Клайв Льюис – C. S. Lewis Bible: New Revised Standard Version (страница 7)

Lewis sat for “responsions”—the entrance exam to Oxford University—and passed all but the mathematics paper. He was accepted to the university provided that he passed the math section at a later date—something that in fact he failed to do. However, his student career was interrupted by the First World War, and his sense of duty to his adopted country drove Lewis into enlistment in the British Army. He trained for the war in the Officer’s Training Corps at Keble College and was made a lieutenant of the Somerset Light Infantry, arriving at the front in the trenches of the valley of the Somme, on his nineteenth birthday. During this time he began to read the works of G. K. Chesterton and discovered a plausible apologetic for the Christian faith. As he wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, all of his reading began to close in on him. He was discovering that the authors he most enjoyed were Christians. After the war he found to his delight that the university had waived, for returning officers, the requirement for passing responsions, and he returned to Oxford. Lewis received three degrees—in classics, literature, and philosophy. Later, he would win a teaching post at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was during his early years at Oxford that Lewis began the more serious business of reconsidering the claims of Christianity.

Lewis had many intellectual barriers he had to hurdle, and slowly he passed over each one, moving from his atheism and materialism, through a period of agnosticism and idealism, until he finally became a theist. And it was at this time in his life that Lewis felt he could go no further. He believed he could no more know God personally than Hamlet could know Shakespeare. Nearly two years later Lewis did in fact convert to Christianity. One of his friends at Oxford was J. R. R.

Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was a Christian, and Lewis says he was one of the human causes of his conversion; in essence it was Tolkien who led Lewis to faith in Christ. Lewis revisited the Hamlet-Shakespeare analogy and decided it was a good one. Certainly Hamlet, a character in a play, could never break out of the play and introduce himself to the author. But Shakespeare, the author, could have written himself into the play as Shakespeare the character and thereby made an introduction between author and character possible. And Lewis believed that something like this actually occurred in history when God the Son became a man.

Lewis’s conversion to faith was followed by a life of spiritual discipline. He spent time daily in Bible study and prayer. He committed himself to a community of faith and even went to a spiritual director to be discipled. Furthermore, he gave of his resources—both money and time—in service to Christ. He took what he had, his pen and his brilliant mind, and harnessed the gifts God gave him for service to Christ. All who have read his works are the beneficiaries.

EDITOR’S NOTE

On Scripture: C. S. Lewis generally referred to the Authorized Standard Version (King James Version) of the Bible in his writings. He also read regularly and studied from the Greek text.

On grammar: During the time of C. S. Lewis’s writing, English speakers and writers often used the word should where today it is more common to use the word would. In places where the grammar is incorrect, we have placed a bracket next to the word should to provide greater understanding of Lewis’s writings.

On abbreviations: C. S. Lewis had a habitual style of using shorthand or abbreviations in his writings. Following is an explanation of each abbreviation:

cd. = could

v. = very

wd. = would

wh. = which

Xianity = Christianity

TO THE READER

This preface is addressed to you by the Committee of translators, who wish to explain, as briefly as possible, the origin and character of our work. The publication of our revision is yet another step in the long, continual process of making the Bible available in the form of the English language that is most widely current in our day. To summarize in a single sentence: the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952, which was a revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which, in turn, embodied earlier revisions of the King James Version, published in 1611.

In the course of time, the King James Version came to be regarded as “the Authorized Version.” With good reason it has been termed “the noblest monument of English prose,” and it has entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt.

Yet the King James Version has serious defects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of biblical studies and the discovery of many biblical manuscripts more ancient than those on which the King James Version was based made it apparent that these defects were so many as to call for revision. The task was begun, by authority of the Church of England, in 1870. The (British) Revised Version of the Bible was published in 1881–1885; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated with the work, was published, as was mentioned above, in 1901. In 1928 the copyright of the latter was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education and thus passed into the ownership of the Churches of the United States and Canada that were associated in this Council through their boards of education and publication.

The Council appointed a committee of scholars to have charge of the text of the American Standard Version and to undertake inquiry concerning the need for further revision. After studying the questions whether or not revision should be undertaken, and if so, what its nature and extent should be, in 1937 the Council authorized a revision. The scholars who served as members of the Committee worked in two sections, one dealing with the Old Testament and one with the New Testament. In 1946 the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament was published. The publication of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, took place on September 30, 1952. A translation of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books of the Old Testament followed in 1957. In 1977 this collection was issued in an expanded edition, containing three additional texts received by Eastern Orthodox communions (3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151). Thereafter the Revised Standard Version gained the distinction of being officially authorized for use by all major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.

The Revised Standard Version Bible Committee is a continuing body, comprising about thirty members, both men and women. Ecumenical in representation, it includes scholars affiliated with various Protestant denominations, as well as several Roman Catholic members, an Eastern Orthodox member, and a Jewish member who serves in the Old Testament section. For a period of time, the Committee included several members from Canada and from England.

Because no translation of the Bible is perfect or is acceptable to all groups of readers, and because discoveries of older manuscripts and further investigation of linguistic features of the text continue to become available, renderings of the Bible have proliferated. During the years following the publication of the Revised Standard Version, twenty-six other English translations and revisions of the Bible were produced by committees and by individual scholars—not to mention twenty-five other translations and revisions of the New Testament alone. One of the latter was the second edition of the RSV New Testament, issued in 1971, twenty-five years after its initial publication.

Following the publication of the RSV Old Testament in 1952, significant advances were made in the discovery and interpretation of documents in Semitic languages related to Hebrew. In addition to the information that had become available in the late 1940s from the Dead Sea texts of Isaiah and Habakkuk, subsequent acquisitions from the same area brought to light many other early copies of all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures (except Esther), though most of these copies are fragmentary. During the same period early Greek manuscript copies of books of the New Testament also became available.

In order to take these discoveries into account, along with recent studies of documents in Semitic languages related to Hebrew, in 1974 the Policies Committee of the Revised Standard Version, which is a standing committee of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., authorized the preparation of a revision of the entire RSV Bible.

For the Old Testament the Committee has made use of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1977; ed. sec. emendata, 1983). This is an edition of the Hebrew and Aramaic text as current early in the Christian era and fixed by Jewish scholars (the “Masoretes”) of the sixth to the ninth centuries. The vowel signs, which were added by the Masoretes, are accepted in the main, but where a more probable and convincing reading can be obtained by assuming different vowels, this has been done. No notes are given in such cases, because the vowel points are less ancient and reliable than the consonants. When an alternative reading given by the Masoretes is translated in a footnote, this is identified by the words “Another reading is.”