History
The First Translations
The Vulgate Bible
Earliest English Translations
First English Bible
First Printed Bible
Luther and the German Bible
First Printed New Testament in English
First Complete Printed Bible
The First Translations: The Septuagint (mid 3rd Century BC)
By the 3rd century BC, after the conquest of much of the Middle East by Alexander the Great and his successors, there were many Jewish people living outside Palestine, in Egypt and elsewhere, who no longer understood even Aramaic, let alone the Hebrew in which most of their Scriptures were written. Some translations were therefore made into Greek, the most commonly-used language of the region. The most famous of these at the time was the Septuagint, which was regarded with great respect because of a tradition that seventy scholars from Alexandria (in Egypt) had worked under divine inspiration for seventy days to produce it (this was why it was called “Septuagint”, which means “seventy”). Later, many of the early Christians also used this as their holy book. Several books written in Greek by Jewish authors of this period were often grouped together with the texts translated from Hebrew and Aramaic, and were also regarded as holy scripture; many Christian churches still recognise some of these books. They are correctly called the Deuterocanon, or sometimes, less accurately, the Apocrypha.
Although the ancient Hebrew texts had been written on long rolls of leather, in Egypt a more convenient writing material was a kind of “paper” made from strips of fibre from the stalks of the papyrus plant. These were laid at right angles to each other, then pounded and treated until they stuck together and formed a smooth writing surface. This was not a suitable material outside Egypt, however; in a drier climate, it became brittle, while in a wetter one it soon rotted. Elsewhere, therefore, people used vellum (the treated skin of sheep or goats), or other materials.
Translating the Bible into Latin The Vulgate Bible, AD 383-410
When Christianity became more widespread in the western half of the Roman Empire, where Greek was not much spoken, there was a need for a Latin version of the Bible, and translations soon began to appear. Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, asked a brilliant scholar Jerome, to revise the existing texts and make a new translation.
Jerome moved to Palestine, and began by translating the entire volume from Greek into Latin. He also learnt Hebrew, and then made a fresh translation of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew text. This whole task took him about twenty-five years, and his translation became Europe’s Bible for the next thousand years.
The Vulgate was created by assembling books from a variety of sources, including Jerome. Jerome’s translations only extended as far as the four gospels of Matthew Mark Luke & John in the New Testament.
The Earliest English Translations, AD 735
As Christianity spread through the eastern part of the Roman Empire, many of its texts were translated into local languages. In the countries in the western part of the Empire, however, the Vulgate became the standard text.
Although Christianity soon spread quite widely in England, here also the Christian Bible continued to be available only in Latin and only well-educated people could read it for themselves. Ordinary people had to rely on what they were told. A legend tells of a Saxon cowherd, Caedmon, a lay-brother who lived in an abbey. The brothers there used to sing after the evening meal, and Caedmon began to sing songs telling Bible stories, in the Anglo-Saxon language that people spoke every day. His paraphrases are believed to be the earliest form of the Bible in an English language.
About fifty years after Caedmon, an outstanding scholar called the Venerable Bede translated the Lord’s Prayer into Anglo-Saxon, and wrote commentaries on many books of the Bible. Believing that ordinary people should be able to read some part of the Bible in a language that they understood, he began to translate the Gospel of John. Bede died in 735, and there is no copy of his work left, so we do not know whether he was able to complete his task. However, this was the beginning of serious attempts to translate the Bible into the language of ordinary people in Britain. In the next two centuries, a tradition of translating the Bible into Anglo-Saxon continued to develop, marked particularly by King Alfred’s Psalter and Aelfric’s Old Testament.
The First English Bible, AD 1383
When the Norman French conquered England in 1066, they also took over the English church, and required the use of the Latin Bible. Over the centuries, the language of the invaders and the Saxon and other languages spoken by the conquered inhabitants of Britain began to blend together, forming the basis of modern English.
One of the first to realise the importance of the new English language was the controversial religious activist, John Wycliffe. Wycliffe organised a band of “poor priests”, much as St Francis had, to live simply and to give the message of Christ to the ordinary people in a way that they could understand. These “Lollards”, as many called them, travelled all over England preaching in homes, at crossroads, and in fields, and ministering to the spiritual needs of the people.
Wycliffe soon came to realise that people needed a Bible in English, and set out to provide one. With the aid of Nicholas de Hereford and some others, he completed a first translation into English, based on the Latin Vulgate, in 1383. In the following year, immediately after Wycliffe’s death, a revision was made, and circulated through the country by the Lollards. About two hundred manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions still survive, mostly from the early 15th century, which indicates a high level of demand. Although a single copy cost a sum equivalent to the wages of a labourer working for 2000 days, these texts were eagerly sought, even only single pages. One man gave a whole load of hay, which would have given him much of his year’s income, for the few pages containing the Epistle of James. However, the church authorities feared that trouble might follow if people without education tried to read and understand the Bible for themselves, and they prohibited Bible-reading by any but the clergy. Punishments were sometimes severe.
The First Printed Bible, AD 1456
Up until this time, even books as large as the Bible were still written out by hand. This took a lot of time and effort; in addition, the pages were often very beautifully decorated, so books were very expensive and not easily obtained. However, this was about to change.
By the middle of the 15th century, there were some efforts being made in continental Europe to find a quicker way to produce books. This was stimulated in part by increasing trade with China where books were already being printed by the woodblock technique. The first person to succeed in printing whole books from metal type was Johannes Gutenberg, who was born in Mainz.
It took Gutenberg many years to solve the considerable problems. He had to work out a satisfactory alloy of various metals, so that the type would continue to print clearly and cleanly over a whole print run; he also needed to find a practical mould for the letters, and suitable ink and paper. Developing this process was costly, and he had to borrow quite heavily; as a result, he often appeared in court, and the court records are our main source of information on Gutenberg’s invention.
Gutenberg began by printing several small Latin grammars and materials on single sheets. The Latin Bible was the first work of substantial size to be printed. This vast undertaking occupied him from 1450 to 1456. The investment of effort, time and money does not seem to have made Gutenberg and his partners wealthy, but others soon capitalised on his invention. The new process did not immediately result in more accurate copies. Indeed, it was a long time before a printed book, even a Bible, was as accurately transcribed as a copied one; the printed book was also much less decorative than the copied one. However, a printer could do as much in one day as a copyist could do in a year, so for the first time in Europe it was possible to develop a “mass” market (among the literate) for the printed word.
Luther and the German Bible, AD 1522-34
A number of translations of the Bible into the local (vernacular) languages had appeared in different countries of Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries. For example, a translation of the Bible into German had been made in the middle of the 14th century, and it had even been printed at Strasbourg in 1466, but the language was clumsy and difficult to understand, and it was based (like Wycliffe’s translation into English) on the Vulgate text. By the beginning of the 16th century, some scholars were growing dissatisfied with the Vulgate, and they preferred to base their translations on texts in the original languages. Many church leaders saw this as a challenge to their authority, as the Vulgate text was the accepted Bible of the European church of the day.
A translation of the Bible into German from the original languages played a significant part in Martin Luther’s efforts to reform the church. Luther finished a German translation of the New Testament in 1522 and of the whole Bible in 1534. For the first time in Western Europe since Jerome’s day, a translation into the vernacular had been based, not on a Latin translation (the Vulgate), but on Hebrew and Greek texts. Despite some changes in spelling and punctuation, Luther’s Bible has remained the standard text of German Protestants, and it also had a considerable influence on later English translations.
The First Printed New Testament in English, AD 1525
Despite the invention of printing in the mid-15th century, there was still no printed version of the Bible in English at the beginning of the 16th century (although Caxton had included some translated passages from the Vulgate in his Golden Legend of 1483). This lack disturbed William Tyndale, who had studied at both Oxford and Cambridge and who was keenly aware of the new currents of thought. In argument with other scholars and church officials, he hotly declared: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.”
Tyndale went to London to seek from the church or from the King money and support for a new translation. However, as he later wrote, he came to “understand at the last,not only that there was no room in my Lord [the Bishop] of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.” In 1524, he went to Germany, and the printing of his translation of the New Testament began in Cologne. This was dangerous work, and he was soon forced to flee up the Rhine to Worms, where two editions of his New Testament were printed in 1525. Early the next year, copies were smuggled into England in bags of grain, cloth and furs. Immediately, both the King (Henry VIII) and the church authorities prohibited its use, and the church authorities bought up all they could find and burnt them. They objected less to Tyndale’s translation into English than to his annotations to the text, which were very critical of some Catholic teachings.
Meanwhile, Tyndale was working on the Old Testament, with the financial support of some English merchants. Finally, in 1535, he was betrayed, and was imprisoned for sixteen months in Vilvorde Castle in Belgium. He begged his friends to send him a warm coat, his Hebrew Bible, Grammar and Dictionary, and also a candle, so that he could continue with his work. He never completed it, however. Found guilty of heresy, William Tyndale was strangled and burnt near Brussels on October 6, 1536.
Tyndale’s translation strongly influenced all subsequent translations into English until recent times; indeed, much of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament in the Authorised Version (King James Bible) is closely based on his work.
The First Complete Printed Bible in English, AD 1535
The task which William Tyndale had begun was completed by Miles Coverdale. Born in Yorkshire (like Wycliffe) in 1488, and educated at Cambridge, Coverdale was soon in touch with the “new learning”. He left England in 1528 and, probably in Germany, prepared an English version of the whole Bible, using Tyndale’s work on the New Testament and the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) and also referring to a number of versions in Latin and German. This was therefore not a direct translation from Hebrew and Greek texts, but a compilation of the work of many great translators. This first printed English Bible was published in either Zurich or Marburg, on October 4, 1535. Despite the persecution and imprisonment of Tyndale, this translation circulated in England quietly and without much difficulty. There is even some evidence that Anne Boleyn, King Henry’s second wife, may have persuaded Henry to have the English Bible placed in every church, although this command was not issued.
Coverdale’s style lacked the vigour and originality of Tyndale’s, but it is often much smoother. Many of his expressions, particularly in the Old Testament, were eventually retained in the King James Bible.
