Whether it is understandable or not, the English of the Bible is very fine indeed; but not, I think, so perfect as people generally say. It is difficult to judge, as it has now become a standard, like the English of Shakespeare’s plays. Ben Jonson thought that some of Shakespeare’s lines might be improved; and he was a good judge. People now think the weakest lines superb; and they admire the Bible also without discrimination.
There is no virtue in using a language that is ‘understanded of the people,’ if it is used for saying things that will be misinterpreted. In modern English ‘virgin’ means ‘virgo intacta,’ but that is not the meaning of ‘almah’ in the Hebrew of Isaiah, VII. 14. Every schoolboy knows (to his cost) that ‘deum’ is accusative, not vocative; and Te Deum is mistranslated—the older part may be heretical or even pagan. There are hundreds and thousands of these mistranslations and misinterpretations and statements that are unintelligible without long explanation. Readers very often fail to see the meaning of it all, and sometimes will not face the meaning when it is quite clear.
No doubt, Scripture is taught in every school; but there are many ways of teaching it. Lustleigh has a County Council school, and the Scripture teaching is regulated by a County Council syllabus. The syllabus says what things the children are to read, and what they are to learn by heart; and when people grumble at the Education Rate, I remind them that every well-taught child in Devon can say the names of the Ten Plagues of Egypt as glibly as a parrot. And then, of course, they feel that they are getting value for their money.
Old folk used to search the Scriptures very diligently here, and picked up words and phrases that they used in most embarrassing ways. One old lady told me in sorrow and in wrath, “The Parson, he come here, and I spoke Scripture to’n. And ‘good mornin’,’ he saith, ‘good mornin’,’ and up he were and away over they steps ’fore I could say another word.” I found that she had used some words the Parson had to read in church but did not wish to hear elsewhere.
I have two volumes here of Miracles and Lives of Saints, with coloured plates; and two small children who came to stay with me, used to call them the Funny Books, as the pictures in them were so funny. By the time these children came again, they had just learned to read; but I forgot this when I let them have the Funny Books again, and presently a little voice read out, “Now a certain nun became with child, and....” I stopped the reading, but could not stop the questions that they asked.
A small boy of my acquaintance had duly learned to say his prayers and was having a course of Scripture stories, but went on strike when he was told of the creation of Eve. He said that it was mean of God to put Adam to sleep and then take a rib away; and to show God what he thought of it, he would stop off saying his prayers. The strike lasted for six weeks.
The creation of Eve is sculptured in relief on the Campanile at Florence and on the Façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and in these reliefs (and also in some others) the sculptors have kept closely to their text, ‘God created Man in his own image.’ Adam and the Creator are exactly alike, even in the growth of the beard and the arrangement of the hair—the same model served for both. Anthropomorphism is an artifice that must be used, and I think those sculptors used it more effectively than Michaelangelo. In his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he makes Adam a young man of twenty and the Creator an old man of seventy, not the least like Adam, and neither human nor divine. There is a picture by Pesellino in the National Gallery (No. 727) portraying the three Persons of the Trinity. An old lady told me, forty years ago, that she took one of her maids there soon after this picture had arrived: the maid stared at the First Person for some considerable time, and then said, “Lor’, mum, d’you think it’s like?”
In King’s College Chapel at Cambridge the central figure in the great east window, usually mistaken for God Almighty, is really Pontius Pilate; and I am always pleased to see him on his judgement-seat up there—it is some compensation for the ignorant abuse that is poured out on him from pulpits. In the case before the Court the Prisoner had pleaded guilty—‘thou sayest’—to the charge of claiming to be a King: the Prosecution would not allow the charge to be withdrawn; and the Judge was bound to pass the sentence which the Law prescribed.
I fancy Pilate may have misinterpreted a phrase. Julius Cæsar had been canonized as ‘divus,’ and Augustus therefore styled himself ‘divi filius,’ and afterwards was also canonized as ‘divus.’ But while ‘divi filius’ and ‘dei filius’ were quite distinct in Latin, they were both translated into Greek as ‘theou uios.’ (There is no question of misreadings here: the phrase is in inscriptions and on coins.) Saint Paul says that the Gentiles thought his doctrines ‘foolishness,’ and Pilate might think it ‘foolishness’ for anyone to claim to be a son of God; but it would be a serious matter for anyone to claim to be a son of the late Emperor, especially if he also claimed to be a King.
The ancient portraits of Christ are of two different types, the oldest portraits making him a beardless youth, and more recent portraits making him a bearded man. The very old portraits agree with the tradition (Luke, II. 2) that the Nativity was at the time of the census by Quirinius. That was at the end of 6 or beginning of 7 A.D., and the Crucifixion may have been as early as the spring of 27 A.D., as Pilate was in office then: in which case there obviously could not be any genuine portraits of Christ above the age of twenty. The more recent portraits agree with the traditions that make Christ over thirty at the Crucifixion. But in these portraits it is another kind of face, not the same face in maturer years; and the youthful face is usually much pleasanter, betokening a Deity who would delight in turning water into wine.