beast by a Greek cryptogram, 666.
To both these there is a reply. " Aleph and Thau " is an old
Hebrew proverb for the beginning and the end. The Syriac trans
lation has returned to this rendering ; the Greek amanuensis
substituted the last and first letters of the Greek alphabet, and
some of the translators of the Bible at the present day into the
languages of barbarous tribes, which use the Eoman alphabet, have
proposed to substitute " I am A and Z." The Apostle, when he
dictated the cryptogram 666, was thinking as a Hebrew : he had
no such familiarity with the Greek alphabet as to base his sayings
upon it. The Aramaic language had a well-known written
character, and each letter had a numerical value, and 666 resolves
itself without difficulty into " Neron Kesar," and no doubt the
Emperor Nero, who slew Peter and Paul, was intended. However,
the only interest attached, as far as the present subject is con
cerned, to this solution is, that no argument in favour of Greek
being the language of the Apostle can be based upon it, but the
contrary. In his old age the Apostle drew upon a store of sanctified
recollections, and wrote his Gospel ; there is no evidence, that he
had seen the Synoptic Gospels, but his Gospel has a supplementary
character. We all know how in old age the nearer Past, as it were,
vanishes away, and the far-off Past comes before the recollection.
Aged people recount in great detail, and accurately, conversations
which took place half a century before : there is a peculiar illu
mination round the setting sun.
In this Gospel we have a narrative of the Saviour's words, which
had clearly passed through the lenses of a loving heart, and
thoughtful mind, just as any one would recall for the benefit of his
own children the words uttered long before by a dead parent. It
is clear, that his account of our Lord's utterances is not a mere
chronicle, not the careful account of a skilled reporter, not the con
nected arrangement of well-remembered facts, but the result of
deep meditation on their meaning : he realized the grave import
ance of every word, and he dictated in his old age, possibly in his
case the ipsissima verba to his trained Greek amanuensis. Subse
quent events had unconsciously coloured his recollection : we all
know what it is to see things in the light of subsequent events :
in no other Gospel is he himself called the beloved disciple : he
alludes to no miraculous casting out of devils : mankind had out-

LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.

43

grown that mode of describing particular diseases : he never uses
the word " Sadduuee " : the term had been forgotten, but he
alludes to the Chief Priests, who were Sadducees, because the office
had not been forgotten : he calls his Master SiSdaKaXe, not iiriaTaTa,
as the Synoptists. He applies to his Master the term " Eabbi "
flve times ; the Synoptists never.
The Lord had promised him (xiv. 26), " The Holy Spirit will bring
all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you."
This is remarkably fulfilled. The discourses with Nicodemus, the
woman of Samaria, and the narrative of the raising of Lazarus,
were no doubt known to all, though only recorded in John's Gospel ;
but how about those chapters of advice given at the Supper table
just before his arrest? How could the Apostles have forgotten
these words so soon, and deserted their Master, while these words
were still in their ears ?
One point of language suggests itself. Our Lord raised three
persons from the. dead ; I have visited each of the spots, where
these great miracles were performed, with profound reverence. It
might have been expected, that as our Lord had used the words
" Talitha Kumi," when He raised the daughter of Jairus, the
Evangelist would have recorded analogous terms, when He raised
the widow's son. But Luke records the words 'HeaviaKe, aol Xe^io,
e^^epOijTi. Mark had learnt his lesson from an eye-witness, Peter,
who was an Aramean, and remembered the words uttered. Luke
had learnt his lesson chiefly from Paul, and others not eye
witnesses ; he wrote as a chronicler rather than a reporter. And
when Lazarus was raised, John, who is the only chronicler of this
event, did not record the ipsissima verba of his Lord, but supplied a
translation, Ad^ape Sevpo i'^to. We .see the process : Peter remem
bered the words of his Lord, and Mark, in the freshness of liis
life-like sketch, took them down. Luke was an historian, who
reduced all his information, whether of facts or utterances, to
Greek. When John's time came, Aramaic had ceased to be under
stood ; he may possibly have been one of the few, who knew it out
of Palestine.
I shall be sorry if any words of mine, in these Papers on the
Languages of the New Testament, may have distressed any tender
conscience. After all, if portions of the New Testament are but
translations, we must reflect what a blessing translations have been
to the world, and how fortunate we are, that our Faith has chosen
the best of the, two alternatives. All false religions have shrunk
into a dead language, which language was in very deed the lan
guage spoken bp^hTTounder, but which has ceased to he intelli
gible, and is jealous of translation into the vernacular. The precious
truths of the Gospel have not come down to us in the very words
of the Lord and His disciples, but through the channels of trans-

44 LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE.
lations made from the earliest periods, and, multiplied to a pro
digious extent during this century, they are blown over the world.
In former years subtle arguments were based on the words of the
English translation, which was deemed the one unquestioned form
for the English-speaking people, as, indeed, in the early centuries of
the Christian Era the Septuagint-translation of the Old Testament
was deemed an inspired book, and for a thousand years the very
existence of Christianity seemed to depend on the Latin Vulgate.
We have got beyond that stage of critical obliquity. It may he
truly said, that of all the books of, or antecedent to, the Augustan
age, no book has come down to us with such satisfying evidence, as
to its genuineness and authenticity, as the New Testament.
The Chl'eohman, 1889.

45

II.
TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

Chaptee 1. Ancient and Modeen Times.
Chapter 2. Latin.
Chaptee 3. Fkench.

CHAPTEE I.— THE TEANSLATION OF THE BIBLE IN ANCIENT
AND MODERN TIMES.'
I have been invited by the Headmaster to speak upon a most
interesting subject in my old School, and it gives me the greatest
pleasure to do so. I left Eton at Election, 1840, nearly half a
century ago, but it is still with gratitude that I look back to the
sound education, which I received under the headmasters Dr. Keate
and Dr. Hawtrey {non sine virgd), and my tutors. Dr. Hawtrey,
Bishop Chapman, and dear Harry Dupuis. There remain at Eton
of that period only Archdeacon Balston and Mr. Carter, my school
fellows, and Mr. John Wilder, of whom I shall ever think gratefully
for having "sent me up for good " at Christmas, 1834, ™y ^'st
out of twenty-one times.
The Old Testament, as you all know, was mainly written in the
Hebrew, a Semitic language ; but after the return from the
captivity at Babylon, in b.c 536, that language ceased to be the
vernacular of the people, and gave way to a sister-language, the
Aramaic, in which parts of the Books of Ezra and Daniel are
written. Before the time of our Lord, Hebrew had become a dead
language, and the Jews, as well as the Samaritans, when they read
the Old Testament in their Synagogues, made use of Targams,
which were partly translations, and partly explanations. When
our Lord read from the Book of Isaiah in the Synagogue at
Nazareth, we may presume that, if He read the actual Hebrew
text. He explained it by a Targam. Some of the very words which
fell from our Lord's lips are quoted: "Amen," "Ephphatha,"
"Talitha kumi," and " Eloi, Eloi, lama Sabacthani," the latter
being a quotation from the Targam of Psalm xxii. ; the hypothesis,
' Address given on Saturday, February 16, 1889, in the School Library of
Eton College to Eton boys by an old Etonian.

46 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
that our Lord and His disciples, mostly residents of Galilee, and
uneducated persons in a humble position of life, used the Greek
language, cannot be maintained. When Paul is described in the
Acts as addressing the Jews in the Hebrew tongue, it means, that
he used the vernacular understood by the Hebrews, i.e. Aramaic.
No doubt Paul, a highly- educated man, born a citizen of a Gentile
city, spoke both Greek and Aramaic.
The Hebrew Scriptures had been translated into Alexandrine
Greek about 150 b.c by the order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King
of Egypt. This translation differs materially from the Hebrew
text, which has come down to our time, and is known as the
Septuagint, from the legendary number of translators employed.
The New Testament has come down to us entirely in Greek,
though it is asserted, upon reasonable grounds, that the Gospel of
Matthew was written in Aramaic. Greek became the Church-
language of the early Christians, as the Gospel spread westward
into a region, where Greek was the vernacular. A value was then
placed upon the Septuagint, as if it were inspired, and this error
still clings to the Greek Church. In those days no Christian ever
cared to refer to the original Hebrew text, but the Jews preserved
it faithfully, and took many precautions for that purpose. About
one hundred years before the Christian era, the old Phoenician
Hebrew character, which still survives in Samaritan texts, gave
way before the square-written characters so well known as tlje
Hebrew. When Moses is exhibited in statues or pictures holding
the tables of stone with the Decalogue written in the square
Hebrew character, an anachronism is committed; On the other
hand, that the square-written character had been adopted in our
Lord's time is proved by His remark " that one jot or tittle would
not pass away " {iGna ev ij fit'a Kepai'a), which would not have
applied to the old written character, or to the Greek Uncials.
It cannot be impressed upon our convictions too strongly, that
from the earliest days of the Christian Church there was a strong
desire and universal practice to convey the truths of the Bible to
the people in the vulgar tongue. In a letter to Paulinus a.d. 395,
Jerome remarks with a kind of prophetic spirit : " Et de Jerusalem,
et de Britannia, sequaliter patet aula coeli." In every false religion,
such- as the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Mahometan, and every
corrupted form of the true religion, such as the Eoman, Greek,
Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic, Syriac, Koptic, and Ethiopic, the
tendency has been to keep the sacred books in an unknown and
obsolete language, and restrict the laity and the female sex to oral
instruction, or reading of selections, or metrical versions, constructed
by the priests. Such instruction may possibly be good and faithful,
but it varies from generation to generation, and is imperfect. For
instance; sixty years ago Dr. Keate used every Sunday to read one
of Blair's Sermons in the Upper School, and called it "prose."

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

47

Dr. Hawtrey used other books of the period, but they would
not go down now. Moreover, the revelation, which has been
made to man, is a message in its entirety to each human
conscience, and, as the vehicle of words and sentences be
comes gradually antiquated and unintelligible, it must be
translated. We are not at liberty to place any limitation on
the great plan of Salvation, and must consider the Bible as a
precious legacy to be handed down from one generation to another,
from one country to another, from one language to another.
Wycliffe put the matter clearly when he wrote : " Since secular
" men should assuredly understand the Faith, it should be taught
" them in whatever language is best known to them." Some of you
recollect that fine passage in the " Agamemnon" of ^schylus, 312:
loioiS eTolfXoi Xafnra$r)(j)opwv vofioi,
uXXo's 'Trap' ilXXov iiaioxati TrXijpo-ifjievoi.
It is the link, that connects us with the Church in the
Catacombs, the golden cord that unites the humble translator,
now at work in Central Africa or the New Hebrides, with
Luther, and Bede, and Wycliffe, and Ulfilas, and Jerome,
and Origen, and the seventy scholars of Alexandria, who set
the great example of rendering the sacred books of one race
into the language of another, and established the great principle
of doctrinal continuity, based upon the oracles of God, ever
re-appearing in a new combination of sounds, syllables and
sentences. The light shining through a crystal appears in different
colours, but it is the same light.
The Church of the Catacombs, recruited from the lower classes
of Eome, was not long content with the Greek version, and
several translations were made into Latin, the earliest being a
gift of the Church in North Africa to its mother Church in Italy.
Many saints suffered martyrdom for the sake of the old Latin
versions. A dangerous divergence of texts soon troubled the
Church, and Jerome was commissioned by Damasus, Bishop of
Eome, in the year 385, to revise the whole, and put forth an
approved version. He was a most capable man, and used the
Septuagint as the basis for the Old Testament. Accompanied by
two holy Eoman laflies, he settled at Bethlehem, and after he had
completed his first revision, the conviction was forced upon him,
that the suggestion of Origen in his " Hexapla "_ was the right
one, and that he ought to make a fresh and distinct translation
from the Hebrew text ; this venerable work was known as the
Vulgate. He was not a profound Hebrew scholar, and he had no
critical appliances, and he lived one thousand years before the in
vention of printing. His work was committed to the precarious
charge of manuscripts prepared from century to century by ignorant,
cai-eless, audacious, and, in some cases, fraudulent copyists.

48 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
It is astonishing to read of the liberties taken by copyists. Such
a thing as a critical conscience did not exist. Glosses, written
in the margin by one generation, crept into the text in the next
generation ; passages were altered to render the supposed meaning
intelligible ; there was no public or learned criticism to control the
copyist working in the cloisters of a convent under particular
theological infiuences. It is not a matter of surprise, that the text
of the Vulgate, which was the very first out-turn of the new '
power of the printing-press, cannot be accepted, as if fresh
from the hand of Jerome, yet it is most valuable. A study of the
Vulgate converted Luther and the Eeformers.
After a usage of one thousand years, it was declared by the
Council of Trent, in 1542 a.d., to be the only authorized medium,
in which the Gospel could be conveyed to the laity. The Church
of Eome had come to the parting of the ways, and had left the
high road of Bible-truth for the tortuous path of mediaeval error.
At a later period translations of the Vulgate were made, under
Episcopal sanction, into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
Polish, and German, and published in avowed antagonism to
Protestant versions.
The main stream of Christianity flowed westward to Europe ;
still there remained Churches in the west of Asia and north-east
corner of Africa, and the early Church cared for them also.
The Syriac translation was the gift of the Church of Antioch,
a Greek-speaking Church, in 200 a.d., to the natives of the
country, who knew not Greek. This language was akin to
Aramaic, but had a peculiar character of its own. It is a cogent
reply to those, who fondly urge that our Lord and His Apostles
used the Greek language, that two hundred years later the Church
of Syria required a translation in the vernacular, notwithstanding
the great increase of Greek and Eoman influences, and the entire
destruction of all indigenous culture. The Old Testament was a
direct translation from the Hebrew ; and the Syriac manuscripts,
which have survived to our time, have been valuable as checks on
the Greek and Eoman copyists. This version is still used for
liturgical purposes by the Syriac Churches in Mesopotamia and
South India, though Arabic is the vernacular of the one, and
Malayalam of the other.
In Egypt there was a population which did not speak Greek,
but made use of the latest, and now extinct, corrupted form of the
great Egyptian language, which, through the vehicles of Demotic,
Hieratic, and Hieroglyphic papyri and lapidary inscriptions, can
be traced back for a period exceeding four thousand years. The
Church of Alexandria, itself Greek-speaking, recognized the right
of its members, who did not know Greek, to have personal access
to the story of their risen Saviour, and translations were made in
three dialects, Memphitic, Sahidic, and Bashmuric, showing their

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

49

anxiety that the millions of Upper as well as Lower Egypt, in the
second and beginning of the third centuries, should, as the best
antidote to heresies, not be deprived of their inheritance. Copies
of that translation, found like waste-paper in boxes in the convents
of the Nitron Lake, and forgotten by a race, which had changed
their language to Arabic, have brought home certain precious
Cfintributions to our Scriptural knowledge. It has its own
peculiar written character.
To the south of Egypt is the great country of Abyssinia, which
is indebted to Alexandria for its being nominally, only nominally,
in the category of Christian nations. Before the close of the fourth
century after Christ a translation was made of the Bible into
Ethiopic or Giz, now a dead language, but then the language
of the natives, in ,a peculiar written character. Among the
MSS. which have eome down to us, are the unique copies of the
Book of Enoch, the Book of Adam, and some books found in the
records of no other Church.
From the north about that period a pressure of the Goths was
taking place on the Eoman Empire : they were heathens, the
advance-guard of the great Teutonic branch of the ethnic family,
to which we ourselves belong. The Church at Constantinople
thought it their duty to give the Gospel to these heathen in the
same spirit, that Britons now exhibit to the people of India, of China,
of Japan, of Africa, of the Islands of the South Seas, and North
and South America. A great man named Ulfilas, Bishop of the
Moeso-Goths, who dwelt in Bulgaria (as now called), born a
heathen in a.d. 3 1 8, and baptized at Constantinople, undertook
the translation from the Greek in an alphabet formed by himself
for the purpose. A celebrated fragmentary copy of this trans
lation, dating back to the fifth century, is shown at Upsala in
Sweden. In that same century was held the Council of Ephesus, and
some young Armenians came to it, their object being to buy
correct manuscripts of the Gospels in Greek. Young Armenians
had been sent to Alexandria to study Greek, and, on their return,
under the guidance of Miesrob, who had already translated the
Bible from Syriac into Armenian, they set about a translation of
the Greek into the same language, and accomplished it. The debt,
which they owed to Europe, has in these last days, been repaid,
for in the Armenian convent at Venice has been found an old
Armenian Harmony of the four Gospels of the second century,
showing clearly, that the four Gospels must have existed at an
anterior date, whatever critics may argue to the contrary.
In the valley of the southern slopes of the Caucasus is a country
called Georgia, now part of the Eussian Empire. This, is the
region known in ancient times as Colchis, whence Jason stole
the golden fleece, and to these mountains, according to the Poets,
4

50 TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Prometheus was chained as a punishment for the benefits conferred
by him on mankind. The inhabitants had accepted Christianity,
and in the sixth century, to supply a want felt, young men were
sent to Alexandria to study the Greek language, and this enabled
them, on their return, to translate the Bible into the Georgian
language, the first language in Asia belonging neither to the Arian
nor Semitic family, which had been so honoured, and in a written
character peculiar to itself.
The Teutonic races, which had been the terror of Eome up to a
certain time, had been pushed forward to the West by hordes of
a different though kindred origin, the Slavs, and the vast plains
of Eussia had been occupied, and the settlers had accepted
Christianity from Constantinople. As if in the fulfilment of a
law, which could not be broken, two brothers, Cyril and Methodius,
sons of a Greek noble at Thessalonica, both learned men, and
occupying high social positions, which had enabled them to
acquire the language of the Slavonic barbarians, retired into a
convent for the purpose of translating the Bible, before the close
of the ninth century, in a form of written character invented by
themselves, which still bears the name of Cyril.
The same fatality overtook all these translations : the spirituality
of the Church, which used them, was dried up, and the language
had become unintelligible to the vulgar, though still clung to by an
ignorant and unworthy priesthood. The Gothic language perished
entirely off the lace of the earth- ; the others survive, and are used
rather to obscure than to teach truth. A part of the duty of
Bible Societies is to supply the Bible in the modern vernaculars
to Churches, starving under the shadow of old and venerable, yet
dead trees, which no longer bear leaves and fruit, for the healing
and feeding of the nations.
In the peninsula of Arabia the Gospel never obtained a foothold.
Tlie Arabic language was, however, destined to play a mighty part
in the history of mankind, as the vehicle of a false religion, and as
the invigorator by its contact, and linguistic amalgamation, of some
of the greatest languages in Asia and Africa. Translations of the
Bible were made into Arabic as early as the lifetime of Mahomet,
who died a.d. 632 ; from which, as he knew no other language, he
must have gleaned his imperfect and distorted knowledge of its
contents. Had such a translation of the Bible as now exists in
Arabic been at the disposal of that great high-souled and earnest
man, how different would probably have been his utterances !
how different the creed of his followers !
Still further to the east is the kingdom of Persia. The inhabi
tants of the southern provinces speak a language called Persian.
A translation of the Pentateuch was made by a Jew from the
Syriac. The date is uncertain, but it cannot be earlier than
the ninth century a.d., as the Tower of Babel is called the

TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.

51

Tower of Baghdad, a city, of which the foundation date is
known, a.d. 827.
Let me cast one glance at the extreme west of Europe. By the
singular good fortune of the inhabitants of the British Islands in
all the early efforts of Christians they had a conspicuous part. They
received the Gospel early ; one of the early Christian martyrs,
St. Alban, died at Verulam in Hertford.shire ; and their missionaries
to the heathen were early in the field, Columba, Columbanus,
Aidan, and Boniface. They were foremost in the Crusades, fore
most in Bible-translation, and in the Eeformation. Ceedmon, who
lived in the seventh century a.d., wrote a metrical version, but
Anglo-Saxon interlinear versions of the Latin Bible are found.
The Venerable Bede, on the very day of his death (a.d. 735), gave
a finishing touch to the translation of John's Gospel. King Alfred
the Great took part in the trnnslation of the Bible, and prefixed
some chapters of Exodus to his Code of Laws in a.d. 890. An
Anglo-Saxon Glossary of the four Gospels, dated a.d. 900, is in
the British Museum. In the tenth century another Anglo-Saxon
version was made from the Vulgate, and the MS. is in the
Bodleian. There exists also a copy of Paul's Epistles with Irish,
or Erse, interlineal Glosses of the ninth century a.d.
This completes the story of the different languages to which the
Bible was committed at a period antecedent to the Norman
Conquest of England : i. Hebrew; 2. Aramaic; 3. Samaritan;
4. Greek; 5. Syriac; 6. Latin; 7. 8. 9. (3 Dialects) Koptic;
10. Ethiopic; 11. Gothic,- 12. Armenian; 13. Georgian; 14.
Slavonic; 15. Arabic; 16. Persian; 17. Anglo-Saxon; 18. Old-Erse.
There was a dense silence for three centuries, and a dark period
preceded the dawn of the Eeformation. Oriental travellers know
well the darkness, that precedes the coming of the morning. It was
a darkness of ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and bigotry.
Latin had died out of the mouths of the people ; a new birth of
vernacular forms of speech had taken pi ace; but the Eomish Church
was blind in spite of warnings. The first effort of Protestants was
to get at the inspired records of their faith, and give them to the
people. The Anglo-Saxon versions above alluded to were justly
appealed to by the Eeformers in England, as a proof of the
continuity of vernacular versions, and the right of Christian
Churches to have the Bible in the language understood by men,
women, and children. To Wycliffe, the morning-star of the
Eeformation, in a.d. 1380, temp. Eichard II., belongs the _ high
honour of completing the translation of the entire Scripture in 19.
English. At nearly the same time, and 20. before the appearance
of "jerome of Prague and Huss in Bohemia, a translation had
come into existence. 21. A German version was made at the
expense of the Emperor of Germany in a.d. 1405, and exists in the
Vienna Library. 22. A translation into Provengal dates back to a.d.

52 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
1 179, and 23. one into Flemish to a.d. 1300. These existed before
the dawn of the Eeformation, in all twenty-three translations.
Subsequent to that mighty unbarring of the doors of the closed
temples of religion and knowledge, the following versions sprang
into existence : 1. Welsh; 2. Gaelic"; 3. Erse; 4. Manx; 5. French;
6. Basque; 7. Dutch; 8. Norwego-Danish; 9. Swedish; 10. Spanish;
II. Italian; 12. Eouman ; 13. Euss; 14. Osmanli Turki; 15. Old
Norse; 16. Lapp; 17. Finn; 18. Lithu; 19. Pole; 20. 21. Wend,
(2 Dialects); 22. Magyar; 23. Eomansch ; 24. Lett; 25. Kamiola;
26. Ehst; 27. Nogai Turki (twenty-seven Languages). The
invention of printing, the revival of learning, the reintroduction of
Greek and Hebrew into the curriculum of Western scholars, made
a mighty change. The Latin Vulgate was the first book actually
printed and published, in a.d. 1462. Erasmus put forth his
tjreek edition at Basle in a.d. 1516, followed by Cardinal
Ximenes in a.d. 1520. Texts were compared, translations
revised, and copies multiplied. Bohemian was the first living
language printed. In the mean time the world was being
explored or discovered, a clearer knowledge of the multiplicity
of languages was being obtained ; yet, strange to say, it never
entered into the conception of the good and holy men of that
period, that it was a duty to supply the heathen and Mahometan
world with copies of the Word of God, and in a systematic
way to re-introduce it to the knowledge of the Church of Eome,
the Greek Church, and the fallen Churches of Western Asia,
and North-East Africa. They were content to feed themselves
with the bread of life ; but it was not revealed to them, nor
was it brought home to their consciences from the pulpit, that
Jesus died for all, that Christ from the Cross looked down
upon the poor heathen also, and that the so-called dogs had a
congenital right to the crumbs from the Christian's table.
Now and then there was a bright exception. John Eliot
was bom in a.d. 1604, and went to New England in a.d. 1631.
He learnt the language of the Algonquin tribes, i. who then
dwelt in the States of Massachusetts and Virginia, and trans
lated the Bible, which has outlived the race, religion, and
language ; for all have passed away. The Bible survives as the
language of a dead nation. He had no helps in his work such
as men have now; his method was, "Prayers and pains through
faith in Jesus Christ will do anything." At the other end of the
world some laymen of the Dutch East India Company translated
the Bible into Malay, 2. In a.d. 1668 the New Testament was
printed in Holland, and large portions of the Old Testament in
A.D. 1723, both in the Eoman and Arabic written characters, at the
expense of the Government, who also prepared a translation of the
New Testament and part of the Old Testament in Portuguese 3.
for the use of the settlers in the Dutch colonies, who spoke that

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 53
language ; and this was the first vernacular translation, that reached
that priest-ridden land (Portugal), and the one which, in a revised
form, is still in use. In South India, Ziegenbalg, the Danish
missionary, printed, in a.d. 1714, his translation of the New Testa
ment in Tamil, 4. and had done part of the Old Testament, when he
died; but his great work was completed in A.D. 1727. In a.d. 1661
Gravius, a Dutch pastor in Batavia, printed a translation of
the Gospels of Matthew and John in one of the languages of
the aboriginal tribes of the Island of Formosa, 5. within the
empire of China. The language is still scarcely known, for
before the edition was circulated the mission was uprooted. In
Ceylon, before a.d. 1783, the Dutch Government had promoted
a translation of the New Testament and portions of the Old into
Sinhali, 6. and they were printed at Colombo. Thus there were
in all of this period thirty-three translations. In some lists I find
allusions to a translation, into Osmanli Turki, and Hindustani in
Asia, and Eskimo in America, but I am unable for various reasons
to admit them on my list. I am dealing with facts.
Two reflections arise from these facts. The Dutch supplied
translations in Malay, Formosa, and Sinhali, and the Danish in
Tamil, while the British had done nothing in Asia. In the
following century they made up for their slackness. The famous
Eoman Catholic priest Beschi was one of the best Tamil scholars
of his age, and was alive during the time of Ziegenbalg's labours,
but it never occurred to him to translate any book of the Holy
Scriptures, for his method of converting the heathen, and his
method of guiding a Christian Church, did not require it ; in fact,
would not have survived the contact with a knowledge of
Scripture ; and the same may be said of the Jesuits in Paraguay,
in South America, and on the Congo in Africa, the founders
of the Papist establishments in China, and the missionaries
of the Eomish Church at the present moment, belonging to
any one of the great Congregations, labouring in any part of the
world, among tribes and nations of any stage of intellectual
culture. Not one of them (except the Jesuits at Beirut, who,
under the pressure of the Protestant competition, have put
forth an excellent, though costly, Arabic Bible) has ever taken
their converts to the pure fountain of Christian truth, but
substituted cunningly-devised fables of legends of the Virgin
Mary and so-called saints. More than that, they are the avowed
enemies of Bible-circulation by Protestant agency.
In all, at the close of the second period, there were, as far
as can be traced, inclusive of the inspired Hebrew and Greek,
flfty-six versions in existence, many of them dead, and used
only for liturgical purposes, most of them incorrect, and requiring
careful comparison with the Hebrew and Greek texts, and all
very insufficiently distributed. Many nominal Christians, and

54 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
some real ones, passed through life without ever seeing a Bible.
In England a large Bible was lastened by a chain to a lectern
in some churches, but was not legible, nor was opportunity
given to read it. Bible-possession was rare ; Bible-study, in
the proper sense of that word, rarer. A deadness had fallen
over the Protestant Churches. There may have been some who
desired, but few had the opportunity. At length, at the close
of the eighteenth century, the missionary spirit burst into exis
tence, reacting upon the home Churches ; and a missionary spirit
is based on the Bible, a Bible understood by the people; to be
read ; to be prayed over ; to be thumbed by old folks ; to be
lisped by little children ; to be spelt out by imperfectly-educated
men and women ; to be read and explained in churches, chapels,
and Sunday-schools ; to be whispered into dying ears ; to be
handed down with pencil-marks and annotations from parents
to children.
The want was felt : nobody knew exactly how to supply it.
Some effort must be made to accomplish a great work, which
had been the desire of so many generations. Who would
apply the spark to the train? It came about in an unexpected
way. Great rivers spring from tiny fountains. The story
reads like a myth of the Middle Ages; like the lying legend
of Lourdes in South France it centres round a peasant girl.
God's lessons can be taught by the agency of poor human
creatures : there is no occasion under the Christian dispensation
for visions of angels, or beatified erring mortals. A little
Welsh girl had been in the habit of walking two miles every
Saturday to prepare her Sunday-school lesson from the only
Bible in the neighbourhood : with the savings of six years, in
A.D. 1800 she walked twenty-five miles to purchase a Bible of
Mr. Charles, of Bala, who received an annual small consignment
Irom a local Bible-Association. She burst into tears and buried
her face in her hands, when she heard that every copy was
already appropriated. The minister was greatly moved at the
sight, and gave her a copy from his own shelves, which copy is
now in the Bible House in London, and respected as its very
foundation-stone. In 1802 Mr Charles went to London to try
and found a Welsh Bible Society, but the matter had got beyond
his power, as well as his dreams, and in 1804 was founded in
London a Bible Society to supply the World, and the example was
followed in New York and Edinburgh, and their branches and
depots have spread over the World. From the little acorn has
sprung up a vast tree, which overshadows the globe. All other
Bible-Societies are are local affairs.
Since that date a great crop of new translations in the different
languages of the world has sprung up. Mission-stations were
planted by the different Churches, and translations sent home to

TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.

55

be printed. Copies were sent back in thousands to be sold below
cost-price, to be used in the school, in the family, and the humble
home, and to be the rule of the new life.
I now ask each boy present to accept from me a present of
a specimen book, or sheet, of one single verse of the Gospel
of John, in a great many, though not the whole, of these
versions. I place on the shelves of the school-library a selection
of versions taken at random from the store of every portion of
the world. I am able to tell you in detail, where each
language is spoken, and to what family of languages it belongs ;
what is the state of culture of the people who read it, what
written character is used for the printing, and the name of
the missionary or scholar who made the translation, or can
make use of it ; so far I can, but no living man can pre
tend to say, that he himself knows more than twenty out of the
three hundred and thirty-one (331) varieties, and perhaps not
that number; yet the knowledge of each language is by certain
specific persons as ' certain and accurate as the knowledge of
Latin and Greek possessed by the Newcastle Scholar of the year.
The versions, when printed, are brought into the immediate use of
the pastors, schoolmasters, and the women and children of the
nation or tribe, for whose use they are prepared ; they are not
composed to be put away as a tour de force on the shelf of a
library. Eevision goes on with every new edition, and the
soholaiship of the greatest scholars of Europe and America is
challenged to point out defects. Now, if any Eton boy present
can point out any error of the rendering of the Greek in the
specimens, which he holds in his hands, of the Fiji, or Tahiti, or
Swahili, or Zulu, or Mohawk, or Teiugu, or Mandarin, or Japan,
I shall feel much obliged, if he will stand up and point it out, and
I will get it corrected in the next edition. This is the challenge,
which we give to the critic, or the doubter, or the unbeliever,
quite fearles.s of the result, for we work in good faith.
No one part of the world is more attended to than the rest.
The sun never sets on the work of the Bible-Societies ; their
publications are being read in different quarters at every hour of
the day. Many of the translators were simple, unscientific men,
but they did their work well. Very often they had no help from
dictionary or grammar, for nothing of the kind existed. Eton
boys can realize what it is to write au exercise without such
assistance. Some required one kind of written character, some
another ; some were rendered in two or more to suit the require
ments of the people. Art and Science have been the handmaids
of the inspired Eevelation.
A word about the languages of the world. There are more
than two thousand mutually unintelligible spoken at this moment ;
but the great languages, like the English, tread down the small

56 TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.
ones, and languages die like the people who spoke them. King
Xerxes, who was defeated at Salamis, as you all know, and who
was the husband of Queen Esther, issued orders to the 127
provinces of his kingdom, according to the writing thereof, and to
every people after their language. All have perished except two,
Greek and Hebrew, for they both had become the receptacle of
God's Word. Versions are made in dialects, where it is neces
sary, and in some rare cases in a jargon, for the use of Jews, or
Negroes. Europe is pretty well supplied, and the wants of the tribes who
speak the smaller and less well-known languages have been
attended to. In Asia great progress has been made, especially in
British India; translations have been made in scores of languages,
and are diligently distributed. A great work has been done in
China : people used to think that there was only one language for
all the inhabitants of that great Empire, but the mistake has been
found out. The Book-language is intelligible to the eyes of all the
educated, but each reader has to express himself in his own
vernacular, as the translation is expressed in ideograms, which
speak to the eye only, and so far resemble the figures in arithmetic,
which each nation calls by a different name. Many other trans
lations have been made in the language of the educated classes, and
the different provincial colloquials, some in ideograms, and some in
the Eoman alphabet.
In Africa and Oceania a great work has been done, and much
more is being done ; the whole Bible is now to be purchased for a
small sum in scores of languages, the very names of which were
unknown at the beginning of this century; and they are valued
above all things by the people, who gladly pay all the cost. Most
of these languages are melodious, and capable of expressing every
idea : all the stories about savage languages have been disproved.
Every language of the world can be tuned to sing the same great
Psalm of Salvation.
Passing into America, we find the same necessity for, and the
same power of giving, the Bible, but strangely different is the
vehicle of speech : while in China every word is a monosyllable,
in America the word seems to disappear, and the unit of speech is
a sentence, a compact expression in many syllables. It is asserted
that the word "kneel"' can only be expressed in eleven syllables.
To record such intolerably long sentence-words a syllabary, con
sisting of a united consona,nt and vowel, has been composed, so as
to shorten the inordinate length in printing ; and I leave in your
library specimens of this remarkable and ingenious device to bring
a knowledge of the Gospel home to the Eed Indians, though I
doubt the expediency of retracing our steps in the path of
Civilization, and going back from the perfection of alphabets to the
unscientific conception of Syllabaries.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 57
I recall to your recollection the lines of dear old Horatius
Flaocus, who was fond of airing his geographical knowledge,
which was not more accurate than that of the author of the Acts
of the Apostles, who tells us that there were devout men at
Jerusalem from every nation under heaven {dvo jravTo? edvov^ -rSiv
iiTTo Tov ovpavov), but his enumeration of them reveals a very
limited area. So Horatius Fl accus tells us in his own pretty way
of the unlimited diffusion which he anticipates for his charming odes :
Jam Daedaleo ocior Icaro
Visam gementis litora Bospori,
Syrtesque Gaetulas canorus
Ales, Hyperboreosque campos.
Me Colohus, et qui dissimulat metum
Marsae cohortis Dacus, et ultimi
Noscent Geloni, rue peritus
Discet Iber Ehodaliique potor.
And again : Visam Britannos hospitibus feros,
Et laelum equiuo sanguine Ooncaiium.
Visam pbaretratos Gelonos
Et Scythicum inviolatus amnem.
How true is this, though magnified a hundredfold, of the books,
or rather the one Book, issued by the Bible Society ! It finds its
way to " Urbesque, gentesque, et Latium ferox," well called
" ferox," for no such antagonist to the Bible has been found, both
in deed and spirit, as the Latin Church.
I have told you of the past ; let us look forward to the future of
the Bible- Societies. Dear boys, you are the heirs of all the ages,
the " enfants terribles " of the next half -century, the
" — juvenum recens
"Examen, Eois timendum
" Partibus, Oceanoque rubro."
To your generation will be committed the duty to carry out to com
pletion the work left undone by the men of the time of Victoria,
who came to the throne, while 1 was an Eton boy. Let me appeal
to you, in the names of old Etonians, whose glory you have to
emulate. You recollect that grand passage of Demosthenes' " De
Corona"? We had it, if I recollect right, when Mr. W. E.
Gladstone and his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, came down in
1840 to be the examiners for the Newcastle Scholarship, and I and
Bishop Mackarness were in the Select ; and a few years back
I reminded Mr. Gladstone of the honour conferred upon me by his
hands, doubly an honour when conferred by him, much as I differ
from him in politics at the present moment :
Ma TOV'S MapaOwvi TrpoKivSeiitravTai TiSi/ Trpcydvivv, Kai toV9 eu
nXaTaiac9 TrapaTa^afievovs, Kal tovs iv "SaXa/iivt vavfiax'rjaavTa'i.
I will tell you how this applies. Fifty years ago, moving about
in our midst, were two figures, one that of a young man, who was

58 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
a private tutor, and one a boy, just such a boy as each of you are
(perhaps I may have fagged him to fetch a book or carry a
letter) ; but the names of those two are now mentioned with love
and honour and fond regret, wherever the English language is
spoken : George Augustus Selywn and Coleridge Patteson.
Selwyn preached in the Maori language within a few weeks
after his arrival in New Zealand. Some Bishops occupy their
dioceses for decades, and are dumb dogs to the end of their days.
The Bible in Maori was revised, and Bishop Selwyn the second,
and his widowed mother, aided in the revision. Coleridge Patteson
exhausted linguistic worlds, and then invented (in the proper sense
of "invenio") new. From island to island in the New Hebrides
he took the Gospel of Salvation as a new idea, and he left it em
bedded in the language, habits, and hearts of the wild tribes, for
whom he gave up his life. Had he lived longer, he would have
left more ample memorials of his genius and his devotion, but his
mode of life and death has left you all a great example. You
remember, boys, the Greek monumental inscription on those, who
fell at Plataea, and which I saw a few years ago in the Museum at
Athens. Let me apply it to you : " Go, boys, do as these did, and
fall as this one fell." England and Eton must be foremost in arts
and arms, in the battle-field and the playing-ground, on the river
and on the sea, in the lecture-room of the scholar and the mission-
chapel of the missionary, in the speeches of the orator and the
printed books of the author :
Aiev dpttjjeveiv, Kal VTreipoxov efifievai aXiKtvv.
The office of a translator is a noble one. Over the grave of one
it is recorded, that he translated the whole Bible into a language
the existence of which was unknown before his arrival on the spot.
When the Lord cometh, and maketh a reckoning with His servants,
such as he will have a good account to render of the talents com
mitted to their charge.
And, finally, a good knowledge of Latin and Greek (as taught
at Eton in my day, and in my case fiogged into me, and still taught
under Dr. Warre) is a KT^/ta e's del, the best mental gymnastics
in the world. It is taught scientifically now, but in my days
the science of comparative grammar had not become known. I re
member Henry Hallam, the author of "The Middle Ages," asking
me in 1842, at Cambridge, whether it were true, that the Sanskrit
language, which I had studied, resembled the Greek and Latin
in its structure and word-store. My reply was that in Sanskrit
alone was found the secret of the infiections of the verbs and nouns
of her younger sister-languages. All this is in the Public School
Primer now, and every schoolboy knows what a stem, and a root,
and a suffix are. But Dr. Keate cared for none of such things, and
probably would have flogged any boy, who suggested such nonsense.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

59

I repeat that a scientific grounding in an Indo-European language
forms a sound platform for further study. If Hebrew could be
added, as a representative of Semitic languages, so much the better ;
but every language evoked by the genius of man, in spite of all its
multiform varieties, must have a method of expressing the object,
the predicate, and the subject, must have elementary roots and
some method of modifying them so as to express the meaning of
the speaker ; it must have a sound-lore, word-lore, and sentence-lore.
The Bible is meant to be the faithful witness of past times, the
solemn teacher of the Church in all times, the fountain of in
exhaustible truth, the awakener of souls from a fatal slumber, the
still small warning voice to the sinner to repent from his ways ; it
is not meant to be the subject of a merely mechanical, musical,
system of chants and anthems and antiphons, sung or muttered or
intoned by non-spiritual hirelings ; it is not meant to be the school-
book of non- Christian children, the mere shibboleth of the con
ventional worshipper, the corpus vile of the ingenious philologist,
ethnologist, geologist, or historiologist. No Christian Church has
ever existed without some rudimentary translation. The eunuch
of Kandake, as he sat in his chariot reading his chapter of Isaiah,
understood the literal meaning of the words, as he had either a copy
of the Septuagint, or an Aramaic Targam, in his hands, but under
stood not the application and the hidden meaning until Philip,
taught by the Spirit, explained it. There is no trace of the
existence of a Church, however small, without a trace of a ver
nacular version, and this version has not been the result of a Canon
'of the Church, but of the voluntary exertions of each Church.
Many non-Christians have been converted by Bible-reading,
unaided by oral instruction. In all ages and countries there has
been a desire, a desire not always realized, to communicate the
Bible to others. It is mere folly to urge at this period of our
knowledge of the languages of the world, and the intellectual
aptitude of barbarous races, that the contents of the Bible cannot
with care and precision be conveyed to every nation or tribe or
language under the sun, so as to be understood by men, women,
and children. For two thousand years, since the Septuagint was
taken in hand, one stream of solemn music has been sung in the
multiform voice of the human race to the honour of the Great
Eedeemer, HoWaJ fiev QvTjtoi^ '^fkuiaaai, fila h dOavaiolae,
telling the same story in fresh combinations of syllables, fresh
blending of sounds, fresh scratchings of the pen, tresh impres
sions upon the human soul.
Eton College, Februai-y l6, 1889.

6o

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

Veesions Existing peevious to the Close oi' the Eighteenth

Centuey.

Pee-Eefoemation Peeiod.

Post-Eefoemation Period.

EUEOPE.

EUEOPE.

English.

Welsh.

Anglo-Saxon (dead).

Gaelic.

Old-Erse (dead).

Erse.

Flemish.

Manx.

5 German.

5 French.

Bohemian.

Basque.

Provengal

Spanish.

Gothic (dead).

Pottuguese.

Latin (dead).

Old Norse or Icelandic,

10 Greek.

10 Norwego-Danish.

Slavonic (dead).

Swedish.

Lapp.

Asia.

Dutch.

Hebrew (dead).

Finn.

- Aramaic (dead).

15 Euss.

Samaritan (dead).

Eouman.

15 Syriac (dead).

Lithu.

Armenian (dead).

Pole.

Georgian (dead).

Wend (2 dialects).

Arabic.

20 Osmanli Turki.

Persian.

Magyar

Italian.

Africa.

Eomansch.

20 Koptic (3 dialects) (dead).

Lett.

Ethiopic (dead)

25 Karniola (or Slovfo).

Ehst (Eeval dialect).

Nogai (Krim dialect).
Asia.
Sinhali.
Malay.
30 Tamil.
Formosa (dead).
Ameeica.
32 New England (dead).
Abstract.
Pee-Eeformation : Post-Eeformation
Languages ... 21 — ... Languages  32
Dialects  2 — 23 Dialects  i
Total ... ... 56
— 33
TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 6 1
P.S. — I must record my obligation to the Eev. Prebendary
Edmonds, of High Bray, Devon, for the advantage gained by
the perusal of his published addresses on this subject in Exeter
Hall, and his sermon in Exeter Cathedral in 1888, and his kind
letter of suggestions. He was with great propriety selected to
give the address at Eton. At the last moment the date was
altered, and his services were required elsewhere. I was called
upon unworthily to fill his place, for which I have only one
special qualification (so far, superior to his), that I am an Etonian,
sprung of a race, which for seven generations of men have known,
and desire to know, no other public school but Eton, and this fact
is recorded in my family-stall in Eton Chapel.

CHAPTER II.-LATIN TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
There can be no question that for a considerable period the
Christian Church was a Greek- speaking Church. The Septuagint
had quite superseded, in the estimation of the men of that period,
the Hebrew original text. The New Testament was entirely in
Greek ; in the Churches of Alexandria, Corinth and Antioch, Greek
was the vernacular, and even at Eome there were sections of the
community which spoke Greek. It is noteworthy, that the works
of the great Stoic philosophers, Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, have come down to us in the Greek language, notwith
standing that Cicero had shown that the refined Latin of the
pre-AugTistan age presented a sufficient vehicle for philosophic
inquiry. The oldest non-Hellenic version was not the Latin, but
the Peshito Syriac, a loving return of the Scriptures to a kindred
dialect of the old Aramaic and Hebrew. No one, however, can
read the Greek Testament without feeling, that the penumbra of
a Latin superior powder overshadows it, just as in the modern
literature of India the presence of English is felt in the ideas,
the phraseology, and the word-store. Such words as "sicarius,"
"Prsetorium," "membrana," "census," "Caesar," "Colonia,"
"Niger," "Gaza," "libertinus," strike the reader in the same
manner as an English expression in a Hindustani document. The
current coins bore Latin names and Latin characters ; one of the
inscriptions on the Cross was in Latin. Still, even in the distant
Church of Gaul, so far removed from direct Hellenic infiuences,
where the people spoke a barbarous vernacular, Greek was for some
peribd the recognized language of Christian authority ; in Eome the
literary use of Greek extended into the third century, and in the
early days of the Eoman Church Greek was the language of public
worship. Here let us stand aside for a moment and refiect upon another
aspect of the Divine plan; the period, the locality, the environ
ment of the great drama of man's Salvation were unique in the

62 TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.
history, the geography, and the ethnology, of the world ; no such
a favourable conjunction of place and opportunity for a world-wide
revelation had occurred before or since the Christian era, and I
proceed to show, how in the fulness of time a suitable vehicle, not
always the same, was, as it were, prepared beforehand to safeguard
the oral Message. In all false religions the founder from his own
narrow human point of view thought only of his own time, his own
people, and their peculiar surroundings ; his blinded followers
worshipped the letter of their master's writingSj and allowed of no
vernacular translations, and so the oral word became shrouded and
withdrawn from the human intelligence of generations. yet to be
born, using languages which had not yet come into existence, or
which had not been reduced to literary requirements ; the Message
was thus darkened by the overlaying of antique and obsolete words
and custohas, instead of being capable of adaptation to the require
ments of every age, every clime, every grade of civilization.
Now a doubt has been expressed whether the red, black, yellow,
and white, man can have possibly descended from one primaeval
pair, and have become differentiated in the colour of their skin and
shape of their skull, in the course of ages, from causes of which
we have no knowledge, and in a manner, which has never recurred
in the long period of recorded history. I pass no opinion on this
subject beyond recording the fact, that the existing races of
mankind, however differing in minor features, resemble each other
physically and intellectually more than they resemble any other
species of animal. But there can be no doubt whatever, that
languages did not spring from the same seed-plot. There has been
no continuous descent of languages even in historic times ; they
differ from each other so considerably in structure and word-store,
as to render the theory of their being descended from a common
stock quite untenable. Some have thrown out the idea, that man
was created without the power of uttering articulate speech ; that
there existed in early times an animal, scientifically described as
akcCKo^ dvTjp ; after the dispersion of mankind in many countiies the
power of utterance was developed by their organs under different
circumstances, and presented different phenomena. Now in no
ancient document do we find such early allusions to the existence
of differentiations of speech as in the Old Testament. We become
aware of the existence of the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian
languages, and of other less important dialects. All the nonsense
of Hebrew having been spoken in the Garden of Eden, or before
the Flood, or in Mesopotamia before the call of Abraham, has been
swept away ; up to the time of the Jewish Captivity the Egyptian,
Assyrian, and Babylonian languages had had a long innings, and
had played their game out. Egyptian might have been the
language of the older Hebrews after their long sojourn in Egypt,
and Babylonian might have been the language of the later Hebrews

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 63
after their shorter sojourn in Babylon : they were both literary
languages, and documents in their particular form of words and
method of writing have come down to our time ; but they were not
chosen to be the vehicle of conveying the oracles of God, and
centuries have passed since they both became dead and extinct. But
during the Captivity in Babylon the Jews came into contact with
two other languages, the Median and the Persian; both are known
to us, the former only by the -inscription of Darius' tablets of
Behistun, the latter by a vast literature and a living vernacular,
one of the simplest and most beautiful in the world : but neither
was selected for God's purposes. The Hebrew form of speech,
which had lasted more than one thousand years, from the time of
the sojourn in Egypt to the Captivity in Babylon, had died as a
living speech, and in fact never was a sufficient vehicle for logical
thought ; still less so was the Aramaic vernacular, which
succeeded it, and which had the peculiar honour of being the
vehicle of the oral teachings of our Lord and His Apostles.
I write advisedly, that the Hebrew never was a sufficient
vehicle for logical thought ; as a rule, the Semitic languages are
more simple, childlike, and primitive than the Arian : Emanuel
Deutsch, himself a Hebrew, and a great scholar, too early lost to
the world, thus expresses himself :
"Philosophy and speculation are not easily expressed in a
' language bereft of all syntactic structure, and of the infinite
' variety of little words, which ready for any emergency, like
' so many small living links, imperceptibly bind word to word,
' phrase to phrase, period to period ; which are the life and soul
' of what is called ' construction ' : there is no distinction betwixt
' the Perfect and Future Tenses in Hebrew. There is indeed, in
' spite of all these shortcomings, a strength, a boldness, a
' picturesqueness, a delicacy of feeling, and expression in Semitic
' languages, but it cannot be compared with the suppleness of Arian
' languages, and that boundless supply of words, that enable them
' to produce the most telling combinations, their exquisitely
' consummate, and refined syntactical development, that can
' change, and shift, and alter the position of words and phrases,
' and sentences, and periods, to almost any place, so as to give
' force to any part of their speech.''
The epoch of the Captivity was a remarkable one in the history
of the world. Cyrus, or Kai Khusru, had appeared as the
representative of the so-called Arian race ; before him and his
successors fell the empire of the Semites in Mesopotamia, and
of the Hamites in Egypt. There was a birth of great spiritual
leaders at that time all over the world : Jerusalem was taken '
by Nebuchadnezzar, 586 b.c; Pythagoras flourished, 580 B.C.;
Buddha, 580 B.C. ; Koung-futz-zee, or Confucius, 550 B.C. The
later Hebrew prophets were pronouncing the decay of Israel,

64 TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.
and looking forward into a mysterious and to them and their
contemporaries unintelligible future. The domination of the
races who spoke Arian languages commenced, when Cyrus the
Persian appeared, followed by the Greeks and Latins, and law has
since been given to the world in an Arian language, with the short
interlude of a Semitic revival in the early Mahometan rule. On
the other hand, the dominating cosmopolite religions of the world,
the Christian and Mahometan, have been, and ever will lemain,-
essentially Semitic ; and there seems no possibility, of any change,
except a return to the blank atheism of Buddhism and Confucianism,
or the development of a scientific agnosticism, or a hopeless, de
spairing atheism : the former seems improbable, the latter sadly
probable. The time, predestined fiom the commencement of the world, had
come for the throwing down of the barrier betwixt the Jew and
the Gentile, and for the manifestation of God, as the Father of all
His poor children, and not only of one favoured race, to whom
up to this time His oracles had been entrusted. The civilization of
tho nations who dwelt on the shores of the Middle Sea of the
Western' World (for the Eastern World of India and China sat
apart, until last century, in darkness) had been prepared; and
there was a preparation also of the Eoman polity, the Greek
philosophy, and the Phoenician written character in its three great
developments, Hebrew, Greek, and Eoman. The Hebrew lan
guage might have been sufficient for the spiritual and intellectual
wants of one insignificant nation ; the lordly languages of Greece
and Eome were required for the teaching of races in a higher
civilization, and the illumination of the countries west of the
Volga and the Euphrates for all time. The Greek language had
gone through the great curriculum of poetry, the' drama, the
schools of philosophy, and the political debates in the Agora.
When Alexander the Great defeated Darius at Arbela, Greek had
already, in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, been fashioned into
a great logical machine, and had become ripe for the reception
of the Divine oracles, which had become too vast to be any longer
contained in the imperfect receptacle of the vowelless and the
grammatically undeveloped Hebrew. The alphabet of the Greek
nations was strong in all the details where the Hebrew failed.
Here we see the marvellous wisdom of God watching over the
preservation of His Word. When the Jews came back from
Babylon, they left in that city a large colony, who were in
possession of the books of Moses, the poetical books, and some
of the prophetical, thus anticipating and guarding against the
attacks, which after-ages would bring against the honesty of Ezra,
who is charged with crediting Moses with utterances which he
never uttered. The rival sect of the Samaritans seem to have
been maintained in a profitless existence merely to be additional

TRANSLATIONS OF TtlE BIBLE. 65
witnesses of the genuineness of the Pentateuch, preserved in a
different dialect and written character down to our days. To
anticipate falsification on the part of the Pharisees and Sadducees
of the time of our Lord, the Septuagint translation into Greek
had come into existence 150 B.C., the first instance on record of
a translation of a large volume from one language into a totally
different one. As far as we can judge, the Old Testament is the
unique specimen of the Hebrew language of that period. There
were few, if any. Gentile Hebrew scholars before the time of
Jerome. Greek became the vehicle of the translation of the
Old Testament, and supplied the original text of the New. Many
Eomans studied, and were acquainted with the Greek literature,
and there was no need of Latin translations ; on the other
hand, no one seems to have cared to make translations of
the ample stores of Egyptian literature, such as the " Book
of the Dead," or of the accumulated learning of the Assyrian,
Babylonian, and still more ancient Accadian, libraries. No
Greek translations have come down to us of the inscriptions, or
literature, of the Cypriote, Hittite, Lycian, and many other minor
languages. The Hebrew Old Testament, being at this early period
enshrined in Greek, and entrusted to nations who knew no
Hebrew, has been thus preserved, so that no one could possibly
add to or take from its text, or impugn its genuineness.
The word Greek, as used in the New Testament, no more
exclusively means a person, who speaks, or a person who spoke,
the Greek language, than the word "Feringhi" in Asia means a
" Frenchman." Paul says, " There is no distinction between Jew
and Greek : " this means betwixt Jew and Gentile, or, as a Hindu
would ' express it, "between a Hindu and a Mletcha ; " and as a'
Mahometan would express it " between a Mahometan and a
Kafir." John in his Gospel mentions that some Greeks desired to
see Jesus : these were not Jews, who spoke Greek, of which there
were some in Palestine, but bond fide Gentiles.
But as time went on a second vehicle of speech was required,
and was found in the Latin. The Greek language was destined to
be childless, to give birth to no great families of new languages,
as its two sisters, the Sanskrit and Latin, have done ; never
entirely dying as a vernacular, for many centuries the Greek was .
under a cloud, and had ceased to be a vehicle of literature. On
the other hand, the Latin language, which differed from it in so
much, and yet resembled it in so much more, was selected for a
more remarkable destiny, and, as we shall see, for a long period
became the faithful depository of the Word of God, guarded, how
ever, from fabrications by the existence of the Greek and several
early Asiatic and African versions, and, as regards the Old
Testament, by the jealous care of the Jews of their Hebrew
text.

66 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Let us pause and thank God. The Eoman Catholic Church
might have been tempted in the hour of its dogmatic pride, amidst
the dense ignorance of the mediaeval laity, to alter the Sacred
Text ; but, bearing in mind the early translations in Syriac,
Koptic, Abyssinian, Armenian, Georgian, hid away in unknown
regions, and forgotten corners in the heart of Mahometan countries,
they dared not. The Greek Church, in its madness for disputation,
might have done the same ; but the separation of the Latin
Church prevented them. The Jews, at the time of our Lord the
custodians of the Hebrew text, might have desired to rid them
selves of the Messianic prophecies ; but the Septuagint stood in
their way. The Samaritan Pentateuch was an unwilling testimony
to the accuracy of the Hebrew Synagogue rolls. At the time of
the return from the Captivity, if Ezra had wished to manipulate
the Scriptures to suit the views of the priestly party, how could
he have induced the remnant of Israel left at Babylon, who had
ceased to care for Canaan and Sion, the Jews scattered like Tobit
at Eages and Ekbatana in Media, to fall into his views and alter
their MSS. also ? The Holy Spirit made use of language as a
watchful sentinel on the text of the Scriptures, more faithful and
powerful, because the nature of the safeguard was less understood.
Manuscripts in uncial and cursive characters of different dates and
styles, endorsed on varying material, distinguishable by idiosyn^
crasies of copyists and prejudices of rival Churches, have survived
in scores to testify in these last days to the essential genuineness
of the Word, which has come down to us.
Of the old Latin Version little is known with certainty, except
that it existed. It is first heard of in the Churches of Africa,
before the time of Tertullian ; but in the hands of unskilled
transcribers it became so changed, that it is uncertain whether
there was one leading translation or several distinct versions.
Jerome alludes to variations in copies, but Augustine tells us, that
the "Itala" is to be preferred to other versions. Manuscripts of
the old Latin are in general terms called copies of the Vetus Itala ;
but it cannot be precisely defined, for it is only mentioned by
Augustine, and by him only once. Such as exist are of no prac
tical value ; but we must always think of these pre-Vulgate
versions with tender love, for men and women, notably Perpetua
and Felicitas, names to be perpetually and happily remembered,
gave up their lives rather than sacrifice their copies of the Scrip
tures, thanking God that they were counted worthy to suffer for
His Name. Felicitas was a young wife, and was seized with the
pangs of labour in the dungeon. When the gaoler heard her
groans, he asked her how she would bear on the morrow the agony
of being thrown to wild beasts, when she groaned so much under
the ordinary trials of women? Her noble reply should live for
ever ; true nobility is born of tribulation : " It is only I that am

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 6/
suffering now ; but then there will be Another with me. Who will
suffer for me, because I also shall be suffering for Him."
It cannot be said, that the Vetus Latina Africana was written in
vain, and passed away from the lips and eyes of men without
leaving some happy names entered in the Book of Life. Later on,
in the time of the persecutions of Diocletian, the Bishop of a
town near Carthage was called upon to surrender his copy of the
old version. He replied, " Better it is that I should be burned
than the Scriptures of God,'' and he suffered death. These things
happened for our learning and the strengthening of the hearts of
generations to come, and not in vain. We find their echo in the
bold words of John of Gaunt, the protector of Wycliffe from a
more deadly enemy than the pagan Eoman, viz. the Eoman
Papist : " We will not be the dregs of all, seeing that other
" nations have the Law of God written in their own language."
We find these words interpreted into acts by the Protestant
martyrs, who fell two hundred years later in England, going to
the stake with the Bible tied round their necks, and in these last
days by the young uncivilized, unlearned, weak Christians of the
Churches in Madagascar, who would not surrender their Bibles to
Giant Pagan ; and later on, even to the time while we are writing,
by the nascent Church of Christ in the Society Islands in Oceania,
who will not give up their Bible in their own language at the
bidding of Giant Pope, only because these islands have passed
under the sovereignty of France.
The necessity had arisen for a new and authorized version of the
Old Testament in Latin : there was, perhaps, a spark of rivalry
in the movement. The Emperor Constantine had legalized Chris
tianity, but he had migrated from Eome to Constantinople, and
Greek had again become the vehicle of empire. The New Testament
existed in the original inspired Greek, and the Old Testament in
the Septuagint, with the authority of a usage of five hundred years,
which gave it the weight of inspiration, though it was not alone in
the Greek field, as is evidenced by Origen's Hexapla. Damasus,
Bishop of Eome in the year a.d. 381, felt the difficult position of
the Eoman Churches and the danger of unsettled and varying Latin
translations, and looked round for a man of learning, industrious,
pious, free from heretical bias, yet possessed of critical acumen.
Such a man was found in Hieronymus, better known as Jerome,
who, after the Apostles, rendered the greatest service to the
Western Church, that it was possible for man to render. He was
born in Dalmatia about a.d. 340, and was old enough to study
grammar in a.d. 353, when the last sigh of expiring paganism was
breathed by the noble but mistaken Emperor Julian: "Galilean,
you have conquered." His parents were orthodox Christians, so
he had no hard struggle of conversion to pass through. He
finished his education at Eome : it is recorded that he attended

68 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
lectures of the Neo-Platonic School, and expended his Sundays in
deciphering the inscriptions in the catacombs. He was a great
scholar, and a great traveller in Gaul, Germany, Dalmatia, Greece,
Asia Minor, and Syria. A serious illness'had brought him to God,
and he consecrated his talents to the translation of the Scriptures.
In the island of Eubcea he adopted the life of a hermit, copying
manuscripts and learning Hebrew. He then went to Constantinople
to make himself a master of Greek. No' such scholar as Jerome
appeared until one thousand years later Erasmus was born, and
closed the period of tbe reign of the Vulgate and opened a new era.
Jerome accepted the task imposed upon him by Bishop Damasus.
No one was more aware than he was of the necessity of a careful
revisioBj of the Latin Bible. He began the work of collation of
manuscripts at Eome, amd in a.d. 385 he published a revised
edition of the New Testament and the Psalms. When Bishop
Damasus died, he left Eome and set out for the East. At Antioch
he was joined by two Eoman ladies, Paula and her daughter
Eustochium, who both had leajmt Hebrew. They were accom
panied by a baiid of Eoman women to found a nunnery in Palestine.
Jerome made a tour of Palestine to satisfy himself on Scripture
topography. He then went to Egypt to inspect the convent, still
existing, in the Nitrian Desert. Here resided the debased, ignorant,
and fanatic monks, who under the leadership of Cyril Bishop of
Alexandria massacred the beautiful and unfortunate Hypatia, the
last teacher of the Neo-Platonic School in Alexandria. Chrysostom
was his contemporary at Antioch, and predeceased him, 407. Before
he died Jerome heard that the eternal city had been taken and
plundered in 410 by Alarie, King of the Goths. The end of the
world must have seemed to be at hand. Nothing but the Word of
God had any degree of permanence, but even before Jerome com
menced his task Ulfilas had translated the New Testament from the
Greek into the language of the Goths, as he died a.d. 381, and
perhaps may have been comforted by a belief that the Word of God
would be honoured when entrusted to the Teutonic race. In the
preface to Ezekiel, he writes : " Hseret vox, et singultus interrum-
' ' punt verba dictantis. Capitur Urbs, quae totum cepit orbem :
" Urbs antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos."
During all his wanderings his thoughts were fixed upon this one
subject, and he took the opportunity of discussing moot passages
with learned men when he met them ; and we can hardly imagine
how' important this was at a period, when there was no accumula
tion of commentaries, and not the faintest development of a free
press for discussion. On his return to Palestine Paula built four
monasteries at Bethlehem, three for nuns and one for monks.
Paula presided over the nunneries till she died in a.d. 404, and her
daughter Eustochium succeeded her. Jerome lived to an advanced

TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE. 6g
age and survived both the ladies, and in one of his letters we read
how poignant his grief was at their loss, for they were remarkable
characters, and sustained him in his high endeavour and in his
numerous conflicts, for he was a bitter controversialist, and at one
time so provoked his antagonists, that he had to fly from- the
monastery over which he presided at Bethlehem and conceal him
self for two years. He returned to Bethlehem im 4 1 8 and died in
420, aged 80 years. Jerome unhappily yielded to the strange
fascination of the period of seeking by retirement into a hermitage to
escape from the needed discipline of ordinary life ; but in his letters
to Paulinus he sternly re'bukes the increasing folly of seeking
sanctity by making pilgrimages •. " Let them that say, ' the temple
"of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,' listen to the words of the
" Apostle, ' Ye are the temple of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit
" dwelleth in thee ' " ; and the famous passage, " Et de Jerosolomis,
" et de Britannia, aequaliter patet aula ccelestis." We thank the
good old man for his prophetic utterance, for that country, of which
Jerome had only heard vaguely as the Ultima Thule, was destined
in the century after his death to be won to Christ, and, by God's
grace upon the love of the British nation for the Bible, to become
the centre of the evangelization of the world, carrying the Gospel
in its own proper vernacular to regions which Caesar never knew,
and fulfilling the prophecy, " The isles shall obey Thy law."
Here he translated the Old Testament Irom the Hebrew
original with the aid of Jewish scholars, who came to him
secretly for fear of their co-religionists. The result of his labours
at Eome was a revision of the New Testament, and at Bethlehem
a new translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, viz. the
famous Vulgate. No doubt the text became very coiTupt in the
Middle Ages, changes being made by copyists under the influence
of older translations. It must be recollected, that Jerome had
collected all existing early Latin translations of the New Testament,
and the best Greek manuscripts. He separated the inspired books
from other books, and struck out the Apocrypha as having no
Hebrew original. It required no small nerve to accomplish his
task : it was no small matter for Jerome to abandon the Greek text
of the Old Testament, sometimes, though not always quoted by the
Apostles and Evangelists in the New Testament and read in the
Churches, and commented upon by the early Fathers. Augustine,
Bishop of Hippo, a younger man, but a correspondent of Jerome,
who had freed himself from Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism,
thought the experiment a dangerous one. He was informed by the
great translator, that the Church had already abandoned the Sep
tuagint, and used the text of Origen, which contains additions made
by the Jews, Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, because the
Septuagint had gradually in the flrst centuries of the Church been
degraded by mistakes and additions. The Jews had always had

70 TRANSLATLONS OF THE BIBLE.
their Hebrew originals to check the tide of growing errors, but the
Christians had nothing to prevent glosses creeping in or phrases
being manipulated. Origen's Hexapla had partially added to the
sources of error, for, as few cared to copy the Hexapla in toto, they
entered the variations gleaned from it in the margin of their own
copies of the Septuagint with the usual result. To the stolid
conservative, who prefers quiet error to emendations, which must
cause anxiety, Cyprian's remark applies as well now as in his own
time, "Custom without truth is the decrepitude of' error." The
Church of England of the nineteenth century has not much ground
for throwing stones at the contemporaries of Jerome, as it still uses
in the Prayer Book a version of the Psalms pronounced inaccurate
by two companies of revisers at the interval of two centuries.
The favourite argument against Jerome's Vulgate was much of
the same kind as is urged now : " It is better to adhere to false
translation than disturb the peace of the Church and the foundations
of faith." Church and faith so called were put against, and preferred
before, eternal truth. " Populus vult decipi, et decipiatur." Usage'
hallows errors. Only a few could see the importance of having
access to the purest possible text, and the most accurate possible
translation. Truth triumphed at last, and always will, and some
of us may live to see the disuse of the Psalms in the Anglican Prayer
Book. Gradually the Vulgate supplanted the old versions, many
of which have bodily disappeared. Africa clung to the old version
till the day of her opportunity had passed and her candlestick was
removed. The Venerable Bede in the eighth century had adopted
the Vulgate in England.
The infiuence, which the Vulgate exercised upon Western
Christianity, is not less than that of the Septuagint on the Eastem
Churches. Both versions have been in later times unjustly neg
lected and reviled, though the share which they took in preserving
the Scriptures up to the age of the revival of learning in the fifteenth
century can scarcely be overrated : they were the bulwarks of the
Western and Eastern Churches for centuries. The Vulgate was for
one thousand years the only Bible used, and the real parent of all
the vernacular versions of Western Europe except the Gothic version
of Ulfilas. From the point of language, it is interesting to record
that the Vulgate held the fort until the magnificent crop of Neo-
Arian languages in Western Europe was matured, and ready for
the reception of the oracles of God. We have copies of the Vulgate
in our libraries, with Saxon and Irish glosses written interlinearly,
BO that we know what manner of form of speech existed in Great
Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries. Neither Bede's trans
lation (a.d. 735) nor Wycliffe's (a.d. 1324-1384) were fit to be the
conquering angels of the everlasting Gospel, which it was the happy
lot of the English Bible of a few centuries later to become. God's
wheels grind slowly, but very fine, and the fulness of time had to

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

71

be waited for in the use of languages. The Vulgate is also the
source of our current theological terminology, and an important
witness to the text and interpretation at the time of the translation.
The words " Vulgata Editio" are synonymous with Koivij eKioaiv in
Greek, and "current text" in English. As the monument of the
power of a translator from a Semitic language into an Arian, at a
period of linguistic knowledge, when few men knew both languages,
the translation of the Old Testament is so far unique, that we have
no other specimen that can be compared to it. The New Testament
had indeed been translated from the Arian Greek into the Semitic
Syriac by men of Antioch, who were bilinguists, living in the
midst of a bilingual population. In the same manner the Hellen
ized Jews at Alexandria had translated their sacred books from their
dead sacred language, which they had studied, into the Greek,
which they spoke, at a much earlier date. But Jerome's work
compares more closely with the labours of missionaries like Carey,
and Morrison, and Eliot, and many others, who acquired a strange
vernacular first, and then rendered a book from the dead languages
into this new and unadapted vehicle of thought. But Jerome was
still at a great disadvantage when compared with the modern
translator, who always has on his table critical helps to assist him
to the interpretation, linguistic helps in the way of grammars and
dictionaries to bring out the meaning, and, lastly, his own English
version standing as arbitrator betwixt the inspired originals and the
imperfectly handled vernacular. Jerome had nothing.
The Vulgate was unduly venerated by the Church of Eome,
and in consequence its value was unduly depreciated by the
Protestants. It is a faithful translation, and sometimes (notably
Eev. xxii. 14) exhibits the sense of the original with greater
accuracy than our Authorized Version. Jerome had access to
manuscripts older than any now existing, and supplies an approxi
mation of readings now lost in the original. The work was
completed before many of the theological controversies, which
disgraced the second period of Christianity, came into existence.
That the Council of Trent was madly foolish in giving to the
Vulgate its Imprimatur, absolute and unconditional, cannot be
doubted; but it is manifest that it was the only version, which
a majority of Churches, which clung to Eome, would acknowledge
at that time. As finally accepted, it differed from the original
translation of Jerome, in that it included" the Psalms of the old
version, only revised by Jerome, and not translated from the
Hebrew, and some apocryphal books, which Jerome did not include
in his version at all. We must recollect the circumstances of the
time, when we sit in judgment upon, the leaders who led the
Council of Trent on to its unwise and fatal decision. The Protes
tant Churches were tearing up all the landmarks of theology,
as then received, by their new vernacular versions, and the inter-

72 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
pretation placed upon newly-revealed texts. The Church of Eome,
had it been guided by the Holy Spirit, might have recognized the
signs of the times, and employed ' scholars of repute, such as
Erasmus, to revise the text, correct the translation, and bring the
Vulgate up to the level of contemporary knowledge, as we have
been doing in England with our Eevised English Version. If the
new text and translation destroyed some dogma based on error,
so much the worse for the dogma. Throw it over the side of the
ship. This meant reformation of errors, and the discontinuance of
some of the favourite vices of the Church of Eome, celibacy of the
priesthood, worship of images, doing penance, ritual in a foreign
language, transubstantiation, purgatory, masses, etc., and the
Church of Eome had become hopelessly hardened in her evil
unscriptural system. Although the Latin language had in the
natural course of time ceased to be understood by the laity, in
its stupidity and blindness, and utterly mistaken •view of the
object and nature of true worship in spirit and truth, Eome clung
to the mediaeval conception of uniformity of usage and unity of
worship, and refused to allow the vernaculars to approach the
altar. Ttiis is a sure test of a false religious conception. The
policy then adopted by Eome had been adopted long before by the
Hindu, Buddhist, and Mahometan. In the dark hours of the
Middle Ages there was no prohibition of glosses, or versions, or
Scripture narratives for private edification, generally metrical, or
artificially made up ; but with the revival of learning and the
Eeformation, Eome became aware of the wide gulf between the
Scripture and her practice. The Bible had become an instrument
of righteous attack in the hands of her enemies. No inquiry was
made whether the books included by usage in their Scriptures
were inspired. It was blindly decreed that the Vulgate was the
only Bible, the entire Vulgate, and nothing but the Vulgate. On
that rock the Church of Eome must sooner or later be wrecked,
for the letter kills, and the spirit gives life. " Quem Deus vult
perdere, prius dementat." At one time it was demanded by the
Theological Faculty of Mayence that a total revision and correction
of the Hebrew Old Testament should be made on the grounds that
it differed from the Vulgate. The folly of the Eoman Catholic
Church could go no further than this : the attempt was not made.
The Hebrew text still condemns the Vulgate.
Other versions of the Scripture appeared in Latin : i . Erasmus
published the New, Testament 1516, at Basel, eleven hundred
years after the death of Jerome. 2. Pagninus at Lyons in 1528. 3.
Cardinal Cajetan in 1530. 4. Munster in 1534. 5. Leo Judaein 1534.
6. Castello in 155 i. 7. Junius and Tremellius in 1575. 8. Malvenda
in 1650. 9. Schmid in i6g6. 10. Henbigaut in 1753. 11. Dathe
in 1773. And others of a later date, and of a decreasing import
ance : in fact modem Latin translations are absolutely valueless.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. -ji
None ever came in comparison with the Vulgate, or were of any
practical value for the conversion of souls. Copies of the Vulgate
spread over Western Europe, some prepared in the most costly
manner, as may be seen in the treasure house or the library of
many Eoman Catholic foreign cathedrals or convents. In this lay
the difficulty of substantially amending the text, as who was
prepared to pay the vast expense of collating the copies scattered
all over Europe, the hazard of offending all by the compilation of
a new text, the difficulty of supplying the copies of the amended
text, and the still greater difficulty of enforcing compliance with
the order to use the text only ? In a.d. 802, after a lapse of four
centuries ' from the time of Jerome, the text had been revised by
Alcuin, under the orders of Charlemagne. This helped to preserve
its purity. In a.d. 1455 it was the first book printed and pub
lished. Although A.D. 1546 the Council of Trent declared, that
the then existing Vulgate was the sole authorized version of the
Bible, in 1589 a new edition appeared under the authority of
Pope Sixtus v., and in 1592 this version was further revised
by Pope Clement VIII. Two infallible Popes issued rival
editions of the same inspired book; and thus the story of the
Vulgate ends. Another incidental solid advantage accrued from
its existence, that it proves the substantial identity of the Hebrew
text used by Jerome and the Masoretic text in use to this day.
Whatever English Eoman Catholic priests may say to the
contrary, the desire of the Church of Eome has for many centuries
been to hide the Scriptures from the eyes of the people. It is clear,
that in early centuries the Latin Churches yearned for copies of the
Scriptures in their own vernacular, and the Head of the Church of
Eome took counsel to secure a revised text on a level with the
learning and requirements of the age. Such is not the Eoman
policy now. As the chemist places his dangerous ingredients out
of the reach of the public, and only supplies them under the
prescription of the competent and authorized physician, so the
Eomish Priesthood, deeming the vernacular Bible dangerous, forbid
it to the laity except under the conditions laid down by themselves.
This is no new claim. I supply a catena of Papal dicta on the
subject. Gregory VIL, Hildebrand, in 1080 a.d., replies to the Duke of
Bohemia :
Non immerito saoram Scripturam Omnipotenti Deo plaouisse quihusdam loots
esse oceultam, ne, si ad liquidum cunctis pateret, forte vilesceret, et subjaceret
despeotui, aut prave iutellecta a mediocribus et in errorem iuduceret.
Gregory IX., in 1229 a.d., wrote :
Probibemus, ne libros Veteris Testament! aut Novi laid permittentur habere,^
nisi forte Psalterium, sed ne prsetermissos libros habeant iu vulgari lingua
arotissime probibemus.

74 TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.
In 1546 there follows the Council of Trent Eule VI., which I
give in English :
Inasmuch as it is manifest from experience that, if tbe Holy Bible translated
in tbe vulgar tongue be indiscriminately allcwed to every one, the temerity of
man ¦will cause more evil than good to arise from it, it is ou this point referred to
the judgment of the Bishop, or inquisitor, who may by the advice of the priest-
confessor permit the reading of the Bible translated into the vulgar tongue hy
Catholic authors, and this permission they must have in writing. But if any one
should have the presumption to read, or possess it, without such written permission,
he shall not receive absolution until he shall have first delivered up such Bible to
the Ordinary. Any bookseller who shall sell, or otherwise dispose of. Bibles iu
the vulgar tongue to any person not having such permission, shall forfeit the value
of the books, to be applied by the Bishop to some pious use, and be subjected to
penalties. Benedict XIV., 1757, somewhat relaxed this :
Quod si hujusmodi librorum versiones vulgari lingu^ aint ab ApostolicS sede
approbatse, aut editse cum annotationibus desumptis ex sanetis Ecclesise patribus,
vel ex doctis, Catholicisque viris conceduntur.
Finally, in the Eules of the Index we find :
Ad extremum omnibus fidelibus praecipitur, ne quis audeat contra harum regu-
larum prjescripta, aut hujus Indicis probibitiones libros aliquos habere aut legere.
Quod si quis libros hsereticonim vel scripta ob hseresiam, vel falsi dogmatis
suspicionem damnata atque prohibita legerit sive habuerit, statim, in excomrnuni-
cationis sententiam incurret. Biblia sacra eorum (baereticorum) operS, impressa,
vel eorum annotationibus, argumentis, summariis, scholiis et indicibus aucta, sunt
inclusa. In 1713 Clement XI. issued the Bull " Unigenitus," and con
demned Pasquier Quesnel's French translation of the Vulgate in
such terms as finally to lay down unmistakably, that the Scriptures
were shut out from the peopU.
In J 8 1 6, June 29th, Pius VII. denounced the British and Foreign
Bible Society " as a crafty device, by which the foundations of
Eeligion are undermined, and a defilement of the Faith most
universally dangerous to souls. No version of the Bible in the
vulgar tongue is to be permitted except as above stated."
The same Pope in 18 16, September 3rd, prescribed that "if the
Holy Bible in the vulgar tongue was permitted everywhere without
discrimination, more injury than benefit would thence arise."
In 1824 Leo XII. issued an Encyclical letter, urging all his
subordinates, by all means in their power, to keep the people from
reading the Scriptures, and giving his sanction to the Bulls of his
predecessors against the circulation and reading of the word of God,
which he calls the Gospel of the devil. I quote his words :
you are not ignorant that tbe Bible Society is stalking through the world,
which, condemning the tradition of tbe Fathers, and contrary to the Council of
Trent, is lending all its strength, and by every means to .translate the Bible in the
vulgar language of all nations, or rather to pervert it ; whence it is greatly to be
feared lest, as in some versions already known, so in others, by a perverse
interpretation, instead of tbe Gospel of Christ, it should become the Gospel of man,
or, wh^t is worse, the Gospel of the devil.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 75
In 1 844 Gregory XVI. strongly enforced the Encyclical letter
of Pius VIII. :
"We confirm and renew the decrees delivered in former time by Apostolic
Authority against the publication, distribution, reading, and possession of the
Holy Scriptures translated in the vulgar tongue.
Tou are consequently enjoined to remove from the hands of the faithful the
Bibles in the vulgar tongue, which may have been printed contrary to the decrees
above mentioned.
All these decrees breathe a determined and unmitigated hatred
to the Bible, and a desire to dishonour it in the eyes of the people,
as it is placed in the same index with nauseous and obscene
publications. In 1 840 the Bishop of Bruges, in Belgium, described the British
and Foreign Bible Society as a " society hostile to God and the
"Holy Church. The Church holds heretical Bibles in abhorrence,
" and utterly detests them."
In 1 844, in the presence of Archbishop Hale, of Tuam, Ireland,
a friar preached as follows :
Any person who practises tbe reading of tbe Bible will inevitably fall into
everlasting damnation. Do not allow the Bible-readers near your homes ; do not
speak to them ; when you meet put up your hands, and bless yourself, and pray
to God and the Virgin Mary to keep you from being contaminated by the poison of
the Bible. The worst of all pestilences, the infectious pestilence of the Bible,
will entail on yourselves and children the everlasting ruin of your souls. Those
who send their children to school where the Scriptures are read give their children
bound with chains to the devil.
In 1 849, Pius IX., the predecessor of the present Pope, addressed
an Encyclical letter to the Bishops of Italy, in which he reiterates
the condemnation of the Bible-Societies, and represents ' ' the
" Bible, when translated into the vulgar tongue, and issued
" without Catholic comments, as poisonous."
In 1864 appeared the Syllabus, in which Bible-Societies are
placed in the same category with secret societies and Socialists.
Thus the holy work of good old Jerome, which had been com
menced so au.'^piciously and lasted so long, has become the snare
and curse of the Eoman Church. Science advances, and the
thoughts of men grow broader with the progress of the sun ; just
when the Eenaissance of Literature was bringing new light, the
Council of Trent galvanized the poor Vulgate into a cast-iron
reservoir of the errors of thirty generations of copyists, who
were denied access for the purpose of periodical verification to
the Greek or Latin or early Asiatic and African versions. A
more sad mistake was never made. The folly of the Mahometans
in not allowing the Koran in the Turkish language is as nothing
to it ; in India, however, the Koran is appearing in the vernacular,
and in diglott editions.
Gradually the Church of Eome allowed translations, with notes,
to be made from the Vulgate into the vernaculars of Europe, and

•^6 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
the ubiquity of the agents of the Bible-Societies has compelled
them to go forward. It may be accepted as a fact, until the
contrary be proved, that no attempt was made deliberately to
tamper with the text of the Vulgate by the Eoman Church, nor,
considering the wide spread of manuscript copies in libraries,
convents, churches and private houses in every part of Europe,
was it possible, as it had been used for centuries in independent
countries, and by quasi-independent churches. According to all
experience of manuscripts, secular or religious, corruptions come in
the very process of transcription ; the copyists of those ages had no
conception of the fiduciary duty of their office ; glosses and marginal
notes were insensibly incorporated in the text of the new copy;
corrections were made in the supposed interest of grammar and
style, especially in parallel passages of the Gospels. When trans
lations came to be made in the vernacular of particular Churches,
as a general rule they were faithful renderings of the Vulgate, but
not always. I have only to allude to the Bordeaux version in the
French language made by the Jesuits in 1685 to cajole the French
Protestants, who, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were
at the mercy of their persecutors ; copies of this book are rare, but
still in existence. No doubt there is always the possibility of
unscrupulous religionists, who place their Church and dogma
above truth, attempting such shameless forgeries again,- but
exposure must soon follow.
In all the essentials of the Christian verities, and the saving
truths of the Gospel of Christ, certain versions issued under the
authority of the Church of Eome are sound.; and this compels me
to allude to a controversy, which is disturbing one tiny corner of
the Evangelical section of tbe Protestant Churches of England
at this moment. The priests of the Eomish Church positively
forbid the use by their floc'ks of the versions made in certain
languages of Europe, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and
Polish, and, distributed by the British and Foreign Bible Society.
That Society has no love for versioaas, which have the imprimatur
of Eomish bishops ; but the value of a soul is not to be weighed in
a human balance ; and the possibility of bringing the Word of God
into contact with the conscience of man is not to be limited by red-
tape rules, and the great Bible Society of London, seeing that the
Eoman Catholic flocks are permitted by their bishops to purchase
and possess certain authorized translations of the Bible, supply
them, and they are greedily purchased, and greatly blessed in
their use. I wish not to speak hardly of those, who would deny
wholesome broad to starving Christians, because it is not of the
finest flour, and who would let their children pine with hunger,
because they are by the foolish rules of their family not permitted
to partake of the pure unadulterated cocoa, which is the only diet
which narrow-minded enthusiasts can tolerate. There is abundant

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

77

evidence of the blessings, which have attended the circulation
of these Vulgate translations, and a strong protest from sincere
Protestants would be evoked by any attempt arbitrarily to stop
the supply: when they cease to be called for, the Society will
cease to send them, and having done their work, they will drop
out of circulation.
The inspired Word of God in the Hebrew and Greek has never,
in its long course, been other than an unmixed blessing to man
kind. Words are but coins to represent ideas, sentences are but
capsules to enclose an opinion or statement. The inspired Word
of God, always fresh, always clear, makes itself always intelligible
to the prayerful spirit. I think poorly of the zeal or ability of any
minister of the Gospel, who has not made himself familiar with the
Hebrew and Greek. A translation is something essentially different.
Let us take the highest instances, the Septuagint, the Vulgate,
and our own Eevised Version : the translators were honest, and
learned up to the level of their epoch, but their renderings only
express the eternal Word in the transitory conception of their
own age and country, and general turn of thought. The intellect,
which has coined 'the translation, the hand that engrosses it, is
human, nothing but human ; the language, which they use, is the
vernacular of their age, and the danger is that a false halo will
surround their errors, and a false sentiment be engendered to
pepetuate the so called eccentric beauties of the style, the
majestic flow of the words, not reflected from the original. We
see it painfully in our own beautiful, and flexible, and constantly
changing form of speech. What right have we to cling to erroneous
word-renderings and avowedly interpolated sentences (such as the
last words of the Lord's Prayer, the words of Philip to 'the eunuch,
and the heavenly witnesses) because we learnt them from the lips
of our mothers ? Let us go back more to the original texts, if we
care'more for rhythm, or beauty of expression, and be content with
the matter contained in the translation, for the form of words used
is only a transitory human conception ; that which suited the time
of Queen Elizabeth is antiquated in the time of Queen Victoria,
but the matter contained is always the same, whether expressed in
English, Arabic, Hindustani, or Maori. Translations are a necessity
of the stream of time, and the ever-changing word-moulds of
succeeding generations. We- should have holy strength each century
to free ourselves from the yoke of the linguistic interpretations of
our ancestors, and bathe fresh and fresh in the river of crystal, the
pure Word of God, as delivered to holy men of old, and handed
'down to us, and children still to be born, in their ipsissima verba.
And not only from the linguistic interpretation, but from the
narrow interpretation of the meaning of the words. The writers of
the Old Testament wrote with no knowledge beyond the horizon
of the Jewish people; the translators of the Septuagint had an

78 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE,
Alexandrine bias with a possible admixture of Platonism. The
Apostles and the Greek Fathers had their human intelligence
restricted to the Shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Eoman
fathers could see nothing beyond the bounds of the decaying Eoman
Empire. We are in a fuller light with the inhabitants of the whole
world, all equally the children of God, for all pf whom Christ
died, revealed to us and with a corrector text, and more accurate
translations, are in a better position to arrive at a sounder judgment.
We look with pity on the narrow views of the Procrustean bed of
the Eoman Church, and the crass ignorance of the weak Oriental
Churches ; and we cannot but feel that the power of elucidation of
a text is now at a higher level. No one can have had the oppor
tunity of following a text from the Hebrew to the Septuagint and
the Vulgate, and thence to one or two of the cultivated vernaculars
of Europe, and then extended his comparison to some of the many
languages of India, and the great Semitic language of Arabic,
without feeling that new lights are thrown upon the meaning of
the inspired original, as each faithful translator struck his hammer
on the anvil, which gave forth a different, and yet similar, sound.
How much better is this than the commentary based on mediaeval
fallacies, repeating platitudes of previous generations, grasping no
new aspects of the eternal truth. The Holy Spirit still dwells
among men, vindicating the right of private judgment on a matter
affecting individual salvation, after sufficient and prayerful reading
and inquiry, and with a humble, undogmatic and chastised frame
of mind, seeking illumination from the only quarter in which it
is to be found, not infallibility, but a spiritual discernment, and
harmony with the Spirit of God.
No one body of Christians, calling itself "The Church," can be
allowed to stand betwixt the Word of God and the Covenant of
M an, and to lay down dogmatically, that such and such must be the
interpretation of a Scripture-Text, because centuries ago certain
persons, less qualified to form an opinion than the men of this
generation, said that it was so : nor can this generation pretend
that the men of the next generation may not use the same liberty :
it has been well put by an American association :
" The recognition of philogical and historical laws as the sole
"human methods for discovering of the facts of the Word, from
" which facts alone the inductions and deductions are to be made.
"All other methods, such as by tradition, by authority, by the moral
" sense, by the ethical nature of man, by natural laws so called, by
"reason, by the Christian consciousness, by any mystical inner
"light, whether used as explanatory or as complementary, or both
" combined, are to be rejected as unscientific."
The Churchman, May, 1890.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

79

CHAPTER IIL— FRENCH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Finality in translation is not to be attained, at leafet, in this
generation. Of the great European languages, not one has settled
the form, in which the inspired text of the Hebrew and Greek is to
be placed before the unlearned. English is still on the anvil.
I received lately a prospectus of a proposed translation in the
vulgar tongue, such as people ordinarily speak, and newspapers
write. In Germany Luther's translation is undergoing revision.
In Holland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal new translations
are in progress. Considering how much hidden meaning is ex
tracted from the original, which is not patent on the surface, it
may probably end in a plurality of translations obtaining a
currency, which, from one point of view, though not every point
of view, is to be regretted. Other causes are at work. An edition
of the English New Testament is threatened with distinct
utterance on the Baptist question, and the words " John the
Dipper " and " total immersion " will take the place of " Baptist "
and ."Baptism." In the French versions we have variation in the
rendering of the word " priest" in the New Testament as applied
to the officers of the Christian Church; " sacriflcateur " in the one
case, and " pretre " in the other. This brings me back to the
direct subject of my essay.
The French language is spoken in the greater part of Prance, in
Belgium, in Switzerland, in a certain portion of Italy ; in the
Channel Islands, the Island of Mauritius, and a portion of Canada
in the British Empire ; in Louisiana of the United States, and in
the French colonies in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, as part
of their colonial system is to introduce the French language into
schools. As early as the twelfth century a.d. attempts were made in
France to translate the Scriptures into the vernacular, and
publish books of Scripture History. About 1530 a.d. a version
of the entire Scriptures was published at Antwerp by Jacobus
Faber, Stapulensis ; this went through editions and reprints, and
held its own. Other independent translations were made in
Switzerland and France ; but two superseded all the rest, and are
used to this day. De Sacy and other Port Eoyalists made a new
version of the New Testament from the Vulgate, and it was
printed by the Elzevirs at Amsterdam, 1667 a.d. Being thrown
into prison by the Jesuits, he translated the Old Testament in
prison, and finished his work on the eve of his liberation, 1668 a.d.
This was considered the most perfect version in the French lan
guage. In 1724 Ostervald revised the translation made at Geneva
in 1588; he was a Lutheran pastor. Both of these last two,
revised over and over again, are now circulated by the Society for

8o TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the British and Foreign
Bible Society. De Sacy's version is preferred by Eoman Catholics,
and, I regret to say, is still circulated with a recommendatory
Imprimatur of a French Archbishop, which, considering that the
feeling of the Eomish Church has been greatly altered on the
subject, and that the version has been somewhat modified, is to be
regretted. The Word of God requires no recommendation from
priest or king. Church or Parliament. They exist through it ; it
will continue to exist long after they have passed away.
Neither of the versions in use gave entire satisfaction ; far from
it. Some objected to the version of De Sacy, because it was from
the Vulgate, and inaccurately called a Eoman Catholic translation ;
others objected to Ostervald because of the inferiority of its style.
It is noteworthy that in the first verse of John's Gospel De Sacy
uses the word " Verbe " for Ao'^os, and Ostervald " Parole."
In 1873 Dr. Louis Segond published his entirely new translation
of the whole Bible from Hebrew and Greek at Lausanne, in
Switzerland. In the preface he gives in detail his reasons and his
principles. The chief reason was, that the Geneva translation,
which was the household treasure of the Swiss Churches, was not
from the original texts, but from the Vulgate ; that it had been
repeatedly revised, but was still far from perfect ; in fact, the
same reason led him to make an entirely new translation, which
had led Jerome centuries earlier to make his celebrated translation,
known as the Vulgate. His principles of translation were
exactness, clearness, and accuracy, with a good literary style and
a religious turn of expression. If. his translation upset any pre
conceived dogma, he could not help it ; so much the worse for the
dogma. A correct translation rests on a philological, not a theo
logical, basis. The division into chapters and verses is dispensed
with ; the figures indicative of both appear in the margin to
facilitate reference. The notes are philological ; the poetic
writings are printed in a manner totally distinct from the prose,
upon a principle carefully explained by the translator. The result
is a translation of a most fascinating character, and which has met
with a most favourable reception. As long as Dr. Segond lived,
he allowed no changes to be made, but since his death this has
become possible. As it has never been authoritatively accepted by
any Protestant Church, the British and Foreign Bible Society have
been unable to place it on their lists ; and another and more for
midable reason for not adopting it is the startling novelty of some
of its translations. Take, for instance, Isaiah vii. 14, "A virgin
shall conceive," etc., is rendered, " Voici lajeune femme deviendra
enceinte," etc. No doubt the word used in this passage in the
Hebrew original is not the regular word for a " virgin " used else
where, and susceptible of the translation made by Segond ; but
the Septuagint, written 150 years before Christ, has fixed for ever

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 8 1
the interpretation adopted by the Jews : lho'6 ij Trapeivo^ iv r/aarpl
X-^-^erai. Such a translation cannot be accepted until it has been
carefully revised, and purged of such novelties, shaking the very
foundation of our faith, and running counter to long and deeply-
cherished opinions.
Thus the translations available in French-speaking countries
were three : De Sacy, Ostervald, and Segond. A version by
Martin, a predecessor of Ostervald, is still on the list, but is of no
practical value.
A new translation of the Psalms was published by Abbe
Crampon in Belgium ; in the Preface he expresses his regret at
the neglect, in which private reading of the Scriptures had fallen,
and he hopes that his new translation will restore the Psalter to its
old place beside the Gospel in every Christian family : one edition
is published with the Latin Text and Philological Notes for the
Clergy, and educated laity : one for Nuns, and the faithful
generally, with spiritual and moral notes.
In 1885 the Eev. John Nelson Darby, the founder of Plymouth-
itism, published an entirely new version, not following the Textus
Eeoeptus, as the translator has made use of the materials, which
have become known or made available during recent years. I have
placed a copy of this version in the Library of the British and
Foreign Bible Society.
To the surprise of the religious world, a new translation ap
peared in 1877, and in July, 1884, in the issue of the Missions
Catholiques, the Eoman Catholic weekly published at Lyons,
appeared the following, headed "La Sainte Bible" :
Traduction nouvelle avec notes, approuvie par la commission d'examen nomme'e
par le Souverain Pontife, par M. I'Abbe Glaire, ancien Doyen de la Faculte de
• theologie. 4 volumes in 18 brocbes : 10 fr.
II manquait aux families catholiques une Bible sAre et autorisie. M. I'Abbe
Glaire, en publiant cette traduction a laquelle il s'etait prepare par plus de
quarante annees d'une etude continue des langues et de la science biblique, a
largement comble cette lacune.
Ajoutons qu'a la demande signee de cinquante-cinq eveques, le Souverain
Pontife a daigne nommer une commission d'examen, qui accord^ a cette nouvelle
version sa haute approbation. D'un format portaiifet elegant, omee de jolies
gravures sur acier, cette Bible sera un des cadeaux les mieux appropries aux
personnes chretiennes.
I sent for a copy and reviewed it as follows in the monthly
periodical of the British and Foreign Bible Society :
In a late number of the Missions Catholiques, the weekly organ of French
Roman Catholic Missions, appeared a notice strongly recommending the faithful
to supply themselves with a copy of the French translation of the whole Bible,
lately made by I'Abbe J. B. Glaire, and published under the special sanction of
the French Episcopate, and the written authorization of Pope Pius IX.
On July oth, 1870, the assembled Bishops of France addressed the Pope to this
effect :
" Profoundly alHicted to see the Protestants supplying Catholic families with
" Bibles to an alarming extent, and exerting in this way a great infl^uence by

82 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
" lowering in their eyes our holy dogmas, and attracting children to their schools,
" the assembled Bishops, desirous of arresting so great an evil, petition your
" Holiness to examine the French translation of the Old Testament, made by
" I'Abbe Glaire, and give it your imprimatur.
" One cannot doubt, that this will be a powerful means of arresting the pro-
" gross of the evil, experience having already proved, that the publication of the
" New Testament by the same author, and previously authorized by your
" Holiness, has produced most salutary fruits.
" It is incontestable, that nothing in the present time can prevent the reading
" of the entire Bible in the world. Is it not, then, a great advantage to substitute
" a faithful and authorized version to translations which are incorrect, and which
" have no ecclesiastical approbation ?
" In short, a French Bible, authorized by the Pope, wiU deprive the Pro-
' ' testants of aU pretext for accusing imjustly the Catholic Church of cutting ofiE
' ' the faithful from the W ord of God.' '
The Pope, on January 22nd, 1873, after an interval of two years and a half
authorized the proposal on these conditions :
I. The version is to be an exact translation of the Latin Vulgate.
II. Nothing in it is to be contrary to faith or morals.
III. The notes are to be taken from the Fathers of the Church, or from
learned Catholics, under the decree of the Congregation of the Index.
IV. The license now given to the French Bishops is not to he deemed as a
formal and solemn approbation of the French translation.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux declared, on March 4th, 1873 : " That
" the translation made by M. Glaire was a correct rendering of the Latin Vulgate,
' ' and that he and the Bishops were convinced, that it wonld be of great use to
" the faithful, and that it would with advantage replace all translations previously
" existing, for the correctness of which there was not the same guarantee." The
Archbishop of Paris expressed similar opinions. The Archbishop of Bruges added
the follo'ffing remarks : " That the Latin text was interpreted when required by
" the original text (Hebrew), and accompanied by the explicatory notes, as
" required hy the Council of Trent. He considered this new version more
" faithful than most of the French versions, and satisfying the requirement, long
" felt in France, of a sure and authorized translation, which can be put ¦without
" danger into the hands of the faithful."
The translator modestly tells us, that he had prepared himseU for the duty by
forty years' study, and that he approached the diificult task with great diflidenoe.
He had wished to make use of the translation of Sacy, but found that Sacy was a
paraphraser rather than a translator. He could have nothing to say to the trans
lation of Genonde, which did not adhere to the Latin Vulgate, but abandoned it
occasionally for the Hebrew and Greek.
He had tried to make use of the translations of Bishop Bossuet, but found that,
notwithstanding all his erudition, Bossuet was ignorant of Hebrew, which he
(the translator) deemed indispensable for Scripture exegesis !
He had rendered, where possible, word for word, with a view to preserve the
admirable simplicitrf of the Bible, to imitate the example of Jerome, who made
his version a literal one, and so evidence his respect for the 'Word of God. He
wished his translation to preserve all the linguistic peculiarities of the Hebrew
and Greek.
AU the remarks of the translator indicate patient research and humility. He
quotes, perhaps unnecessarily, a number of opinions of competent critics and Pro
testant divines, in favour ot the excellence of the Latin 'Vulgate. There is no
question of the extreme value of that venerable translation, which clearly points
to the existence of Hebrew texts, which were available to Jerome, but have since
perished. It was the Latin Vulgate, that converted Luther and Melanchthon ; and if M.
Glaire's is a faithful literal version of the Vulgate, the Holy Spirit will use it for

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

83

new conquests. AU that Protestants ask is, that the Bible should have free
course in the language understood by the people ; and the great charge against
the Church of Rome is, that it would not allow this, and against the ignorant
priesthood of countries in a lower state of civilization than France, that they
destroyed the Bible when it came into their hands and called it " a cursed book."
It wiU be observed, that the Romish Church do not permit a Bible to be pubUshed
in any vernacular without notes, and these notes are to be quotations from the
works of Church authorities. Anyhow, the whole Bible, translated from the
Latin Vulgate, has now become accessible to every Frenchman who can afford ten
francs. It is the conscientious work of a learned ecclesiastic, who fortified him
self iu his translations by reference to the Hebrew and Greek.
But a greater surprise was in store. In 1886, at Paris, was
published a book with the title: "Les Salutes Evangiles, tra-
" duction nouvelle par Henri Lasserre, publiee avec I'Imprimatur
" de I'Archeveche de Paris."
In the " Monthly Eeporter of the British and Foreign Bible
" Society" of April, 1887, appeared the following remark :
Its interest to the friends of the Bible Society lies in this, that it chronicles
another effort ou the part of members of the Roman CathoUc Church body to
supply themselves with the documents of the faith in the vernacular, 'with which
efforfB the Society has always sympathized ; and, moreover, by the quotation of
the exact words of the Paris correspondent, it gives to Protestants an interesting
view of current French Roman Catholic opinion in the circles, in which the mere
litterateur moves. It is a strange thing to observe, that the Bible, and all that
concerns the history of the Bible, though lying in the main road of human pro
gress, is every now and then " discovered " by some Frenchman or Italian, as if
it were a new thing, and announced to the world with much flourish, as if Diodati,
and Martini, and OUvetan, and Ostervald, and Val&a, and Scio had never lived
at aU.
The book had then passed through nine editions, but a strange
romance was destined to surround this version.
It is dedicated to " Notre Dame de Lourdes," described as the
"Eeine du Ciel," and the healer of the translator's blindness.
The same author, who undertook with success the translation of
the Four Gospels, had already written the history of the Greatest
Lie of the Century, the Imposture at Lourdes, which in 1881 I
visited, and an account of the visions seen by the poor peasant girl
Bernadette, to whom the Virgin is said to have appeared. It must
be recollected, that this new cultus is not of the Virgin Mother
with her Holy Child in her arms, which originated as an assertion
of the great truth of the congenital Divinity of our Lord, but it is
the worship of a beautiful young woman, as she appeared before
the Holy Ghost overshadowed her ; it is, in fact, the reappearance
in Christian form of the old worship of Lucina, and other female
divinities of the Latin races in pre-Christian times.
The translation is preceded by a long preface, with the dates
1 872-1 886 attached to it. On the title-page is the notice r " Publiee
avec I'Imprimatur de I'Archeveche de Paris." The names of pub
lishers at Paris, Brussels, and Geneva are attached to it, and the
following notice of it appeared in a Eoman Catholic journal under

84 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
date December 4, 1886, explaining its objects, methods, and peculiar
features :
This translation of the Gospels, which contains the germs of a religious revo
lution, has been made after a new method. All the French versions that we have
are a copy {dicalque) of the Latin, Latin Frenchified, Latin words translated
into French words, but by no means participating in the genius of the French
language. So that the teanslations make the Scriptures illegible and often in
comprehensible. The great mass of the faithful do not know Latin, and can only read the
Gospels in the French translation. As M. Lasserre says in his preface, " Most
of the faithful only know of the Divine Book fragments reproduced in the Par-
roissien (Prayer-book), without logical or chronological order, in the Mass for
festivals and Sundays ; we believe we do not exaggerate," he adds, " in stating
that there are not perhaps on an average three CathoUcs {fideles) in each parish,
who have got beyond that vague notion, and who even once in their whole lives
have endeavoured to foUow and study in its harmonious whole, and in the quad
ruple form given it by the Evangelists, the complete history of the Man-God..
"What an astonishing and painful contrast ! while continuing to be the most
iUustrious hook in the whole world, the Gospel has become an ignored book."
One can indeed say, that the French are not acquainted with the Gospel ; it is
for them a dead book, of which they have read a few fragments, which they did
not understand or which they found wearisome. So that their religious instruc
tion and their religious education are second-hand, and their reUgious feelings
are not drawn from the fountain source. Hence that deformation of religion of
which the bishops have often complained, without being able to remedy it, because
the number of those, who are not content with the coal-heaver's faith, and who
like to discuss religious questions, is becoming greater and greater, and they are
completely ignorant of the Gospel.
Now, without paraphrasing the text, but without translating it servilely, by
translating it so, that the genius of the French language shall take the place of
the genius of the Latin language, instead of being in that chopped, hopping,
rebus-like style, which characterizes all existing translations, M. Lasserre has
made of the Gospel a book, which any one can read readily, understand and admire.
The distribution of the Gospel into chapters dates from the thirteenth century,
and was the work of Cardinal Hugues de St. Victor ; and the division into verses
was only introduced in the sixteenth century hy the celebrated Parisian printer,
E. Estieime (Robert Stephen).
" By transferring to the translations in the vulgar tongue," says M. Lasserre
in, his preface, " these divisions of the printer Estienne ; by introducing into the
" discourses of the Saviour and into the narrative of the EvangeUsts these per-
" petual and brutal choppings {hachures), which disturb the mind as well as the
" eye, by imposing on the mind without necessity or benefit, this march con-
" stantly arrested and resumed, this abrupt and jerky gait ; the intrinsic charm,
" the profound and peaceful charm of the Book of Lite has been more and more
" destroyed, in order to facilitate the labour of the learned, of exegetists and
" preachers, for whom these translations into the vulgar tongue were not made."
M. Lasserre has, therefore, returned to the old and primitive arrangement.
His Gospels have the appearance of an ordinary book to he read in the same
manner, save that the Gospels are the most beautiful book in the whole world,
and can be read from one end to the other without fatigue or difficulty.
I have just made the trial, M. Lasserre having himself brought me his book,
and I can certify that I experienced great literary pleasure, besides the religious
pleasure I derived from it. I did not fancy that the Gospel, thus deprived of the
savour which Latin and Greek gave it, could be read with so much pleasure and
so much ease, just as I could not have imagined M. Lasserre as a former artUlery
colonel, for it was the first time I saw him.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 85
Now if the public take to reading this book, and I should be much astonished
if it were not tempted to do so, it will see religion under quite a new light ; it
will be able to argue with some personal and direct knowledge of the subject, and
a movement may arise, which will end in a reUgious renovation.
This idea of making of the Gospel a book iu the vulgar tongue, but readable
and comprehensible, attractive and interesting, which a man of the world, or a
beginner, a woman of fashion, or a servant, may read, understand, enjoy and love
without the help of any one, merely through the clearness and charm of the trans
lation, is really an original idea.
Such a book can certainly present disadvantages ; among others, that of intro
ducing free inquiry with the aid of authentic documents ; but free inquiry with
the aid of authentic documents is better than free inquiry at haphazard, like that
of our days. But it will have the great advantage of teaching again religion to
the French, of interesting them by giving them direct knowledge of it, and of
bringing back the faithful to a participation in the things of the Church.
Such must have been Mgr. Richard's opinion, who is prudence itself, when he
gave his imprimatur to a book which, if only a faithful translation of the Gospel
is none the less a book of great boldness, seeing it is destined to charm, to instruct,
to attach, to associate the people to religion and to the Church, and that, though
being the Gospel, the pure Gospel, it is nevertheless quite a new and unknown
Gospel, a real revelation and revolution. — From the Paris Correspondent of the
Journal de Bruxelles, December 4, 1886.
It is, indeed, a beautiful translation, and is so printed, that it
reads like a novel. The notes are reasonable in extent and ex
pression. Of course the text is taken from the Vulgate ; the
Council of Trent has made that a necessity for the Church of
Eome. The price was four francs, and the circulation remarkable.
Moreover, the Pope Leo XIII., in an Italian letter, printed with
a French translation in the volume through the Secretary of State,
Cardinal Jacobini, on December 4th, 1886, acknowledged receipt
of the copies of the translation sent by the authors from time to
time, applauded the object, which the translator had in view, sent
his apostolic blessing, and his hope that these objects, which he
states in his preface, may be attained.
Had the translator invoked the aid of the Holy Spirit, or
dedicated his work to the glory of the Holy Trinity, he might have
attained a blessing ; but none reached him, for it was dedicated, in
a blind and servile manner, to the holy and humble-minded Mother
of our Lord, the most blessed among women, concerning whom
there is no mention in the Gospels, that she was the Queen of
Heaven, that she had the power to work miracles, or extend grace
and favour to those, who, forgetting the second commandment,
worshipped her image. Thus being from its first page entangled in
the maze of a falsehood, the book and the author have fallen into
trouble, and the eyes of those, whose faith is based on the Bible
alone, have been open to certain peculiarities of the Eomish Chrch.
And, as was to be expected in " a one-man" translation, there
were manifest errors. I quote one (Matt. vi. 12): " Forgive us
" our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into
" temptation."

86 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Under what possible view can the original Greek of these words
be rendered? " Faites-nous remise de nos dettes, comme nous
" memes nous faisons remise eI ceux qui doivent. . . . Toutefois
" ne nous mettez pas a I'epreuve."
This means, without doubt: "I wish to be forgiven and be
" generous ; all the same, do not put me to the test, for I know
" myself and my own frailty." This is a distortion of the Word of
God, and justly condemned by all Christians.
By a decree of the Sacred Congregation, dated December i gth,
1887, a little more than one year after the imprimatur of the
Archbishop of Paris, dated November nth, 1886, Lasserre's trans
lation was placed on the Index of forbidden books, denounced as a
book of degraded doctrine, the circulation of which is forbidden
under spiritual penalties. And Lasserre, being in connection with
the Eomish Church, withdrew it from circulation, after it had
passed through twenty-five editions, and been approved of by
a large number of Bishops, and some of the most important
members of the secular press.
But the withdrawal of the book did not leave matters in the
same position as that which they occupied before its publication.
This was forcibly put by a writer in the Contemporary Review
of May, 1888:
I. The Pope publicly approved of the book, and his letter is
prefixed to all the copies. Can the Pope be placed on the Index ?
II. The Pope was declared by the General Council to be in
fallible in the discharge of his teaching office. Is not the
appro'ving of a vernacular translation of the Gospels part and
parcel of his teaching ? What becomes of his infallibility ?
III. Under the decree of the Council of Trent it rests with the
Bishop of each diocese to approve of translations of the Bible.
The Archbishop has given his official approbation after a sufficient
examination by the priests of St. Sulpice, and it may be a question,
whether he is not within his rights.
A side-light was let into the crooked councils of the Church of
Eome, which is involved in a network of unholy intrigue. It has
been proved beyond doubt, that the Scriptures are acceptable to
the French nation, if the priests get over their fear of, and aversion
to, the truth. The Bishops themselves have evidenced their appre
ciation of this work, which they must surely have read before
they recorded their approbation.
The matter was not destined to rest there, for Eichard Clarke, a
Jesuit priest, of Farm Street, Berkeley Square, London, in 1889,
published a sixpenny pamphlet at the Catholic Truth Society,
18, West Square, London, called "The Pope and the Bible, an
Explanation of the Case of M. Lasserre, and of the Attitude of
the Catholic Church to Popular Bible Eeading." The Book is
interesting, as written by an Englishman in the ffee atmosphere of

TRANSLA TIONS OF THE BIBLE.

87

English literature. Moreover, he had to take account of the
presence of many Protestant converts, who are familiar with the
Bible from their childhood, and men like Cardinals Manning and
Newman, who are masters of the subject. An Italian or Spaniard
in a country long cursed with an ignorant priesthood, and a laity
totally uneducated in spiritual things, would have expressed
himself differently. It is important to note the attitude asserted
by a London Jesuit-priest towards the Bible in the nineteenth
century, and it must be recollected, that the practice in the
different countries of the world, which practice is well known to
those who are occupied in the work of Bible Societies, differs very
much from the academic utterances of a priest, who knows
possibly nothing beyond London.
He lays down distinctly, that Papal infallibility extends only to
dogmatic decrees laid down for the whole Church in matters of
faith and morals.
He remarks, that in itself the spread of the Word of God is an
unmixed good, but the perversity of men may turn to their own
destruction this, like every other good gift of God, and there may
be times and places, where it is necessary to place restriction on
the distribution of the Scriptures.
He then proceeds to utter words which are inexact, and which
he cannot prove, that heretics have mistranslated the Bible for their
own purposes, or taken the open Bible as the watchword of heresy ;
in such and other cases prudence wiU put restriction on the
use of the treasure so fatally employed by men to their own
destruction. In Protestant translations there are indeed errors,
inaccuracies, faults of scholarship, but I doubt whether any
instance can be produced of an intentional rendering of a Hebrew
or Greek word for theological, and not philological considerations.
The rendering of " la jeune femme deviendra enceinte " shows,
how bold the translator is, reckless of the consequence, and
deeming it cowardly to glide over a difficulty. Can we in good
faith say the same of the Latin text, which has come down to us,
sadly corrupted by the copyists, under the name of the Vulgate of
St. Jerome ?
He lays down the principle that, when once a book is placed on
the Index, " the faithful " must not open the pages again without
special permission, however much they may be attached to it, and
although, as a matter of opinion, they do not agree in the con
demnation, and do not think that the Congregation acted prudently
or wisely in condemning it, and though they may in past years
have derived solid good from the perusal of it. He must obey,
and no doubt in the confessional he will have to state whether
or no he has taken a peep at the contents of his old pocket
companion. To such a miserable condition are even the educated
and steady Catholics reduced in the nineteenth century !

88 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Father Clarke tells us how the case stands betwixt his Church
and the Bible. He maintains, that his Church is not opposed to
the study of the Bible, but . has a right to control the use of it.
Under the Council of Trent no Bible is to be read in the ver
nacular, unless that translation receives ecclesiastical authorization,
and have notes explanatory of difficult passages. As a fact, the
Douay Bible is freely sold at a small price in Great Britain and
Ireland. He admits that between the two extremes of exclusive
and indiscriminate use, both of which are forbidden by his Church,
there is a wide disputable ground, on which the opinion of the
faithful differ.
(i) Is it desirable to put the Bible in the hands of all the
faithful ?
(2) Ought the young to be allowed to read it as they please ?
(3) Ought children to be encouraged to study the historical
books of the Old Testament ?
(4) Should the prophetical books be generally used as books of
devotion ?
(5) What portion should be withheld ?
(6) How far are priests to encourage the circulation of the
Bible ?
(7) Are there some portions, which it is their duty to place in
the hands of the faithful ?
(8) Is there any obligation to see that the young are acquainted
with the Bible ?
(9) Should abridged Bibles or extracts be prepared?
(10) Are the laity bound to read the Bible, to teach their
children, and distribute it among the poor at home and abroad,
among Christians and non-Christians ?
The pamphlet is not creditable to his honesty or his acumen.
Casuistry, rightly called Jesuitical, unsupported assertions, un
proved condemnations, unjustified abuse, dogmatism, an evident
fear of inquiry, and the exposure, which would accompany it, are
the features of his production. It may convince uneducated
laymen and women, but his clear object is to uphold sacerdotal
power in the nineteenth century, to prevent people forming their
own judgment on the most important subject, the way of salvation,
to keep men and women in leading-strings, to prevent access to the
Word of God in the original Greek and Latin, and by copious
abuse of a],l religious men outside the Church of Eome, to drive
men and women, who cannot swallow the mediseval unscriptural
composite, called the " Christianity of '"ome," into blank atheism
or abandonment of all religion. Such is the condition of a majority
of the educated classes in France, Italy and Spain. The whole
design of his book is to prop up a class, who are to stand betwixt
the people and God, and be the only channels of divine truth.
If he indeed believes, and rightly believes, that the Bible

TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE.

89

contains the Word of God, and that the Holy Spirit can bring
home to the heart of humble readers the blessed truths contained in
the Bible, what need is there to restrict the reading to the Psalms
in the Old Testament and the Gospels in the New Testament?
He admits that, as a rule, Eoman Catholics are strangely ignorant
of the Bible, and averse to reading it, and that, on the other hand,
Protestants have an enviable familiarity with the text. He
chooses to assume, that this familiarity is only with the text and
not with the spirit, that "all is surface and the heart is not
" touched." Here the Jesuit is like the ostrich in the desert,
which shuts its eyes that it may not see the adversary. Otherwise
he could not be ignorant, that the words of the Bible are to
thousands and tens of thousands in this island as their very life-
blood, the main-spring of their actions, the leading note of their
thoughts, the hope on the sick and dying bed, when all things
are very real, the delight of youth, the stay of manhood, and the
solace of old age. It is the one thing which the British people, to
whatever phase of religious thought they belong, will surrender
life rather than be deprived of, stinted in the supply of, or con
trolled in the use of.
The Churchman, Makch, 1890.

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