treatment or of arbitrariness; but in order to partially obviate this defect, the Notes have been drawn up in such a way as to include copious references to the bibliography of recent criticism. What is offered is no catena or inventory of opinions. It is merely a conspectus of relevant authorities, together with a note of the main arguments in support of each position. One hopes thus to be able to take a line of one's own, without producing an unfair impression or incurring censures like that once passed by Bacon upon tradition and knowledge "which is for the most part magistral and peremptory, and not ingenious and faithful; in a sort as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined." Whereas, he rightly proceeded, "in the true handling of knowledge men ought to propound things sincerely with more or less asseveration, as they stand in a man's judgment proved more or less." My plan, then, in the Notes has been to indicate in a handful of sentences the leading data for each book's origin and object, the division and preponderance of authorities upon the question, and finally-by means of sifted references-the select literature. The latter includes for the most part what has proved of chief service in my own work; but the plan also involves a series of references, as any trained observer will detect, to some works which are to be regarded in the main as landmarks and beacons for progressive study. The wealth and the complexity of modern literature upon the NT make selection and economy imperative in drawing up Notes of this kind. But although the method becomes now and then depressingly utilitarian, it will always serve to less discussed, except at a length which would unduly distend the volume. The result is, one has had to rest content with merely indicating the more salient linguistic parallels upon which the position adopted in the text depends. The whole argument from such parallels and affinities in regard to the filiation of early Christian literature is one of several problems that still await discriminating treatment. Hitherto its use has been mainly characterised by arbitrariness and artificiality, and in this respect the critical and the conservative wings of scholarship are equally to blame.

furnish materials by which the view adopted in the text may be corroborated or modified or refused. Both in the Notes and in the Appendix one has constantly felt, indeed, as the translators of the AV put it in their shrewd and neglected Preface, liable "to weary the unlearned, who need not know so much, and trouble the learned, who know it already." As it is never easy to know how far an acquaintance or sympathy with the subject can be presupposed, and to what extent critical processes in this particular department are as yet naturalised, it is hard to judge what materials should be inserted or omitted. However, it is annoying to find that authoritative references are sometimes as inaccessible as the accessible are unauthoritative, and I have therefore chosen in the bibliography to err upon the side of fulness; all the more so, seeing that the present state of NT criticism in this country is still marked by immaturity in many vital sections. Not a few of the arguments in this volume, and indeed whole pages of it, would have been gladly omitted, had there been (for example) any modern and thorough NT Introduction to which an English student could be referred with safety or satisfaction. The lack of such a volume is only one of many desiderata felt at every turn by the English worker in NT research. Here, perhaps more than in most branches of historical science, investigation continues to be hampered by the resurrection of the obsolete, the survival of the unfit, and the prominence of the irrelevant; as if the subject itself did not bring with it sufficient obstacles and problems. It is devoutly to be hoped that in the next century some of the enterprise and enthusiasm which have made the OT blossom like the rose during the past fifty years, may be spared by English scholarship to the task of handling with truer reverence and courage the more central problems raised by the NT literature. Few of these are solved; some are scarcely stated yet in proper form. Indeed, for some time to come it is to be

b

feared that the prospects of free and full NT criticism in this country will be hampered by the fact that not all the results already gained seem to have been perfectly assimilated, while the very methods by which alone conclusions can be formed or adequately tested are often misunderstood or sadly misapplied.

Conditions such as these, to say nothing of the movements within criticism itself, make any enterprise like the present extremely tentative. But I believe it is timely. Unprejudiced treatment of the historical element in Christianity is one of the most immediate needs for faith and truth alike. For if holiness has not its sources in history, the supreme expression of religious thought and conduct has come to us in a historical form, and any intellectual neglect of that form is an error which cannot long be harboured with impunity.

More things than wisdom are best left to be justified by their works, if they are to be justified at all. But a word must be added here upon the translation; especially as that has been an after-thought, or rather an after-necessity. Owing to the difficulty of securing permission to reprint the RV, the only practicable course was evidently to undertake the preparation of an independent version, and it is the result of this difficult and audacious attempt which is now offered to the reader, with extreme diffidence. It is neither a revision nor an adaptation of any previous translation, but has been made directly from a critical study of the literature itself. The task originally lay as far outside my plan as it has proved beyond my powers. Still, I am in hopes that, despite its many drawbacks, the present rendering will contribute something to that mental impression of change and progress in the NT literature which it is the aim of the whole edition to accentuate. Translation, like peace-making, is always a delicate and often an ungrateful business. The translator pleases nobody, not even himself. But his task

in Biblical literature is additionally severe, as three-fourths of his readers instinctively compare his version, not with the original, but with an English classic which has unrivalled associations of literary rhythm and of religious experience. The one claim of the present version is faithfulness. I have tried to make it accurate and idiomatic, besides presenting, to some extent, the nuances of individual writers. At the same time, I see very little literary or religious gain in making a fetish of over-precision in the verbal reproduction of the original. There is no obvious reason why the translator should not be allowed to exercise his right of inheritance to something of the same freedom that would be granted him if he were dealing with a Greek classic. Accordingly, while I admit that any version of the NT must incline to be literal, the following pages are not intended for the purists who expect to find in a translation those complete materials for stylistic and grammatical research which only a lexicon can properly afford. If a translator's first duty is to reproduce his text as exactly as possible, his final duty is to write English. As I conceive it, he is not bound to dislocate style in the pedantic attempt to eschew a reasonable use of English synonyms, or to rehearse at any cost Oriental and Hellenistic idioms that come uncouthly to the modern ear. Transliteration is not translation; nor is a paraphrase. The latter tends to looseness and weakness, while an absolutely literal version is often the most inaccurate, as it is sometimes the most hideous thing in the world. To be crabbed is the temptation of the one; to be diluted, of the other. If I have in any degree attained the ideal of my conception, it has been by steering between these two shoals. Attention has been carefully paid to the more recent investigations by Hatch, Kennedy, and Deissmann into the linguistic features of the kový, as well as to a series of grammatical studies in Hellenistic Greek by Viteau, Blass, Jannaris, and Schmiedel. I have further attempted, with

some hesitation, to reproduce, so far as that is possible or desirable in a translation, one or two of the rhythmical and rhetorical features (oxýμara) that mark the structure of the NT literature. These are due, in the main, to either of two influences. One is the gnomic method of parallelism, antithesis, and climax, pervading the older Semitic poetry, and especially the Wisdom-literature, upon which the NT writers, in company, e.g., with the author of 4th Esdras, have drawn in form and spirit to a much larger degree than is commonly suspected. Along with this influence (discussed by Jebb and Wilke) another falls to be placed, due to the rhetorical and artistic spirit of the later Greek and Roman prose, which had a vogue not merely in oratory but in the philosophical compositions of the period (Norden, Die Antike Kunstprosa, 1898, Anhang I., "Ueber die Geschichte des Reims "; and Wendland, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie u. Religion, 1895), where, as in the older Hebrew literature, poetry never lay far from what we should to-day distinguish as prose. It would be artificial, indeed, to rigidly reproduce all these strophic features in print. Some, like assonance, live only in the original. Some have to be felt rather than exhibited. Others again appeal to the ear more subtly than to the eye. Still quite a number of them are obvious, as Heinrici, Blass, and J. Weiss have seen in Paul, D. H. Müller (Die Propheten in ihrer ursprüng. Form, 1896, I. p. 216 f.), and Briggs (Expository Times, viii. pp. 393 f., 452 f., 493 f., ix. p. 69 f.) in the gospels; these it is well to mark, so far as is legitimate, in order to preserve the freshness of their literary charm, no less than for the sake of their occasional bearing upon the larger questions of exegesis and interpretation.

The translation is substantially based upon the critical text which Professor Eberhard Nestle has recently edited with accuracy and success (Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu critico ex editionibus et libris manu scriptis collecto,