CORRESPONDENCE

BETWEEN THE

American Bible Union

AND

REV. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D. D.

In behalf of the Amity Street Baptist Church.

AMERICAN BIBLE UNION, New-York, Feb. 6, 1852.

To the Amity-street Baptist Church, New-York city:

DEAR BRETHREN :-The American Bible Union applies to you for a collection in aid of the object of our organization, to procure and circulate the most faithful ver sions of the Sacred Scriptures in all the languages throughout the world.

Having matured our measures for a revision of the English New Testament, and completed several contracts with scholars, and authorized the completion of others involving an expenditure of a large amount of money, we feel the pressing need of funds for this object, and also for the Spanish and French Scriptures. On behalf of the Union, yours, in the love of the truth, WILLIAM H. WYCKOFF, Corresponding Secretary,

per JAMES FARQUHARSON, Agent.

The Amity-Street Baptist church of the city of New York to the American Eible Union

MEN AND BRETHREN:-The letter written to us by your Secretary, and in your name, asking of us a collection in aid of your organization, and also the printed circular accompanying that letter, have been received and read throughout. In frankness, let us present the views which forbid our compliance with your wishes.

1. Our admirable Received Version has, we think, on your platforms, aud in many of your publications, been most unjustly disparaged. The only sound and trustworthy criticism to be employed in amending its minor defects must begin with recognizing its rare and indisputable merits. Now, for its general fidelity, beanty, and excellency, the existing popular version has received the highest praises from some of the most eminent scholars. Walton, and Castell, and Cudworth, when met for a proposed revision of it, and whilst allowing the existence of some defects, yet declared that it "was agreed to be the best of any translation in the world." The greater Selden, held similar views as to its singular worth. Among those now most fluent in its depreciation, is it common to find one having even the tithe of the bibli cal attainments of either of these scholars? It may be imperfect, but can you war rant any translation that may be proffered to replace it, as being less imperfect? Have not, notoriously, a large number of changes suggested in its renderings, and which to the authors of the changes, seemed unquestionable emendations, proved, in the sounder judgment of the churches generally, but misjudged alterations for the worse? Can any human version so far approach the immaculate and perfect, as to command for all its renderings the undivided and cordial assent of any one competent scholar besides, it may be, its own partial anthor! Some ill-considered principles have been propounded, as to the duty of every man to correct, at all hazards, by an edi tion and version of his own, whatever he may beli ve to be errors. But such positions, if fully carried out into practice, would make it the inevitable duty of every man who read Greek to issue his own English New Testament; would give to our

3

churches as many varying versions as they may have classical scholars; and thus would accept as true he taunt of Romanism, that Protestantism, when fully obeyed, makes it every mau's duty to prepare and issue his own separate Bible. do not so read the Bible's own lessons, and the examples of the apostles.

We

At

2. When the apostles went everywhere, whilst, from time to time, they were writing the New Testament, they everywhere found a Greek uninspired version of the Old Testament. Greek was then the literary language of the world-the tongue of Fashion, Commerce, aud Philosophy-and this Septuagint version was in the hands of educated Hebrews throughout the Roman dominious. It has faults far more grave and more numerous than can be alleged against our English version. Paul might have turned aside from his missionary tasks to prepare, not only a better, but what none else than an inspired apostle could have given, an infal lible and perfect Greek version of the Old Testament. But how does he act? times, he quotes in Greek the Old Testament, with variations from and corrections of the Septuagint translation. At others he cites, without comment or correction, the rendering of that Septuagint, when it was not a close and exact version of the orig inal Hebrew. Was he the servant of a base expediency, in failing to devote himself to the production of a correct translation? So, as it seems to us, some of the principles by you presented, would require us to call that faithful apostle. Luther, on the contrary, saw in this disposition of the New Testament writer to content himself with the general sense of a rendering of the Old Testament, which he might have made more close in its phrases, an express design of inspiration thus to anticipate and reprove the cavils that would insist so much on one set form of words.

3. Your remarks apparently proceed on the assumption that your brethren who decline sharing in your revision are guided by expediency, whilst your aim, on the contrary, is full, fearless obedience to the truth. In this you misapprehend the actual position of these brethren. When Paul determined to labor in Foreign, rather than in Home Missions, not building on another man's foundation, nor preaching Christ where he was already named, did he really do homage to a low expediency? You allow with us that his choice was just. Now, was this, his preference of the most needy field as demanding the first labors, very uulike our own resolution, that the supply of the unevangelized heathen with the Cherokee, Burman, Karen, aud Chinese Bible, is an object of higher and earlier obligation; whilst we postpone to the fitting time the bettering of an English Bible, already by your own acknowledgment "GOOD?' Are we justified in forsaking the versions for Rangoon and Hong Kong, and in breaking down the organization that does most to supply these versions, in order to concentrate our strength on the one or more projects, at various times submitted to us, for a new version of the English Bible? But assuming that your projects seek to serve the truth, are you unanimous and assured that the alleged amendments are really such? To some of us many of these suggested changes appear palpably erroneous. Are we to be denounced as enemies of the truth in withstanding their rash endorsement and adoption by the churches? The advocate of a groundless and mistaken change in really assailing the truth, so far as he forces a poorer rendering into the room of a better; and the opponent of such deterioration of the divine oracles is, in fact, the defender of truth.

4. The alteration most sought by some esteemed brethren among you, was in the word describing the first ordinance of the Christian church. We are not convinced that expediency or truth requires the change. Supposing that, as the effect of such new rendering, when once it became current, it should come to be said that the submerging of a convert in water, and his emerging, are not truly and fully designated by the word BAPTISM-that the last word has been so distorted and marred by superstitious usage of it, that it is no longer a fitting appellation for our own primitive form of the ordinance; should we not have sacrificed the truth in the vain hope of advancing it? We believe that neither expediency nor truth demands the change of term; but that both unite in requiring the retention of the present word. 5. And as to other changes, going beyond this one term, can we overlook the warning testimony of Carson, as to much over which modern criticism vaunts as being emendation? 66 Many real improvements [he has said] of our trauslation in particu lar passages have undoubtedly been made, but BY FAR A GREATER NUMBER of pretended improvements are gross corruptions. . . Besides, it is in small matters they amend; in matters of the HIGHEST IMPORTANCE they pervert and corrupt." So wrote Carson to the author of a celebrated article in the Edinburgh Review. Nominal emendations may be really, and have often been, violent wrestings of God's truth.

You would avoid the admission of such amongst your changes. But must we not be earnest in demanding some greater safeguard than the allowed homesty of your inteutious? Mere piety without learning, or mere learning without piety, would equally endanger us, aud to both these need to be added, judgment, taste, and mastery of our owu rich tongue. Do we recognize the presence of these in some of the rival versions to which you appeal as if with admiration? We find in the very pamphlet published in connection with the proceedings at your organization in 1850, favorable mention made (p. 27) of "the most godly and learned men," who, it is said, have been dissatisfied with the received version, and then, amongst others, are recounted the names of "Scarlett, Wakefield, and Dickinson." Now, Dickinson's work certainly incurred general reprobation, as being in every way inferior to the received version, and as exposing, by its absurdities of style, the Scriptures themselves to contempt. Scarlett's work was written in the interest of Universalism, to make it out that future punishment was not everlasting, but "Eonian," as he phrases it. Vidler was his pastor, and aided Scarlett in the work. Of Vidler's incompetency and untrustworthiness, as a scholar and theologian, his controversy with Andrew Fuller affords abundant proof. Abounding in Greek and Hebrew criticism, his knowledge of the tongues was wondrously and intolerably superficial. Wakefield was a Unitarian, the subject of remark in another of Fuller's works, and his renderings of the New Testament eyed and favored that system constantly and relentlessly. Must we disinter the slain whom Fuller was thought to have routed and buried, to re-animate them as guides and patrons along our critical way? Taken in the mass, these three works at least would serve, in our view, to point a warning against the enterprise, rather than to furnish an argument for it. And of the Eng lishman, Bellamy, (not to be confounded with his American namesake, the disciple and friend of Edwards,) whose labors on the Old Testament we have seen pleaded by some as a precedent and warrant for the present undertaking, a recent English work of much authority, Bagster's "Bible in Every Land," has spoken, pronouncing Bellamy's work to be "too extravagant” to “ deserve mention." Now, if these be among the names which the laborers of your Society see fit to quote aud honor, to what inferences are we not shut up, as it respects the soundness of judgment, and purity of doctrine, and perfection of language to be expected from a project heralded by such outriders and forerunners.

6. But you say that so numerous are the errors of our present version, that "their attempted correction constitutes a considerable share of the duty of an intelligent minister in his weekly ministratious.” We cannot judge as to the duties of any ministry, of special intelligence; but, as to ordinary ministers and their charges, neither pastor nor people have, amongst us, regarded it as any "cousiderable share" of the pulpit work to correct evermore the pulpit Bible. We have been rather content to acquiesce in the opinion of Carson, no lenient or incompetent critic, that “no rule can be more general," or, in other words, admit fewer exceptious, than does the maxim that he who is perpetually amending the common version is but a novice in criticism.

7. But you allege that "the strongest and most effective arguments of infidelity and scepticisin among the common people, are founded upon mistrauslations of the words of inspiration." Here, too, we must dissent. Some of us have looked much into the pleadings of infidelity, and the counterpleadings of those who have resisted and refuted it. Some few renderings might perhaps be more felicitous, to exclude here and there a sceptical cavil. But we believe that. beyond all peradventure, the chief quarrel of scepticism is against facts and doctrines that no just trauslation can put out of the Bible, and that no sound theologian or evangelical disciple would wish put out thence. And we must also add the expression of our solemu and mournful conviction that very much has been conceded to scepticism by rash emendations and unreliable renderings, that served only to confirm the incredulity they vainly sought to propitiate and sooth. Bellamy pleaded, for the strange translation which he began of the Old Testament, the necessity of thus counteracting infidelity, and Bahrdt, in Germany, made the like allegation for his most reprehensible and irreverent version of the New Testament. It is possible, by awkward concessions, excisions, and adjustments, to produce a result tending rather to make Christians sceptical than to convert sceptics into Christians.

As to the preliminary question, therefore, of the NEED of an amended version, and the bearings of expediency and truth on the present attempt, we are not in unison with you.

II. But allowing that it were-which allowance we cannot make-needed at this time, we differ as to the best MODE of securing just, scholarly, and orthodox results.

1. You address your appeal to us for aid, as we suppose, merely because we are a Baptist church. You send no similar letters to Presbyterian, Cougregatioualist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churches around us. Many of the arguments in your document and oral addresses are to our churches as a denomination. Your officers are mainly Baptists. So far, your enterprise is denominational.

2. Now, the history of our own and other evangelical churches, and the provideuce of God as shaping that history, have given to our received version more than a denominational character. It has a national reputation and authority. It has struck its roots through the British and American classics of two entire centuries. It came from a time when neither the Latitudinariauism nor Pelagianism of some later periods in the English Establishment had as yet currency and sway. The Episcopal Church of England was then evangelical, not to say Calvinistic in doctrine. The sending of delegates to the Presbyterian and Calvinistic Synod of Dort, done in that age, would not have been done in any later era of the English Church. At the time of the preparation of King James' version, the Presbyterian, the Congregational, and the Baptist, then feeble and obscure, like Levi paying tithes in Abraham, were lost from view under the broad shadow and preponderating power of the Establishmeut. But, as those other bodies became known and powerful, they emerged into influence, not to reject and impugn, but to accept, as a general rule, and to quote and extol the received version. For many generations, their grateful endorsement and acceptance and eulogies of it have made it a ground of common union, and a point of mutual appeal. Any amendments now to be made would, we think, be considerate and effective only as they should not be sectarian, using that term as Carson, a Baptist and a critic, used it, in the innocuous sense of denominational. You want, in reasoning with your neighbor who is of another Christian communion, a Bible not only that you will believe, but one that he can believe. To exercise the prophetic gifts of the Spirit profitably in the primitive Christian assemblies, the speaker having the Spirit must find hearers also. There could be no hearers, if all were at the same time speakers. Paul declared, therefore, that the speaking should be of one at a time, and that others should keep silence. Nor were the men, thus for a time kept silent, to say that the spirit of truth in them forbade a moment's pause. God was the God of order, and not of confusion. The spirit of the prophets was subject to the prophets; and was therefore to be exercised by them in an orderly and edifying manuer, And so, it seems to us, that the spirit of truth, in wise and pious critics and translators, will seek utterance in the form of a good version of the Scriptures, by such methods of utterance as will secure a hearing and a helping in other evangelical bodies; and not by such methods as would minister only discord and disorder, and profitless and endless janglings. God is not a God of confusion in versions more than in prophesyings.

3. A sectarian version of a work that has, by the common endorsement of all evangelical sects, become catholic and general, is little likely to obtain currency or confidence, even within our own denomination, much less beyond it. And by laying down, as your society is said by its friends and officers to have laid it down, that the rendering of the Greek word for baptism by another word is no longer held "an open question," but that in effect "immerse " must take the place of "baptize," does not your enterprise incur the very censure which your advocates cast upon King James for his instructious to translators? You limit the consciences and re strain the unfettered judgment of your revisors.

4. Again, in withholding from the Baptist churches, thus invoked for help, the statement of the particular Greek of the New Testament, which you announce yourselves to have selected as the basis of your critical labors, is the course pursued warranted by usage or right? The Greek texts of the several critical editors widely differ as to accuracy, fulness, and orthodoxy. Griesbach was said to have one hundred and fifty thousand various readings. Scholz, consulting nearly double the number of MSS,, could have little less probably than three hundred thousand. The intrinsic weight of these variations, as affecting the great doctrines of the Scripture, is not to be supposed to hear any proportion to their number. But if your advocates have spoken much of twenty thousand alleged errors in the English, are they entitled to make very summary and quiet disposal of three hundred thousand variances in the Greek text? And none of these several Greek texts can be considered to be

now as perfect as the further collations at this time in slow progress will yet make them. If you refuse to give, like Scholz, twelve years to travel and toil in the work, is it on the ground that truth does not deserve such exactions, or that expediency does not allow the delay and cost? Equal reserve-a gross darkness that may be felt-rests upon the exact plan to be pursued in renderings and revisions. If differ ent laborers are to translate, at several remote points, different books of the New Testament, who is to give to their independent and divergent labors harmony and final unison? If a central committee in our city oversee this last task, have we not a right to inquire their names and scholarship?

5. And in giving not the names even of the translators whom you employ, is it regard to truth or to expediency that dictates this remarkable and mysterious reserve? In the preparation of the received version, the names of the learned and orthodox men to be employed were published. The Jews, in their offerings to the tabernacle, knew as skilful workmen the Bezaleel and Aholiab who were to frame from their gifts the furniture of the sanctuary. When Solomon called from Tyre the highly endowed Hiram to build the temple, do we read that he introduced the architect to the tribes without a name, and wearing a mask? Why repair the goodly edifice of our Scriptures in so covert a manner? You inform us that contracts have been made with some scholars, and are about to be made with others, and you ask for funds in their aid and support. Should we not know the men whom we thus endorse and sustain? When Paul sent brethren to gather and bear the contributions of the churches, he presented them as men well known and trustworthy, "the messengers of the churches, and the glory of Christ." If funds in alms-giving need known and approved distributors, do not the funds asked for Scripture translation deserve also as much publicity and reliability, in the case of the men who are by these funds to be sustained in work for the churches? Have we not a right to know whether those who are to interpret for us God's Word dwell in the tents and speak the dialect of Ashdod, or whether they belong to the tribes and use the tongue of Zion? Surely Baptists have not been wont to ask this implicit credence in the anonymous and unknown, nor, when it has been asked, have they been prompt to render it.

6. But shall nothing be done to remove errors, it may be asked? We think that, in the unfinished collation of manuscripts; in the slow evolution of a yet more accurate text; in the currency which individual labors, in the translation of separate books of Scripture, gain in proportion to their intrinsic merits, there is an advance in the right direction far more safe and eventually more speedy, than aught gained by imperfect, and precipitate, and unsuccessful endeavors on the part of rival denominations.

III. But yet in great distrust must we hold the ALLIANCES which you have accepted in the work of revision. A religious body, most numerous at the West, the adherents of the Rev. Alexander Campbell, are associated with you. With that body, in its doctrines, ministry, and membership, our own churches have long held no fellowship. The movement began by denouncing all creeds as one chief cause of prevalent disunion. But the body called, from their founder, Campbellites, or the Disciples, have in various descriptions of their tenets, given what may be called virtually a creed, though disclaimed as binding the consciences of their members. We find in these statements much that is obscure, and vague, and painfully unsatisfactory as to great truths. On some minor points, as the weekly communion, and its being occasionally dispensed by a private member, they seem to lay stress. But the main peculiarity of the system we have not been able to distinguish from Baptismal Regeneration, which is, as we believe, one of the most baleful of religious delusions, wronging the Holy Spirit, corrupting the first germs of the Christian Church, and dislocating the entire gospel, by teaching men to expect in Sacraments that kingdom of God which begins within their own spirits. The new body, on its appearance made promises most high and large of restoring "THE ORIGINAL GOSPEL AND ORDER OF THINGS "that had for centuries been overwhelmed, and was proclaimed to be "the Reformation of the Nineteenth Century." In an article, evidently by a member and apparently by a leader in the Counexion, contributed to "Hayward's Book of Religions," and quoted in "Howe's Historical Collections of Virginia," it is said that they regard "TRINITARIANISM and Unias EXTREMES begotten by each other," and "cautiously avoid them

tarianism

as EQUIDISTANT from

the doctrine and facts

of the Christian institu

* Charleston, 1849, p. 195.