Now we enter Africa. Though a curse was of old pronounced upon those who went down into Egypt for help, it cannot be that the malediction was intended for those who go down into Egypt for help in writing a life of Christ. So I went. Some of our Lord's most important years were spent in Africa. What a morning was the 25th of November, 18S9, for new and thrilling experiences, for then I first saw Egypt. I landed at Alexandria amid a Babel of voices; the boatmen clamoring for our luggage; the Pasha, with his five wives, descending the ladder on the side of the steamer; custom-house officers on the alert; friends rushing aboard to greet friends; Europeans, Asiatics and Africans commingling. After a few hours' wandering about, and looking at Pompey's Pillar which has stood as the sentinel of twenty-six centuries, and through the gardens of the Khedive, and through streets filled with people of strange visage and costume, we sleep an hour to regain equilibrium before taking the train for Cairo.
Now the train is rolling on through regions watered by canals and ditches that make the Nile the mightiest of aquatic blessings, through a country that otherwise would not yield food for one hungry man in all the land. We find here by irrigation the luxuriance of an American farm just after a spring shower. These Egyptian lands without a drop of rain direct from the heavens, have been drinking until they can drink no more. Thank God for water, canals of it, rivers of it, lakes of it, oceans of it, all the cups of the earth, and all the bottles of the sky at times overflowing! We meet processions of men and beasts on the way home from the day's work. Camels, dromedaries, mules and cattle discharged of their burdens. But alas! for the homes to which the poor inhabitants are going. For the most part, hovels of mud. But there is something in the scene that thoroughly enlists us. It is a novelty of wretchedness, a scene of picturesque rags. For thousands of years this land has been under a very damnation of taxes. Nothing but Christian civilization will ever roll back the influences which are "spoiling the Egyptians." There are gardens and palaces, but they belong to the rulers. This is the land in which Joseph and Mary and Christ were fugitives.
Now we are on the Mediterranean Sea. This morning we sailed by Crete, the island spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles; where Paul "desired to winter," and near which they met the euroclydon, by which they "were driven up and down in Adria," until shipwrecked. "Ye should not have loosed from Crete, and have gained this harm and loss." The engineer of our boat told me that. cyclones now arc sometimes met in the same quarter. He says: "The winds have a terrible sweep along that coast of Crete." We are having a smooth sea, but there is a rocking and a narrowness of limits on shipboard which make me long for shore. There are Mohammedans on board. To-day at noon, regardless of spectators, they went through their devotions, first washing face' and hands and feet, then reciting their prayers, kneeling and putting their foreheads to the rug which they had first spread beneath them. Their behavior is a rebuke to Christians who, under such circumstances, would neglect or postpone their devotions. Whatever else the Mohammedan neglects, he does not neglect his genuflexions.
Others might write a Life of Christ without seeing the Holy Land, but I could not. So in October, 1889, I embarked for that sacred country, accompanied by my wife, daughter and my friends Mr. and Mrs. Louis Klopsch, determined to see with my own eyes, and press with my own feet many of the memorable places connected with the life of the patriarchs and the ministrations of our Lord.
We were told that as we proposed crossing the Atlantic at that season we should have a very rough passage and that as we were to cross the Mediterranean in winter we should suffer from appalling marine treatment, and that we would freeze in the Holy Land. Just the opposite has been our experience. We had crossed the Atlantic eight times before, but this was the smoothest of all our voyages - sunshine from New York to Liverpool, sunshine from Liverpool to Rome, sunshine from Rome to Athens, sunshine from Athens to Egypt.
In a small boat, pitching till it threatened to capsize us, we come ashore at Patras, Greece, and take rail-train for Corinth and Athens, the skies blue as the bluest, and the sea a deep green, save where it is white-crested. We enter now the realm of the classics. What an opportunity, if at the close of college course and before entering a profession every young man could take a journey to see the places vividly associated with the birth, the life and the writings of the ancient poets, essayists and orators. May some philanthropist with large means see the opportunity and embrace it for hundreds and thousands of young students!
But now we rush along on a rail-train in regions where Paul went afoot. What a contrast between the fatigues and slowness of ancient travel and the comforts and velocities of the modern journey; the difference between weary limbs and ptarmigan's pinion. But why tarry at all on my way to Palestine amid these Pauline scenes? I want gradually to come upon the Christly places. Beside that, Paul was only a sublime echo of Christ. Nothing but the divine occurrences of Palestine could make the Apostle's life possible. There would have been no epistle to the Corinthians if there had been no sermon on the Mount. Mars' Hill was blood relation to Calvary. The spear that pierced the sacred side had answering flash in the beheading sword on the road to Ostia. The foot that died on the hill hack of Jerusalem was followed by the bleeding foot of the Pauline pilgrimage through this Grecian peninsula.
The scenery through which we are now riding is for grandeur absolutely appalling. No sooner does the Mediterranean subside at the beach, than the knoll-- become hills, and the hills mountains, and the mountains a volcanic bombardment of the heavens. Surely the stage on which martyrdoms were enacted was grand enough for the mighty tragedies! We come to Corinth. What a solemn place it is to me! All the ancient city gone, but the Acro-Corinthus, tin.- fortress two thousand feet high, still standing. It not only looks down upon a vast realm of scenery but looks down upon the ages. Paul's eyes were lifted toward that proud eminence as he came from the mobocracy of Athens. The fortress is a great heap of black basalt. O thou doomed and dead and buried Corinth! Thy splendor was overpowered by thy dissoluteness. Yet all is quiet now. and, but for the clouds built like another Acro-Corinthus above the fortress, it is a rather peaceful scene, birds flying, sheep pasturing, peasant women sewing. It was the same landscape on which Paul looked on his gradual progress to martyrdom for Christ's sake.
One o'clock a. m., at Athens. - Cannot sleep; and I might as well be writing. Who could sleep amid such circumstances? Yesterday I saw the Acropolis, and preached on Mars' Hill, and after dark went out and wandered among the fifteen immense pillars which are the survivors of the one hundred and twenty that surrounded the temple of Jupiter Olympus. From the Acropolis I saw the same scene where the great sea-fight of Salamis occurred, saw the Pentelicon mines, the birthplace of temples; saw nearly to the battlefield of Marathon, saw the Parthenon, saw the two miles of circle which swept around a greater congregation of temples and architectural wonders and sculptured exquisiteness than were ever crowded into the same space. Saw twenty centuries of columns, columns standing, columns fallen, columns beginning to fall, the ages piled up in Pentelicon marble, everything old, terrifically old, overwhelmingly old. It looks like a wrecked eternity. Have read about the Acropolis all my life and have seen pictures of it, but find it a surprise unspeakable. Doxologies in stone. The eloquence and poetry and art of two millenniums frozen into marble. All honor to the memory of Ibituos and Killikrates, the architects who planned it, and Phidias who chiseled it, and Pericles, under whose patronage it was lifted.
But this secular classic of the Acropolis did not move me like the Gospel of Mars' Hill. What a bold man was Paul to stand there on those tumbled rocks and say what he did! I suppose he could be heard across to the Acropolis, which was covered with temples to heathen gods and goddesses. An Englishman standing there said he heard distinctly what I said while I was preaching on Mars' Hill.
As Paul's voice rang out over the valley, between Mars' Hill and the Acropolis, he swung his hand toward that pile of heathen divinities and announced his belief in only one divinity, saying: "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands." And then looking up at the glittering idols on the higher hill he continues: "We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device; and the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent." No wonder that meeting broke up in a riot, and that Paul had to clear out and go to Corinth,from which we came day before yesterday. It was not yesterday afternoon so much that the wind fluttered the leaves of my Bible as I was speaking about that address of Paul on Mars' Hill, as it was emotion that shook the book when that Apostolic scene rose before my imagination. I obtained a block of stone from Mars' Hill to be sent to Brooklyn for the pulpit table in our new church, now building. But has this Paul nothing to do with the blessed One whose life I am trying to write? Yes. Paul was Jesus Christ's man. Mars' Hill shall be to us only a stepping-stone to Golgotha.
We were presented by Mr. Tricoupi, Prime Minister of Greece and the chief statesman of that kingdom, to the Queen of Greece, who gave us a most cordial grasp of the hand and welcomed us to Greece. The Queen is a very beautiful and gracious woman, and we talked together as though we were old friends. We met also the ex-Empress of Germany, Fredericka. I was never so favorably impressed with any distinguished woman as with her. She had on not a single jewel, was in plain black, dignified, but not coldly so, with a countenance that indicated good sense and kindness, but it was a somewhat tearful face. This may have been partly due to the fact that she was leaving her newly-married daughter in Athens. But I think the sadness of the face was consequent upon the multitude of troubles through which she had passed, the long and terrible sickness and death of Frederick, and many other griefs, domestic and political. ( 1897)
Before beginning, it is always advisable to test ones art supplies, whatever those may be. I also removed a blank page from an older Bible to conduct my simple research with, because I didn't want to use up any of the pages from my new Bible for the process.
Make sure that the page you are practicing on is similar to the pages found inside your Note Takers Bible. Modern Bible papers are very thin and are very particular in their substance. If you can find a Bible to use for the purpose of practice, share it with companions so that you don't end up destroying more books than you have to. I keep a Bible that is falling apart for this purpose alone so that my students don't need to abuse any of their own volumes in order to do their experiments.
Above you can see that I chose to test the pen and pencil types that I have in my own personal collections. If you are illuminating or illustrating texts in your Bible with paints: watercolor, acrylic etc... You should conduct a similar test for those supplies to see what the after effects will be.
Above I have shown both the front and back pages on the left after using each pen or pencil type. This experiment helps me to see what the material will look like and how much "bleed through" the ink pens and pencils will leave on the flip side of the page. On the right, I have tested the sample with a Krylon acrylic coating to see if this chemical treatment would alter my materials. Remember, you should apply acrylic coating and/or fixative sealers to both the front and backside of pages after you have completed drawings. If you only treat the front of the page, the ink or pencil could still bleed on the backside if the page should get wet. I was somewhat surprised that the permanent ink was the only material to bleed, ironic.
The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the
simple. The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart : the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever : the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold : sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them is Thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand his errors cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins ; let them not have dominion over me : then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great trans- gression. Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
PSALM 19. 7-14.
The story of the English Bible has often been written, and well written; with sympathy and insight, that is, as well as with knowledge . In what follows here it is told from the standpoint of the Tercentenary of the Authorized Version, which has now pursued its blessed and fruitful career for three hundred years. What went before it came, is dealt with only in so far as that is necessary to trace back to its sources this river of God which is full of water, and which has been bringing beauty and fertility wherever it has flowed. What has happened since it came, is dealt with only in so far as that is necessary in order to see how much has grown out of this wonderful version, which is the English Bible rather than an English version, as it has pursued its unique course to the glory of God and the good of men. For its natural strength is not abated; nor has its fascination grown less as the years have gone by. Inviting as the theme is, nothing has been said regarding the ancient versions and manuscripts which lie behind our English translation; and which, in an altogether adequate manner, fill up the gap between the Bible as we have it now and the original autographs which have long since disappeared. There is no translated classic which has such a wealth of manuscript authority behind it as the Bible ; and those who speak as if the existence of various readings, and the like, left us in any real doubt as to what the message of Scripture is in any detail, to say nothing of its message in its outstanding doctrines, must be strangely ignorant of the facts of the case, or weirdly biassed against the Evangel. Even apart from the manuscripts and versions which are so abundant and helpful, the early Christian Fathers made such liberal use of the Scriptures in their writings, that if everything else were lost which comes to us from other sources, the greater part of the Bible could be recovered from their works. In particular, the whole of the New Testament, except a few verses, is quoted by them in one passage or another .
The English-speaking peoples everywhere owe so much to the English Bible and especially to that version of it which for well-nigh three centuries was the only version read that it would be both unseemly and ungrateful were no adequate notice taken of the Tercentenary of its appearance in the land, as a great gift of God to the nation. All through these three hundred years it has been spreading light and life and liberty ; and there must be multitudes who are eager to acknowledge their vast indebtedness to it. It has comforted the sorrowing and cheered the downcast. It has guided the perplexed and strengthened those who were ready to perish. It has interpreted the deepest emotions of the believer and increased his gladness. It has led the sinful and erring back to God. And still there are inexhaustible depths of comfort and inspiration and growth, for those who explore the riches of its treasury.
In the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, the river from the Temple, which grew without tributaries, flowed eastward to the Desert and the Dead Sea; and by the same law of spiritual gravitation which prevails in the realm of the consecrated life, this other river of living water from the throne of God and of the Lamb has always flowed down to the wilderness, and has enriched the lives of the needy and poor. Its work, too, has been to make all the land as if it were beside an Engedi; to render the repulsive attractive and the sordid fair ; to turn the barren places into the garden of the Lord ; and to make the Dead Sea teem with life, even as the Great Sea. ' Everything shall live whither the river 'cometh.'
It is well, therefore, that those whom this river long since too deep except for those who can swim has so greatly blessed, should walk beside its banks that they may see how marvelously God has led His people, and what great things He has done for them. If our celebration of the Tercentenary is to be worthy of such an occasion, there must not only be emotion, but research ; and the fuller the knowledge is of what God has wrought, the more profound will the gratitude be. If we are to possess the whole land, and give thanks with intelligence, it is both natural and obvious that we should deal, first, with the sources of the river as they are to be found in previous English versions, whether partial or complete ; that we should then consider with greater detail how the river itself arose; and, finally, that we should look at it as it has flowed down through the ages ever since, in splendor and majesty. To that threefold division there may well be added, as supplement, some reference to the Revised Version of our own time, which will at least do epoch-making service in hearty co-operation with the Authorized Version, how- ever unlikely it seems that it will ever displace it in popular esteem or popular use.
More than any of our predecessors we can say that others have labored, and we have entered into their "labors" ; and we shall best show our gratitude to the Authorized Version, and our loyalty for all it has achieved, by entering into the whole of the vast inheritance it has brought us . No true friend of the Authorized Version ever claimed finality for it, any more than finality can be claimed for the Revised Version, or any other. That the Authorized Version may continue to be the English Bible to the end of time, and must always be an object of wonder and delight, can in no way interfere with the Christian duty and privilege of welcoming light whenever it breaks forth, or in whatever way it may come; since all light is of God, and belongs to those who are His heirs. It is the strong and confident who are truly tolerant and open-eyed, and hospitable to the ever-deepening revelation.
Many saints of God have contributed to the noble inheritance in which we now rejoice; many whose names have perished although their work endures, and the list is still unfinished. To the roll-call of fame on which such names appear as those of Caedmon and Bede; Alfred and Rolle; Wycliffe and Purvey; Tyndale and Coverdale; Cromwell and Cranmer; Rogers and Whittingham; Reynolds and Andrewes; Saville and Harding: there fall to be added in our own generation such names as those of Alford and Westcott; Hort and Scrivener; Davidson and Perowne; and other scholars who have had open eyes on all study and research, and hospitable hearts for all truth, and have kept Biblical learning in our land abreast of all the discoveries and progress of modern times. Those who deem it necessary to depreciate the Authorized Version in the interests of the Revised are shortsighted and circumscribed; while those who think that loyalty to the Authorized Version demands hostility to the Revised are failing in their loyalty to Him who is ever causing new light to break forth for those who have the eyes to see it and the hearts to appreciate it.
Perhaps the best form which the popular use of either of the versions can now assume, is that the two should be used side by side, at least for private study . This can now be literally done, either with the two in parallel columns as they can be had in convenient forms, or in interlinear editions such as are now also in use. To compare the two versions, to trace the changes which have been made in the later version, and to understand why they were made, is to know the Scriptures themselves after a new fashion; and manifestly the purpose of every translation is to enable those who read it to do this, and thus to bring 'them face to face with the real meaning of what God the Self-revealer has spoken to men in His Word. This mode of comparing Scripture with Scripture often provides the most helpful of all textual commentaries, and brings the reader nearest to the truth.
Those alone have the true reverence for Scripture, or true faith in its message, who seek always and everywhere to hear what God has said, and to be obedient to the heavenly vision. "Its seed is in itself," as the Word itself has it in another connection ; and those who really trust in it to do its own Divine, saving, keeping work, will never yield to that worship of the external which reaches its climax in those who worship the letter, and make a fetish of the Book itself, apart from what it says. Nor will they ever think of it as if it acted mechanically, as a sort of charm. Marvelous as its fruits have been, alike in individual lives and among the nations, it never works by magic, but always on moral and spiritual lines . "The Spirit ' breathes upon the Word, and brings the truth to sight." Little as God needs our learning, He has even less need of our ignorance; and those alone are truly loyal, either to the old version or the new, who use every, means in their power to get at the very heart of the revelation of God in Christ, as it is contained for just in His Holy Word.
It is in the Word itself, therefore, and not in any mistaken views of it, no matter how strenuously these may be advocated, or how conscientiously they may be believed, that our trust is to be placed ; and that version of the Scriptures which most fully sets forth God's actual manifestation of Himself and His purpose of grace among men, in terms which the ordinary man can understand, is the version which will bear most fruit, and which therefore ought to be most heartily welcomed and most widely circulated. Whatever is to be the future relation between the Authorized Version and the Revised Version, and whether as seems most probable they are to flourish side by side, history has abundantly vindicated the claim of the former to be a true and adequate representation of the Word of God as set forth in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is a representation, indeed, which has far more of the characteristics of an original work than of a translation from another language. What has been claimed with justice for Luther's German Bible may be equally claimed for the Authorized Version among ourselves that it is rather a re -writing than a mere translation ; a transfusing of the original into a new language rather than a mere version of the letter ; so deep is the insight, so true the sympathy, so perfect the command of clear popular language. Its ascendency can only be ascribed to its intrinsic excellence. It is the English Bible. Its authority arises from its Divine right to rule; and to deny this is to be guilty of lese majeste.
Even those who emphasize most the inadequacy of the text on which the Authorized Version is based, and the greatness of the progress in comparative philology and the study of the original languages which has been made since the days of King James, hasten to acknowledge, and that in no grudging fashion, that nothing could have more truly or more impressively set forth not only the meaning but the spirit of Scripture, than it did. Nor are those awanting among students and scholars who go further, and say that such was the spiritual sympathy of the translators of three centuries ago, and such their scholarly insight into the fullness of the Word, that they have wonderfully anticipated in their renderings the truer text to which they had no access. "The Revised New Testament is substantially the same as that of Wycliffe and Tyndale, though they lacked the MSS. we have today," says one who is deeply impressed with the superiority of the later text and of its new rendering. The Revisers themselves say, and say it with enthusiasm, that the more they worked with the Authorized Version, the greater did their admiration of it become . "We have had to study this great version carefully and minutely, line by line," they say in their Preface; "and the longer we have been engaged upon it, the more we have learned to admire its simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy turns of expression, its general accuracy, and, we must not fail to add, the music of its cadences, and the felicities of its rhythm."
A competent scholar and critic has gone even further than to suggest a happy anticipation of the true text and the true rendering on the part of the translators in 1611. He maintains that "the Greek of the New Testament may never be understood as classical Greek is understood;" and that the Revisers have in reality distorted passages formerly correctly rendered "by translating in accordance with Attic idiom phrases that convey in later Greek a wholly different sense, the sense which the earlier translators in happy ignorance had recognized that the context demanded." Be this as it may, nothing that is said about versions or translations or texts ought ever to be allowed to make us feel that we are removed even by one step from the very mind of God as He has revealed it to us in His Holy Word.
The Bible not only occupies a unique place in the literature and life of the human race, and has some inherent power of its own which no other book has ; it bears evidence of having been given in order that it might be rendered into other tongues. It loses less than any other book by being translated ; and manifold testimony has been borne to the fact that the Authorized Version in particular resembles a book in its original language rather than a translation . "The tongue of the Hebrew, the idioms of Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation." Although it is Oriental in its origin, the Bible is at home in the West as truly as in the East. Other sacred books, like trees, have their zones of vegetation beyond which they cannot grow ; but where ever man can live, the Bible can flourish as native to the soil. And nowhere has this been made more manifest than during these bygone three centuries in our own land. Muir.
