A thousand years had passed before time permitted the trial of strength between the Greek Bible and the Latin. They had fairly met in the struggles of 1582 and the thirty years following in their respective English translations. The Vulgate yielded before the Greek; the mutilated version before the pure Word. The Jesuits were obliged to shift their line of battle. They saw, that armed only with the Latin, they could fight no longer. They therefore resolved to enter the field of the Greek and become superb masters of the Greek; only that they might meet the influence of the Greek.
They knew that manuscripts in Greek, of the type from which the Bible adopted by Constantine had been taken, were awaiting them, — manuscripts, moreover, which involved the Old Testament as well as the New. To use them to overthrow the Received Text would demand great training and almost Herculean labors; for the Received Text was apparently invincible.
But still more. Before they could get under way, the champions of the Greek had moved up and consolidated their gains. Flushed with their glorious victory over the Jesuit Bible of 1582, and over the Spanish Armada of 1588, every energy pulsating with certainty and hope, English Protestantism brought forth a perfect masterpiece. They gave to the world what has been considered by hosts of scholars, the greatest version ever produced in any language, — the King James Bible, called “The Miracle of English Prose.” This was not taken from the Latin in either the Old or the New Testament, but from the languages in which God originally wrote His Word, namely, from the Hebrew in the Old Testament and from the Greek in the New. The Jesuits had therefore before them a double task, — both to supplant the authority of the Greek of the Received Text by another Greek New Testament, and then upon this mutilated foundation, to bring forth a new English version which might retire into the background, the King James. In other words, they must, before they could again give standing to the Vulgate, bring Protestantism to accept a mutilated Greek text and an English version based upon it.
The manuscripts from which the New Version must be taken, would be like the Greek manuscripts which Jerome used in producing the Vulgate. The opponents of the King James Version would even do more. They would enter the field of the Old Testament, namely, the Hebrew, and, from the many translations of it into Greek in the early centuries, seize whatever advantages they could.
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In other words, the Jesuits had put forth one Bible in English, that of 1582, as we have seen; of course, they could get out another.
CHAPTER 5
THE KING JAMES BIBLE BORN AMID THE GREAT STRUGGLES OVER THE JESUIT VERSION
THE hour had arrived, and from the human point of view, conditions were perfect, for God to bring forth a translation of the Bible which would sum up in itself the best of the ages. The heavenly Father foresaw the opportunity of giving His Word to the inhabitants of earth by the coming of the British Empire with its dominions scattered throughout the world, and by the great American Republic, both speaking the English language. Not only was the English language by 1611 in a more opportune condition than it had ever been before or ever would be again, but the Hebrew and the Greek likewise had been brought up with the accumulated treasures of their materials to a splendid working point. The age was not distracted by the rush of mechanical and industrial achievements. Moreover linguistic scholarship was at its peak. Men of giant minds, supported by excellent physical health, had possessed in a splendid state of perfection a knowledge of the languages and literature necessary for the ripest Biblical scholarship.
One hundred and fifty years of printing had permitted the Jewish rabbis to place at the disposal of scholars all the treasures in the Hebrew tongue which they had been accumulating for over two thousand years. In the words of the learned Professor E. C. Bissell:
“There ought to be no doubt that in the text which we inherit from the Massoretes, and they from the Talmudists, and they in turn from a period when versions and paraphrases of the Scriptures in other languages now accessible to us were in common use — the same text being transmitted to this period from the time of Ezra under the peculiarly sacred seal of the Jewish canon — we have a substantially correct copy of the original documents, and one worthy of all confidence.”f91
We are told that the revival of Massoretic studies in more recent times was the result of the vast learning and energy of Buxtorf, of Basle.f92 He had given the benefits of his Hebrew accomplishments in time to be used by the translators of the King James Version. And we have the word of a leading Revisionist, highly recommended by Bishop Ellicott, that it is not to the credit of Christian scholarship that so little has been done in Hebrew researches during the past 300 years.f93
What is true of the Hebrew is equally true of the Greek. The Unitarian scholar who sat on the English New Testament Revision Committee, acknowledged that the Greek New Testament of Erasmus (1516) is as good as any.f94 It should be pointed out that Stephens (A.D. 1550), then Beza (1598), and Elzevir (1624), all, subsequently printed editions of the same Greek New Testament. Since the days of Elzevir it has been called the Received Text, or from the Latin, Textus Receptus. Of it Dr. A. T. Robertson also says:
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“It should be stated at once that the Textus Receptus is not a bad text. It is not a heretical text. It is substantially correct.”f95
Again: “Erasmus seemed to feel that he had published the original Greek New Testament as it was written... The third edition of Erasmus (1522) became the foundation of the Textus Receptus for Britain since it was followed by Stephens. There were 3300 copies of the first two editions of the Greek New Testament of Erasmus circulated. His work became the standard for three hundred years.”f96
This text is and has been for 300 years the best known and most widely used. It has behind it all the Protestant scholarship of nearly three centuries. It ought to be pointed out that those who seem eager to attack the King James and the Greek behind it, when the enormous difficulties of the Revised Greek Testament are pointed out, will claim the Revised Text is all right because it is like the Greek New Testament from which the King James was translated: on the other hand, when they are not called to account, they will say belittling things about the Received Text and the scholars who translated the King James Bible.