THE NEWEST TESTAMENT.—Various attempts have been made from time to time to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length of life is destined for the latest attempt, _Sayings and Stories_, a translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,” and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent” of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact, to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.