During a few years after this, the subject remained in abeyance, but in 1832 there was published, at Cambridge, a calm and scholarly pamphlet, entitled Hints on an Improved Translation of the New Testament, by the Rev. James Scholefield, A.M., Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge. A second edition was issued in 1836, and a third, with an appendix, in 1849.
Through these and other publications a widely-spread conviction was produced that the work ought at length to be attempted, and in the years 1855-57 the question was in a very emphatic form brought under public notice. In the Edinburgh Review of October, 1855, in a notice of a certain Paragraph Bible then recently published, there appeared the following words: “Surely it is high time for a further revision. It is now almost 250 years since the last was made. During that long period neither the researches of the clergy nor the intelligence of the laity have remained stationary. We have become desirous of knowing more, and they have acquired more to teach us. Vast stores of Biblical information have been accumulating since the days of James I., by which, not merely the rendering of the Common Version, but the purity of the Sacred Text itself, might be improved. And it is essential to the interests of religion that that information should be fully, freely, and in an authoritative form, disseminated abroad by a careful correction of our received version of the Sacred Scriptures.”
In the following year, 1856, the Rev. William Selwyn, Canon of Ely, and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, sent forth his Notes on the proposed Amendment of the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, in which he states: “I do not hesitate to avow my firm persuasion that there are at least one thousand passages of the English Bible that might be amended without any change in the general texture and justly reverenced language of the version.”
In July of the same year an address to the Crown was moved in the House of Commons by Mr. Heywood, member for North Lancashire, praying that Her Majesty would appoint a Royal Commission of learned men to consider of such amendments of the authorized version of the Bible as had been already proposed, and to receive suggestions from all persons who might be willing to offer them, and to report the amendments which they might be prepared to recommend.
In the January of the following year a resolution in support of revision was proposed at the general meeting of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, by the Rev. G. F. Biber, LL.D., who subsequently published the substance of his speech in support of this resolution, under the title, A Plea for an Edition of the Authorized Version of Holy Scripture with explanatory and emendatory marginal readings. Pamphlets also were published the same year by Dr. Beard and by Dr. Henry Burgess; but, what it is more important to note, in that year there was published the first of a series of works which were intended to show by example the kind of work which the wiser advocates of revision desired to see undertaken. This was The Gospel according to John, after the Authorized Version, newly compared with the original Greek, and revised by five clergymen—John Barrow, D.D.; George Moberly, D.C.L.; Henry Alford, B.D.; William G. Humphry, B.D.; Charles J. Ellicott, M.A. In that same year also Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster (now Archbishop of Dublin), published his work On the Authorized Version of the New Testament; and in 1863 Dr. Plumptre, in the Dictionary of the Bible, reiterated the statement, “The work ought not to be delayed much longer.”
In the spring of 1870 the desirableness of a fresh revision of the English Bible was advocated—by Dr. J. B. Lightfoot in a paper read before a meeting of clergy; by the writer of these lectures in a paper read before the annual meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales; by the British Quarterly Review in its January number; and, finally, by the Quarterly Review in its April number.
A weighty sentence from the last-mentioned writer will be a fitting conclusion to the present lecture. “It is positive unfaithfulness on the part of those who have ability and opportunity to decline the task. The Word of God, just because it is God’s Word, ought to be presented to every reader in a state as pure and perfect as human learning, skill, and taste can make it. The higher our veneration for it the more anxious ought we to be to free it from every blemish, however small and unimportant. But nothing in truth can be unimportant which dims the light of Divine Revelation.”