THE KING’S BUSINESS
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it, the more I am convinced that the Holy Spirit guided the translation as now given.” But it is perfectly clear that the Holy Spirit did not guide the translation, for it is an utterly wrong translation, and we wish to enter a protest (as we have done privately to the writer of the article), against this flippant and presumptuous way, so common in some quarters today, of bringing in the Holy Spirit to give added force to one’s own unwarranted and im possible notions. He' says again in another part of the article, “We believe the. Holy Spirit prompted the translation of Acts 4:12 as now rendered, in order to set before us very plainly and yet very forcibly, the fullness of salvation which is ours through Jesus Christ.” To a reverent student of the Word of God, especially to one who has a thorough knowledge of the Greek language and of the real meaning of the word, this is simply shocking. It may be added that the translation does not set before us more plainly than the Authorized or Revised Version the fullness of salva tion which is ours through Jesus Christ, on the contrary, if the translation were cor rect, it would set forth a far more meagre salvation, merely a salvation from sick ness of the body, than that set forth in the Authorized and Revised Versions. It takes one of the most precious passages in the Bible (Rom. 5:10) that does set forth the full salvation that there is in Christ, a salvation not merely from the guilt of sin by His atoning death, but a salvation from the present power of sin by His resurrec tion life, and so dilutes its message as to make it only a useful passage for those who make the healing of the body the one all-important thing, while every careful studenti of the New Testament knows that it is by far the least important thing in the salvation that there is in Christ Jesus. Full salvation does include the redemption of the body, but the perfect redemption of the body which was secured for us by the atoning death of Christ upon the cross of Calvary is to be obtained, not by physi cal healing in this present dispensation, but
dence in his Christian character. He is an excellent man in many ways, but he is com pletely obsessed by his own particular doc trine of Divine healing, and everything he reads in the Bible he reads through this obsession. We have had other illustrations of this in personal conversations with him. For example, he translates Rev. 21:8, “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whore mongers, and druggists, and idolators, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake w-hich burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” He substi tutes “druggists” for “sorcerers” for what appears to him the sufficient reason that the Greek word'translated “sorcerers” (phara- makois) is closely related with the Greek word pharmakeia and our word pharmacy, or drug store, is closely related to this word, so the ,rest, to his mind is easy, viz., thus pharmacists or druggests are sor cerers. This would illustrate how he has the type of mind that utterly disqualifies one to. be a teacher. His attempts in other parts of his ;article to retranslate the Hebrew are as unwarranted as his attempts with the Greek. He is neither a .Hebrew nor a Greek scholar in any sense. As already said, by his’ own frank admission, he does not even know the Hebrew or the Greek alphabet, and could not read a sen tence in Greek if it was put before him in Greek characters. In his whole article we have another illustration of how it is bet ter to have no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek at all than to .have such a smattering of it as is picked up from English printing of Greek and Hebrew words and the ren derings that are given in concordances such as Strong’s and Young’s, books which in themselves are of great value, but which were never intended to encourage a man who has no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to set himself up as a teacher of the Greek New Testament or Hebrew Old Testament, and to attempt to criticise the best Greek and Hellfew scholarship in the world. The writer of the article says, “The more I examine it, and the more carefully I study
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