AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH UPON THE NEW TESTAMENT. 173 



At length, the various theories have become discredited ; and the 

 confusion that has overtaken them was foreseen by Joseph Barber 

 Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham, who, in 1863 — fifty years ago exactly — 

 went so far as to say that " if we could only recover letters that 

 ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being 

 literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the under- 

 standing of the language of the New Testament generally.''* The 

 judgment thus expressed has in the interval of years been supported 

 by thousands of documents, written in common or unstudied 

 Greek, such as was used in ordinary conversation throughout the 

 Near East ; and these throw a flood of light upon the form and 

 terminology of the New Testament books. 



Hence, in one of its "bearings" the research of modern times 

 places the New Testament in a fresh and remarkable light. The 

 Gospel gives us not a dialect but a Book. The speech was common 

 even as the writers were of the common people ; but the Message 

 was extraordinary, and in certain respects so were the men who 

 delivered it. We have, indeed, to recognize that, to natural 

 intelligence on their part, there was added a calling of God which 

 qualified for a great work even with the use of the most simple 

 instrument. The might, however, was not in the dialect but in the 

 Revelation, of which it was the spoken medium. Thus, while 

 " decay's effacing fingers " have blotted out great works of antiquity, 

 the New Testament lives on. 



(2) In the second place, I would remark upon the commanding 

 importance of recent discoveries as they bear upon certain of the 

 great words of the New Testament. I limit myself to one class 

 and the principal words therein. I refer to those words of majesty 

 that are employed with reference to the Person of our Lord and the 

 words of grace that describe His work " for us men and for our 

 salvation." Are we surprised that the former — the words of 

 majesty — were quite familiar by reason of their application to the 

 mighty ones of earth 1 We should not be surprised. We under- 

 stand the Gospel itself in the measure that we understand, and 

 rightly appreciate, the words in which it comes to us. 



^ Notes by the Eev. J. Pulliblank of lectures by the Bishop. Quoted 

 from Dr. J. Hope Moulton's Grammar of New Testament Greek, 

 vol. 1, p. 242. 



