My father--Charles Bray Williams.

My father, Charles Bray Williams, was born on January 15, 1869. People usually tell me that he could not possibly be my father, he must be my grandfather!

He grew up on the family farm, which was near the small country village of Shiloh in extreme northeastern North Carolina's Camden County--not too far from the Outer Banks area to the east and the Great Dismal Swamp to the north. His family included six children--four boys and two girls.

His Education

Charles turned out to be the scholar of the group, often recalling his habit as a boy of reading and studying his Latin with his book tied to the handles of his plow. Growing up in the years right after the Civil War, he experienced times of hardship, and as in most families, it was necessary for him, like other sons, to work in the fields every day. But Charles, by burning the midnight oil and by studying his lessons while his team rested periodically from their plowing, was able to report to the teacher of the public school on Friday afternoons and quickly recite the whole week's assignment. By the age of fifteen, he was teaching in the country school, earning $20 a month, which he used to help pay off the mortgage on the old family homestead. At eighteen, Charles entered Wake Forest College with $48 in his pocket, plus $150 borrowed from the local educational board. He graduated as the class valedictorian in 1891, with a four-year average of 98.5.

Just before enrolling at Wake Forest, Charles, at the age of seventeen, was licensed to preach. Three years later, the Wake Forest Baptist Church ordained him. He served as pastor of the Winton Baptist Church, principal of the school in Winton, and raised money for a new school building during his first five years following graduation. In Winton, Charles met and married Alice Owen, and in 1897, they moved to Pennsylvania where he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary, graduating with his B.D. degree in 1900. While working on his divinity degree, he somehow had found time to take a business course in Poughkeepsie, New York. While a student, he pastored churches in Chester, Pennsylvania, and in nearby New Jersey cities. In 1899, his first child was born, Charles Weston.

His Academic Career

After Charles' graduation from Crozer, the Williams family headed west in 1900 to settle in Texas, where he pastored several churches during the next five years. In 1903, their second child, Eunice Lois, was born. The dean of the theological school of Baylor University, B. H. Carroll, hired Charles in 1905 as chair of Greek New Testament and Interpretation, which led to his being one of the first professors hired for the newly formed Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. While teaching at Baylor, Charles traveled by car during the summers to attend summer school at the University of Chicago, where he received his M.A. in 1907 and Ph.D. in 1908. His dissertation, The Participle in the Book of Acts, was probably the seed from which his New Testament translation would grow.

Charles was a bundle of energy who loved to do everything in a hurry. Can you imagine traveling 2,000 miles roundtrip with a wife and two young children in the first decade of the 1900s, with roads being what they must have been and cars still being a primitive mode of transportation.

As the first librarian at Southwestern Seminary, Charles catalogued the first 5,000 volumes of its excellent library. From 1913 to 1919, he served as dean of the seminary and as managing editor of the Southwestern Journal of Theology, while continuing to teach his Greek courses. Most likely during this time of teaching New Testament Greek to seminary students, Charles began working on his translation that would be published twenty years later in 1937.

In 1919, Charles resigned his position at Southwestern to accept the presidency of Howard College in Birmingham (now Samford University). In his two years there, he led the college in paying off a $60,000 debt; raised an additional $400,000 for an endowment; and succeeded in having the college accredited by the Southern Association. Yet, he ran into opposition from alumni when he recommended relocating the college from Marion to downtown Birmingham. (1)

In 1921, Charles returned to his teaching, research, and writing, accepting a position as professor at Mercer University where he taught from 1921 to 1925. His wife, Alice, died in 1925, and Charles moved to Jackson, Tennessee, to teach Greek and Ethics at Union University. His tenure at Union lasted until 1938, and during his years there, he finished his New Testament translation, and it was published in 1937.

His Second Family

During the years of college and seminary teaching, Charles preached in numerous churches and pastored several in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. In 1933, he was called as pastor by a small church in Friendship, Tennessee, not far from Jackson. There he met Edith Stallings, a young English teacher who was a member of the church. They were married in 1934, and I was born in June of 1935. Once again, he demonstrated his boundless energy and determination to get things done quickly.

I was born when my father was sixty-six years old, just two years before he retired for the first time. In a letter written to his brother Sim back in Shiloh on December 15, 1937, Charles noted how happy he was with his new family: "I have a fine faithful wife who does everything she can daily to make me comfortable and happy.... I have as sweet a little daughter as any daddy has. She is growing and developing and is showing herself so smart physically and mentally. She can set the table and do other house chores for mother and daddy.... Charlotte is talking Santa Claus all the day now."

When I was four years old, our family moved to Tampa, Florida, and my first real memories as a child began there. Basically, I knew my father as a retired person who was still working most of the time as a preacher, teacher, or writer. Never one to really retire, especially at the young age of sixty-eight, my father promptly found a teaching job at a Bible Institute in Tampa and began to travel to nearby towns like Sarasota, Brandon, and Plant City to do interim pastorates. I became quite a fan of the Sarasota Morrison's cafeteria during my fifth or sixth year, since we usually had dinner there every Sunday.

I remember my dad pecking away at his old Underwood No. 5 typewriter, continuing his writing during the week. I have no young childhood recollection of my father's mentioning the New Testament translation, but in retrospect I am sure that was an important part of the last few years he was teaching at Union University. He was probably putting the finishing touches on it about the time I was born. Throughout his years of teaching New Testament Greek at Baylor, Southwestern Seminary, Mercer, and Union, his students probably continually urged him to work on a translation of the whole New Testament. Yet, he rarely talked about or mentioned his translation work, not even in his letters to his family back in North Carolina. In a collection of mostly handwritten letters (a few of them were typewritten) that my cousin Charles (my father's Shiloh namesake who was Sim's son) found in his mother's attic after she died and made copies to send to me, my father never mentioned his work on the translation. In a letter to his brother in 1921 from Mercer, Charles wrote: "I am a born teacher, they say. Surely one thing I know: I love to teach and love educational work."

In addition to his New Testament translation, which by the early 1940s was out of print because the New York publisher, Bruce Humphries, had gone out of business, my father produced numerous other books, writings, and articles. He continued to write even after his retirement from Union, and, of course, he always had a weekly sermon to prepare.

Return to North Carolina

In the fall of 1941, I started school at Roosevelt Elementary school in the Palma Ceia area of Tampa where we lived. My extreme shyness must have subsided some because I remember saying to my mother that I would walk by myself to school on the first day of classes. After I had been in that school only two months, my father accepted the call to return to his old home church in Shiloh, North Carolina, to be their pastor. His brother, Sim, had suggested his name to the church, and the members eagerly asked him to come be their pastor. We hurriedly packed up and moved to what was to become an interesting home for me for the next five years--the pastorium of Shiloh Baptist Church, a big two-story house in the middle of the village and about two blocks from the church. I started back to first grade in the big old Shiloh school and proceeded to become a preacher's kid--becoming my dad's constant companion. He began an intensive system of visitation to all the families of the church, and I often accompanied him on those visits. He would sometimes let me sit in his lap and steer the car on some of the country roads.

Our world quickly changed in late 1941 following the outbreak of World War II. Pearl Harbor was bombed just two months after we arrived in Shiloh, and because our town was located about fifty miles south of Norfolk, Virginia, and its shipbuilding facilities, our part of North Carolina was suddenly in a dangerous area of the world. I was too young at first to realize much of the danger we were in, but I remember hearing Mr. Kaltenborn on the radio talking about the dangers of German submarines trying to get close to Norfolk's shipyards. My father never missed the evening news on the radio, and he was an ardent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt.

Many sailors lived in the Norfolk area, and many times one would appear at the front door of the pastorium with his girlfriend, asking my father to marry them before the sailor had to ship out for Navy duty. I was a witness (or at least had to go across the street to the village store to find one) at many impromptu weddings in our living room.

During these years, members of the community were expected to take turns as aircraft spotters or to work at the library folding gauze bandages. I vividly remember going with my dad and mother to take part in these activities. My favorite cousin, Charles, had just graduated from Duke University, and he and his brother Bailey went off to Grand Rapids Naval Training Center to become Navy officers. Charles came home periodically wearing his handsome uniform and carrying his movie camera. He took lots of home movies of my father while he was chopping wood, with my help, out in the garage, practicing one of his sermons in his study, or reading from his Bible or New Testament. I have all those old sixty-five-year-old home movies now on a video tape, and every now and then I watch them.

Retirement ... Again

After the war ended in 1946, my father retired again at the age of seventy-seven, and we moved back to Florida--first to a small town near DeLand and Stetson University and then two years later to Lakeland, where my mother could earn a better salary teaching school again, since she was now the wage earner for the family. I graduated from Lakeland High School in 1952. Perhaps my father's best advice to me was that I take at least two "practical" courses--typewriting and shorthand--in addition to the traditional Latin and English and other high school courses. Years later, when I was in college and graduate school, his advice was appreciated because I was able to get good part-time jobs to help with my tuition costs.

My father once more became a teacher at the Florida Bible Institute in Lakeland, and he was working on another book, A Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, when an inquiry came from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago about the possibility of their publishing once more the New Testament translation. Several representatives of Moody came to our home in Lakeland to meet with him and sign the necessary papers. The managing editor of Moody was Kenneth Taylor, who later became well-known for his paraphrase translation, The Living Bible.

New Editions of In the Language of the People

In 1951, just a few months before he died, my father had the pleasure and gratification of once again seeing his New Testament translation In the Language of the People in print. Moody printed a thick, red, buckram-bound copy at first, then for a few years also published a nice leather-bound India-paper edition. I still have the first leather copy that they presented to my father with his name printed in gold.

My mother became quite a salesman for the translation after my father's death. She moved back to Tennessee and became the manager of the college bookstore at Carson-Newman College, where she made sure that almost all the ministerial students were introduced to the translation. Moody, during the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, produced many different editions of the testament, even finally putting it out in a paperback edition. In the late 1970s, Moody ceased publication, and for almost ten years, it was again out of print. In 1985, Holman Bible Publishers obtained the publishing plates from Moody, and in 1986, a month or two before my mother died, she was able to see the translation again in print.

For about nine years, Holman continued to sell its 10,000-copy printing, but in 1994, the last copies were sold before I was notified or even given a chance to buy a few reserve copies. I asked Holman to transfer the copyright to me, and for several years, I tried unsuccessfully to find another publisher who might be interested in publishing the translation. Finally in 1999, my husband and I decided to find a printer in Atlanta who could produce 1,000 copies for us, and in 2000, the Millennium Edition went on the market, sold primarily through our website from our home in Montreat, North Carolina. With help in publicizing the new edition by friends and former students who had been using the translation for years and by placing only a few ads in several of the state Baptist papers and Baptists Today, the New Testament has continued to sell steadily. This past year we found another publisher who is now printing the Montreat edition for us on much thinner paper and in two different bindings--one a hardback leather. Our web address is www.sprawls.org/williams and, among other information, includes an order form. We have sold copies in the past year to people living in Russia, England, Switzerland, and Australia, and we have had buyers who live in northern and western parts of the United States.

Our son, Charles Perry Sprawls, a classical musician in New York City, will continue to manage the New Testament business when we are no longer able to do so, and hopefully, this translation, which has proved so valuable to several generations of readers over the past seventy years, will continue to be available to future generations.

(1.) See http://www.samford.edu/pubs/belltower/Mar2006_3/williams.html, accessed April 11, 2007.

Charlotte Williams Sprawls lives in Montreat, North Carolina.