Bible translation

“ It talks the language not of the upper level nor of the lower level, but of that middle level where all meet sometimes and where most men are all the while.
These are great traits to mark a book, any book, but especially a translation—that it is honest, that it is accurate, and that its language blends dignity and popularity so that it lowers the speech of none. They are all conspicuous traits of our familiar version of the Bible, and in them in part lies its power with the generations of these three centuries that have followed its appearance. ”

“ They did many things well, as learned men; but yet as men they stumbled and fell, one while through oversight, another while through ignorance; yea, sometimes they may be noted to add to the original, and sometimes to take from it: which made the Apostles to leave them many times, when they left the Hebrew, and to deliver the sense thereof according to the truth of the word, as the Spirit gave them utterance. This may suffice touching the Greek translations of the Old Testament.
Translation out of Hebrew and Greek into Latin. ”

“ Into what critic’s crucible, it may be asked, do we propose to place the Bible, and what frigid, tame, and insipid version, among those with which we have been of late years familiar, do we design to substitute for our own old authorized translation?
Plainly, none. We know of none—valuable as some of them unquestionably are—worthy of competing, in whole or in part, on an extended view of the question, with our own; while, in point of phraseology, to which the objection specifically refers, the advantage is all in favour of the old version. ”

“ Modern research, not seldom carried out by open-minded Protestants, has furnished some surprising results in this respect, so that one of the most recent and diligent of the Protestant workers in this field could write: “If everything be taken into account it will no longer be possible to say as the old polemics did, that the Bible was a sealed book to both theologians and laity. The more we study the Middle Ages, the more does this fable tend to dissolve into thin air.” “The Middle Ages concerned themselves with Bible translation much more than was formerly supposed.” ”

“ The young should not lose sight of the fact, that we have the Bible only in the form of a translation by uninspired men, from the original Hebrew and Greek, in which it was penned by the inspired writers. ”

“ While translations in general could not pretend to the strength and universality of appeal which belonged to the Bible, nevertheless taken in the mass and judged only by the comment associated with them, they suggest a varied public and a surprising contact with the essential interests of mankind. ”

“ The question of increasing the vocabulary, for example, is in the case of biblical translation so complicated by the theological connotation of words as to require a treatment peculiar to itself. Translators of the Bible were scarcely ever translators of secular works and vice versa. The chief link between the two kinds of translation is supplied by the metrical versions of the Psalms. ”

“ In other words, we see by the margins of our English Bible, that there are many old Bibles in different languages which scholars must study if they give us the best that can be produced.
2. Every one who can read the Bible in English must recognize the fact that our Bible is only a translation from the language in which the books of both Testaments were originally written. The original language of the Old Testament is Hebrew with a few sections appearing in the Aramaic tongue ”

“ There will be, there can be, no absolutely reliable translation of these or other scriptures, unless it be effected through the gift of translation, as one of the endowments of the Holy Ghost. The translator must have the spirit of the prophet if he would render in another tongue the prophet's words; and human wisdom leads not to that possession. Let the Bible then be read reverently, and with prayerful care, the reader ever seeking the light of the Spirit that he may discern between truth and the mistakes of men. ”

“ We are only following in the footsteps of our great predecessors when, with the growth of our numbers, we have applied ourselves to the sacred task of preparing a new translation of the Bible into the English language, which, unless all signs fail, is to become the current speech of the majority of the children of Israel. ”

“ The English translation of the Bible, became the great rule of life. The whole moral effect which is now produced by the newspaper, the sermon, the lecture and the circulating library was then produced by the Bible alone; and its effect on the national character was simply amazing. Religion was no longer confined to the cloister and cathedral, but became a subject of thought for every individual. ”

“ The like we are to think of translations. The translation of the Seventy dissenteth from the Original in many places, neither doth it come near it for perspicuity, gravity, majesty. Yet which of the Apostles did condemn it? Condemn it? Nay, they used it, (as it is apparent, and as St. Hierome and most learned men do confess;) which they would not have done, nor by their example of using of it so grace and commend it to the Church, if it had been unworthy the appellation and name of the word of God. ”

“ In view of this strongly opposing conservative spirit, it is remarkable that so much improvement has been realized in our national religion as we now witness. This improvement has been effected more by the process of changing the meaning of words and language than that of changing the text by a new translation, as I have already shown. This surgical operation has been inflicted upon thousands of texts; and so frequently and so generally has this expedient been adopted by churches to get rid of the errors of the "Holy Book," that the meaning of some texts has been changed hundreds of times. ”

“ Every translation of the Bible is known to contain grave and numerous errors. Even in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts there are thousands of various readings. In some cases the text is uncertain, in some cases interpolated, and in others irrecoverably impaired. The vowel points by which Hebrew is now read are demonstrably a modern invention. Even the discourses of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, are not reported with accuracy. The New Testament writers seldom quote from the Old Testament exactly, but generally rely upon the Greek translation called the Septuagint. ”

“ There is found in the Bible no intimation that there was the least difference in the days. They are all spoken of in the same way. It may be replied that our translation is incorrect. If this is so, then only those who understand Hebrew, have had a revelation from God, and all the rest have been deceived. ”

“ God has caused the Bible to be written in such a way, He has put all important matters of truth and duty in such a variety of forms, that any translation, made with a reasonable amount of learning and honesty, is sure to make things intelligible enough in some of the forms in which they are presented in the Book. ”

“ It is quite true that the larger number of the inversions here ventured would, as he conceives, adorn any translation, and because of their apt reflection of the Hebrew or Greek he honestly thinks they possess strong claims on general adoption; but not all of them. Speaking approximately, possibly in one case out of ten the Editor of The Emphasised Bible would have himself shrunk back from what he has actually dared, if he had been so presumptuous as to think of producing a competitive translation. ”

“ In the ideas of Scripture lies its eternal anchorage, not in its perishable words, which are shifting for ever like quicksands, as the Bible passes by translation successively into every spoken language of the earth. ”

“ It is evident that the care of the Scribes to guard their Scriptures against error has been scrupulous and vigilant. Doubtless this intense devotion to the very letter of the sacred books has been exercised for many centuries. We know that in the earliest days this precision was not sought; for the Septuagint translation, made during the second and third centuries before Christ, gives us indubitable proof, when we compare it with the Hebrew text, that changes, some of them radical and sweeping, have been made in the text of the Hebrew books since that translation was finished. ”

“ Whereas some men think now that many translations make division in the faith and in the people of God, that is not so: for it was never better with the congregation of God, than when [Pg 161] every church almost had the Bible of a sundry translation. Among the Greeks had not Origen a special translation? Had not Vulgarius one peculiar, and likewise Chrysostom? Beside the seventy interpreters, is there not the translation of Aquila, of Theodotio, of Symmachus, and of sundry other? Again, among the Latin men, thou findest that every one almost used a special and sundry translation ”

“ In a letter to the Athenæum, speaking of the way in which people hawk fine terms for common things, I said that these people ought to have a new translation of the Bible, which should contain the verse "gentleman and lady, created He them." ”

“ Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from "The Cambridge History of English Literature"—'either proceeds from divine inspiration, as some will have it, or, according to others, is the fruit of the religious genius of the Hebrew race. From either point of view the authors are highly gifted individuals' [!] ”

“ Furthermore, holy church approveth not only the true translation of mean Christian men, but also of open heretics, that did away mysteries of Jesus Christ by guileful translation, as Jerome witnesseth in one prologue on Job, and in the prologue of Daniel. Much more late the Church of England approve the true and whole translation of simple men, that would, for no good on earth, by their witting and power, put away the least truth, yea, the least letter or tittle of holy writ that beareth substance or charge. ”

“ Many of these, it will be noticed, are versions adorned and heightened by literary labor and poetic inspiration. Plain prose Bible translations existed in large numbers, which, as being more exposed, were the first to perish from the effects of time, the elements, and the wilful destruction of bigotry. The metrical versions were generally better bound and better cared for in special libraries, and in the hands of the wealthy. ”

“ Books We All Pretend to have Read
The Bible is a real book, although during the whole of the nineteenth century the Churches turned a blind eye to the fact that it was a free translation by Jacobean clergymen of a Greek text of doubtful authenticity and of multiple authorship. The Bible is as divinely inspired as Shakespeare, or Milton, or Anatole France. ”

“ But it must be the Bible translated into their own language, so that they may comprehend it. Give them the Bible! Bestow on them those sacred books which Moses and the Prophets, the Evangelists and the Apostles wrote for the people, and not for the priests only! Give the people that which is their own; they have a right to it of which you cannot deprive them. It is the testament of our God, who left His people the heirs of His holy Word; in reading which, faith will be granted, and to the belief of which are attached salvation and life. ”

“ The weight and importance of these remarks will best be felt by those who have observed how new and rare meanings are perceived when we read the words, for instance, of Holy Writ in their original language, and lose sight for a moment of those groundless fancies with which long association has confused our perception. To study the Bible in other languages than our own is like looking upon the Urim and Thummim when, for him who rightly consulted it, the fire of the divine messages flashed upon its oracular and graven gems. ”

“ But there is one effective set-off against the evil of translating the Bible: few really read it, even after it has been translated. If you find a man here and there who has really read the Bible, he is always more or less of an "Infidel." ”

“ The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity, mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism. The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits, who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully realized in their own hearts and lives. ”

“ For these reasons and other, with common charity to save all men in our realm which God would have saved, a simple creature hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English. First this simple creature had much travail, with divers fellows and helpers, to gather many old Bibles, and other doctors and common glosses, and to make one Latin Bible some deal true; and then to study it anew, the text with the gloss and other doctors as he might get, and especially Lyra on the Old Testament, that helped full much in this work ”

“ The furious opposition of the Church in the Middle Ages to letting the people have the Bible to read in their own tongues seems perfectly ridiculous, when we remember that in the early Christian church every people had it in their own language, and it was thought to be the greatest work for a heathen people that could be done, to translate the Bible for them. ”