Removing the Divine Name Renders a Bible Worthless

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Article in The Christian Life, Volume 4, July 26, 1879

Original Title: IS THE REVISED VERSION TO BE FAITHFUL?

THE scholars and divines who have been asked by the Convocation of Canterbury to revise the Authorised Version of the Bible, do not communicate to the public the particulars of their work as it goes forward. They do not intend that it should be criticised in detail; we are to wait until it is all finished before we are allowed a sight of any part, unless, perhaps, they may publish the New Testament without waiting for the larger work, the Old Testament. But notwithstanding this aim at secrecy, knowledge about it does creep out; and this is not altogether encouraging as to what the work will be. Now it is well known that the Jews at an early time—certainly before the Christian era—had such a religious reverence for the name of Jehovah that they would not utter it when reading the Scriptures aloud. They used the word Adoni, Lord, in its place.

This religious feeling led the Greek Jews, when translating their Scriptures into Greek, to avoid the sacred word Jehovah; and thus in the Septuagint, for Jehovah they always wrote the Lord, and for Jehovah God, the Lord God, and for the Lord Jehovah, the Lord God. In this matter the Greek translators were followed by King James's translators, except in seven places, where in our version we meet with the word Jehovah. The modern Jews, in their new translations, show the same scruple against using the sacred name, and they write The Eternal. This is a great improvement on our Authorised "Version. It removes the ambiguity of using the ordinary word Lord as the proper name of the Almighty.

The writers of the Greek New Testament, writing in Greek, unfortunately introduced this same ambiguity into their work; and thus they call Jesus the Lord, and then, perhaps in the next sentence, quote the Hebrew Scriptures as saying, "the Lord thy God," "when in truth the Hebrew is, "Jehovah thy God." This sad ambiguity, which runs through the Greek New Testament, cannot now be removed by a translator. It must be left to the commentator to say when, in the English New Testament, "the Lord " means Jesus, and when it means Jehovah. This ambiguity has done much to make ignorant readers of the Bible think Jesus was God, because they find Jesus and God are both styled "The Lord." But though this cannot be corrected in a revised translation of the New Testament, it of course should be corrected in the Old Testament. There we should keep the word Jehovah as a proper name; and this would often enable the unlearned reader to recognise in the New Testament that "the Lord," when quoted from the Old, meant not Jesus but Jehovah. In short, a correct translation of the Old Testament would do much to throw light on the Unitarian controversy, not for scholars, but for the unlearned. All scholars know perfectly well that this mistranslation in the Old Testament does quite as much to support the doctrine of the Trinity among the ignorant as the verse of the three heavenly witnesses has done in the New Testament.

Now if, as report tells us, the revised version of the Old Testament is to say "the Lord God," when the Hebrew has Jehovah God, this will be the wilfully retaining a mistranslation. It will be giving a support to orthodoxy which it is not entitled to. It would be such a departure from impartial accuracy that we will not believe twenty-four gentlemen can be guilty of it until we see it. The forthcoming version is, we understand, to have a margin, with a second rendering of some words; and then, perhaps, we shall read in the text "the Lord God," and in the margin, "Jehovah God. But this will be no apology for not putting the correct translation into the text. If the cheaper copies of the Bible shall be printed without the margin, as is probable, then the million will be left in their ignorance to continue to think that the Lord Jesus and the Lord God are the same, But let us hope better things of our translators. The report that they are going to retain the words "the Lord," when the Hebrew has "Jehovah," may be a slander. Such an obvious departure from accuracy would throw a distrust upon the whole work, and go far to render it worthless.

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