Chapter 10: Early Translations and the Latin Bible

A Bible meant for every language

The Bible was never meant to remain in one language. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit enabled the apostles to speak so that each pilgrim could say, “how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?” (Acts 2:8). The Great Commission is to “all nations” (Matthew 28:19), and John’s vision of heaven includes people “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” standing before the throne (Revelation 7:9). The gospel travels by translation.

The New Testament writers themselves relied on translation. When they quoted the Old Testament, they often quoted the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, and the Holy Spirit allowed the Greek wording to be used as the Word of God (compare Hebrews 10:5-7 with Psalm 40:6-8). The Word of God remains the Word of God when faithfully translated.

The earliest translations

Aramaic Targums. Jewish translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament into Aramaic for synagogue readings, reflecting the practice of Nehemiah 8:8.

The Greek Septuagint (from the third century BC), as described in chapter 4.

The Old Latin versions, from the second century, made in North Africa and Italy for Latin-speaking churches.

Syriac. Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. AD 170), the Old Syriac Gospels, and later the Peshitta (“simple”) version, which became the standard Bible of Syriac-speaking Christians.

Coptic, for Egyptian Christians, from the third and fourth centuries.

Gothic, by the missionary bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) in the fourth century, who first reduced the Gothic language to writing for the purpose.

Armenian, produced in the early fifth century after Mesrop Mashtots designed an Armenian alphabet. Ethiopic and Georgian versions followed.

Slavonic, begun in the ninth century by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who also created an alphabet for the Slavs.

In each case, the Bible gave a people its first written literature (Metzger 1977; Daniell 2003).

Jerome and the Latin Vulgate

By the fourth century, the Old Latin copies had become varied and uneven. In AD 382, Pope Damasus asked Jerome (c. 347–420), the most learned biblical scholar of the Latin church, to prepare a reliable Latin text. Jerome revised the Gospels from the Greek. He then moved to Bethlehem, where he learned Hebrew, and in the following twenty years translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint, completing his work about AD 405 (Jerome, Prologus Galeatus). He took the Hebrew canon as his standard, which is why he called the extra books of the Septuagint apocrypha.

His translation, later called the Vulgate (“common,” in the sense of popular), met with suspicion at first, since many feared to depart from the familiar wording. In time it became the Bible of Western Christendom for more than a thousand years. The Council of Trent in 1546 declared it “authentic” for public use in the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries, Bible reading in the West meant reading Latin, which most people could not read.

The Bible in early English

Caedmon (c. AD 680), an unlearned herdsman of Whitby, was given the gift of song and turned Bible stories into Old English verse (Bede, Hist. eccl. 4.24).

Bede (died AD 735), the monk of Jarrow and the church’s first English historian, was translating the Gospel of John into English while he lay dying, according to the account of his disciple Cuthbert (Cuthbert, Letter on the Death of Bede).

King Alfred the Great (died AD 899) placed passages of Scripture, including the Ten Commandments, at the head of his law code in English.

The Lindisfarne Gospels (c. AD 700), a Latin text with a tenth-century Old English interlinear translation added, are among the earliest English renderings of the Gospels.

These were partial and local. No complete English Bible existed until the fourteenth century, and none would be freely available to the ordinary reader for two centuries more.

Summary. From the very beginning, the church translated. Each translation carried Scripture to a new people. The Latin Vulgate became the Bible of the West, and it prepared the way for the vernacular translations of the Reformation.