|
Forty years ago, in view of a proposed Commentary upon the New Testament,
Hort, then Vicar of St. Ippolyt's, suggested ‘a partition the whole New
Testament’ between Lightfoot, Westcott, and himself.<note
1> The Johannine writings fell to the share of the present Bishop of
Durham, but the Apocalypse was ‘not finally assigned’<note
2> Benson, who at the time had recently entered upon his duties at Wellington,
does not appear to have been mentioned in connexion with this particular book,
although a hope was entertained that he might undertake the Epistle to the
Hebrews. But the Apocalypse possessed stronger attractions for a nature so
deeply in sympathy with the visionary and the symbolical. ‘All his life,
perhaps’ (his daughter writes), ‘he had been peculiarly interested
in the Revelation … When the book was actually beguni I do not know, but
for many years he habitually worked at it before breakfast, and on any unoccupied
Sunday afternoons. <note 3>’ Cyprian and
the Study grew together under the Archbishop's hands at Lambeth and
Addington, and in his last journey he carried both with him, ‘that no
moment might be lost in the intervals.’ But while the Cyprian was
practically ready for publication, the Study was left in an unfinished
state. It is in this condition that it has been given to the world, the Editor
having rightly judged that ‘it is better to leave a characteristic’ work
rough-hewn than to let any hand but that of the master round the outlines and
smooth the surfaces <note 4>.’
The Archbishop's own estimate of his work is characteristic. ‘If it
ever sees the light’ (he wrote in 1896) ‘many will think it a very
odd book. Folks are edified in such different ways. But it has edified me,
which was what I began it for<note 5>.’ These
words on the whole give a fair idea of the book. It is certainly not without
a vein of oddity, which. shows itself both in the plan and in the execution.
The volume consists of five Essays, broken into two groups by a translation
which is preceded by an analysis, quaintly called ‘a Breviate.’ An
Introduction, an Appendix, and a series of aphorisms adapted from Auberlen,
complete the collection. The style is as unconventional as the arrangement;
the Archbishop's Thucydidean ‘avoidance of the obvious<note
6>’ makes itself felt here even more distinctly than in the Cyprian.
And there are ‘folks’ who will not be ‘edified’ by
the contents. Readers whose interest in the Apocalypse is limited to questions
of Introduction — sources, authorship, date, and text — will be disappointed;
and even less encouragement is given to those who regard it as a promising
field for prophetic research. The Study ‘makes no pretensions
to be an Interpretation, still less what many Interpretations are, a new Prophecy<note
7>.’ To the Archbishop the Revelation presented itself as an apocalypse
of ‘principles and powers,’ and not a prediction of particular
events or a foreshadowing of historical personages. His one historical note
is intended to show by an example the baselessness of a system which interprets ‘by
persons and events<note 8>.’ The true key
to the Apocalypse is to be found in attention to the structure of the book.
It is here that the student will find the Study an enormous help. Under
the Archbishop's guidance order springs out of chaos; the perplexed mass of
visions, voices, songs, descriptions, becomes a great spiritual drama, with
its characters, its scenery, its occasional bursts of choric poetry; whether
the work of a single author or one in which Jewish sources have been laid under
contribution by a Christian hand, the Apocalypse in its present form is seen
to be a magnificent unity. This result is obtained not by technical arguments,
which another pen may presently overthrow, but by a sympathetic handling of
the book which appeals the imagination and to the spiritual sense. Fragmentary
as the Study is, it leaves an impression of the substantial oneness
of the Revelation, which criticism will not easily efface.
The scholarship of the book is not unworthy of the Senior Medallist and Master
of Wellington. Yet the translation will seem ‘odd’ enough to the
reader who forgets Archbishop Benson's intense sympathy with his author. It
is a deliberate attempt to reproduce in English the glorious audacities of
the original. Who but Benson would have ventured to print ‘the Was’ as
a rendering of St. John’s ὁὁ ἦν? The version is full of surprises,
some of which are novelties; e.g. 4, 3 ‘like
/304/ a vision of jasper stone’; 10,
7 ‘and the mystery of God was finished’; 12,10 ’the Kingdom
became our God's and the authority His Christ's’; 14,1 ‘behold
the Lamb gone to stand on the mount Sion’; 15,2 ‘them that
come conquering forth from the Wildbeast’; 17,5 ‘a name written
a mystery’; 20,14 ‘this is
Death the Second’; 21, 17 ‘man's measure which is angel's measure’;
22,15 ‘out, ye dogs.’
The Archbishop's view of the Greek of the Apocalypse is set forth in a separate
Essay characterically called ‘A Grammar of Ungrammar.’ Starting
from the cautious admissions of Dionysius of Alexandria, he works his way through
the solecisms so called, and defends the greater part of them on various grounds.
The writer's habit of introducing without notice comments proceeding sometimes
from himself, sometimes from Christ or from the ‘hierophant,’ has
the effect of breaking the grammatical structure and producing the appearance
of a solecism which does not really exist. In other cases grammatical difficulties
are met by a slight change in the punctuation, or by an improved translation.
Thus in 7,4 ἐσφραγισμένοι is
right, if a comma precedes, as it does in the text of W. H. ; in 22, 5 the
true construction is καὶ νὺξ οὐκ ἔσται ἔτι .
. καὶ φῶς ἡλίου [οὐκ ἔσταο ἔτἰ.
It is admitted, however, that when all deductions have been made, some insoluble
anomalies remain. Only two examples are given ( 14,19 τὴν ληνὸν .
. τὸν μέγαν, 21,14 τὸ τεῖχος … ἔχων);
but the Essay was left unfinished, and we may perhaps add 11,4 οὗτοί εἰσιν αἱ δύο ἐλαῖαι .
. αἱ . . ἑστῶτες, 12,5. ἔτεκεν υἱὸν ἄρσεν,
where neither W. H.'s υἱόν, nor υἱὸν ἄρσενα (P
95 al.) improves the sense, and 19,20 εἰς τὴν λίμνην τοῦ πυρὸς τῆς καιομένης.
In dealing with the writer's use of λέγων, the Archbishop
rightly calls attention to the practice of the LXX; but it is surely unnecessary
to find an extreme case of this anomaly in Mc.
15, 36 δραμὼν δέ τις .
. ἐπότιζεν αὐτὸν λέγων,
where he regards λέγων as practically equivalent
to οἱ δὲ λοιποὶ εἶπαν of
Mt. 27, 49.
Here and there the Archbishop has perhaps suffered his judgement to be warped
by his sympathies, as when he translates ὰδικεῖν by ‘wrong’ when
it relates to the inanimate creation (6,6;
7, 3; 9,4)<note 9>, although Lc. 10,19 or even his
favourite author Thucydides might have suggested a different rendering in such
combinations as ὰδικεῖν τὴν γῆς, τὸν χόρτον, τὸ ἔλαιον.
A more serious drawback is the absence of any due recognition of the Semitic
influences which affect both the language and the thought of the Apocalypse;
through the limitations imposed upon him by the exacting claims of his office,
Archbishop Benson was compelled to study the book ‘solely from the point
of view of a Greek scholar <note 10>.’ But
these defects do not interfere with the general usefulness of the work. Within
its own province it renders unique service to the student. A mere πάρεργον — one
of two πάρεργα produced amidst the incessant
labours of an archiepiscopate — the Study is a monument of the
enthusiasm, the power of realization, the spiritual insight and force, which
characterized the personality of its author.
 Edward
White Benson
Born:. July 14, 1829
Died: October 9, 1896
Biography: Father of the Bensons: The Life of Edward White Benson, Sometime
Archbishop of Canterbury by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd. Lennard,
226 pp., £16.99, ISBN 1 85291 138 7
Note 1: Life and Letters of F.J.A. Hort,
pp. 417 f.
Note 2: Prefatory note to Dr. Hort's I Peter,
by Bishop Westcott.
Note 3: Apocalypse, p. ix.
Note 4: Ib. p. xii.
Note 5: Apocalypse, p. xii.
Note 6: Prefatory note to Cyprian, p.
iii.
Note 7: Apocalypse, p.I
Note 8: Ib. p.176.
Note 9: Apocalypse, p.73, note: ‘ “Wrong” — ἀδικεῖν,
does not in the Apocalypse lose its sense, [? when it is used] as here, of
the innocent creation.’
Note 10: lb. p.131. |
