English translations of the Bible: Encyclopedia II - English translations of the Bible - Early translations

English translations of the Bible - Early translations

English translations of the Bible - Early Jewish translations

Some of the first translations of the Jewish Torah began during the first exile in Babylonian, when Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Jews. With most people speaking only Aramaic and not understanding Hebrew, the Targums were created to allow the common person to understand the Torah as it was read in ancient synagogues.

The most well-known movement to translate books of the Bible appeared in the 3rd century BCE. Most of the Tanakh then existed in Hebrew, but many had gathered in Egypt, where Alexander the Great had founded the city that bears his name. At one time a third of the population of the city was Jewish. However, no major Greek translation was sought (as most Jews continued to speak Aramaic to each other) until Ptolemy II Philadelphus hired a large group of Jews (between 15 and 70 according to different sources) who had a fluent capability in both Greek and Hebrew. These people worked for several years to complete what is now called the Septuagint.

While there is accumulating evidence that there was spoken in Judea at that time a colloquial Greek, with which most people would be familiar, it is yet probable that Jesus spoke neither Greek nor Hebrew, but Aramaic. He knew the Hebrew Bible, but most of his words have come down to us in translation. We have his words as they were translated by his disciples into the Greek, in which the New Testament was originally written. However, because of the hundreds of references to books only contained in the Septuagint that are in the Gospels (and the New Testament in general), it seems clear that Jesus and the early Church tended to use the Septuagint for a basis of teaching.

English translations of the Bible - Early Christian translations

By the time the writing of the New Testament was completed in the 2nd century AD, while Greek was still current speech, the Roman Empire was so dominant that the common people were speaking Latin almost as much as Greek, and gradually, because political power was behind it, the Latin gained on the Greek, and became virtually the speech of the common people. The movement to render the Bible in the language of the time appeared again. It is impossible to say now when the first translations into Latin were made. Certainly, there were some within two centuries after Jesus, and by AD 250 a whole Bible in Latin was in circulation in the Roman Empire. The original writing of what constitutes today's New Testament was most likely written in Greek, and so were the common translations of the Old Testament. The Latin versions of the Old Testament were, therefore, translations (Greek to Latin) of a translation (Hebrew to Greek). These translations generally came to be known as the Vetus Latina.

English translations of the Bible - Jerome's Bible

There were so many of these versions, and they were so unequal in value, that there was natural demand for a Latin translation that should be authoritative. So came into being what is called the Vulgate, the very name of which indicates the desire to render the Bible in the vulgar or common tongue. Jerome began by revising the earlier Latin translations, but ended by going back to the original Greek, bypassing all translations, and going back to the original Hebrew wherever he could instead of the Septuagint. Fourteen years he laboured, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine, to do his work the better. In AD 404 his Latin version appeared. It met a storm of protest for circumventing the Septuagint, so dominant had the translation become. Jerome fought for it, and his version won the day, becoming the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early translations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki