Appendix, Note II: The Revised Version of the New Testament

(Chap. VIII. p. 110, ante.) THE REVISED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

I wish to bring in the R.V. controversy only in so far as my argument demands it. The method on which the revisers dealt with the text has been thus described by one of the company (Dr. Newth), whose account is confirmed by Bishop. Ellicott himself. The Bishop, as chairman, asked whether any textual changes were proposed. “By tacit consent” Drs. Scrivener and Hort were left to reply by stating their respective views. ‘Dr. Scrivener opens up the matter by stating the facts of the case and giving his judgment on the bearings of the evidence. Dr. Hort follows, and, if differing from Dr. S.’s estimate of the weight of the evidence, gives his. reasons and states his own view. After discussion the vote of the company is taken, and the proposed reading accepted or rejected. The text being thus settled, the chairman asks for proposals on the rendering.”

Is it any wonder that a learned writer declared that if this description of their action “is not a kind of joke, it is quite enough to ‘settle’ this Revised Greek Testament in a very different sense”? Fancy a question of prescriptive rights being “settled” in such a manner as this in a court of justice! And remember that, while “textual criticism” sounds very recondite, the question at issue in every instance was as definitely a matter of evidence as is the case in a suit about a water-course or a right of way. And it ought to have been dealt with according to the established principles and

rules of evidence.
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If the four or five most ancient MSS. were always in accord 4 a plausible case might be made out for following them to the exclusion of the other authorities. But as a matter of fact they are scarcely ever in accord in any instance where they differ from the Received Text. Suppose that in a prescriptive rights action the ‘‘ancient witnesses” called for the plaintiff differed in their evidence, and the jury dy a majority vote decided to follow some of them in opposition to the others and also to the united voice of the rest of the community; and you have in a parable the action of the Revisers in “settling” the Greek text.

And in numberless cases where the Revisers happily refused to mutilate the text, they compromised matters by allowing the insertion in the margin of an alternative reading, which, though possibly quite devoid of authority, suggests a doubt as to the right reading of the passage.

The question of the ¢vans/ation is quite outside the purpose of this reference to the R.V., which is merely to emphasise the fact that sceptical objections based on textual criticism are worthless. I will therefore dismiss the matter with a word of comment and a word of advice.

An old MS. may have survived its fellows for the same reason that an old pair of boots sometimes survives, namely, through having been put aside on account of some fault or blemish. Of the five most ancient MSS. which the Revisers chiefly followed, three are declared by critics of eminence to be corrupt and untrustworthy.

And the advice I venture to offer to readers who cannot revise the R.V. for themselves is this: Read the Gospels always in the Authorised Version, using the R.V. only as a book of reference; and when the /ex¢ differs, assume that the A.V. is right, for in the great majority of cases it is so.