THE KING’S BUSINESS
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need of a change and where the Revised Version makes no change, and there are other places where changes are desirable where they are not made. Sometimes a change is made in thé translation of a Greek word in one part of a verse, but is not made in another part of .the same verse. For example, in Matt. 6:45, .in the first part of the verse, “Take therefore no thought” is changed into “Therefore be not anxious,” which is a change that is warranted by the Greek, but further on in the verse the English for the same Greek word is not changed, but le“ft as it is in our Authorized Version, “shall take thought.” It should be rendered “will be anxious,” as in the Revised Version. In other words, the 1911 version is entirely inconsistent with itself in its translation. When the version first came out we went through it with some care and found 138 very unfortunate renderings, either changes being made where there was no reason for making them, or changes not being made where they were positively demanded, or other unfortunate things in the translation. In making the Revised Version the Ameri can and English Committees met once a month, practically the entire Committee, and went over the work that the individual revisers had done during the month, com paring notes and thoroughly debating the question of making changes. This went on through a long series of years. The men who did the work were the most eminent scholars in England and America. But in the case of the 1911 Bible the Committee never met but once, and then went over the work that the individual members had done, in the most hasty and careless way. Furthermore, some of the men engaged in the work were in no sense Hebrew or Greek scholars. At the time of its publica tion we called the attention of the manager of the firm who put the Bible out to these facts, and he wrote very frankly admitting the truth of the criticism, and furthermore inquired whether we would undertake with others a correction of the book, but we were obliged to say that the mistakes were
so many, and to do the work properly would take so much time, that we thought any effort in that direction must neces sarily prove futile. The most dependable translation of the Bible, take it all in all, is the American Standard Edition. This, however, does not differ in any essential respect from the Revised Version put out by the Oxford University Press, incorporating the sug gestions of the American Committee in the text. Furthermore, there is no very essential .difference between the Revision as originally published, and the American Standard Version, though the American Standard Version, or the edition of the revision with the suggestions of the Ameri can Committee embodied in the text, is for some reasons to be preferred. Any of these translations are immeasurably more to be depended upon than Weymouth’s, or Mof- •fatt’s, which in reality are not translations, nor even paraphrases, but interpretations, and frequently very poor interpretations. However, probably any of these is to be preferred to the Twentieth Century New Testament, in which some of the render ings are positively ludicrous, and the whole work is characterized not only by very crude English, but by entirely unwarranted renderings. -------- O-------- Dr. De Witt, the dean of the Western Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, states that for many years the seminaries of his church have hardly sup plied men enough for the ministry to meet the death rate of the clergy. “The dis parity between the number of our parishes and of our clergy was larger by ninety last year than the year before. Bishops, par ticularly in the West and South, are seek ing priests to fill vacancies. Wardens, dis tressed and discouraged, are writing to the seminaries asking for assistance in finding a rector. Lay readers were never so numerous and in many places congrega tions are thus being trained to get along without the sacraments.”
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