CHANGES IN WORDS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 16, 1880

CHANGES IN WORDS.

Words are like families—they often change their place in society. A family that is great and honorable now, may be poor and almost forgotten twenty years to come, and that is poor and unknown now, may be great then; so, words that were formerly popular and proper are now obsolete, that is, not used, and words which are now regarded as slang, will, after a few years, be allowed in pure conversation and writing. The Bible was originally written in Hebrew and Greek, and translated into English at different times and by different persons. The first translation into English was made by John Wickliffe, between 1360 and 1380, but was not printed, as printing with wooden types was not discovered until about 1430, and metal types were not used until about 1445, and the first Bible was published in 1450, but it was not an English Bible. Wm. Caxton, the first English printer, set up his press in Westminster Abbey, and began business in 1474, nearly a hundred years after Wickliffe had finished his translation. Another reason why it was not printed, when printing was popular, was that he was a great reformer, and cruelly persecuted by his enemies, who, about 1384, secured an order from the king of England to expel him from the University of Oxford, and that everywhere his writings should be seized and destroyed, and even after his death his bones were dug up and burned. A few of his manuscripts, however, escaped destruction, and are to be found in the public libraries of England. The New Testament was printed from this manuscript many years after, but never got into general circulation. In this translation, Psalms 121:4, reads in this way: “Lo he not nappe; neither slepe that kepeth Israel.” The sense of this is just the same as that given in the same passage in our Bible, but the spelling and words are very different, while “nappe” has in our day been abbreviated to nap, and is seldom, if ever, used in dignified composition. Suppose you turn to your Bible and see how it reads there. Another remarkable rendering in that Bible is found in Acts 14:14, which reads: “Paul and Silas rent their clothes and skipped out among the people.” This is the very same in meaning as that found in our Bibles, but how different in expression. In John 12:26, we read: “If any man serve me, my Father shall worship him.” This sounds like blasphemy, but simply because the word worship has changed its meaning so much since that time. Another great reformer, named Wm. Tindal, sometimes called Tyndale, also made a translation of the Bible, and published the New Testament in 1526, but the edition was bought up by Sir Thomas More and Bishop Tonstall to keep the people from reading it; but another edition was published in 1530, which was collected and burned to keep it from the hands of the people. In

1532 Tindal and his associates printed the whole Bible, but in preparing a second edition he was arrested and burned at the stake. One of Tindal's associates was named Miles Coverdale, who, after Tindal's death, published a complete translation of the Bible in 1535. In Tindal's New Testament we read, in Heb. 12:22, “a sight of angels,” which would be thought very low language, indeed—we think our Bible reads better. In Coverdale's Bible we read, in Cant. 2:8, “My beloved cometh hopping upon the mountains,” and in Judges 4:15 we read, “So the Lord trounced Sisera and all his host.” Now, we know that boys hop, and sometimes are trounced, but it sounds strange when these words are applied to the actions of the Lord.

In 1604 King James, of England, appointed fifty-four learned men to make a new translation of the Bible, but they did not begin their work until 1607, and then only forty-seven engaged in it; they finished the Bible which we now have, in 1611. It is a grand piece of literary work, and in the language of one of the most learned and respected ministers that ever lived in the Methodist Protestant Church, It is the most perfect English in the world.

Remember, the Bible never changes in meaning; the language is constantly changing, as you see how some words that were once good English, and thought fit to be used in translating the Holy Bible, are now not allowed in good conversation in the parlor.—Methodist Protestant.