,[To TEE ZAMA OP THE " SPECTATOR.") Sur,—Mr. De Havilland
Bushnell records the singular fact that at the gone examination for Honour Mode. no fewer than nine candidates concurred in aesdering the familiar passage (John viii. 44), "He is a liar and the father of it," by the words "He is a liar; and so is his father." Their rendering he oharacterizea as "an uncommonly good shot," and wonders "whether they held some novel theory of the ancestry of the devil." I would suggest that the explanation of the simultaneous concurrence of nine men in this unusual rendering may perhaps be found, not in their having made spontaneous (yet identical) "shots," but in their all having _read the same hook. Dr. Monoure Conway, in his Idols and Ideals (London, 1877), says of John viii. 44:— "Though the English version turns the sentence into bad grammar and worse Dense, the original is plain= He is a. liar; and so is his father.' The notion that the devil had a ,father was one of the late phases of the Gnostics philoeorthy. The Demiurge employed to create -the world was associated with the devil, and suggested as his creator, by Marcion."—(Idols and Ideals, tit. " Christianity," p. 8.)
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