Some of you may be surprised to learn that the King James
Version of the Bible wasn’t the first Bible translation. Apart from the translation
of the Old Testament into Greek, mentioned above, there are many other versions
of the Bible:
The Samaritan Pentateuch – this contains the first five
books of the Old Testament. The Samaritans only took these books as part of
their canon. They also had Damascus as their capital and worship-centres in Dan and Bethel for
many years, and were considered a sect by Jews. The Samaritan Pentateuch is not
a translation, as such, but an important text, in that it duplicates the ‘Torah’
– the teaching part of the Hebrew Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls – also not a translation, but an important
collection of Hebrew texts, dating back to the 1st century BC. The
scrolls were found in a cave in Qumran, so are sometimes known by that epithet.
They were remarkably well preserved, given the fact they had been lying there
for about twenty centuries before they were discovered. Thankfully the extreme
dryness of the climate led to their preservation. Nevertheless, they ended up
in fragments, and scholars have been pasting them back together ever since.
Still, one or two books, such as Isaiah, are in a very good state.
The Peshitta – this is the Syriac translation of the Hebrew
Bible (Old Testament). It was probably translated into Syriac in the 2nd
century AD.
The Vulgate – this is the translation of the Bible into
Latin, and was carried out by Jerome in the 4th-5th
centuries AD.[1] By
then a Latin version of the Bible was very much needed, as Greek was no longer
as influential as it had once been. The crazy thing is that this became the
standard translation of the Bible for the next ten centuries! Latin became the language
of the Western church, and remained so until relatively recently. It was only
in the 1960s that the Roman Catholic church decided to allow mass to take place
in local languages rather than in Latin.[2]
The Eastern church continued to use Greek until the advent of the Russian
Orthodox Church, and some other Slavic churches, which use Church Slavonic[3]
for their liturgy. Of course, most of these churches have readings and sermons,
and these were sometimes in local languages, at least in the last couple of centuries.
The Russian Orthodox Church today continues to use Church Slavonic for its
liturgy, but the sermon is normally in modern Russian, as are the readings.
As for English translations of the Bible – the first was
probably by John Wycliffe and his colleagues in the 14th century. He
was an Oxford scholar, but also trained up lay preachers and evangelists, and
they were encouraged to use a translation of the New Testament from Latin into
English made by Wycliffe and others, so that ordinary people could understand
them. It was a translation of a translation, since the Bible is written mainly
in Hebrew and Greek.[4]
He himself was not persecuted, but he was posthumously labelled as a heretic.
After his death his bones were dug up, burnt, and thrown in the river Swift.
His writings were also burnt. Wycliffe was around at the very beginning of the
Reformation, which we will get to in the next chapter.
There were also translations into French, German, Czech and
Arabic around this time. Arabic was earlier, in fact. Still, in Europe, at
least, the Latin Bible continued to hold sway.
[2]
The decision to allow this was made at Vatican II, which took place in Rome,
1962-1965.
[3]
This dates back to the 9th century.
[4]
This is, generally speaking, not a good idea, as it is much like making a tape
of a tape, in that the number of errors is bound to increase, much like the
hiss on a recording increases.
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