Four Gospels

An influential scholarly translation of the four Gospels, issued together with extensive critical dissertations. It works directly from the Greek, taking the Greek Gospels as its base text, and is classed as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing English version. Its manner is at once scholarly and idiomatic, aiming at a rendering in current English rather than the traditional diction inherited from earlier Bibles. Among its distinctive features are the accompanying essays on the principles of translation and on the language of the Gospels, which proved as influential as the rendering itself, and which situate the work within the wider nineteenth-century movement toward vernacular biblical translation grounded in textual scholarship. The volume is associated with the Restoration tradition of Alexander Campbell, among whose churches it circulated widely, and it remains of interest chiefly for its combination of translation and critical apparatus.