262 - The Bible In the Making

The Bible In the Making
By Geddes MacGregor
447 pp. Philadelphia & New York, Lippincott, 1959. $6.00.

Here is a book that people need and have been seeking. It is up-to-date, as very few histories of the English Bible are; and it is written with good judgment and rare literary skill. After five chapters on the origin of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Apocrypha, there follow: two chapters on the transmission of the text throughout "a thousand years till printing"; two on the printed English versions of Tyndale and his sixteenth-century successors; and four on the making of the King James 'Version. Then come two chapters on the Revised Versions of 1881-1901, one on independent modern English versions, and one on the Revised Standard Version of 1952. The new translation into modern English which has been in progress under the auspices of the British Churches is described in an extended quotation from an address by Professor Theodore H. Robinson, chairman of the Old Testament panel. There are two chapters on Roman Catholic versions in English, one on Jewish translations, and one on the world-wide work of the Bible Societies, concluding with a thoughtful, pointed essay on "Biblical Thinking: the Barrier Beyond Words."

Fourteen appendices, covering 121 pages, afford a wealth of concrete material. Appendix I is a comparative exhibit of the renderings of Hebrews 1: 1-4 in forty-one English versions from Wyclif to J. B. Phillips. This is the most helpful exhibit of the sort that I have seen. Other appendices include a list of the principal Biblical manuscripts, an impressive listing of the modern languages into which the Bible has been translated, and a hitherto unpublished report by E. H. Robertson concerning the Roman Catholic Church and the Bible in Western Europe today. Three appendices give further information concerning the

263 - The Bible In the Making

Revised Standard Version; others give specimens of non-Biblical sayings of Jesus, of early Christian literature, and of the material in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Geddes MacGregor is a minister of the Church of Scotland, with doctorates from the Sorbonne and from Oxford, who is Rufus Jones Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Bryn Mawr College. At the end of the present academic year he leaves this post to become Dean of the Graduate School of Religion at the University of Southern California.

L. A. Weigle
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut