Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech: Preface and Introductions | Page 2

renderings of other scholars, especially of course witll
the Authorized and Revised Versions. But alas, the great majority of
even "new translations," so called, are, in reality, only Tyndale's
immortal work a little--often very litLle--modernized!
4. But in the endeavour to find in Twentieth Century English a precise
equivalent for a Greek word, phrase, or sentence there are two dangers
to be guarded against. There are a Scylla and a Charybdis. On the one
hand there is the English of Society, on the other hand that of the
utterly uneducated, each of these patois having also its own special,
though expressive, borderland which we name 'slang.' But all these
salient angles (as a professor of fortification might say) of our language
are forbidden ground to the reverent translator of Holy Scripture.
5. But again, a modern translation--does this imply that no words or
phrases in any degree antiquated are to be admitted? Not so, for great
numbers of such words and phrases are still in constant use. To be
antiquated is not the same thing as to be obsolete or even obsolescent,
and without at least a tinge of antiquity it is scarcely possible that there
should be that dignity of style that befits the sacred themes with which
the Evangelists and Apostles deal.
6. It is plain that this attempt to bring out the sense of the Sacred

Writings naturally as well as accurately in present-day English does not
permit, except to a limited extent, the method of literal rendering--the
verbo verbum reddere at which Horace shrugs his shoulders. Dr.
Welldon, recently Bishop of Calcutta, in the Preface (p. vii) to his
masterly translation of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, writes, "I
have deliberately rejected the principle of trying to translate the same
Greek word by the same word in English, and where circumstances
seemed to call for it I have sometimes used two English words to
represent one word of the Greek;"--and he is perfectly right. With a
slavish literality delicate shades of meaning cannot be reproduced, nor
allowance be made for the influence of interwoven thought, or of the
writer's ever shifting--not to say changing--point of view. An utterly
ignorant or utterly lazy man, if possessed of a little ingenuity, can with
the help of a dictionary and grammar give a word-for-word rendering,
whether intelligible or not, and print 'Translation' on his title-page. On
the other hand it is a melancholy spectacle to see men of high ability
and undoubted scholarship toil and struggle at translation under a
needless restriction to literality, as in intellectual handcuffs and fetters,
when they might with advantage snap the bonds and fling them away,
as Dr. Welldon has done: more melancholy still, if they are at the same
time racking their brains to exhibit the result of their labours---a
splendid but idle philological tour de force --in what was English
nearly 300 years before.
7. Obviously any literal translation cannot but carry idioms of the
earlier language into the later, where they will very probably not be
understood; /2 and more serious still is the evil when, as in the Jewish
Greek of the N T, the earlier language of the two is itself composite and
abounds in forms of speech that belong to one earlier still. For the N.T.
Greek, even in the writings of Luke, contains a large number of
Hebrew idioms; and a literal rendering into English cannot but partially
veil, and in some degree distort, the true sense, even if it does not
totally obscure it (and that too where perfect clearness should be
attained, if possible), by this admixture of Hebrew as well as Greek
forms of expression.
8. It follows that the reader who is bent upon getting a literal rendering,

such as he can commonly find in the R.V. or (often a better one) in
Darby's New Testament, should always be on his guard against its
strong tendency to mislead.
9. One point however can hardly be too emphatically stated. It is not
the present Translator's ambition to supplant the Versions already in
general use, to which their intrinsic merit or long familiarity or both
have caused all Christian minds so lovingly to cling. His desire has
rather been to furnish a succinct and compressed running commentary
(not doctrinal) to be used sidc by side with its elder compeers. And yet
there has been something of a remoter hope. It can scarcely be doubted
that some day the attempt will be renewed to produce a satisfactory
English Bible--one in some respects perhaps (but assuredly with great
and important deviations) on the lines of the Revision of 1881, or even
altogether to supersede both the A.V. and the R.V.; and it may be that
the Translation here offered will contribute some materials that may be
built into