PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The Translation of the New Testament here offered to
English-speaking Christians is a bona fide translation made
directly from the Greek, and is in no sense a revision. The plan
adopted has been the following.

1. An earnest endeavour has been made (based upon more
than sixty years' study of both the Greek and English languages,
besides much further familiarity gained by continual teaching) to
ascertain the exact meaning of every passage not only by the
light that Classical Greek throws on the langruage used, but also
by that which the Septuagint and the Hebrew Scriptures afford;
aid being sought too from Versions and Commentators ancient and
modern, and from the ample _et cetera_ of _apparatus grammaticus_
and theological and Classical reviews and magazines--or rather,
by means of occasional excursions into this vast prairie.

2. The sense thus seeming to have been ascertained, the
next step has been to consider how it could be most accurately
and naturally exhibited in the English of the present day; in
other words, how we can with some approach to probability suppose
that the inspired writer himself would have expressed his
thoughts, had he been writing in our age and country. /1

3. Lastly it has been evidently desirable to compare the
results thus attained with the renderings of other scholars,
especially of course witll the Authorized and Revised Versions.
But alas, the great majority of even "new translations," so
called, are, in reality, only Tyndale's immortal work a