My one object has been to defeat the mischievous attempt which was made in 1881 to thrust upon this Church and Realm a Revision of the Sacred Text, which -- recommended though it be by eminent names -- I am thoroughly convinced, and am able to prove, is untrustworthy from beginning to end. Dedication, p. v.Mischievous. Thrust upon the Church and Realm. Recommended by eminent names. Untrustworthy from beginning to end.
The English (as well as the Greek) of the newly 'Revised Version' is hopelessly at fault. It is to me simply unintelligible how a company of Scholars can have spent ten years in elaborating such a very unsatisfactory production. Their uncouth phraseology and their jerky sentences, their pedantic obscurity and their unidiomatic English, contrast painfully with 'the happy turns of expression, the music of the cadences, the felicities of the rhythm' of our Authorized Version. The transition from one to the other, as the Bishop of Lincoln remarks, is like exchanging a well-built carriage for a vehicle without springs, in which you get jolted to death on a newly-mended and rarely-traversed road. But the 'Revised Version' is inaccurate as well; exhibits defective scholarship, I mean, in countless places. Dedication, p. vi.Not only the Greek but the English is terrible, jerky and jolting. But not only is the English bad but the scholarship is bad too, in countless places.
I do not understand how anyone could read such a description of the Revised Version -- written by a scholar who is both the contemporary of, and at least the scholarly equal of, its principal authors Westcott and Hort, who has gone to prodigious effort to demonstrate his claims by chapter and verse -- and just shrug him off. But this is what the apologists for Westcott and Hort, and the modern versions derived from their work, have done.
It is, however, the systematic depravation of the underlying Greek which does so grievously offend me: for this is nothing else but a poisoning of the River of Life at its sacred source. Our Revisers, (with the best and purest intentions, no doubt,) stand convicted of having deliberately rejected the words of Inspiration in every page, and of having substituted for them fabricated Readings which the Church has long since refused to acknowledge, or else has rejected with abhorrence; and which only survive at this time in a little handful of documents of the most depraved type. Dedication, p. vii.A poisoning of the River of Life at its sacred source. Do you simply dismiss such a statement as, well, sort of "extreme" perhaps? Surely it's not all THAT bad? Fabricated readings. Either long since unacknowledged or rejected with abhorrence by the Church.
Here he is claiming that the readings in the Greek texts favored by the revising committee were ALREADY KNOWN TO THE CHURCH, and rejected!
...The Revisers have in fact been the dupes of an ingenious Theorist, concerning whose extraordinary views you are invited to read what Dr. Scrivener has recently put forth Dedication, p. vii.[Here are a couple of the quotes of Scrivener Burgon is referring to, which he's quoted facing the first page of the Dedication]:
(2)Dr. Hort's System is entirely destitute of historical foundation.Burgon is not a KJVO! He is an ANGLICAN clergyman, preacher, theologian and textual critic of the 19th century, Dean of Chichester Cathedral at the time he wrote the Revision Revised. He does not argue for the perfection of the King James Bible or the Textus Receptus. He is entirely motivated to oppose what he sees to be a horrific mutilation of the word of God by irresponsible revisers. Twelve years before the Revision Revised, in which he shows the errors of these revisers in their finished product, he had written a lengthy disputation of the elimination of the last twelve verses of Mark from the currently favored Alexandrian Greek texts, yet the revising committee ignored his work and chose in favor of the Alexandrians. Their mentality continues to this day. Burgon is in unjustified disrepute while what he labored to show to be a Trojan Horse in the house of God has instead been welcomed and elevated in the minds of today's scholars, and in the church at large because of their acceptance of it. Although Westcott and Hort's THEORY has been rejected, the Greek texts they introduced have been incorporated in various degrees into the Critical Texts -- such as Nestle-Aland -- underlying most of today's Bible versions, and their translation itself has been retained just about wholly and has become the model for a wild proliferation of gratuitous changes in the English text of all the new versions.
(4)'"We cannot doubt" (says Dr. Hort) "that S. Luke xxiii. 34 comes from an extraneous source." {notes, p. 68.} -- Nor can we, on our part, doubt,' (rejoins Dr. Scrivener,) 'that the System which entails such consequences is hopelessly self-condemned.'
-- Scrivener's "Plain Introduction," &c {ed. 1883}: pp. 537, 604.
From the Preface: [He is lamenting the insufficiency of his efforts in this book, prodigious though they may look to me and others]:
...It requires to be demonstrated by induction from a large collection of particular instances, as well as by the complex exhibition of many converging lines of evidence, that the testimony of one small group of documents, or rather, of one particular manuscript, --(namely the Vatican Codex B, which, for some unexplained reason, it is just now the fashion to regard with superstitious deference,)-- is the reverse of trustworthy. Nothing in fact but a considerable Treatise will ever effectually break the yoke of that iron tyranny to which the excellent Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and his colleagues have recently bowed their necks; and are now for imposing on all English-speaking men.He goes on optimistic that even his insufficient efforts should prevail with "the good sense and fairness of the English mind" and that in any case the Revision's "days were already numbered," and ultimately
...delay would have been fatal. I saw plainly that unless a sharp blow was delivered immediately, the Citadel would be in the enemy's hands.Preface, pp. ix-x
the 'Revision' of 1881 must come to be universally regarded as -- what it most certainly is -- the most astonishing, as well as the most calamitous literary blunder of the Age. Preface p. xi.How I wish he had been right!
