Four Gospels

A scholarly rendering of the Four Gospels shaped by Torrey's strong theories about Semitic originals, this version belongs to the tradition of fresh translations made directly by an individual scholar rather than by committee revision of an existing text. Its base text is the Greek Gospels, but the work proceeds from Greek together with reconstructed Semitic hypotheses, so that passages are read in light of the Aramaic or Hebrew wording thought to lie behind them. The guiding philosophy is scholarly and rests throughout on a Semitic-background hypothesis, a line of inquiry that occupied biblical scholars who noted Semitic idiom within the Greek of the Gospels. The result is chiefly of historical interest: its translation choices reflect a specific reconstruction of the linguistic background of the Gospels, and it therefore documents a particular moment and position in the long discussion of the sources and composition of the Gospel texts.