NEGATIVELY— ITS REMOVING OF DIFFICULTIES

What was said at the close of the previous section will have shown that it is not the substitution of the Revised for the Authorized Version that we are at present pleading for. That, if it ever takes place, can only be brought about through the new Version's gradually winning its way through its own superior merits, as the old in its time had to do. All that we are in the meantime concerned with is the value to all Bible students of a careful study of the two versions side by side, and the fresh light which in consequence is continually cast upon the best-known words and scenes.

1. It Arrests Attention.

We begin then at once by noticing that this comparative study of the two versions, even if it does nothing else, is of the utmost importance to the ordinary reader in arresting his attention.

We all know how our very familiarity with the language of Scripture is apt to lead to our reading in a careless, perfunctory way, supplying words and finishing verses it may be from memory, and so falling into many inaccuracies and errors. But when we read with a Parallel New Testament in our hands, comparing verse with verse, and word with word, we are constantly being brought up by some slight, though it may prove very significant, change, and so being led to inquire what exactly the sacred writer says.

For here let me dispose in passing of the objection sometimes brought against the Revised Version by those who have only examined it superficially — namely, that the changes in it from the Authorized Version are neither numerous enough nor important enough to make it worth while referring to. Of the importance of the changes we shall learn more directly; but, as regards their number, it has been estimated that in the New Testament "there are in all over 36,000 departures from King James's Version in the English text, and (probably included in the former) nearly 6000 changes in the Greek text."1 I know, of course, the counter - objection that will at once be raised, that many of these changes are quite unnecessary, and in no way affect the sense. But when we remember that in the case of changes caused by a variety of reading in the original Greek, a majority of two- thirds of the Company present had to be secured on the final revision, and that no change was adopted without being first carefully scrutinized in the interests of faithfulness by a large and representative body of scholars, we may be sure that all merit our most careful consideration, and contribute their share in bringing out the true meaning of the text.

To return, however, to the point immediately before us, "it would not, I imagine" — and here I gladly avail myself of the weighty words of Archbishop Trench2 — "be for most of us unprofitable to discover that the words in which the truth has hitherto reached us, are exchangeable for other, in some places, it may be, for better, words. The shock, unpleasant and unwelcome as it would perhaps prove at the first, might yet be a startling of many from a dull, lethargic,. unprofitable reading of God's Word; a breaking up of that hard crust of formality which so easily overgrows our study of the Scripture; while in the rousing of the energies of the mind to defend the old, or, before admitting, thoroughly to test the new, more insight into it might be gained, with more grasp of its deeper meaning, than years of lazy familiarity would have given."

An example may make this clearer. Let us take a very familiar passage, which bears directly upon our work as preachers and teachers, the Parable of the Sower in Matt. xiii. 1-23. In the Revised Version it opens not "Behold a sower went forth to sow," but "Behold the sower," where the definite article, if it does not suggest some sower actually at work in a field close at hand, at least points to him as the representative of his whole class. It is "as he sowed" too, as he was carrying out his purpose, in the very process of sowing,3 that the things about to be related happened. Passing over such slight changes as "the birds" for "the fowls" and "devoured them" for "devoured them up" in ver. 4, we come in ver. 5 to the important substitution of "upon the rocky places" for "upon stony places." The latter naturally leads us to think of a field covered with loose stones, which is clearly out of keeping with the fate of the seed which fell upon it. Indeed it is often just such fields which are the most productive, through the stones helping the soil to retain its moisture. Whereas the "rocky places" bring before us a characteristic feature of the corn-lands of Galilee — a rocky bed covered over with a thin sprinkling of earth, in which the seed from its nearness to the warm surface would spring up quickly, but would as quickly wither away. Again it is "upon the thorns" and not "among thorns" that other seeds fell, upon soil, that is, in which the seeds of thorns lay already lurking, rather than among growing and flourishing thorn-plants, which every sower would be careful to avoid. While once more we cannot but recognize the precision which the definite article again gives to the fourth kind of soil, "the good ground," though unfortunately our English idiom prevents us giving its proper emphasis to the article which in the Greek text is again repeated before the adjective — "the ground" which (in contrast to the kinds of ground already mentioned) is specifically "the good" ground.4

Similarly, to pass to our Lord's interpretation of the Parable, it is "the evil one" rather than "the wicked one," the same Enemy from whom we are taught to ask deliverance in the Lord's Prayer (Matt. vi. 13, R.V.), who snatcheth away that which "hath been sown," the perfect participle bringing out that, while the sowing was completed, the seed still lay undisturbed in the heart of the wayside hearer. Or as this hearer is described in words which identify the seed with the person receiving it, a truth quite lost sight of in the Authorised rendering, "This is he that was sown by the way side." Just as the seed reproduces itself in the grain, so the living truth reproduces itself in the heart of all by whom it is welcomed — a further assurance of what in our teaching we need so constantly to be reminded of, that at best we are sowers : the word of the Lord must be left to find its own "free course," or more literally to "run and be glorified" (2 Thess. iii. 1, R.V.).

In the next class of hearers again the Revised Version alone preserves the parallel between the ofttimes hasty reception and the equally hasty rejection of the Word — "straightway with joy receiveth it . . . straightway he stumbleth." The changes of "by and by" into "straightway" and "is offended" into "stumbleth" in this last clause have also their interest. Even at the time when the Authorized Version was made, "by and by" was beginning to lose some of its original force of "immediately," and this weakening tendency, owing to the procrastinating habits of men, has gone steadily on, so that now we always refer "by and by" to a more or less remote period. But the Greek word5 here means "at once," "straightway," and should be rendered accordingly. "Stumbleth," again, is a clear gain over "is offended," which conveys to any but the educated reader an altogether different sense from what is intended. And yet once more, we are now told of the good hearer not that he "also beareth fruit," a self-evident proposition, but that he "verily" beareth it. Fruit is the certain result of his being good.

So far then from a close attention to the exact words of the original being profitless, enough has, I hope, been said to prove that it at least leads us to ask, What exactly did our Lord or His Evangelist say? and so awakens interest and stimulates inquiry even with regard to those points which we think that we have perfectly understood before.

2. It clears up Many Obscurities.

But the Revised Version does more than this. It makes clear the meaning of many words and phrases which, as they stand in the older version, are, if not actually unintelligible, certainly obscure.

Take a very obvious class of examples which has been suggested to us already. In the Authorized Version, owing to the period when it was written and its subsequent long history, there is necessarily an archaic style and mode of speech. And so far well. It lifts the sacred language of Scripture above all mere colloquialism, and gives it a strength and dignity of its own. One has only to glance at some of the attempts which have been made to modernize the diction of our version to see how terribly it has suffered in the process.

But it is different with regard to those words and phrases which have so altered their meaning since the Authorized Version was made that they are now liable to be understood in an altogether misleading sense. Here obviously some change has to be made. A very commonly cited instance is the familiar precept, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink" (Matt. vi. 25), which at first sight seems to conflict strangely with the well-established rules of prudence and thrift. But in old English "thought" had a note of anxiety attached to it, which it has now lost, and therefore to bring out the full force of the original, we require to render with the Revised Version, "Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink." Similarly Phil. iv. 6 now runs : "In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God," and 1 Pet. v. 7 : "Casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He careth for you," where a significant distinction of words lost in our English Version ("Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you") is also brought out.

In like manner, "occupy" is no longer understood in its old sense of "lay hold of," "employ," "trade," so that it is properly replaced by the last term in the Parable of the Pounds, "Trade ye herewith till I come" (Luke xix. 13), with the further advantage of preserving the parallel with the statement two verses later, "what they had gained by trading." And the same applies to the substitution of "wallet" for "scrip" (Matt. x. 10), a word which is apt to be taken in its modern business meaning,6 and of "interest" for "usury" (Matt, xxv. 27), which is now only used of illegal or exorbitant transactions. We seem too to have a reversal of the usual process when in Acts xxi. 15 we are told that St. Paul and his companions "took up" their "carriages," until we learn from the Revised Version, that "carriages" is here the old word for "baggage." And there is no longer the danger of its distinctively modern meaning being attached to "compass" when in the account of St. Paul's voyage to Italy we read with the Revisers, "we made a circuit" rather than "we fetched a compass," and arrived at Rhegium (Acts xxviii. 13).

It would be easy to carry this line of illustration further, but it must be sufficient to draw attention to one or two words which have practically reversed their meaning since 1611. Thus the verb "let" was then = "hinder," though now we use it in the sense of "permit," and though the context might prevent us from misunderstanding such a passage as Rom. i. 13, "And I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let (R.V. hindered) hitherto)," the very obscure verse, 2 Thess. ii. 7, is undoubtedly rendered still more difficult to the ordinary reader by the translation : "For the mystery of iniquity doth already work : only he who now letteth, will let, until he be taken out of the way." It is a "restraining" not a "permitting" power that is in view, in conformity with ver. 6, where the same Greek word occurs, and this at least is made clear when we read : "And now ye know that which restraineth, to the end that he [i.e. the man of lawlessness] may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work : only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the lawless one. . . ."

Or, to take another example suggested by this last, how many fail to realize that in Matt. xvii. 25, "Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon?" really means, as Tindale had already shown, "Jesus spake first to him, saying...," or that in 1 Thess. iv. 1 5 those who are alive at the Parousia shall not in our sense "prevent them which are asleep," but rather shall "precede" them. The Thessalonians' fear was that those who were already dead when Christ came would have no part in His Resurrection. So far from this being the case, the Apostle assures them that it is the dead in Christ who shall rise first, to be followed by those who are alive, who are left, at the time.

What an added force, too, is given by the disappearance of the archaic "presently" in Matt. xxi. 19, "And immediately the fig-tree withered away," and in Matt. xxvi. 53, "Or thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and He shall even now send Me more than twelve legions of angels?"

Or, to take one instance from the very numerous examples that might be cited from the prepositions, when St. Paul states in 1 Cor. iv. 4, "For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified : but he that judgeth me is the Lord," we naturally think that the Apostle means that for all his knowledge he was dependent not on himself, but on God, whereas "by" is used in its old English sense of "against," which, to avoid misunderstanding, has been substituted for it in the Revised Version, "For I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified : but he that judgeth me is the Lord." St. Paul is at the moment on his defence, and with reference to certain charges that have been brought against him by the Corinthians, he declares that it is for him "a very small thing" to be judged "of man's judgement," nor is he conscious in his own mind of having done them any wrong. And yet, after all, he does not rest his justification on this, but rather leaves all in the hands of God, the one true Judge.

But unintelligibility in the Authorized Version does not only arise in this way. With all our admiration, and it can hardly be too strongly expressed, for the manner in which the translation as a whole has been executed, it cannot be denied that there are many passages to which, as they stand at present, little or no sense can be attached. The most noticeable examples of these perhaps occur in the Old Testament in such books as Job and the Psalms, but examples may also be cited from the Gospels. Let me mention two, where I venture to think their very familiarity with the words has in many cases prevented readers from realizing that they do not, and indeed cannot, understand them in the ordinary version.

The first occurs in Mark vii. 10-12 : "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother : and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say. If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me : he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father, or his mother." Now, what do these words mean? Without the aid of some note or comment no ordinary reader can tell. But when we read them in the Revised Version we are at least put on the right lines for understanding them, though even then, from the difficulty of the subject, some further explanation is probably required : "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, He that speaketh evil of father or mother, let him die the death : but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or his mother, That wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me is Corban, that is to say, Given to God; ye no longer suffer him to do aught for his father or his mother." What is referred to is the Jewish custom, according to which a person had merely to pronounce the word Corban over any possession, and it was irrevocably dedicated to the Temple, and could consequently be no longer used for the benefit even of his parents.

My second example occurs in the same chapter a few verses lower down. Jesus has been explaining to His disciples the importance of inward, as contrasted with outward, defilement, and He proceeds, "Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him, because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?" Again, as it stands, this last clause is meaningless. But by the change of a single letter in the Greek a new reading is gained, and the verse now concludes — "This He said, making all meats clean," being the Evangelist's comment upon what he has just recorded, a comment that gains still further in significance when we remember that St. Mark's Gospel was in all probability largely dependent upon the recollections of the Apostle Peter, who was taught in so striking a manner that in God's sight nothing is common or unclean (Acts x. 9-1 6). How in later life St. Peter, brooding on his vision, must have loved to connect it with those words of His Master, enforcing, though he had not at the time understood them, the same truth!

3. It corrects Erroneous Ideas.

Another use of the Revised Version lies in the erroneous ideas which it corrects and the difficulties which it removes. Let us take one or two examples under each of these heads.

First, erroneous ideas which are corrected. In the list of the Twelve Apostles in St. Matthew's Gospel we must have been astonished, or should have been astonished, if we had stopped to think, to find one of them described as "Simon the Canaanite" (x. 4), as if he belonged to the heathen stock which the Israelites had failed to root wholly out of the Promised Land. But the true reading is "Simon the Cananaean" or, as the margin suggests, "Simon the Zealot," proving that, before Christ's grace seized him and converted him into a Christian disciple, Simon had belonged to that Jewish faction, who thought any deed of violence justifiable for the recovery of national freedom.

Similarly, to turn to a very different case, when Herodias' daughter danced before King Herod, and he promised her what she would ask, "she," so we read in our ordinary version, "being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger" (Matt. xiv. 8). But the Revised Version, correctly following the Greek, has, "And she, being put forward by her mother, saith . . ." clearly indicating that the girl herself was unwilling to make such a proposal, and had to be "put forward,"7 urged on, as it were, by her angry and revengeful mother, until, at length, as we learn from Mark vi. 25, "she came in straightway with haste unto- the King, and asked, saying, I will that thou forthwith give me in a charger the head of John the Baptist," as if it were an errand she would gladly have quickly over.

Turning to difficulties removed by the Revised Version, the statement of Luke iii. 23 that after His Baptism, "Jesus Himself began to be about thirty years of age," is, to say the least, somewhat unintelligible. But there is no reason for any perplexity. What the original says implies that "Jesus Himself, when He began to teach (so the Revised Version fills up the blank), was about thirty years of age." A proper attention to the Greek again enables us to appreciate the force of the woman's argument in Matt. xv. 27, for she does not say, "yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table," but, "for even the dogs . . ." In the very appellation which the Lord had used, she finds ground for assurance and hope.

Exactness of rendering similarly restores harmony between the accounts of St. Matthew and St. Luke as to the spot from which the Sermon on the Mount was spoken. In our old version the statements seem directly contradictory. According to the former, Jesus "went up into a mountain: . . . and He opened His mouth, and taught . . ." (Matt. v. I, 2) : whereas the latter tells us, "He Caine down. . . , and stood in the plain," and only then "lifted up His eyes on His disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor" (Luke vi. 17, 20). But when we read with the Revised Version in the latter case, "and stood on a level place," we see that what happened was this. On the previous evening Jesus went up "into the mountain" — where the definite article is to be taken as pointing to the mountainous region or barrier overhanging the Lake of Galilee — and there spent the night in prayer. In the morning He chose His Twelve Apostles, and then, going with them to some "level spot" in the midst of this hilly country, preached to them and to the multitudes who had gathered round.

In like manner the Revised Version is successful in removing popular misapprehensions, if not actual difficulties, in not a few well - known passages. Thus in the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke xvi. i ff.) the substitution of "his lord" for "the lord" in ver. 8 makes it perfectly clear that it was his earthly master, and not God, who "commended the unrighteous steward," while the injunction, "Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness," sets the lesson drawn in a very different light from "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness," and the gain is further increased by the correct reading in the following clause, "that, when it" — that is, the mammon of unrighteousness, and not "ye," as in the Authorized Version — "shall fail, they (the friends whom you have thus made) may receive you into the eternal tabernacles."

Any doubt as to the true meaning of the words which introduce the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, as they were originally printed in 1611 — "And He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised other" (Luke xviii. 9) — is set at rest by the fuller and more exact "and set all others at nought." And of still greater importance is the correction a few verses further on, where the Pharisees' boast reads, "I give tithes of all that I get," instead of "of all that I possess" — the tithe was paid not on what he possessed or had laid up, but on what he acquired in the way of increase. Similar attention to the tense of the same Greek verb in Luke xxi. 19 shows that our Lord did not intend to enforce the duty of holding fast what is ours already, "In your patience possess ye your souls," but, in view of the troublous times that were impending, cheered His disciples with the promise — •"In your patience ye shall win your souls."8

Other passages which show gains in clearness are Matt. xxii. 8, 13, where the marginal notes show that two classes of servants are referred to, the "bond-servants" or slaves, who were sent to bid the guests to the Marriage Feast, and the "ministers" or angels, to whom was afterwards entrusted the carrying out of the sentence of doom; Matt, xxiii. 35, "Zachariah... whom ye slew between the sanctuary and the altar, where the "sanctuary," or inner shrine of the Temple, is distinguished from the whole Temple precincts; and Matt. xvii. 25, where the Revisers, by substituting "half-shekel" for "tribute money," show that the reference is not to any civil tax, but to the half-shekel which was payable to the Temple annually by every Jew over twenty years of age (see Exod. xxx. 13).

1 See Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version,, New York, 1883, p. 418.

2 On the Authorized Vernon of the New Testament, London, 1859, p. 214f.

3 ἐν τῷ σπείρειν αὐτόν.

4 τὴν γῆν τὴν καλήν.

5 εὐθύς.

6 The reference to the "wallet" gains still further in significance, if, with Dr. Deissmann (New Light on the New Testament, p. 41 ff.), we understand by it not a travelling-bag, but a beggar's collecting-bag : the disciples were not even to beg.

7 The same Greek verb (προβιβάζω) occurs in the Received Text of Acts xix. 33, ἐκ δὲ τοῦ ὄχλου προεβίβασαν ΄Αλέξανδρον.

8 Cf. also 1 Thess. iv. 4, where the translation of the verb is again amended.