# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1855_S134
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

134 Lutheran-Theological Pastors’ Library.

knew so little how to handle language; one cannot imagine how such men, in their oral presentations, where this obscurity of language must certainly have been even more pronounced, managed to make themselves understood at all, much less how they won a large number of educated people for Christianity. But alongside its ridiculous aspect, that game with pro and idem quod also has a serious one. Does Scripture not become, as a great linguist indicated long ago, like a waxen nose that each person can turn this way or that according to the limitations of his knowledge of language? ... If all the quid pro quos that a number of interpreters in past decades put into the mouths of the apostles were ever compiled, their contemporaries would have to be seized with just astonishment.” (See: Preface to Winer’s Grammar of the New Testament Idiom. Leipzig. 18[illegible]) Gratefully as we accept this public rebuke by so great a linguist as Winer, which he directs at the many who in the recent past imagined that they had accomplished great things in biblical philology, and gratifying as it is that men such as Winer have helped bring about a better era in the study of the sacred languages, the time has nevertheless not yet come when an orthodox preacher could dispense with a key to the sacred languages such as Christian Stock has given us. It is impossible for an unbeliever or one of false belief to teach correctly the language of a book whose content is either entirely or at least partly foolishness to him *). As highly as Luther once valued what he had learned from the rabbis in matters of grammar, he nevertheless wrote: “There it is, there it lies, there it remains: whoever does not rightly and purely possess, nor wishes to possess, this man who is called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom we Christians preach, should leave the Bible alone; that is my advice. He will certainly stumble over it, and the more he studies, the blinder and more foolish he will become, whether he be Jew, Tartar, Turk, Christian, or whatever he may wish to call himself ... If it were a matter of wishing and choosing whether I should have in Scripture the understanding of St. Augustine and the beloved Fathers, that is, of the apostles, with the shortcoming that St. Augustine sometimes does not have the correct letters or words in Hebrew, as the Jews mockingly say; or whether I should have the Jews’ exact letters and words—though they themselves do not have them consistently everywhere—without the understanding of St. Augustine and the Fathers, that is, with the Jews’ understanding, it is easy to determine what I would choose: I would let the Jews go to the devil with their understanding and letters, and with St. Augustine’s understanding, without their letters, I would go to heaven. For although Augustine cannot say Kilajon as the Jews do, where he says Cucurbita in Jonah 4:6, and likewise cannot say veniet Hemdath, where he says veniet desideratus in Haggai 2:8, and many similar things, nevertheless

*) We readily concede that, as far as purely linguistic matters are concerned, perhaps no writing by an unbeliever offers so much that serves the proper interpretation of the Bible as Winer’s aforementioned grammar.