Herman Heinfetter and the Literal Translation of 1863

Introduction

In 1863 a large quarto volume appeared in London under the title A Literal Translation of the New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on Definite Rules of Translation, from the Text of the Vatican Manuscript. The name on the title page was Herman Heinfetter, and the publisher was Evan Evans of Paternoster Row. For many years bibliographers could say almost nothing about the translator. The standard catalogue of printed English Bibles recorded only that the name was treated as a pseudonym for one "F. Parker", of whom nothing was known. Later research identified him as Frederick Parker, a London businessman who spent more than four decades and a considerable private fortune on the translation of the Greek Scriptures. His work is now remembered chiefly because it used the name Jehovah in the Christian Greek Scriptures on a scale that no earlier English translation had attempted. This article examines the man behind the pseudonym, the principles on which he worked, the shape and fortunes of his translation, a number of its characteristic renderings, and its place in the history of the divine name in English Bibles.¹

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A Name and a Pseudonym

Frederick Parker was born in South Lambeth, Surrey, in 1804. He died at Highgate, London, on 10 February 1888, aged 84, and was survived by five children.² Nothing certain is known of his formal schooling. Late in life he referred to meetings with scholars and to his membership of a body called the Anglo-Biblical Institute, and the final editions of his translations were dedicated to its members "in grateful remembrance of their defense of Biblical criticism".³ An article published by Jehovah's Witnesses describes him as a wealthy London businessman who began translating at about the age of twenty, which would place the beginning of his interest in the text of the Greek Scriptures in the 1820s.⁴

The census taken on 30 March 1851 recorded his occupation as "Animal Charcoal Manufacturer". Animal charcoal, produced by burning bone and other residues left after the extraction of glue and gelatine, was used commercially in the refining of sugar and in a range of other products. The trade directories of the day nevertheless listed Parker among the gentry, and he left a substantial estate.⁵ The contrast between his trade and his scholarly ambitions helps to explain the name under which he wrote. In 1885, in a tract criticising the newly published Revised Version, he wrote openly under his own name and explained his earlier practice:

"As long as I was in business, I judged it better to publish under the assumed name of Herman Heinfetter, and the address of my printer; I judged a knowledge of my being in business would impair my statements in scholastic estimation; and that by a knowledge of my being engaged in publishing, my transactions in business would be imputed not to have received sufficient attention."⁶

The preface to the 1863 volume is signed "Herman Heinfetter, 17, Fenchurch Street, July 1st, 1849", the same preface having been carried forward from earlier editions.⁷ The address placed the work in the commercial heart of the City of London, and it agrees with Parker's own statement that he used the address of his printer rather than his own.

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A Private Patron of Scripture

Parker's translation was not a commercial venture in any ordinary sense. He once calculated that he was spending eight hundred pounds a year on his biblical work, a very large sum in the 1850s. Many of his volumes were printed privately and sent as unsolicited gifts. He described sending copies to "relatives and acquaintances – it may be in number 50 – trusting that one might escape being cast into the fire and in fitting time be the means of unfolding the truth to the Christian world".⁸ Copies of the English Version that survive carry the heading "With the Author's Respectful Compliments", which suggests that this edition too was distributed freely.⁹

The small print runs explain why his books are scarce. Later donations to institutions mean that the British Library holds eighteen volumes, University College London seven, and Dr Williams's Library in London at least eight.¹⁰ The modern reader is more fortunate, because a digitised copy of the 1863 Literal Translation, from the library of the University of Oxford, is freely available on the Internet Archive.¹¹

Alongside his translations Parker wrote a great number of tracts and booklets between 1841 and 1885. Many of them deal with Greek grammar, punctuation and word order, which he regarded as the keys to a correct translation. Others set out his views on doctrine and practice. Among the positions recorded by a modern researcher are that the day of Christ's death should be reckoned as a Thursday rather than a Friday, that the Sabbath of the Bible was Saturday, that oaths should not be taken, and that the Revised Version confused the Lord God with the Lord Jesus. He also attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation and argued that the honour given to the Son differed from the absolute worship due to God the Creator.¹² In the introduction to his translation he repeatedly refers the reader to particular tracts, for example on the word Kyrios, for a fuller account of his reasons.

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The Growth of the Translation

The translation grew slowly and was revised repeatedly. Parker's first published part was the letter to the Romans, issued in 1842 by Cradock and Company of London. Other books followed in small pale-blue volumes, and by 1857 the complete Greek Scriptures were being advertised in nine volumes in editions ranging from the second to the fourth. A comparison of the first, third and sixth editions of Luke held by Cambridge University Library shows that each edition was substantially revised.¹³ Across twenty-three years, from 1842 to 1864, his two translations ran to six editions and appeared in formats from pocket size to large octavo presentation volumes.¹⁴

Each of the early volumes contained two distinct translations. The first was a "Literal Translation", accompanied by numerous notes. The second, placed at the end, was an "English Version" without notes, intended to be more readable. The volume of Matthew issued in 1853, for example, bore the title A Literal Translation of the Gospel of Matthew on Definite Rules of Translation and an English Version of the Same.¹⁵ The distinction mattered to Parker. In his introduction he explains that a literal translation keeps as close to the Greek as English allows, while a version is free to express the sense in idiomatic English.

In the 1860s the two translations were issued separately in single volumes published by Evan Evans. The Literal Translation with notes appeared in 1863 and was priced at a guinea, while the English Version sold for ten shillings and sixpence, with a smaller edition at five shillings. In 1864 came the sixth and final editions, together with a third work, A Collation of an English Version of the New Testament … with the Authorised English Version. Using different typefaces, the Collation set Parker's English Version against the King James Version so that a reader could see each departure at a glance.¹⁶ In 1865 Parker began work on the Hebrew Scriptures, translating from the Septuagint as found in the Vatican manuscript, but only Genesis appeared.¹⁷

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The Vatican Manuscript

Parker's choice of base text was unusual for an English translator of his generation. The King James Version and most English translations before the late nineteenth century were made from forms of the printed Greek text known as the Textus Receptus.¹⁸ Parker instead declared, "My Translation is made from the Greek Text of the Vatican Manuscript alone."¹⁹ The manuscript in question is Codex Vaticanus, a fourth-century codex held in the Vatican Library and now recognised as one of the most important witnesses to the text of the Greek Scriptures.²⁰

In Parker's day access to the Vatican manuscript was restricted, and reliable printed editions of its text were only beginning to appear. One researcher notes that his introduction indicates use of the Griesbach recension in conjunction with the readings of the Vatican manuscript.²¹ Whatever the precise working text, Parker's preference for the oldest available authority placed him in step with the direction that textual scholarship was taking. Within a generation the critical editions of Tischendorf and of Westcott and Hort, and later the Revised Version of 1881, would give far more weight to Vaticanus than the Textus Receptus had done. Parker had committed himself to that manuscript decades earlier, at his own expense and without academic standing.

The choice had consequences for individual readings. In his note on John 1:18 Parker observed that the reading "an only begotten God" was supported by "all the oldest MSS. but one (the Alexandrian)".²² The note illustrates both his dependence on the oldest witnesses and his willingness to set out the evidence for a reading that differed from the Received Text.

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Definite Rules of Translation

The phrase "on Definite Rules of Translation" in Parker's title was meant literally. His introduction sets out the principles that governed the work, and the body of the translation is keyed by numbers to a series of "Rules" explained in his other publications. According to the introduction, no word was to be translated in any sense beyond those given either in the Received Translation or in Donnegan's Greek lexicon. The tenses were to be rendered according to Valpy's Greek grammar. The Greek article was to be represented consistently. Punctuation was to follow his own rules, the order of the Greek words was not to be transposed, and the sense of each passage was to be determined by his Rules rather than by the translator's preference.²³

Parker explained his purpose with a discussion of the Greek aorist. He allowed that English sometimes compels a translator to render an aorist with a present or perfect tense, but he denied that this left the choice open in every case:

"That man will never duly comprehend the Sense conveyed by Greek, who regards the Sense as that which the Author has not power himself to fix, but must leave to the choice and selection of him who thinks fit to translate his work; reducing the instruction of Almighty God, to that which man deems it fitting it should be."²⁴

He argued in the same way about the Greek conjunctions hina ("in order that") and hoti ("that"), holding that the difference between them was not left to the translator to obscure.²⁵ He summed up the principle in arithmetical terms. If ninety-nine out of a hundred examples were compelled by English usage to be translated in a sense other than the strictly literal one, that did not justify translating the hundredth in a non-literal sense if English did not require it.²⁶

The printed page reflected this system. Small figures between the lines under 500 referred the reader to the Rules; figures of 500 and above pointed to the footnotes. A dotted line under the text marked an arrangement the Rules classed as irregular, an unbroken line marked an ellipsis, and italic type marked an addition or alternative that Parker proposed to make the sense clearer.²⁷ He anticipated that his notes might appear dogmatic, and explained that a note beginning "Literally" meant that in every similar construction with a like context the same kind of sense was invariably found. "In either case," he wrote, "I do not refer to opinion, but to invariable usage, and so to that which admits of proof or disproof."²⁸

The result was a translation that reads more like an interlinear than a conventional English Bible. A modern researcher describes the Literal Translation as reading "very much like an interlinear" and "replete with footnotes".²⁹ For Parker this was the point. The literal translation was a tool for examining the Greek, while the English Version was meant for continuous reading.

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The Problem of Lord

The feature of Parker's work that has attracted most attention arose from a problem he identified in the Greek word Kyrios, "Lord". In the Greek Scriptures Kyrios is applied both to God and to Jesus Christ, and in quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures it often stands where the Hebrew text has the divine name, the Tetragrammaton.³⁰ Parker believed that English readers were misled when one word, "Lord", was used for both.

His first solution was to replace "Lord" with "God" where it referred to God. In a preface dated 1 July 1849 he wrote that, since he could not see how to distinguish in English between "Lord" used of God and "Lord" used of Christ, he had substituted "God" for "Lord" where it referred to God. He confined this substitution to quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures in which the divine name occurred, although his 1853 Matthew still rendered Matthew 22:44 "The Lord said to my Lord".³¹

By the time of the single-volume editions of the 1860s Parker had adopted a different solution. The introduction to the 1863 Literal Translation states:

"In my Tract on Κύριος I have stated the reasons why κύριος not preceded by the Article, and used as a Distinctive Appellation, is used exclusively in relation to God; and as I do not see the possibility of distinguishing in English between the Appellation Lord, when used in relation to God, and when used in relation to Christ, in any way consistent with our usage in relation to Sense and Sound, I have substituted in my Versions for Lord, when used in relation to God and not preceded by the Article, the Appellation Jehovah, as ensuring a more correct apprehension of the Sense, and sanctioned by the only places in the Authorized Version translated Jehovah being in Greek expressed by κύριος without the Article."³²

The passage shows that Parker's rule was grammatical. He tied the use of "Jehovah" to the absence of the Greek article before Kyrios, a feature he believed marked the word as a distinctive appellation of God. He also appealed to the King James Version itself, arguing that the places where it used "Jehovah" in the Hebrew Scriptures corresponded in the Greek of the Septuagint to Kyrios without the article.

The two modern accounts of Parker's work give different figures for the number of occurrences. The jw.org article states that the 1863 edition used "Jehovah" 187 times, while the researcher quoted above estimated about 140 occurrences and stressed that Parker remained careful to restrict the name largely to places drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures.³³ The difference may reflect different editions or methods of counting. What both agree on is that the name appeared far more often in Parker's work than in any earlier English rendering of the Greek Scriptures.

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Jehovah in the Text

A reader opening the 1863 volume at the Gospel of Matthew meets the divine name in the first chapter. In the account of Joseph's dream at Matthew 1:20 Parker's translation reads "angel of Jehovah" where the King James Version reads "the angel of the Lord".³⁴ The same rule applied throughout the Gospels, Acts and the letters wherever the Greek had Kyrios without the article in reference to God.

Earlier English translators had occasionally used "Jehovah" in the Greek Scriptures. Edward Harwood, William Newcome, John Lingard and others did so in a few places, mainly in quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures where the sense required it. The usual example is Matthew 22:44, quoting Psalm 110:1, where the first "Lord" stands for the divine name in Hebrew.³⁵ Parker's achievement was to turn an occasional clarification into a consistent principle applied across the whole of the Greek Scriptures.

The jw.org article on translators who restored the divine name observes that Parker's 1863 translation was shaped by the work of Lancelot Shadwell (1808–1861), a barrister whose translation of Matthew had appeared in 1859. When Parker saw Shadwell's comments on Kyrios, according to the article, he became convinced that in certain contexts the word "should be translated Jehovah" and revised his entire translation accordingly. The article describes Parker's 1863 edition as, "as far as is known", the first published English version to use the divine name throughout the Christian Greek Scriptures.³⁶ To illustrate the value of the change, Parker pointed to verses such as Romans 10:13, "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved", and asked who had ever gathered from the Authorized Version "that it was Jehovah, and not The Son Jesus Christ our Lord" that was referred to. The New World Translation lists Heinfetter's work among the English translations that use the name in the Christian Greek Scriptures, designating it J24 in its list of sources.³⁷

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Notable Renderings

Parker's commitment to literal rendering produced translations that often look strange to a modern reader. His English Version and Literal Translation were deliberately unidiomatic in places, because he believed that idiomatic English concealed distinctions in the Greek. His treatment of John 1:1 shows both the method and the theology behind it. The English Version of 1851 rendered the last clause "the word became a God". By 1864 this had become "the command had relation to a God".³⁸ In the 1863 Literal Translation Parker's note offers an expanded paraphrase of the verse: "In commencing (this dispensation) the command was existing, the command was with the God (to fulfil), as a God the command was (to produce)."³⁹ At John 1:14 the literal text reads "although the command flesh became".⁴⁰

These renderings show two features of Parker's approach. First, he rendered logos not as "Word" but in the sense of "command", consistent with his view that the sense of a term should be fixed by usage and context according to his Rules. Second, he distinguished between "the God", representing the Greek article before theos, and "a God", representing the anarthrous theos in the final clause. The distinction between the articular and anarthrous noun was central to his whole system, as his treatment of Kyrios shows. The rendering "a god" in John 1:1 has a long history in English, going back at least to Edward Harwood's translation of 1768 and the Unitarian Improved Version of 1808, and it appears in the interlinear of Benjamin Wilson's Emphatic Diaglott.⁴¹

Parker's position on the Trinity was clear from his tracts. A modern researcher concludes that, in common with Unitarians, Christadelphians and many Adventist and Church of God groups of his day, he could not accept the doctrine of the Trinity, and that his translation reflected this.⁴² His note on John 1:18, supporting the reading "an only begotten God" from the oldest manuscripts, shows that he did not simply choose readings to suit a theological position. The reading is the one supported by Codex Vaticanus, the manuscript he had chosen as his text, and he followed it.

The grammatical precision Parker demanded extended to the smallest words. His insistence on distinguishing hina from hoti led him to criticise the common translation of John 13:34, where he held that the sense had been obscured.⁴³ His treatment of the aorist led him to note in passages such as John 4:7 that English had no single way of expressing the Greek tense and that the present tense was a forced substitute.⁴⁴ Such notes fill the volume. For the student of Greek they offer a running commentary on grammar; for the general reader they made the book difficult to use.

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Reception and Isolation

Parker's translations did not find a wide public. They were costly to produce, printed in small numbers and distributed largely as gifts. Their unusual typography and system of numbered rules made them hard to read, and their anonymity, deliberately maintained, meant that they carried no scholarly reputation with them. The bibliographers Darlow and Moule could record only that the author was "F. Parker of whom nothing is known".⁴⁵

Parker himself was aware of his isolation. His final tracts, issued between 1883 and 1885, were sent in large numbers to dissenting ministers, theological colleges and religious groups. According to the account of his later life, only one recipient responded, by returning the tract marked "Inconsequent Rubbish!" In his last tract Parker wrote: "Here on the 30th June 1885 I stand alone, unaided by one clergyman, or one dissenting minister, or one brother".⁴⁶

The context helps to explain this response. The Revised Version of the Greek Scriptures had appeared in 1881, and its revisers had themselves given new weight to the oldest manuscripts, including Vaticanus.⁴⁷ Parker's criticism of the Revised Version was not that it relied on the wrong manuscripts but that, in his view, it confused the Lord God with the Lord Jesus. His solution, the use of "Jehovah" for Kyrios without the article, had no place in the plans of the revisers, who retained "Lord" throughout the Greek Scriptures.

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Parker and Wilson

Parker's work is often compared with Benjamin Wilson's Emphatic Diaglott, which appeared in America in 1864. The two works have a good deal in common. Both translators gave great weight to the Vatican manuscript. Both works began as part-publications and became definitive single-volume editions in the 1860s, Parker's in Britain and Wilson's in the United States. Both translators rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and both used "Jehovah" in the Greek Scriptures, although Parker did so far more often than Wilson.⁴⁸

There is no evidence of any direct contact between the two men. The researcher who has studied Parker most closely suggests that both may simply have been familiar with the Improved Version of 1808, which used both "a god" in John 1:1 and occasionally "Jehovah", and that Parker, the older man whose work began much earlier, was probably first.⁴⁹ Parker did take an interest in American religious writers. In his booklet The Revealed History of Man (1854) he acknowledged a debt to the Reverend George Storrs of Philadelphia for his understanding that God had revealed "an Eternal Death", and recommended Storrs's work An Enquiry – Are the Wicked Immortal?⁵⁰

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The Divine Name Study

Parker's translation is significant for the study of the divine name in the Greek Scriptures for three reasons.

The first is the principle on which he worked. Parker did not simply insert "Jehovah" where he thought it appropriate. He tied its use to a grammatical criterion, the absence of the Greek article before Kyrios, and to a historical argument, the correspondence between the King James Version's use of "Jehovah" and the Septuagint's anarthrous Kyrios. Whatever view one takes of the criterion, it represented an attempt to identify, from within the Greek text, the places where the writers of the Greek Scriptures referred to God by the name that stood behind Kyrios in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The second is scale. Parker moved beyond the occasional use of "Jehovah" in quotations to a consistent practice across the whole text. Whether one accepts the figure of 187 occurrences or about 140, his translation used the name more often than any English version of the Greek Scriptures before it.

The third is the textual basis. Parker's commitment to the Vatican manuscript meant that his use of the divine name was not tied to the Textus Receptus. It rested on what he believed to be the oldest and most reliable Greek text available. The question of how the writers of the Greek Scriptures used the divine name, and how later copyists handled it, is closely connected with the question of the earliest text, and Parker's work stands at an early point in the history of both inquiries.

The New World Translation, first published in English in 1950, lists Parker's translation among its predecessors in the use of the divine name. Its appendix on the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures includes Heinfetter's 1863 translation in a list of English versions that used the name.⁵¹ The jw.org article on translators who restored God's name places Parker alongside Lancelot Shadwell as an early English translator who recognised the importance of the name in the Greek Scriptures.⁵²

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Legacy

Frederick Parker died in 1888 with his translation little read and his identity largely unknown. For much of the twentieth century he survived only as a puzzle in bibliographies. Research by collectors and historians has since recovered the outline of his life: a prosperous manufacturer from South Lambeth, a member of the Anglo-Biblical Institute, a prolific writer of tracts, and a translator who spent decades and a large part of his fortune on the Greek Scriptures.

His work is not easy to read, and many of his renderings are idiosyncratic. Yet several of the principles he defended have since become common. He insisted that the oldest manuscripts should take precedence over the Textus Receptus. He held that a translator should represent the distinctions of Greek grammar, including the article and the tenses, as consistently as English allows. And he argued that English readers needed some means of distinguishing references to God from references to Christ where the Greek used Kyrios for both.

The digitised copy of the 1863 Literal Translation on the Internet Archive allows readers to examine his work directly.⁵³ It remains a record of one man's attempt, made privately and at his own expense, to give English readers a translation that reflected the oldest Greek text and restored the name of God in the places where he believed it belonged.

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Notes

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