Article April 3, 1902 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from S. M. Crothers, L. D. MCCOLLESTER, John Ruskin, Spurgeon, R. T. Watson

Professor J. H. Moulton writes in the Biblical World of the remarkable change which has taken place within ten years in the lexicography and grammar of the New Testament Greek. This change is due to the discovery in Egypt of a large amount of scraps of Greek centuries. These papyri include not only formal documents, but letters, receipts, memoranda, and informal papers of many sorts, in which the actual colloquial Greek of Pagan Egypt at and shortly after the New Testament period may be studied. The surprising result of such studies, as carried on by Deissmann and other scholars in Germany and England, is that we shall no longer hear of a new Testament or Hebraistic dialect of Greek. so many of the New Testament phrases regarded as peculiarly dependent on the Aramaic mothertongue of the writers have been found in the writings of Greek-speaking people who could not possibly have been so influenced that the old distinction between "sacred" and "profane" Greek is no longer tenable. Apparently the Greek of Palestine was practically the Greek of the whole Roman Empire.... Incidentally we find ourselves moved to this question: If the contents of a few rubbish heaps in Egypt can overturn the whole body of inductions and deductions on which New Testament critics have based their confident analysis of the literary style of an author, a century, a country, what is the bearing of this fact on the much more complicated problem of analyzieg a collection of Hebrew prophecies on the basis of style when we have scarcely any contemporary "pagan" relics of the Hebrew language by which to check our results? Much current criticism ignores the extreme scarcity of the literary materials and the correspondingly large probability of a wrong induction.—The Standard.

The dictionaries do not give us the New Testament definition of repentance. They tell us that the word means contrition, sorrow, grief, regret, penitence, and so on. These are terms of emotion, and they show us how widely and deeply the popular preaching has degenerated into appeals to the emotions, and how it has been robbed of intellectual and spiritual strength. There is a place for emotion in true Christian experience and in a strong Christian life, but it is far from being the first place.

Repentance, in the New Testament, is a change in man's thought, in his way of looking at supreme things, in his inmost convictions and purposes, and especially in his way of thinking about God. It is an appeal to the intellect, the will, the faculties of reason and choice, the "heart" in that large, fine Biblical meaning of the great word which includes all the powers of our moral and mental nature....

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