OF THE BIBLE INFERRED FROM ITS VERSIONS. 95 



choice of the languages of revelation was not left nucarecl for 

 by the providence of God." It is no small thing that Hebrew, 

 the mother-tongue of Israel — unlike Chinese or Accadian — was 

 a language with an alphabet. Moreover, the Hebrew language 

 by virtue of its simplicity and directness is unusually easy to 

 translate. Bishop Oluwole, speaking of his own West 

 African tongue, has said : " Yuruba is a language into which the 

 Bible phraseology goes easily. We find it very convenient to 

 translate direct from Hebrew, more so than from English." On 

 the other hand, we may recall Luther's exclamation : " Good 

 God, how hard it is to make these Hebrew prophets speak 

 German." 



Again, it is not without significance that the Apostles and 

 Evangelists wrote in Greek, which came nearest to a universal 

 language in the ancient world. Moreover, they did not write 

 in classical Greek. Of recent discoveries about the Bible none is 

 more striking than the testimony as to the language of the New 

 Testament wliicli has been unearthed during the last few years 

 out of rubbish heaps of waste paper and broken pottery buried 

 in the sands of Egypt and dating back to the very beginning of 

 the Christian era. What this new linguistic evidence demon- 

 strates may be stated in the words of the distinguished scholar 

 who has clone so much to make it available in Ens^lish : " The 

 conclusion is that ' Biblical' Greek was simply the vernacular 

 of daily life. . . . The Holy Ghost spoke absolutely in the 

 language of the people, as we might surely have expected He 

 w^ould." That is to say, the New Testament was composed in 

 the common homely speech of those who first read its pages ; it 

 was written literally in the vulgar tongue. 



The astonishing translatableness of Scripture has been 

 explained on various grounds. Some point to the character oi 

 its metaphors, the frequent parallelism of its construction, the 

 homely force of its images from common objects. Others 

 emphasize the sublime and pathetic ideas which mingle with 

 its contents. But the real secret lies in the subject-matter of 

 the Bible itself. 



With the true classics of the world there is no respect of 

 persons ; they are concerned with those things which are 

 common, with matters of enduring and universal interest which 

 come home to everyone alike. Now we have one Book, and 

 only one, which embraces all the heights and depths of human 

 nature. The Bible belongs to those elemental things — like the 

 sky and the wind and the sea, like bread and wine, like the 

 kisses of little children a^d tears shed beside the grave — which 



