A History of Bible Translation: Chapter 3 - The Reformation

The reformation really got going when Erasmus began a new translation of the Bible into Latin, based on Hebrew and Greek. He decided to produce a ‘definitive’ Greek text, now known as the Textus Receptus or ‘Received Text’. When Luther saw this, he said to himself, ‘If it’s ok to produce a fresh translation of the Bible into Latin, why not go the whole hog and translate one from Greek (and Hebrew) into German?’ And so the reformation begun. Within a few years Bibles were being translated into a number of European languages. William Tyndale, another Oxford linguist and theologian, began an English version of the New Testament, again working from Greek manuscripts, and within a century this was reworked by a committee commissioned by King James 1^st into what we now know as ‘The Authorised Version’ or ‘The King James Version’, also using Coverdale’s edition of the Bible that included the Old Testament.[1] Many of these translators were, or became, leaders in the reformation, and for the first few years there was much persecution. Tyndale himself was executed just a few years before the King of England gave permission for the Bible to be published and distributed in English. The English and German Bibles came out just as the printing press was invented, and so mass distribution of the printed word became a possibility for the first time in history. We are now experiencing a similar revolution with the advent of digital publishing, so can appreciate how quickly such a new method catches on and is used for good to get the Word of God into the hands of many. The publication of these Bibles, in the ordinary spoken language, sometimes known as the 'vernacular' or 'mother tongue', was a revolutionary move away from the use of Latin in churches, and this caused a lot of waves. The strange thing is that we never learn from history, and whenever Scriptures are published in the local vernacular it causes waves amongst many in authority, and those who have grown up reading the Bible in a language of wider communication such as Spanish, French, Russian or Classical Arabic or a national language such as Urdu or Tagalog.

The Textus Receptus is still the basis of many Bible translations, though of course it was basically the work of one scholar many centuries ago. Today we have more manuscripts available (such as the Dead Sea scrolls), and more advanced scholarship, so most modern Bible translations are based on  Hebrew and Greek texts published by the Bible Societies, though it is usual practice to show variations between those and the Textus Receptus in footnotes, in case someone is worried when they find differences between the modern translation and an older translation such as the King James Version or Luther’s Bible.

Occasionally people ask me whether or not we translate the Bible from the ‘original’, meaning the King James Version. Sadly, I have to disillusion them, and explain that this translation, though the first of its kind in English, was not the ‘original’ Bible. Important though it is in the history of English Bible translation, and indeed in the development of English as a literary language, it is, at the end of the day, a very good 17^th century translation.[2] Let’s not forget how much it depended on the work of Tyndale and Coverdale.[3]

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[1] Much of the Old Testament was translated by George Joye.

[2] It was published in 1611. Tyndale and Coverdale’s work had been published in the 1530s, some seventy years earlier.

[3] Coverdale’s Bible was actually a combination of work by Tyndale, Joye and others.