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(Cymbeline i. v),
and by Philpot: 'What atonement is there between light and darkness?'
The word 'onement' has now dropped out of use, but is found in
Wycliffe's writings, and was employed, according to the Oxford Dictionary in
the year 1598, for 'atonement'.
In 1611, the A.V. translators were perfectly right to render the word
katallage by the then common word 'atonement', as they were also right to
render the same word in Romans 11:15 'reconciling' and in 2 Corinthians
5:18,19, 'reconciliation'. In the same way we find Shakespeare using the
word 'reconcile' on occasion, whereas in other plays he uses the word
'atone':
'Let it be mine honour ... that I have reconciled your friends and
you'.
The translators of the A.V. would have been perfectly within their
rights and have been fully understood by their own generation if they had
written:
'For if the casting away of them be the atoning of the world' (Rom.
11:15).
'And all things are of God, Who hath atoned us to Himself ... and hath
given to us the ministry of atonement; to wit, that God was in Christ,
atoning the world to Himself' (2 Cor. 5:18,19).
Such a rendering only sounds strange to our ears because we have lost
the word that was in common use at that time, but if the A.V. translators had
proceeded in this way, the apparent intrusion of the word in Romans 5:11
would never have been questioned. It is we, and not the A.V. translators,
who need to be adjusted and rectified.
When the Revisers in 1881 undertook to produce a new version, they
substituted for the archaic word a modern one 'in equally good use at the
time the A.V. was made, and expressing all that the archaism was intended to
convey, but more familiar to the modern reader'. They therefore adopted
'reconciliation' in Romans 5:11, but left the sense unaltered. 'Atonement'
and 'reconciliation' are synonymous, the only difference being that
'atonement' is English in origin, and 'reconcile' Latin.
As things stand, therefore, we incline to the belief that the word
'atonement', so consistently employed in the A.V. to translate the Hebrew
word kaphar, is used with intention, as meaning 'to make one', 'to reconcile'
and that instead of condemning the A.V. translators for introducing the word
into Romans 5:11, we should rather be grateful for the link that they have
established between the Old Testament types of atonement and the New
Testament consequence of the anti -typical sacrifice, the reconciliation.
See Reconciliation4.
We now turn our attention to the concept, 'a covering for sin', and an
examination of the Hebrew word kaphar, the word rendered, 'make anatonement'.
In the background of this investigation is the suggestion put forward by some
expositors that the Old Testament merely 'covered' sin, whereas in the New