Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Commemoration of Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures, 1922

The Old Testament [is] a reflection of national life in sharply defined phases: the Hebrews, Israel, and the Jews successively appear as its bearers. But there is a religious unity through the complicated story, a unity which carries with it a continuity of purpose. The people themselves were not always conscious of that purpose; even when they were, they frequently did their best to thwart it. Nevertheless, the purpose prevailed. The religious mind calls it a revelation of God, and the more we pass through a study of the literature into a conception of the people among whom it arose, the more we compare their faith and fortunes with those of their neighbours, the more impossible it seems to explain the rise and career of these particular Semitic clans within the ancient world, a part from a Divine choice. Those who called the literature the “Old Testament” believed that this Divine choice and purpose was fulfilled in the “New Testament,” in the religious movement within Judaism which, during the first century A.D., named itself after Jesus Christ. The members of this movement held that the Old Testament was unintelligible apart from the New, and the New unintelligible apart from the Old. The Church believes that the divine purpose revealed in the Old Testament is not to be fulfilled in any national future for Judaism, within Palestine or elsewhere, but in a catholic community for the world. Hence its Bible adds the New Testament to the Old as the one and only sequel.

... James Moffatt (1870-1944), A New Translation of the Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935, New York: Harper, 1935, Introduction, p. xv-xvi (see the book; see also Heb. 1:1-2; Ps. 18:2; 67:1,2; Acts 2:16-18,36; Rom. 8:1,2; Heb. 12:1-2; more at Bible, Church, Fulfillment, Israel, Life, Nation, Purpose, Revelation, Unity)

 
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2024, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day,
        with Robert Douglas, principal contributor
Logo image Copyright 1996 by Shay Barsabe, of “Simple GIFs”, by kind permission.
Send comments to curator@cqod.com.

Last updated: 11/23/19

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