“We have no right, doubtless, to assume that our Principles are infallible: but we have a right to claim that any one who rejects them ... should confute the Arguments and rebut the Evidence on which the opposite conclusion has been founded. Strong expressions of Individual Opinion are not Arguments.”—Bp. Ellicott's Pamphlet, (1882,) p. 40.
Our “method involves vast research, unwearied patience.... It will therefore find but little favour with those who adopt the easy method ... of using some favourite Manuscript, or some supposed power of divining the Original Text.”—Bp. Ellicott, Ibid. p. 19.
“Non enim sumus sicut plurimi, adulterantes (καπηλεύοντες) verbum Dei.”—2 Cor. ii. 17.
“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”—Job xxxviii. 2.
“Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?”—S. Luke vi. 39.
Proposing to ourselves (May 17th, 1881) to enquire into the merits of the recent Revision of the Authorized Version of the New Testament Scriptures, we speedily became aware that an entirely different problem awaited us and demanded preliminary investigation. We made the distressing discovery, that the underlying Greek Text had been completely refashioned throughout. It was accordingly not so much a “Revised English Version” as a “New Greek Text,” which was challenging public acceptance. Premature therefore,—not to say preposterous,—would have been any enquiry into the degree of ability with which the original Greek had been rendered into English by our Revisionists, until we had first satisfied ourselves that it was still “the original Greek” with which we had to deal: or whether it had been the supreme infelicity of a body of Scholars claiming to act by the authority of the sacred Synod of Canterbury, to put themselves into the hands of some ingenious theory-monger, and to become the dupes of any of the strange delusions which [pg 236] are found unhappily still to prevail in certain quarters, on the subject of Textual Criticism.
The correction of known Textual errors of course we eagerly expected: and on every occasion when the Traditional Text was altered, we as confidently depended on finding a record of the circumstance inserted with religious fidelity into the margin,—as agreed upon by the Revisionists at the outset. In both of these expectations however we found ourselves sadly disappointed. The Revisionists have not corrected the “known Textual errors.” On the other hand, besides silently adopting most of those wretched fabrications which are just now in favour with the German school, they have encumbered their margin with those other Readings which, after due examination, they had themselves deliberately rejected. For why? Because, in their collective judgment, “for the present, it would not be safe to accept one Reading to the absolute exclusion of others.”[705] A fatal admission truly! What are found in the margin are therefore “alternative Readings,”—in the opinion of these self-constituted representatives of the Church and of the Sects.
It becomes evident that, by this ill-advised proceeding, our Revisionists would convert every Englishman's copy of the New Testament into a one-sided Introduction to the Critical difficulties of the Greek Text; a labyrinth, out of which they have not been at the pains to supply him with a single hint as to how he may find his way. On the contrary. By candidly avowing that they find themselves enveloped in the same Stygian darkness with the ordinary English Reader, they give him to understand that [pg 237] there is absolutely no escape from the difficulty. What else must be the result of all this but general uncertainty, confusion, distress? A hazy mistrust of all Scripture has been insinuated into the hearts and minds of countless millions, who in this way have been forced to become doubters,—yes, doubters in the Truth of Revelation itself. One recals sorrowfully the terrible woe denounced by the Author of Scripture on those who minister occasions of falling to others:—“It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
For ourselves, shocked and offended at the unfaithfulness which could so deal with the sacred Deposit, we made it our business to expose, somewhat in detail, what had been the method of our Revisionists. In our October number[706] we demonstrated, (as far as was possible within such narrow limits,) the utterly untrustworthy character of not a few of the results at which, after ten years of careful study, these distinguished Scholars proclaim to the civilized world that they have deliberately arrived. In our January number[707] also, we found it impossible to avoid extending our enumeration of Textual errors and multiplying our proofs, while we were making it our business to show that, even had their Text been faultless, their Translation must needs be rejected as intolerable, on grounds of defective Scholarship and egregious bad Taste. The popular verdict has in the meantime been pronounced unmistakably. It is already admitted on all hands that the Revision has been a prodigious blunder. How it came about that, with such a first-rate textual Critic among them as Prebendary Scrivener,[708] the Revisers of 1881 [pg 238] should have deliberately gone back to those vile fabrications from which the good Providence of God preserved Erasmus and Stunica,—Stephens and Beza and the Elzevirs,—three centuries ago:—how it happened that, with so many splendid Scholars sitting round their table, they should have produced a Translation which, for the most part, reads like a first-rate school-boy's crib,—tasteless, unlovely, harsh, unidiomatic;—servile without being really faithful,—pedantic without being really learned;—an unreadable Translation, in short; the result of a vast amount of labour indeed, but of wondrous little skill:—how all this has come about, it were utterly useless at this time of day to enquire.
Unable to disprove the correctness of our Criticism on the Revised Greek Text, even in a single instance, certain partizans of the Revision,—singular to relate,—have been ever since industriously promulgating the notion, that the Reviewer's great misfortune and fatal disadvantage all along has been, that he wrote his first Article before the publication of Drs. Westcott and Hort's Critical “Introduction.” Had he but been so happy as to have been made aware by those eminent Scholars of the critical principles which have guided them in the construction of their Text, how differently must he have expressed himself throughout, and to what widely different conclusions must he have inevitably arrived! This is what has been once and again either openly declared, or else privately intimated, in many quarters. Some, in the warmth of their partizanship, have been so ill-advised as to insinuate that it argues either a deficiency of moral courage, or else of intellectual perception, in the Reviewer, that he has not long since grappled definitely with the Theory of Drs. Westcott and Hort,—and either published an Answer to it, or else frankly admitted that he finds it unanswerable.