And pray disabuse yourself of the imagination that in what precedes I have been stretching the numbers in order to make out a case against you. It would be easy to show that in estimating the amount of needless changes at 356 out of 836, I am greatly under the mark. I have not included such cases, for instance, as your substitution of ἡ μνᾶ σου, Κύριε for Κύριε, ἡ μνᾶ σου (in xix. 18), and of Τοίνυν ἀπόδοτε for Ἀπόδοτε τοίνυν (in xx. 25),[902]—only lest you should pretend that the transposition affects the English, and therefore was necessary. Had I desired to swell the number I could have easily shown that fully half the [pg 407] changes you effected in the Greek Text were wholly superfluous for the Revision of the English Translation, and therefore were entirely without excuse.
This, in fact,—(give me leave to remind you in passing,)—is the true reason why, at an early stage of your proceedings, you resolved that none of the changes you introduced into the Greek Text should find a record in your English margin. Had any been recorded, all must have appeared. And had this been done, you would have stood openly convicted of having utterly disregarded the “Instructions” you had received from Convocation. With what face, for example, could you, (in the margin of S. Luke xv. 17,) against the words “he said,”—have printed “ἔφη not εἶπε”? or, (at xxiv. 44,) against the words “unto them,”—must you not have been ashamed to encumber the already overcrowded margin with such an irrelevant statement as,—“πρὸς αὐτούς not αὐτοῖς”?
Now, if this were all, you might reply that by my own showing the Textual changes complained of, if they do no good, at least do no harm. But then, unhappily, you and your friends have not confined yourselves to colourless readings, when silently up and down every part of the N. T. you have introduced innovations. I open your New English Version at random (S. John iv. 15), and invite your attention to the first instance which catches my eye.
You have made the Woman of Samaria complain of the length of the walk from Sychar to Jacob's well:—“Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come all the way hither to draw.”—What has happened? For ἔρχωμαι, I discover that you have silently substituted ΔΙέρχωμαι. (Even διέρχωμαι has no such meaning: but let that pass.) What then was your authority for thrusting διέρχωμαι (which by the way is a patent absurdity) into the Text? The word [pg 408] is found (I discover) in only two Greek MSS. of had character[903] (b א), which, being derived from a common corrupt original, can only reckon for one: and the reasoning which is supposed to justify this change is thus supplied by Tischendorf:—“If the Evangelist had written ἔρχ-, who would ever have dreamed of turning it into δι-έρχωμαι?”... No one, of course, (is the obvious answer,) except the inveterate blunderer who, some 1700 years ago, seeing ΜΗΔΕΕΡΧΩΜΑΙ before him, reduplicated the antecedent ΔΕ. The sum of the matter is that!... Pass 1700 years, and the long-since-forgotten blunder is furbished up afresh by Drs. Westcott and Hort,—is urged upon the wondering body of Revisers as the undoubted utterance of the Spirit,—is accepted by yourself;—finally, (in spite of many a remonstrance from Dr. Scrivener and his friends,) is thrust upon the acceptance of 90 millions of English-speaking men throughout the world, as the long-lost-sight-of, but at last happily recovered, utterance of the “Woman of Samaria!”... Ἄπαγε.
Ordinary readers, in the meantime, will of course assume that the change results from the Revisers' skill in translating,—the advances which have been made in the study of Greek; for no trace of the textual vagary before us survives in the English margin.
And thus I am reminded of what I hold to be your gravest fault of all. The rule of Committee subject to which you commenced operations,—the Rule which re-assured the public and reconciled the Church to the prospect of a Revised [pg 409] New Testament,—expressly provided that, whenever the underlying Greek Text was altered, such alteration should be indicated in the margin. This provision you entirely set at defiance from the very first. You have never indicated in the margin the alterations you introduced into the Greek Text. In fact, you made so many changes,—in other words, you seem to have so entirely lost sight of your pledge and your compact,—that compliance with this condition would have been simply impossible. I see not how your body is to be acquitted of a deliberate breach of faith.
(c) Fatal consequences of this mistaken officiousness.
How serious, in the meantime, the consequences have been, they only know who have been at the pains to examine your work with close attention. Not only have you, on countless occasions, thrust out words, clauses, entire sentences of genuine Scripture,—but you have been careful that no trace shall survive of the fatal injury which you have inflicted. I wonder you were not afraid. Can I be wrong in deeming such a proceeding in a high degree sinful? Has not the Spirit pronounced a tremendous doom[904] against those who do such things? Were you not afraid, for instance, to leave out (from S. Mark vi. 11) those solemn words of our Saviour,—“Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city”? Surely you will not pretend to tell me that those fifteen precious words, witnessed to as they are by all the known copies but nine,—by the Old Latin, the Peschito and the Philoxenian Syriac, the Coptic, the Gothic and the Æthiopic Versions,—besides Irenæus[905] and Victor[906] of Antioch:—you will not venture to say (will you?) that words so attested are [pg 410] so evidently a “plain and clear error,” as not to deserve even a marginal note to attest to posterity “that such things were”! I say nothing of the witness of the Liturgical usage of the Eastern Church,—which appointed these verses to be read on S. Mark's Day:[907] nor of Theophylact,[908] nor of Euthymius.[909] I appeal to the consentient testimony of Catholic antiquity. Find me older witnesses, if you can, than the “Elders” with whom Irenæus held converse,—men who must have been contemporaries of S. John the Divine: or again, than the old Latin, the Peschito, and the Coptic Versions. Then, for the MSS.,—Have you studied S. Mark's Text to so little purpose as not to have discovered that the six uncials on which you rely are the depositories of an abominably corrupt Recension of the second Gospel?
But you committed a yet more deplorable error when,—without leaving behind either note or comment of any sort,—you obliterated from S. Matth. v. 44, the solemn words which I proceed to underline:—“Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” You relied almost exclusively on those two false witnesses, of which you are so superstitiously fond, b and א: regardless of the testimony of almost all the other Copies besides:—of almost all the Versions:—and of a host of primitive Fathers: for the missing clauses are more or less recognized by Justin Mart. (a.d. 140),—by Theophilus Ant. (a.d. 168),—by Athenagoras (a.d. 177),—by Clemens Alexan. (a.d. 192),—by Origen (a.d. 210),—by the Apostolic Constt. (IIIrd cent.),—by Eusebius,—by Gregory Nyss.,—by Chrysostom,—by Isidorus,—by Nilus,—by Cyril,—by Theodoret, and certain others. Besides, of the Latins, by Tertullian,—by Lucifer,—by [pg 411] Ambrose,—by Hilary,—by Pacian,—by Augustine,—by Cassian, and many more.... Verily, my lord Bishop, your notion of what constitutes “clearly preponderating Evidence” must be freely admitted to be at once original and peculiar. I will but respectfully declare that if it be indeed one of “the now established Principles of Textual Criticism” that a bishop is at liberty to blot out from the Gospel such precepts of the Incarnate Word, as these: to reject, on the plea that they are “plain and clear errors,” sayings attested by twelve primitive Fathers,—half of whom lived and died before our two oldest manuscripts (b and א) came into being:—If all this be so indeed, permit me to declare that I would not exchange my “innocent ignorance”[910] of those “Principles” for your guilty knowledge of them,—no, not for anything in the wide world which yonder sun shines down upon.
As if what goes before had not been injury enough, you are found to have adopted the extraordinary practice of encumbering your margin with doubts as to the Readings which after due deliberation you had, as a body, retained. Strange perversity! You could not find room to retain a record in your margin of the many genuine words of our Divine Lord,—His Evangelists and Apostles,—to which Copies, Versions, Fathers lend the fullest attestation; but you could find room for an insinuation that His “Agony and bloody sweat,”—together with His “Prayer on behalf of His murderers,”—may after all prove to be nothing else but spurious accretions to the Text. And yet, the pretence for so regarding either S. Luke xxii. 43, 44, or xxiii. 34, is confessedly founded on a minimum of documentary evidence: while, as has been already shown elsewhere,[911] an overwhelming amount of ancient testimony renders it certain that not a [pg 412] particle of doubt attaches to the Divine record of either of those stupendous incidents.... Room could not be found, it seems, for a hint in the margin that such ghastly wounds as those above specified had been inflicted on S. Mark vi. 11 and S. Matth. v. 44;[912] but twenty-two lines could be spared against Rom. ix. 5 for the free ventilation of the vile Socinian gloss with which unbelievers in every age have sought to evacuate one of the grandest assertions of our Saviour's Godhead. May I be permitted, without offence, to avow myself utterly astonished?