Luther who after completing his translation of the Hebrew scriptures, found the Aprocrypha remaining and gathered them together by themselves, under the name they now bear. Yet it is difficult today to get a Bible of less than pulpit proportions that includes them, though for educational purposes such a Bible is indispensable. How we came to produce one, and in so doing found that we had made the first direct translation of the Complete Bible from the most ancient languages preserving it, into English, is a somewhat personal story. At a meeting of the New Testament Club, at the University of Chicago, on February 24, 192o, I read a paper on modern versions of the New Testament, in which I fear I found a good deal of fault with such of them as I knew. I should probably deal with them now with more restraint. Nothing was further from my mind than doing one myself. But in the discussion that followed, it was dryly suggested that I should attempt one and Mr. Crippen of the University Press, who was present, passed this suggestion on to Professor Laing, the editor of the Press. Dr. Laing irrmnediately invited me to prepare such a version. I well remember my first reaction to his letter. I knew that any translation of a masterpiece must be a failure, and fresh from my examination of previous efforts in that line I saw the impossibility of doing an entirely adequate job. My first impulse was to refuse. But on reflection, I thought better of it. The modern versions I knew best were the Twentieth Century, Weymouth a d Moffatt,--each with its peculiar excellencies, but all the work of British hands. Yet if Deissmann was right about the strong colloquial strain in New Testament Greek,-and I was satisfied he was,-there might be room for a really American translation of the New Testament, made directly from the Greek into our terse vigorous native English. After all, there are more readers of the English Bible in America than in any other country in the world, and perhaps there was room for one translation made frankly in our distinctive vernacular, which does of course differ somewhat from that of Britain.