One more example of these strictly literal renderings must suffice, John iii. 4. common version,—­“Nicodemus saith unto him, ’How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’” Sawyer’s version,—­“Nicodemus said to him, ’How can a man be born when he is old? can he become an unborn infant of his mother a second time, and be born?’” The absurdity of the form of language put into the mouth of Nicodemus by Mr. Sawyer is obvious at a glance; no such thought was ever so expressed by any speaker in any language; it is wholly forced and unnatural; and upon comparing Mr. Sawyer’s translation with the original, we find that he has paraphrased the passage with a vengeance, altogether omitting to translate the clause [Greek:  eis thaen koilian ... eiselthein kai gennaethaenai], and interpolating an expression, instead, which is neither in the original text nor in the thought.  Probably Mr. Sawyer’s motive for taking this extraordinary liberty was a false delicacy, amounting to prudery; but it ill assorts with his assertion, that his work is not a paraphrase, nor one of compromises, or of conjectural interpretations.

We might proceed with numerous illustrations’ exhibiting the weakness of Mr. Sawyer’s claim of an improved and strictly literal rendering, but these are enough.  Before he claims much on the score of scholarly accuracy or critical rendering, he must explain these inconsistencies and remove these blemishes.  But if such faults are patent in the simplest narrative passages, what confidence can we place in Mr. Sawyer as a translator of difficult, abstruse, doctrinal, and disputed texts?  In every instance in which we have tested his translation of the original, the changes which he has made from the common version not only, in our judgment, are no improvements, but positively render the expression less clear, less forcible, and less precise; of course, as the language is made worse, the thought is, in the same proportion, obscured.

Another peculiarity of Mr. Sawyer’s translation, which we suppose he claims as an improvement, does not meet our approval.  In all cases where there is no word in our language which expresses the signification of the Greek, as in the names of weights and measures, Mr. Sawyer substitutes for the language of the common version the foreign word of the original,—­sometimes merely giving the orthography of the Greek in English letters, sometimes affixing a termination,—­and frequently he adds, in brackets, an explanation of his rendering.  As examples of this, we quote the following:—­

“Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a modius [1.916 gallon measure].”

“I tell you that you shall not go out thence till you have paid even the last lepton [2 mills].”

“It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three sata [33 quarts] of flour.”

“And there were six stone water-jars there, placed for the purification of the Jews, containing two or three metretes [16.75 or 25.125 gallons] each.”