138 REV. H. J. WHITE, M.A., ON CONNECTION BETWEEN VULGATE 



believe " therefore must have inevitably meant less in Latin 

 than it did in Greek, and the whole conception of faith got 

 more intellectual, and less emotional, moral and spiritual, as 

 the Latin terminology spread. No doubt the trained theologians 

 endeavoured to rectify this ; nothing better, to my mind, can be 

 devised than their distinction between Credere deum (to believe 

 that God existed), Credere deo (to believe that what God said 

 was true), and Credere in Deum (to believe on God with all 

 one's heart and mind and strength) ; but the theologians' careful 

 distinctions are not always appreciated by the populace. 



We now come to the question of alteration in meaning which 

 words sometimes undergo ; the text Ephesians v, 32, presents us 

 with a case of translation where the Latin has in process of time 

 acquired a specialized meaning ; and the specialized meaning is 

 not that of the original Greek. St. Paul, after speaking of the 

 love between husband and wife, adds to fivar^piov rovro /xeya 

 early ' iyo) 8e Xeyco et? Xpto-Tov teal et? ttjv kfc/cXrjaidv. As to 

 the meaning of fjLVGrrjpiov, few people would dissent from 

 Dr. Hatch's verdict,* that the word in the LXX Old Testament, 

 in the Apocryphal Books, and then in the New Testament, was 

 used (1) of a state secret, the secret purpose of God, and (2) for 

 the secret sign or symbol by which this secret purpose could be 

 conveyed from one to the other of the initiated, without the 

 knowledge of the outer world. Thus in the Apocalypse the 

 mystery of the seven stars, the mystery of the woman, etc., 

 means the symbol of the stars, or of the woman ; the woman, the 

 stars, are symbolical representations of certain spiritual facts. 

 Thus in Ephesians v, 32, the mystery which is a great one 

 probably means the symbol ; " this symbol of marriage is a great 

 one. I interpret it as referring to Christ and to the Church." 

 Dr. Hatch concludes: — "The meaning of fxyarr^ptov was 

 expressed in early ecclesiastical Latin by sacramentum. It has 

 hence resulted that the meaning which came to be attached to 

 sacramentum... is the meaning which is proper not to the word 

 itself but to its Greek original, (jLvcmipiov." Certainly Cyprian, 

 and later Augustine, use sacramentum in the sense of symbol ; 

 Augustine says " Sacramentum est signum rei sacrae " ; Cyprian 

 speaks of the many sacraments contained in the Lord's Prayer, 

 etc. ; he says that the Bed Sea was a sacrament of Baptism. 

 Quite naturally, therefore, Ephesians v, 32, was translated into 

 Latin, " Sacramentum hoc magnum est : ego autem dico in Christo 



* Essays in Biblical Greek, p. 57, fF. 



