3. The Bible from Greek to English

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When you come across a word in another language, or a word you haven’t seen before, what is your reaction? How do you work to understand the word? Do you try to find someone who can translate it or do you look it up in a dictionary or on the internet?

Translation Approaches

Before we look at the Bible’s journey from Greek to modern English we need to consider the two approaches to translation.

• Word-for-word translation attempts to render each word in the original language in its equivalent word in the new language, and to retain the original word order as much as possible.
• Thought-for-thought translation is a modern approach that attempts to render each thought or expression in the original language in a phrase that expresses the thought as well as the feeling in the new language.

Most translation up until the twentieth century was word-for-word. The New Living Translation, Good News Bible and New English Bible use thought-for-thought translation.

Jerome and the Latin Vulgate

The first major step was translating the Bible into Latin – the language of the church after the fall of Rome. In 382, Pope Damasus I commissioned a priest and scholar, Jerome, to revise and consolidate the older Latin translations of the scriptures. Jerome worked over the next twenty years, translating the Gospels first and then moving to the Old Testament and the rest of the New Testament. The “Vulgate” (common or “not royal”) included the canons of both the Old and New Testaments, plus the ten books Jerome called “apocrypha,” or disputed.            

Even though the pope had commissioned the translation, he died in 384, and the Vulgate had no official support until 1545. Nevertheless, it was the accepted authority in the Roman Catholic Church for more than a thousand years. As such it had significant influence on the translation of the Bible into English and other European languages (which in turn influenced the ongoing evolution of those languages into their modern versions). The Council of Trent in 1545 declared the Vulgate should be “held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever.”

Note . . . Even though there were a number of translations of New Testament material into the common languages of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church conducted services in Latin, which only trained priests could read.

Old English translations            

Parts of the Bible were translated into Old English (the predecessor of modern English) as early as 700. In almost all cases these translations were made to help priests whose Latin was not good enough to understand the Vulgate. Some examples include:

• A version of John’s Gospel by Bede in 735
• Translations of the Psalms in 850.
• Passages from the Ten Commandments and the Torah around 900 at the direction of King Alfred.
• The four Gospels in 990 (the Wessex Gospels).

Wycliffe’s Bible

John Wycliffe, a scholar at Oxford University, was the first to translate the complete Bible into (Middle) English. He finished the New Testament in 1382 and the Old Testament within the next fifteen years, working exclusively from the Latin Vulgate. He was a reformer who believed – one hundred years before Martin Luther – that every person should have a personal relationship with God and, therefore, every person should study the Bible.

Wycliffe also spoke against the privileges of the church: land, political office, multiple church positions and indulgences. These reformist ideas ultimately angered the English nobility as well as the church hierarchy. Parliament removed Wycliffe from his post at Oxford and banned his version of the Bible (even though he died in 1384, a church council in 1415 had his bones dug up and burned as a heretic).            

In 1455 Gutenberg printed the Bible (the Latin Vulgate) with moveable type. In 1517 Martin Luther published his “95 Theses,” which ignited the Reformation in Europe.

Tyndale’s Bible

William Tyndale became a priest in England in 1521, the same year the pope named English King Henry VIII “Defender of the Faith.” In 1522 he gained a copy of Martin Luther’s German New Testament and started to produce an English version of the New Testament. The Bishop of London denied permission to produce “heretical text,” so Tyndale went to Hamburg, Germany, to complete his work – which was published in 1525. Even though the English church immediately denounced the book and tried to suppress it, the translation standardized the English language and became the basis for the King James Version of the Bible (more details below).  Tyndale then started work on the Old Testament, but he was burned at the stake as a heretic in before he could finish. Some of the men who worked with him continued, publishing Genesis through Chronicles in 1537.            

While Tyndale and his followers were translating and publishing an English version of the Bible, King Henry began fighting the secular power of the church in England, and, ultimately, its power to prevent his divorce and remarriage to gain a male heir. He broke with the Catholic Church in 1533 and made himself head of the church inEngland. He died in 1547 and his son, Edward VI succeeded him. In 1552 the Anglican (English) Church published the Book of Common Prayer, which standardized worship practices (though still very similar to Catholic worship). Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor, was raised by her Catholic mother in France; when she succeeded Edward in 1553 she restored the Catholic Church. Six years later, Elizabeth succeeded her sister and took the country back to the Anglican Church, although she practiced religious tolerance in order to build the power of the crown and the military.

Henry had also initiated an English translation of the entire Bible, published in 1539 as the “Great Bible,” (which was primarily based on Tyndale’s work). In 1568 the Church of England revised the Great Bible to better align it with the Anglican view of the nature and role of clergy. The revision was issued as the “Bishops’ Bible;” but it never gained popularity. Finally, exiled Catholic scholars produced the English Douay-Rheims New Testament, which was published in France in 1582.

Bible Trivia
The Bible was not divided into chapters and verses
until 1551 (Greek New Testament) and 1558 (Latin Vulgate).

The King James Bible 

Elizabeth died in 1603 without an heir to the throne. Parliament, which had greatly increased its power during the unsettled time, chose Scotland’s current – and Calvinist (Presbyterian) – king, James to take the English crown. As part of his acceptance he pledged “no changes” in the Anglican Church. The next year James convened a conference of Anglican leaders at Hampton Court to deal with the alleged problems of the earlier translations brought forward by the Puritan group within the English church. 

James wanted to make sure the new version did not promote anti-monarchial positions so he issued a list of instructions to the translators (47 scholars from the Church of England, all but one clergy). The instructions prohibited any interpretive notes and directed the translators to work from the Bishops’ Bible as the primary basis, although the scholars could also consult the Tyndale, Great and Geneva Bibles. The scholars worked in committees which were assigned different parts of the Bible. The initial translation was completed in 1608, and then reviewed and edited for the next three years. The King James Bible (formal title is “Authorized Version”) was published in 1611. Even though the king had initiated this work, it took more than forty years to become widely accepted as the primary Bible of the Church of England.            

The King James Bible was updated in 1881 (New Testament) and 1885 (Old Testament) as the “Revised Version.” American Biblical scholars participated in this revision project and published their own “Revised Version, Standard American Edition” (more familiar as the “American Standard Version”) in 1901.

Revised Standard Version

The Revised Standard Version is a revision of the American Standard Version. It was begun in 1936 with the goal of a readable and literally accurate American English translation (“as literal as possible, as free as necessary”). The translators used the best available Greek texts for the New Testament and the Hebrew Masoretic Text (not the Septuagint) for the Old Testament. The New Testament was published in 1946, and the Old Testament in 1952.

This was the translation that finally eliminated the archaic “thy,” “thee” and “thou,” as well as the verbs with “st” on the end (“hadst”) in favor of the modern “you” and “had.” The RSV also restored the use of “Lord” and “God” for the divine name.

The Revised Standard Version was updated again in 1989 to use gender-neutral language throughout both testaments.

Contemporary Translations

Today there is a wide variety of translations of the Bible, for example: New English Bible (1970), New International Version (1973), and New Living Translation (1996, revised in 2003). There are also many different versions with notes and study guides for specific groups of people, such as Life Application Bible, Women’s Study Bible, the Student’s Bible and the Good News Bible for Teens.

Bible Trivia
Both ancient Hebrew and Greek had singular pronouns
that included both male and female genders, but English does not.
This is why we have to resort to “she or he” or even “s/he.”

NOTES . . .

Lesson 4
Genesis 1-2: Creation of the heavens, the earth and humans.