ABSTRACT
I have mentioned trie consternation among Orthodox Jewish scholars which was caused by the discovery of ancient Hebrew texts of the Bible that differ from the Masoretic version, and of the nuisance to Christian scholars of the turning-up of unknown documents that throw new light on the emergence of Christianity. The ordinary non-scholarly Jew knows simply that the Torah and the Prophets and the Writings, the three sections of his Bible, are sacred; the ordinary non-scholarly Gentile that his Bible, of which the first section is differently arranged from the Hebrew "Tanakh" (a word made from the initial consonants of the three sections) and which has been translated in several different ways, is a work of Divine revelation, consisting of two solid units called the Old and the New Testaments. He nowadays rarely reads it, and if he goes to church he hears it read in a few selected verses at a time, often very much detached from their contexts. I have been surprised to find, by inquiry, how many literate Gentiles do not know in what languages the Bible was written. The author of a grammar of New Testament Greek, D. F. Hudson, of Serampore College in Bengal, tells of an English lady who is reported to have said to a missionary engaged in translating the New Testament out of Greek into one of the Central African languages, "But why do that? If English was good enough for St. Paul, 287why isn't it good enough for them?" R F. Bruce of the University of Manchester, in his book The English Bible: A History of Translations, has some equally amusing stories of the reaction to the Revised Standard Version of 1952—revised, of course, in the interests of accuracy : there could be no question at that date of recapturing the style of the King James translation. Some people had objected to the inclusion in the committee who prepared the Revised Version of a distinguished Jewish scholar, an authority on the Septuagint. And when it was published, "one American preacher was reported to have burned a copy ... with a blowlamp in his pulpit, remarking that it was like the Devil because it was hard to burn." Pamphlets appeared bearing such titles as "The Bible of Antichrist," "The New Blasphemous Bible," and "Whose Unclean Fingers Have Been Tampering with the Holy Bible, God's Pure, Infallible, Verbally Inspired Word?"-the last of which opens with the sentence "Every informed and intelligent person knows that our government is crawling with Communists, or those who sanction and encourage Communism." Such people, of course, are even further from understanding what sort of problems are presented by any serious effort to establish what was actually written in the Bible and what it meant to those who wrote it. The King James Version of the Bible, in its poetic seventeenth-century language, is such a fine piece of literature that it has been difficult for anyone familiar with it not to imagine, like the English lady or the author of the anti-Communist pamphlet, that it fixes the Word of God in plain print. We not only remember, from First Corinthians, "For now we see through a glass, darkly," and do not recognize—probably have not read—James Moffatt's "At present we only see the baffling reflections in a mirror" or Ronald Knox's "At present we are looking at a confused reflection in a mirror," but we even imagine the young 288Joseph of Genesis- in a kind of harlequin costume, the "coat of many colors," though we have been told by Mof-fatt and the Revised Standard Version that this was really a robe or tunic with long sleeves (Knox tries to make the old interpretation more presentable by calling it "a coat that was all embroidery"). Yet every teacher of beginners' Hebrew has to commence by contending with this influence, by explaining that in many cases we now know better than the seventeenth-century translators. A professor at Union Seminary told me that he passed out to his students mimeographed copies of Professor Walter Raleigh's essay on the beauties of the King James translation, telling them that everything Raleigh said was true: they were to read this, but then bear in mind that it was quite irrelevant to what they were going to study. A professor at the Princeton Seminary used to issue a similar warning, referring to the old cliche that the greatest treasures of English literature are Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and thereafter, when he recognized in a class translation any echo of the latter, which had been obviously used as a trot, would interrupt it with "Never mind about Shakespeare!"
