Preserving our Christian Heritage since 2001.
|
|
Preserving our Christian Heritage since 2001.
|
||||
| Bibles |
|
This is the preface of the New Testament, an American Translation..
Purchase this Bible translation and other fine Bibles on the DCL Bible CD-ROM.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
*
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
By
EDGAR J. GOODSPEED
Professor of Biblical and Patristic Greek
The University of Chicago
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO • ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1923 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1923
TWENTY-FIRST IMPRESSION SEPTEMBER 1946
*
COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.
The New Testament was written not in classical Greek, nor in the "biblical" Greek of the Greek version of the Old Testament, nor even in the literary Greek of its own day, but in the common language of everyday life. This fact has been fully established by the Greek papyrus discoveries and the grammatical researches of the last twenty-five years. It follows that the most appropriate English form for the New Testament is the simple, straightforward English of every-day expression.
The invitation of the University Press to provide such a translation was accepted by the present translator in the hope that it might result in a version with something of the ease, boldness, and unpretending vigor which mark the original Greek. The writers of the New Testament had for the most part little use for literary art. The principal figure among them, the apostle Paul, said this in so many words. They put their message in the simplest and most direct terms they could command, so that it spoke directly to the common life of their day. The great passages in the New Testament owe their greatness more to the trenchant vigor of their thought, or the moral sublimity of their ideas, than to the graces of rhetoric.
The translation of such a book demands first, the understanding of what the several writers meant to say, and second, the casting of their thought in the simplest and clearest of present-day English. It is the meaning, not the dress, of the New Testament that is of principal importance. For many of us the familiar expressions of the Authorized Version are richly freighted with memories and associations. But few indeed sit down and read the New Testament in that version continuously and understandingly, a book at a time, as it was written to be read. The antique diction, the mechanical method of translation, and the disturbing verse division retard and discourage the reader. The aim of the present translation has been to present the meaning of the different books as faithfully as possible, without bias or prejudice, in English of the same kind as the Greek of the original, so that they may be continuously and understandingly read. There is no book in the New Testament that cannot easily be read at a sitting. For American readers, especially, who have had to depend so long upon versions made in Great Britain, there is room for a New Testament free from expressions which, however familiar in England or Scotland, are strange to American ears.
The progress of recent years in the study of the text, grammar, lexicography, and interpretation of the New Testament, together with the discoveries of Greek papyri made chiefly since 1897, offers a wealth of material to the translator. The grammatical works of Blass, Burton, Moulton, and Robertson, and the new lexicons of Preuschen (1910), Zorell (1911), Ebeling (1913), Souter (1916), and Abbott-Smith (1922), with the lexical studies of Moulton and Milligan (1914-) greatly facilitate the work of the interpreter.
I have closely followed the Greek text of Westcott and Hort, now generally accepted. Every scholar knows its great superiority to the late and faulty Greek texts from which the early English translations from Tyndale to the Authorized Version were made. In a few instances, I have accepted the emendations suggested by Dr. Hort himself in his Notes on Select Readings. Under the influence of more recent investigations, I have departed from Westcott and Hort in John 19:29; Acts 6:9; 19:28, 34; James 1:17; and Revelation 13:1; and I have adopted the striking suggestion of Rendel Harris, that by an error of the eye the name of Enoch has dropped out of the text in I Peter 3:19. The passages marked by Westcott and Hort as interpolations have been omitted from this translation, as being no part of the original text.
The generous co-operation of the University Press has made it possible to print the translation as one would a modern book, with all those aids of quotation marks and paragraphing which make an open and inviting page, and so facilitate reading, reference, and understanding. The translator has not interspersed the text with footnotes or captions of his own devising, preferring to leave it to make its own impression upon the reader. Nor has he prefaced the several books with historical introductions, which might aid in their understanding. For such aids, he would refer to his Story of the New Testament, which the studious reader may find a helpful companion to the present translation.
It has been truly said that any translation of a masterpiece must be a failure, but if this translation can in any measure bring home the great, living messages of the New Testament a little more widely and forcibly to the life of our time, the translator will be well content.
EDGAR J. GOODSPEED
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
August 31, 1923
