Revision of the Armeno-Turkish Bible

For your affectionate salutatory in Latin, accept my thanks. I dare not attempt a reply in the same learned tongue, for I do not see that I know a bit more of Latin, or even of theology, than I did before. And I should be very sorry to do any thing which would bring dishonor upon the reverend heads of those whose honest intention, I doubt not, was to do honor to “ your brother and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ,” his residence at Ilass Keuy, on the Golden Horn, where he had a pastoral supervision of the Female Seminary, then under the care of Miss Mrest, and where he preached regularly on the Sabbath, preaching also at the capital. He resumed at the same time his revision of the Armeno-Turkish Bible, in regard to which he wrote to the Secretary of the American Bible Society: —

“ To aid me in the work, I have a Greek, an Armenian, and a Mussulman; and as those who might escape the sword of Ilazael were to be slain by Jehu, and those who might escape the sword of Jehu were to be slain by Elisha, so I hope that whatever errors may escape the notice of any one of my helpers will be detected by another. But, to put God’s blessed word into Turkish is a very difficult work, and I feel my incompetency more and more. The language is not a religious language; it has never been deemed lit by the Turks to be used for the sacred purpose of religious worship, and of course no written prayers or devotional books are to be found in pure Turkish.

“ To my Turkish teacher it sometimes seems quite shocking to express the everlasting truth of the Bible by the ordinary words for eating, drinking, walking, sleeping, wrestling, conquering, buying, selling, losing, saving; while such terms as justification, adoption, and sanctification, with the several benefits, which do either accompany or flow from them,’ are still more difficult to be disposed of in a manner which shall be intelligible, and yet not contemptible. I have suggested to him that if the Turks had long ago translated the Koran into Turkish, and had thus used the very language of the people in their religious worship, it would have been of great service to us in translating the Bible, as many words and phrases would then have been familiar and at home in religion, which now seem awfully strange and incongruous.