William Gunion Rutherford and the Translation of Romans

Introduction

In 1900 the London firm of Macmillan published St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, A New Translation with a Brief Analysis. The title page named the translator as "W. G. Rutherford, Headmaster of Westminster". William Gunion Rutherford was then one of the most distinguished classical scholars in Britain, known above all for his work on the grammar and vocabulary of Attic Greek. His translation of Romans was the product of his conviction that the established English versions had misunderstood the Greek of the apostle's letters, and that the Revised Version, completed less than twenty years earlier, had in some respects made matters worse. The book is short, but it is carefully made, and it contains a preface of considerable interest on the nature of the Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures. It is also notable for its use of the divine name, Jehovah, in five of the quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures that appear in Romans. This article examines Rutherford's life and scholarship, the argument of his preface, the method and form of the translation, a number of its renderings, its reception and its place in the history of the divine name in English.¹

↑ On this page

Early Life and Education

William Gunion Rutherford was born in Glasgow on 17 July 1853. He was the second son of Robert Rutherford, minister of the United Presbyterian church at Mountain Cross in Peeblesshire, and of his wife Agnes, daughter of William Gunion, a Glasgow merchant.² He therefore grew up in a Scottish Presbyterian household, and his middle name came from his mother's family.

According to the account of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography, Rutherford received his first Latin lessons from a village schoolmaster and was then sent to the High School of Glasgow. From there he went to the University of St Andrews, where the professor of Greek was Lewis Campbell, a noted scholar of Plato and Sophocles.³ In April 1873 he went up to Oxford as an exhibitioner of Balliol College.⁴ In 1874 he gained first-class honours in classical moderations, the first part of the Oxford course in classics. Unusually, he then chose natural science for his final examinations, in which he obtained second-class honours, "reading at the same time much Greek on his own account".⁵ He graduated in December 1876.

↑ On this page

Scholar of Attic Greek

Immediately after graduating, Rutherford became a classical master at St Paul's School in London. In 1878 he published a First Greek Grammar, which, according to his biographer, "soon came into wide use". It owed something to the work of the Dutch scholar Carel Gabriel Cobet on Attic forms, "but much also to original research".⁶

His most important book appeared in 1881. The New Phrynichus took as its starting point the work of Phrynichus, a Greek grammarian of the second century of the Common Era who had compiled a list of words and forms that he considered incorrect in Attic Greek. Rutherford's edition, with an extensive commentary, became a standard work. The Dictionary of National Biography described it as "the greatest contribution of English scholarship to the study of Attic usage in vocabulary and inflexions".⁷ In 1883 he followed it with an edition of the fables of Babrius, with critical dissertations and notes.⁸

These works established Rutherford's reputation. They also gave him a detailed knowledge of the ways in which Greek had changed between the classical period and the later centuries. The New Phrynichus is essentially a study of the differences between the Greek of classical Athens and the Greek written by later authors. This knowledge would later shape his approach to the letters of Paul.

↑ On this page

Headmaster of Westminster

In 1883 Rutherford was elected fellow and tutor of University College, Oxford. Before he took up residence, the headmastership of Westminster School became vacant, and he became a candidate at the suggestion of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol.⁹ He was elected and took office in September 1883, at the age of thirty.

Westminster School, closely associated with Westminster Abbey, is one of the oldest schools in England.¹⁰ Rutherford came to it as a reformer, and his changes met opposition from some former pupils. The Dictionary of National Biography records that particular objection was taken to his abolition of rowing on the Thames, known at the school as "water", although he did not waver, "and the opposition gradually died away".¹¹ He was a strict disciplinarian but became, according to the same account, "extremely popular with the boys".¹²

He was also a teacher of distinction. His biographer wrote that he was "always treating words as the vehicle of thought, using them with reverent precision". He quoted the classical scholar J. S. Phillimore, who said that in translation Rutherford showed "a horror of looseness, poverty of vocabulary, and English idiom all stuccoed over with a base convention".¹³ This description helps to explain the character of his translation of Romans.

Rutherford had taken holy orders in the Church of England when he went to Westminster. In 1901 he published some of the sermons he had preached at the school services in Westminster Abbey under the title The Key of Knowledge.¹⁴ In 1884 he married Constance Gordon Renton, and in the same year the University of St Andrews awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.¹⁵

↑ On this page

Later Classical Work

Rutherford continued to publish classical work while he was headmaster. In 1889 he issued an edition of the fourth book of Thucydides in which he argued that the existing texts of Greek authors had been corrupted by explanatory notes that had crept into the text from the margins. His biographer judged that some of his corrections had been accepted, "but not all are necessary".¹⁶ In 1892 he published a text of the newly discovered Mimiambi of Herodas, which was described as "a somewhat hasty piece of work".¹⁷

His most sustained later project concerned the ancient notes, or scholia, on the plays of Aristophanes. He travelled to Italy to examine the important manuscript at Ravenna and in 1896 published a revised text of the scholia with a translation and notes. The third volume, A Chapter in the History of Annotation, appeared in 1905. It traced the history of Greek studies from the earliest commentators to the fall of Constantinople.¹⁸

His health began to fail in the late 1890s, and early in 1899 he made a voyage to New Zealand with his wife. The benefit did not last, and in July 1901 he resigned the headmastership and retired to Little Hallands, near Bishopstone in Sussex.¹⁹ The translation of Romans was published in 1900, during the last period of his headmastership.

↑ On this page

Dissatisfaction with the Revised Version

The Dictionary of National Biography states plainly that "Rutherford was profoundly dissatisfied with the revised version of the New Testament". It explains the reason: "His sense of Hellenistic Greek told him that the author of the Pauline epistles thought in one language and wrote in another."²⁰

The Revised Version of the Greek Scriptures had been published in 1881. It was the work of a large committee of British scholars, and it was intended to correct the King James Version of 1611 in the light of better Greek manuscripts and improved knowledge of Greek.²¹ The revisers had sought to render the Greek closely, and in many places they had altered familiar wording in order to represent the Greek more exactly. Rutherford's criticism was that this exactness was often misplaced, because the revisers had interpreted the Greek according to the rules of classical Attic Greek rather than the Greek of Paul's own time.

↑ On this page

The Argument of the Preface

Rutherford set out his views in a preface of some eight pages. The preface is headed by a sentence from the French scholar Joseph Scaliger, "Non aliunde dissidia in religione pendent quam ab ignoratione grammaticae", which may be translated, "Disputes in religion arise from no other source than ignorance of grammar."²² The title page carries a second Latin sentence, "Hoc est intelligere ut quod cogitavit aliquis idem nos audientes vel legentes cogitemus", which expresses the idea that to understand is to think, as hearers or readers, the same thought that the writer had in mind.²³ The volume is dedicated "Discipulis meis caritatis documentum", "to my pupils, as a token of affection".²⁴

The preface begins with a question. The letter to the Romans, Rutherford wrote, was once "a plain letter concerned with a theme which plain men might understand". Why then was it "so far from plain now to many who in knowledge and even in spiritual discernment are at least the equals of the tradesmen, mechanics, and servants to whom it was immediately addressed"?²⁵

He found part of the answer in the format of printed Bibles. "Some blame rests no doubt with Robert Estienne for the irritating innovation whereby each sentence of the Bible was turned into a numbered paragraph, and with Muret for lending the weight of his authority to another device of the printing house, the dividing of a page into narrow vertical columns."²⁶ To break the current of an argument "at every turn, especially an argument so rapid and impetuous as is St. Paul's in this letter", was, he wrote, "an act of unwisdom which ought not to have been tolerated, much less accepted and made permanent".²⁷

Such mechanical obstacles, however, were not the main cause of the difficulty. "In many passages, some of them cardinal to the argument, the English rendering is not only inadequate but misleading."²⁸

↑ On this page

The King James Translators and the Revisers

Rutherford's judgement of the King James translators was nuanced. "The Jacobean translators, depending like their predecessors largely upon Latin renderings, had too little Greek to form theories of interpretation." Yet this lack had a fortunate result. "They were indifferent happily to matters of dialect, vocabulary, and syntax. They had not contrived to convince themselves that the same Greek word, whatever its context, must invariably be rendered by the same English word."²⁹

The final sentence was a criticism of the revisers, who had sought to render a given Greek word consistently by the same English word. Rutherford regarded this principle as particularly unfortunate in the case of Paul, "whose vocabulary is extremely meagre", so that the same stock words had to carry many different meanings.³⁰

He continued with a statement of the nature of the Greek language. The King James translators, he wrote, "knew no better than their successors that Greek is not one language but several score, or that with every generation it changed". The Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures, he argued, had become "a tolerant speech whereby many races, all differing greatly in habits of mind and in national circumstances, sought for a time to eschew the curse of Babel".³¹ It "may never be understood as classical Greek is understood", but "it has at least begun to be studied from the proper point of view".³²

He accused the revisers of ignoring many "just conclusions, gravely affecting interpretation" that had already been established, and of distorting the meaning in some places "by translating in accordance with Attic idiom phrases that convey in later Greek a wholly different sense".³³ Since the revision, he wrote, "great strides have been made in the knowledge of New Testament Greek". He named the work of the French scholar Joseph Viteau "and more especially of Blass", referring to Friedrich Blass, whose grammar of the Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures had appeared in 1896.³⁴ He predicted that scholars would demonstrate that "the singular speech in which the oracles of God are enshrined has nevertheless a precision and a force of its own".³⁵

↑ On this page

The Problem of Prepositions

The most technical part of the preface concerns one particular feature of later Greek, the use of phrases introduced by prepositions. Rutherford argued that such phrases "may be so charged with meaning that to reproduce that meaning in English several words must sometimes be used for every Greek word".³⁶ He gave a series of examples.

In Mark 6:52, he wrote, the disciples were amazed "for they had not understood at the loaves", which must be rendered, "had not understood at the time when the miracle of the loaves was performed".³⁷ In Romans, the phrase "a righteousness of God out of faith into faith" in Romans 1:17 means "a righteousness of God springing from faith, realized in faith". The phrase "the man out of faith in Jesus" in Romans 3:26 means "the man who is actuated by faith in Jesus". The words "sold under sin" in Romans 7:14 mean "sold into servitude to sin".³⁸

He concluded with a question and an observation drawn from experience. "Is it fair, I ask, to the English reader to translate such idioms word for word? A man cannot return to his place after reading a lesson from St. Paul to an ordinary congregation without feeling that to the bulk of his hearers it would have carried almost as much meaning, if he had read it in Greek."³⁹ The notes to the preface set side by side the renderings of the King James Version and the Revised Version for a number of verses, in order to illustrate the obscurity that he believed both versions shared.⁴⁰

↑ On this page

The Form of the Translation

The translation itself is printed in continuous paragraphs, without verse numbers in the text. Each section is introduced by a short summary of its content in the margin or heading, together with a chapter and verse reference, so that the reader can follow the argument of the letter while keeping track of the standard divisions. The opening section, for example, is followed by headings such as "Doctrine the sanction of conduct. 12, 1-2."⁴¹ The "brief analysis" mentioned in the title consists of these summaries, which together outline the structure of the letter.

The arrangement corresponds directly to the criticism of verse divisions in the preface. By printing the letter as continuous prose, Rutherford sought to restore what he called "the ordered march of thought upon the imprinted page".⁴² Quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures are marked with quotation marks, so that the reader can see where Paul is citing the earlier writings.

↑ On this page

Characteristic Renderings

The translation begins with the greeting of Romans 1:1–4, rendered in these words:

"PAUL, bondservant of Jesus Christ, apostle by call set apart for the gospel of God … made man of David's race, avouched son of God when by an act of power conditioned by informing holiness he had been raised from the dead."⁴³

The rendering shows Rutherford's concern to bring out the force of the prepositional phrases. The phrase "by an act of power conditioned by informing holiness" reflects his explanation in the preface that the Greek phrase in Romans 1:4 means "by an act of power rendered possible by a spirit of holiness".⁴⁴

The central passage of Romans 3:21–26 is rendered as a single long sentence that follows the structure of Paul's argument: "But now is made known a righteousness of God apart from law, attested by the law and the prophets, a righteousness of God consisting in faith in Jesus Christ, intended for all who have faith, and no distinction made." Later in the passage Christ is described as one "whom God of old designed as a propitiation to be accepted by faith, a propitiation consisting in the shedding of his blood". The passage ends, "the import being that God is righteous and does impart righteousness to every one who is actuated by faith in Jesus".⁴⁵

The opening of Romans 5 reads: "Once faith has brought us this righteousness, we enjoy peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have also obtained our access to this state of grace in which we are and triumph in the hope of attaining God's glory."⁴⁶ The rendering of Romans 5:1–2 uses the word "triumph" for the Greek verb often translated "rejoice" or "exult".

In Romans 8 the familiar words of Romans 8:28 are rendered, "We can be sure that all things co-operate for good for those who love God, such as are called according to his purpose." The following verses continue, "Those whom he foreknew he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he should be the first-begotten of a great brotherhood."⁴⁷ The phrase "a great brotherhood" for the Greek word meaning "many brothers" in Romans 8:29 reflects a word that Rutherford used often. He addressed the letter to "the Brotherhood in Rome" and rendered Paul's description of Phoebe in Romans 16:1 as "one of our brotherhood".⁴⁸

The exhortation of Romans 12:1 reads: "I ENTREAT you, brothers, to prove your sense of God's mercies by presenting your lives as an acceptable sacrifice, a living victim consecrated to God, which for you is become a religious duty sanctioned by reason."⁴⁹ The phrase "a religious duty sanctioned by reason" renders the Greek expression often translated "reasonable service" or "sacred service with your power of reason".

The rendering of Romans 8:15 keeps the Aramaic word, "Abba, our Father".⁵⁰ In Romans 9:5 Rutherford rendered the disputed words, "the Christ, supreme over all, God blessed for everlasting. Amen."⁵¹

↑ On this page

The Divine Name in the Translation

Rutherford used the name Jehovah five times in his translation of Romans. In each case the name appears within a quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures, in a passage where the Hebrew text contains the Tetragrammaton.⁵²

The first occurrence is in Romans 4:8, where Paul quotes Psalm 32:2: "Blessed is the man whose sin Jehovah shall not impute."⁵³ The second is in Romans 9:28, where Paul quotes Isaiah: "If the number of Israel's sons shall be as the sand of the sea, the remnant shall be saved; for Jehovah shall bring his word to pass upon the earth, completing and determining it."⁵⁴ The passage reflects Isaiah 10:22–23.

The third occurrence is in Romans 11:3, in the words of Elijah quoted from 1 Kings 19:10: "Jehovah, they have slain thy prophets; they have digged down thine altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life."⁵⁵ The fourth is in Romans 14:11, which quotes Isaiah 45:23: "'As I live,' saith Jehovah, 'not a knee but shall bow to me; not a tongue but shall confess to God.'"⁵⁶ The fifth is in Romans 15:11, which quotes Psalm 117:1: "Praise Jehovah all ye gentiles; and let all the peoples praise him."⁵⁷

Rutherford did not use the name in every quotation where the Hebrew text has the Tetragrammaton. In Romans 9:29, which quotes Isaiah 1:9, he retained the expression "the Lord of Hosts".⁵⁸ In Romans 10:13, which quotes Joel 2:32, he rendered, "Every one who will call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."⁵⁹ He also rendered the confession of Romans 10:9 in capital letters, "JESUS IS THE LORD".⁶⁰

Rutherford did not explain his use of the name in the preface. His usage nevertheless shows that, as a classical scholar of the first rank, he judged it appropriate to identify the God of the Hebrew Scriptures by name in certain of Paul's quotations. The Greek word Kyrios, "Lord", was used in copies of the Septuagint available in the first centuries of the Common Era to represent the divine name, and the same word was applied to Jesus and to human masters.⁶¹ By rendering the word as "Jehovah" in five quotations, Rutherford made clear to the English reader that Paul was quoting passages that spoke of the God of Israel by name.

↑ On this page

Other Contemporary Assessments

The account of Rutherford in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published a few years after his death, adds several details. It records that at Oxford he graduated in natural science "with a view to following the medical profession, which he abandoned in favour of a scholastic career".⁶⁸ It describes his death as having "deprived classical scholarship in England of one of its most brilliant modern representatives". The same article notes that he "devoted special attention to Attic idioms and the language of Aristophanes", and that his edition of Babrius was "a specimen of the later Greek".⁶⁹ It also mentions two smaller works for students, an Elementary Greek Accidence and Lex Rex, "a list of cognate words in Greek, Latin and English".⁷⁰

The detail about Babrius is of some interest for the translation of Romans. Babrius wrote his fables in a later form of Greek, and Rutherford's study of his language gave him experience in identifying the differences between classical and post-classical usage. The same skill lies behind his preface to Romans, in which he argued that the idioms of later Greek must be rendered according to their own meaning and not according to classical rules.

↑ On this page

Comparing the Versions

The notes to Rutherford's preface set out a number of passages in which he considered both the King James Version and the Revised Version obscure. One example is Romans 3:25. The King James Version reads, "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God." The Revised Version reads, "whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by his blood, to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God."⁷¹

Rutherford's own rendering, quoted earlier, reads in part, "whom God of old designed as a propitiation to be accepted by faith, a propitiation consisting in the shedding of his blood, ordained to make known God's righteousness for the remitting of past sins through his forbearance".⁷² The comparison shows his method clearly. Where both earlier versions keep the bare prepositional phrases of the Greek, "through faith" and "in his blood" or "by his blood", Rutherford expands them into phrases that state the relationship he believed they expressed, "to be accepted by faith" and "consisting in the shedding of his blood".

A second example from the notes is Romans 1:5. The King James Version has "for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name", and the Revised Version "unto obedience of faith among all the nations, for his name's sake".⁷³ In the doxology at Romans 16:26, where the same Greek expression recurs, Rutherford wrote of the gentiles "who are thereby invited to the obedience that is faith".⁷⁴ Here again the translator interprets a compressed Greek phrase by stating the relationship between its parts.

The closing doxology of Romans 16:25–27 illustrates the character of the whole: "Now to him who is able to give you the strength promised in my gospel, nay, in the preaching of Jesus Christ, wherein is revealed the secret counsel of God withheld for long ages but now disclosed, and through prophetic writings made known by the command of the eternal God unto all the gentiles … to the only wise God be glory through Jesus Christ."⁷⁵ Rutherford's marginal note states that the conclusion was "written perhaps by St. Paul's own hand".⁷⁶

↑ On this page

Reception

The Dictionary of National Biography acknowledged that Rutherford's translations of Paul "have to contend against some theological prejudice". It added its own judgement, that "he was more learned and acute than any of his critics".⁶² The remark suggests that the translation was criticised on theological grounds, presumably because some of its renderings differed from traditional interpretations, but that its scholarship was respected.

The translation appeared at a time when interest in the Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures was growing rapidly. The discovery of large numbers of Greek papyri in Egypt was beginning to show that much of the vocabulary and grammar of the Christian Greek Scriptures belonged to the everyday Greek of the period. Rutherford's own work reflected this development. His biographer noted that his view of the time at which interpolations entered classical texts "was modified in face of the evidence of the Egyptian papyri".⁶³ His insistence in the preface that the Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures must be studied as the Greek of its own time anticipated a principle that became widely accepted in the following decades.

↑ On this page

The Unfinished Translation

After his retirement Rutherford began a new translation of the letters to the Thessalonians and the Corinthians. He completed it as far as 2 Corinthians 8:24, and on 19 July 1907 he died "somewhat suddenly" at Little Hallands. He was buried in Bishopstone churchyard.⁶⁴ The unfinished translation was published posthumously with a biographical sketch by his friend Spenser Wilkinson.⁶⁵

The Dictionary of National Biography summarised his achievement: "Rutherford, though an admirer of Cobet and Blass, had too independent a genius to be any man's disciple. His fame as a scholar rests chiefly on his studies of Attic, of Aristophanes, and of New Testament Greek."⁶⁶ Portraits of him by J. Seymour Lucas are associated with Westminster School, and a cartoon by "Spy" appeared in Vanity Fair on 3 March 1898.⁶⁷

↑ On this page

Assessment

Rutherford's translation of Romans is the work of a scholar who knew Greek thoroughly and who applied that knowledge to the letters of Paul with independence and conviction. Its preface remains a clear statement of the case for translating the Greek of the Christian Greek Scriptures as the language of its own time, and for rendering its idioms by their meaning rather than word for word. The translation itself shows the practical result. It is written in continuous, carefully constructed English sentences that follow the movement of Paul's argument and bring out the sense of phrases that remain obscure in more literal renderings.

The translation is not without difficulties. Its long sentences can be demanding, and its vocabulary sometimes reflects the formal English of a Victorian classical scholar. Some renderings, such as "avouched son of God" and "informing holiness", are not easy for a modern reader. In other places, however, Rutherford's renderings bring out the sense of the Greek with notable clarity.

The use of the divine name in five quotations is a modest but notable feature. It shows that a translator working directly from the Greek, with no particular theological programme regarding the name, judged that the name Jehovah conveyed the sense of certain quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures more accurately than the title "Lord". His practice was not consistent, but it adds his authority to that of the other translators who restored the name in at least some passages of the Christian Greek Scriptures.

↑ On this page

Conclusion

William Gunion Rutherford was a classical scholar who turned in the last years of his life to the letters of Paul. His translation of Romans grew out of his knowledge of the history of the Greek language and his dissatisfaction with the Revised Version. He believed that Romans had been a plain letter to plain people, and he sought to make it so again for English readers. The translation, with its preface and analysis, remains a valuable witness to the scholarship of its time. Its use of the name Jehovah in quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures places it among the English translations that, in at least some passages, gave the divine name its place in the Christian Greek Scriptures.

↑ On this page

Notes

↑ On this page