A New ‘Textus Receptus’?

The writer is an unrepentant, unregenerate liberal, a liberal without prefix, hyphen, or quotation marks. He belongs to what a distinguished professor in one of our eastern conservative seminaries recently described as a “dying genus.” He suffers from the unfortunate illusion or delusion that the demise of liberalism has been unduly anticipated by wishful thinkers and (as Mark Twain observed long ago in another connection) “greatly exaggerated.” He looks back with nostalgic affection on the good old days when a liberal was a liberal and a conservative was a conservative and each knew where the other stood. In the twenties he studied under such liberals as William Adams Brown, Henry Sloane Coffin, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Julius August Bewer, Ernest Findlay Scott, Shirley Jackson Case, Adolf von Harnack, and Adolf Deissmann, and cannot for the life of him recognize the liberalism he knew in the current caricatures by neo-orthodox, neo-evangelical, neo-fundamentalist, and neo-modernist polemicists. As a matter of fact, he is sick and tired of neo-isms of all varieties, which make him think of Sixth Avenue (“The Avenue of the Americas”) rather than of well-defined theological systems.

He is also a liberal who holds the memory of J. Gresham Machen in high respect and with a certain amount of affection, for Machen (in his judgment) was the ablest of an able corps of Pauline scholars in those far-off days, a scholar who wrote what is still the best book on Paul to come from the pen of an American interpreter and who was a conservative without hyphenation and without apology.

Why, then, should such a liberal, according both to neo-fundamentalists and neo-modernists a fossilized theologian, an epigonous of nineteenth century theological romanticism, submit an article to CHRISTIANITY TODAY? For several reasons. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is well-printed, well-edited, and widely circulated. Probably as many neo-modernists read it with some regularity as they read any other undenominational periodical, though they may do so surreptitiously by some library shelf or on the table in the seminary readingroom. And what should inhibit a liberal theologian from submitting an article to an undenominational journal that is recognized as representative of conservative theological scholarship and conservative churchmanship?

The writer of this article likes conservatives. As a friend recently remarked to him, “They come clean!” He believes they are capable of seeing the best in him and in his theological and critical position, as he hopes he can see the best in them and in theirs. And so he entrusts a study of a problem that has bothered him to the pages of a journal that is ready to give a hearing to points of view with which it may not necessarily or entirely agree.

The writer is a minister of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and is glad and proud that his denomination has been a member from the beginning of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America, has given it support even in such petty crises as that stirred up by a recent statement in an Air Force Manual that had a brief but heady notoriety, and has contributed some able and intelligent individuals to its leadership. He would use what little influence he has in Presbytery, Synod, and General Assembly to strengthen and extend Presbyterian enthusiasm for, and assistance to, the National Council’s Division of Christian Education. Nevertheless, he believes that the Council has made a serious mistake in permitting the Division of Christian Education to promote the Revised Standard Version (the very word “Standard” anticipates and begs a question) as a new “Holy Version,” a new English textus receptus, and he is frankly amazed and disturbed that the only vocal criticism of any consequence of this policy has come heretofore from fundamentalist, neo-fundamentalist, evangelical, and neo-evangelical circles.

The writer agrees with many such “conservative” churchmen that this apparent policy of the National Council is reprehensible, but his reasons for so believing are not (in part, at least) those advanced by scholars and theologians on “the other side of the tracks.” The RSV editors were right in translating Isaiah 7:14 “Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son.…” That decision was purely a matter of applied honesty in the English rendering of a Hebrew substantive. The RSV editors were wrong in translating 1 Corinthians 13:1 “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong.…” The result is rhythmically disastrous; “tongues” remains as meaningless to the average reader in Luther Weigle’s Connecticut as it was to readers in William Tyndale’s Gloucestershire; and it is a real question whether the substitution of “love” for “charity” clarifies or befogs the apostle’s meaning. Which is easier for the minister, to explain to the people in the pew (if any explanation is necessary) that “charity” in the sixteenth century meant “Christian love,” or to explain to his Greekless parishioners that “love” in the RSV means Anders Nygren’s agape?

PROPAGANDIZING GREATNESS

The National Council’s Division of Christian Education boasts that the RSV is rapidly becoming the Bible of the church, and all its propaganda (so far as a Scripture version is concerned) is directed towards effecting that consummation so devoutly hoped. Not long ago its executive secretary marshalled the following statistics, which no doubt could be made even more formidable and impressive in A.D. 1960.

There are … sixteen major denominations which use the Revised Standard Version almost exclusively in their church school literature. These include the Methodist, Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian U.S.A., United Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist, and Congregational-Christian. These are among the larger denominations in the States [the recipient of this letter was employed at the time in Canada], and I am informed that the United Church of Canada uses the Revised Standard Version in most of its literature. I understand that the church membership of the denominations now using the RSV in the program of Christian education is something like 26,000,000, and that churches with an additional membership of 2,250,000 are now using the RSV in parallel columns with the KJV. It seems to me that this use will rapidly acquaint the rising generation with this translation.

The Revised Standard Version is already the English Bible in colleges and seminaries [sic], and most of the young ministers of my acquaintance use nothing else [sic]. In a small Ohio town recently, I found that in three out of the four churches, the RSV is used exclusively in the pulpit.

I have recently [October, 1955] seen a copy of the hymnbook just published by five Presbyterian churches. I discover that the unison and responsive readings are almost exclusively from the RSV. The two exceptions are Psalms 1 and 23, which appear in the King James Version.

The writer submits that the RSV has not, should not, and hopefully will not become the Bible of the English-speaking world, and that the National Council, in tolerating the promotion propaganda of its Division of Christian Education and of the publishers of the RSV without qualification or restraint, has displayed a carelessness with respect to our literary and religious heritage and an ignorance of facts of which every scholar is cognizant that should amaze and dismay all who believe in its mission.

SEVEN OBJECTIONS

Let me itemize seven objections to the claim that the RSV is (or ought to be) the English Bible of Protestant Christians. There are others as cogent, but they would only serve to strengthen a case that does not depend on them for its demonstration.

1. Past revisions of the Bible have required a very considerable stretch of time in which to displace their predecessors: witness the prevalence of the Old Latin versions in parts of the medieval church long after the appearance of the Vulgate; the influence of the Great Bible (see the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in our own time) after the appearance of the Bishops’ Bible; and the hold on the affections of the common folk in England of the Geneva Bible for a generation or more after the appearance of the King James Version.

2. The RSV is admittedly a provisional version. The RSV committee of the National Council’s Division of Christian Education has already made many changes in its text since the first edition of the New Testament in 1946 and the first edition of the whole Bible in 1952, and no doubt will continue to do so. The publication of a really definitive translation (or revision) awaits the preparation of a really adequate Greek text of the New Testament (to say nothing of the even more difficult task of reconstructing a really adequate Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament with the help of the embarrassing abundance of new material available since the first accidental discoveries in Cave I at Wadi Qumran in 1947). The editors of the RSV were compelled to improvise an eclectic Greek text, and the acceptance of a new “Westcott and Hort” awaits the emergence of a new Hort or Tischendorf, or the completion after some decades of the arduous labors of such unsung heroes of biblical scholarship as contribute to the sporadic publications of the American New Testament Textual Seminar.

3. With all their weaknesses, the RV and the ASV, at the time they were issued, drew upon the pooled skills, learning, and resources of English-speaking scholarship, both British and American. Only North American scholars, or scholars resident in North America, had anything to do with the RSV. The translation project underway in the United Kingdom, a project, by the way, that proposes to issue a new translation from the original tongues rather than a revision of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Cranmer and that is now on the verge of publishing its New Testament, is a project of Free Church as well as Anglican scholars and may (when it is completed) prevent the general endorsement of the RSV by the churches in Great Britain and in other countries of the British Commonwealth, including Canada.

4. While the RSV has been more successful than the ASV in retaining a measure of the literary beauty of the KJV (it might be more proper to say, “of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Cranmer”), it is possible to demonstrate that it has frequently sacrificed the cadence and charm of its great predecessor without achieving a compensating precision and clarity in the use of contemporary idiomatic English. And, with all the wealth of learning represented on the National Council’s RSV committee of editors, the committee had no Lancelot Andrewes!

5. Publicists of the RSV and some recent graduates of our seminaries occasionally underestimate the role that the KJV played in determining what would be literary “English” and in creating and inspiring English literature, a role even greater than that played by Luther’s Bibel in Germany. They seem occasionally to be largely unaware of its contribution to the familiar idiom of even American English. At times they even appear to overlook its hold upon the unreflective affections of many who worship in our churches, whether they worship in Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, or Lynchburg, Virginia. There are overtones in the very hearing of the KJV from the pulpit or the lectern that have greater value in creating an atmosphere of worship than is sometimes realized by directors of publishers’ publicity or young men who have just entered the Christian ministry.

6. Statistics of the circulation of the RSV can only be interpreted in proper perspective when viewed in the light of statistics concerning the past and present circulation of the KJV (to say nothing of Moffatt, Goodspeed, Phillips, et al) as published by the university presses in the United Kingdom, by the British and Foreign Bible Society, by the American Bible Society, and by many others. Despite its phenomenal sale, it is probable that the RSV still trails its predecessor in 1960 and that countless homes have a copy of the KJV that never heard of the RSV. And when one recalls that the KJV is not only a current best seller but has been in continuous publication since 1611, that innumerable families treasure copies of it as a “family” Bible, that some families even consider it a sin to burn or discard a “St. James” Bible, and that many laymen and some scholars still prefer it to any other version as a vehicle of the Word of God in public worship and private devotions, it is apparent that any count of KJV Bibles and Testaments still in existence and in use in our time, in a society that is not as biblically illiterate as some rhetoricians suggest when they are inebriated with the exuberance of their verbosity, could only be undertaken by some electronic robot still awaiting invention at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

7. The adoption of the RSV text by various church departments of Christian education will have a long-range influence on the reading practice of their constituencies, but to assume that, because churches with a membership of 30,000,000 or more have officially recognized their preference for the RSV over the KJV, the former is therefore the Bible, the version of Holy Scripture, for half the Protestant population of the United States and Canada, is to perpetrate an egregious non sequitur.

The writer has made generous use of the RSV in his work as a commentator and instructor and is grateful to its editors, publishers, translators, and revisers. But he believes that its place, along with other revisions and modern-speech translations, is in the study and on the lectern in a classroom, not on the pulpit or lectern in the sanctuary.

He recalls with interest and wholehearted approval a remark made by James Moffatt after he had listened to a young minister read the Scripture lesson from “Moffatt’s Translation” at the morning diet of worship: “If I had ever suspected that this could happen, I should never have published a line of ‘Moffatt’s Bible’!” He recalls this reaction of a great scholar and great translator to the misuse of his work, a great scholar who also served for long as executive secretary of the RSV New Testament Committee, and commends it to the consideration of responsible officers in the National Council of Churches in the United States of America and to those ministers of its constituent denominations who (in his judgment) are making a similar misuse of the RSV.

We Quote:

EMOTION IN RELIGION: “A crudely emotional approach to religion is preferable to religious formalism which is purely aesthetic and orderly and lacking in dynamic power. One of our serious troubles in the church today is that it has become legitimate to be emotional in anything but religion. The need is for something that will summon one’s whole enthusiasm. The moment the church becomes completely programized and depersonalized, it becomes a monument to God’s memory and not an instrument of His loving power.”

—DR. JOHN A. MACKAY, former President of Princeton Theological Seminary in an address before the 1960 General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

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