Book. This will be seen immediately by comparing the verses given below with the quotation of the apostle. The verses, two excepted, are given at full length: the corresponding parts are those marked in Italics. Psalm xiv. 1, 2, 3. There is none that doeth good. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are altogether become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no not one. Psalm v. 9. For there is no faithfulness in their mouth, their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. Psalm cxl. 3. They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips. Psalm x. 7. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud; under his tongue is mischief and vanity. Isaiah lix. 7, 8. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they know not, and there is no judgment in their goings. Psalm xxxvi. 1. The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes. Entertaining not the shadow of a doubt that the above difficulty will admit of a satisfactory solution; but having never before heard it stated, and being myself unable to explain it, I beg leave to request an explanation from you, who appear to be eminently skilled in Biblical criticism. I remain, Gentlemen, with sincere respect, Bristol, 15th Feb. 1825. Yours truly, We beg to thank the writer of the above letter for the favourble opinion which he expresses of our papers on the Integrity of the Word, but assure him that we make no pretensions to that eminent skill in Biblical Criticism for which he gives us credit. Like himself, we have at various times, in the course of our reading, been struck and surprised by the notices we met with respecting variations in the text of the Sacred Scriptures: like most other sincere believers in their divine inspiration, the circumstance at first gave us pain: but we did not think it right or prudent, in a matter of such importance, to stifle our uneasy feelings by endeavouring to confirm ourselves in the denial of a fact, which, we presently perceived, we should be compelled to acknowledge, if we ventured to open our eyes to look about us. We deemed it more reasonable to make ourselves acquainted with the exact state of the case; and in consequence of having done so, the uneasiness which formerly attended our idea of it has been removed. While we have become fully convinced, that no single copy of the Word, either of the Old Testament or of the New, is now extant, which can be relied upon as an exact fac-simile, in all particulars, of the autographs of the inspired writers, we have been enabled to see that not a shadow of an argument can thence be drawn against the inspiration of the Scriptures, nor even against their existence in their integrity: and we have been gradually led into the views which are imperfectly developed in our papers on the subject. We are not certain that we can fully satisfy our intelligent correspondent in regard to the extraordinary various reading in the fourteenth Psalm: but we believe we can inform him of the principal circumstances which are known respecting it. The charge of the Roman Catholic writer mentioned by our correspondent against the Bible-version of this Psalm, originates in the circumstance, that persons of his communion are obliged to follow the readings of the Latin Vulgate, which was pronounced by the Council of Trent to be the only authentic edition of the Scriptures: for though they do not deny that the Old Testament was written originally in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, they affirm that, since the time when the Vulgate Translation was made, the Hebrew Scriptures have been depraved by the Jews, and the Greek Scriptures by the Eastern or Greek Church; while they pretend that the Western or Romish Church, being endowed with infallibility, has preserved her Latin Scriptures pure and uncorrupted. Now in the Vulgate Version, Psalm xiv. contains the three additional verses: and hence the charge of the Roman Catholic clergyman against the EnglishBible-version, which follows the Hebrew Text. * * How little room there is for such a boast, will be seen in another part of ou present Number. But how could the Catholic appeal to the Prayer-book-version in proof of his accusation? In doing so he was guilty of what the logicians call a petitio principii,-or he assumed the very point which was to be proved: for the verses are added in the Church-of-England-Prayer-book from the Latin Vulgate; thus in appealing to the Prayer-book-version he appeals to the Latin Vulgate to prove that the Latin Vulgate gives the authentic reading; which is a mode of proceeding that no candid man, unless consummately ignorant, would adopt. The manner in which the additional verses obtained a place in the Prayer-book-version, was this. As is generally known, and as this example evinces, that version of the Psalms is very different from that of the present authorized Bible, which was executed by forty-seven persons, appointed for the purpose by King James I. and published in the year 1611. Neither is it that of the authorized version which preceded the present, and which is commonly known by the name of the Bishop's Bible, which was produced by fifteen translators, the majority of whom were bishops, acting by commission from Queen Elizabeth, in the year 1568. For the Book of Common Prayer, though alterations and additions were made to it soon after the accession of Charles II., and although it had undergone some slight corrections under Charles I. and James I., remains substantially the same as was established by authority of Queen Elizabeth in 1559; and this also took for its basis the Liturgy prepared chiefly by Archbishop Cranmer, and published by authority of Edward VI. in 1552; which again was an improvement upon one prepared by Cranmer, Ridley, and others, in 1548: and this first English Liturgy was chiefly a translation from the Latin Roman Catholic Liturgies in use before the Reformation, but purged from their superstitions. In these Liturgies then, of King Edward and Queen Elizabeth, it is reasonable to expect to find the version of the Psalms in the words of the authorized translation in use before the publication of the Bishop's Bible in 1568; and accordingly, as the later revisions of the Prayer-book left the Psalms as they stood before, the version of what is called "Cranmer's Bible," published by authority of Henry VIII. in 1540, is read in the service of the Church of England to this day. Though not absolutely necessary to the subject before us, it will perhaps be deemed not uninteresting by our readers, if we here give the genealogy of "Cranmer's Bible," and by consequence of the Prayer-book version of the Psalms, in a brief sketch of the previous translations of the Scriptures into the English language. After the time of Wickliff, who, about the year 1380, translated the entire Bible from the Latin Vulgate, the first Englishman who undertook a translation of any part of the Scriptures into his native tongue was William Tindal, who in 1526, either at Antwerp or Hamburgh, printed the New Testament in English, having been assisted in the work by John Fry or Fryth and William Roye: and he afterwards published the historical books of the Old Testament, and the prophet Jonah; for which unpardonable heresies he was strangled and his body burnt at Villefort, near Brussels, in 1536: Fry also was burnt in Smithfield, in 1552: as was Roye in Portugal. Tindal is supposed to have had little or no knowledge of Hebrew, and to have translated chiefly from the Latin. But the first edition of the whole Bible printed in English was executed by Miles Coverdale, and published in 1535, with a dedication to the king. It is said to be altogether a different version from Tindal's: but that it was not taken, in the Old Testament, immediately from the Hebrew, appears from a statement in the preface, in which the translator speaks of "humbly and faithfully following his interpreters, of which he used five different ones, who had translated the Scriptures not only into Latin, but into Dutch;" and he adds, that he "had, with a clear conscience, purely and faithfully translated out of the foregoing interpreters." Of these Latin interpreters, no doubt the Vulgate was the principal: he might also have had the assistance of Pagninus's version, which is literal from the Hebrew, as it was printed in 1528; and even, to some extent, of Munster's, which was published in 1534: By his Dutch interpreter he most probably means the German or High-Dutch translation of Luther, which had appeared by portions between the years 1522 and 1532; but a German translation from the Latin Vulgate was printed as early as 1466. Another edition of the English Bible was printed at Hamburgh or some other place in Germany in 1537, and published in England with the king's licence: it bore the name of Thomas Matthewe, but was in reality edited by John Rogers, the first person who was condemned to the flames in the reign of Queen Mary. This was chiefly a republication of Tindal's version, with the parts A which he had not translated supplied from Coverdale's. large folio edition of this same work, with several alterations and corrections, particularly in the book of Psalms, was published in 1539, and is commonly known by the name of "the Great Bible." Coverdale is said to have been the chief director of the work, and to have mended the translation in many places from the Hebrew-probably he had improved himself in that language during the five years which had elapsed since the publication of his former work. Among the improvements now introduced, this was certainly one of the most important;-that those passages retained from the Latin Vulgate which are not found in the Hebrew or Greek, were printed in a smaller letter; and among the parts thus distinguished are particularly mentioned the 5th, 6th, and 7th verses of the 14th Psalm. This same year another bible was printed under the conduct of Richard Taverner, which is a different correction of Matthewe's Bible: and this edition was also read in churches by royal authority. Three new editions, printed from "the Great Bible," were published in 1540; and as the work now appeared with a preface by the Arch. bishop of Canterbury, who from the beginning had been very active in forwarding this laudable undertaking, and in obtaining the king's licence for its use, it thenceforth went by the name of "Cranmer's Bible." * The source then from which the three additional verses of the fourteenth Psalm were introduced into "Cranmer's Bible" and thence into the Book of Common Prayer was evidently the Vulgate Latin; and though in "the Great Bible," and thence in Cranmer's, the addition was printed in a smaller type, as the mark of probable spuriousness, this distinction has been omitted in the Prayer-book; and thus the members of the Church of England who are unacquainted with the above history, are left to wonder at the great difference between their Liturgy and their Bible, and doubt which edition they are to regard as the authentic Scriptures. It really appears unaccountable that the * We have taken the materials of the above sketch of early English translations of the Bible from Horne's Introduction to the Critical Study of the Scriptures, Vol. 2. Pt. II. Ch. vi.; and Bishop Tomline's Elements of Christian Theology, Vol. 2. Pt. III. Chs. i. & ii.; and the latter of these authors expressly states the Prayer-book translation of the Psalms to be that of Cranmer's Bible. |