The Biography of the Bible

solely in the interest of greater accuracy, but two of the translators, Principal George Campbell of Aberdeen, in 1788, and Gilbert Wakefield, fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1789–91, had enough literary sense to abandon the verse divisions for modern paragraphing. In 1798 Nathaniel Scarlett made an interesting experiment: in order to emphasize the conversational character of much of the New Testament, he arranged it as dialogue, putting the speakers’ names at the side as in drama. The most important of all these translations, however, was Challoner's thorough revision of the Catholic Rheims-Douai Bible in 1749.

Recognition of the need for an official revision of the King James version was voiced in 1810 by Dr. Marsh, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. With true Anglo-Saxon conservatism, nothing was done about it until 1856 when another Lady Margaret professor, Dr. Selwyn, brought the matter up in the Canterbury Convocation, thus provoking a motion in the House of Commons for the appointment of a Royal Commission to consider various "amendments" to the King James version and report back to the House—much as if the Bible had been a set of legal statutes. Finally, in 1870, through the efforts of

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