1. Manuscripts
The manuscripts serving as the foundation for modern translations are of several kinds and dates. In the first three hundred years AD, Roman mss. were commonly written on papyrus which was made from the pith of the stem of the plant of the same name. Vellum, made from the skin of a calf, kid or lamb, was also used and increasingly so from the third century. Some mss., always fragmentary where the Bible is concerned, are palimpsests—scraped a second time with a pumice stone and written on again. In the case of one of the Dead Sea scrolls, the matter was incised on thin copper sheets.
In the matter of materials, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the predominance of papyrus for written records (until the 4th c.) has given fame to the Phoenician city of Byblus, renowned for its export of that material. As such, the Greeks referred to papyrus as byblos, a book as biblion, and it is from this that we have the word Bible, or book, as well as bibliography and similar derivatives.
I should say here that I will refer to those writings that have authority with translators of the Bible as mss., although they are themselves translations where they are not copies. By translations, I will mean those modern efforts based on the aforementioned mss.
The Dead Sea scrolls are themselves among the oldest mss., being written in the 1st and 2nd centuries and in three varieties of Hebrew—classical, “Dead Sea Scroll” and proto-Tannaitic. They consist of around 900 mss. discovered between 1947 and 1956 at Qumran in eleven caves on the shore of the Dead Sea. They were wrapped in linen and placed in jars.
Also early and dating not later than 2nd c. is the Nash papyrus, which contains fragments of Exodus and Deuteronomy.
The Samaritan Pentateuch is 13th to 14th c., is written without vowel markings and in Samaritan characters.
11th to 12th century fragments of Ecclesiastes were recovered from Cairo.
The other Hebrew mss. of the Bible are dated from the 10th c. or later. These Masoretic mss. and printed texts number around 3400 in scrolls and codices. They are much more recent than Greek, Latin and Syriac codices and contain little variation.
The Septuagint mss. are in Greek and are the oldest translations of the Old Testament. A few fragments are preserved on papyrus but the vast majority are on vellum. These vellums give variously the whole New Testament (Codex Sinaiticus), the whole Bible (Codices Alexandrinus and Vaticanus), fragments of Isaiah (Codex Dublinensis), etc.
The Septuagint is so-called from 72 translators assigned to the work, and commonly referred to as the Seventy. According to legend, Ptolemy II Philadelphus wished to add the sacred books of the Jews to his library in Alexandria. He then released 100,000 Jewish slaves and sent them with an embassy to Jerusalem requesting a copy of the law and scribes to translate it to Greek. Six were sent of each tribe of Israel—thus the 72.
There are about 2300 extant New Testament mssi. Forty of them contain all the books. Very many are copies of the Gospels, Acts, or letters of Paul. Here as before, the vast majority of mss. are vellum not papyrus, which quickly becomes dry and brittle, and disintegrates. These mss. are Syriac, Greek and Latin, the Latin providing highly variable renditions.
St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, made in the late 4th c., led to a proliferation of copies, particularly after the 12th c., of which thousands of mss. exist.
Syriac mss. are not unimportant. Two were found in the 19th century that contained most of the Gospels; one, in an Egyptian monastery; the other, at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai. There is a harmony of the Gospels, found also in Arabic, belonging to the 2nd century. There are also the Peshitto (Pentateuch, plus New Testament books) and a Palestinian Syriac New Testament.
There are numerous Armenian mss. of the 9th c. The Revelation and Gospels are preserved in Coptic.
2. English Translations until the 20th Century
I will say nothing of translations other than English since there is a multitude of them. But it is worth mentioning that translations were made into Anglo-Saxon at least as far back as the 8th c. Bede is said to have made a translation of the Gospel of John into Old English. Alfred the Great (who drove out the Danes and rebuilt London) had some passages from the Bible translated into English and circulated.
But the first major translation into English was that of John Wyclif (or Wycliffe) into Middle English from the Vulgate in 1383, banned by the Oxford Synod in 1408.
In the late 15th c., the Oxford professor John Colet translated the New Testament for his students and later for the public at St. Paul’s, a recital attended at one point by 20,000 people.
The first of the modern era was done by William Tyndale from a Greek New Testament edited by Erasmusii, and aided by reference to the Vulgate. It was published in 1526.
A complete translation was finished in 1535 by Miles Coverdale who based it on the Vulgate and Martin Luther’s translation into German. Soon after, another appeared under the name Thomas Matthew, the pseudonym of John Rogers, a friend of Tyndale. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wanted an edition for the English church and commissioned a version from Miles Coverdale which was published in 1539 and is sometimes called the Great Bible. It was the first church-approved English bible.
In 1560, English puritans published an accurate translation, called the “Geneva Bible”iii as they had fled to that Swiss city during the reign of Catholic Mary. Following the innovation of Robert Stephensiv, the verses were numbered, while the paragraphs were divided according to Tyndale. This was the first version to supply italicized English words (for clarity’s sake) in the absence of those words in the original mss.
Similarly, Catholics in the time of Elizabeth fled to France and produced the 1582 Rheims New Testament and the 1609 Douay Old Testament, both made from the Vulgate.
Under Elizabeth, the Anglican Church was moved to compete with the Geneva Bible and so produced the “Bishops’ Bible” under the direction of Archbishop Matthew Parker. This version, however, failed to gain wide acceptance—partly from the translators’ weakness in the languages of the original mss., partly from lack of literary skill.
The inferiority of the Bishop’s Bible in accuracy and eloquence to the Geneva Bible prompted James I, Elizabeth’s successor and late Prince James VI of Scotland, to commission a new version. This version would have numbered verses, as the Geneva, each verse being made a paragraph of its own. Also as with the Geneva, words absent from the original mss. and supplied from English were printed in a distinct type. James forbade the translators to take controversial positions in their translation or notes. The result was an exceptionally strict, scholarly work of fine literary style, known as the Authorized Version or King James Biblev.
The translators’ preface, now generally omitted from printings, is of particular interest.vi The opening passage may as well be reproduced here:
The best things have been calumniated.
Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned. This will easily be granted by as many as know history, or have any experience. For was there ever anything projected, that savoured any way of newness or renewing, but the same endured many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition?
A man would think that civility, wholesome laws, learning and eloquence, synods, and Church-maintenance, should be as safe as a sanctuary, and out of shot, as they say, that no man would lift up the heel, no, nor dog move his tongue against the motioners of them. For by the civility, we are distinguished from brute-beasts led with sensuality: by wholesome laws, we are bridled and restrained from outrageous behaviour, and from doing of injuries, whether by fraud or by violence: by learning, we are enabled to inform and reform others, by the light and feeling that we have attained unto ourselves: and by eloquence are brought together to a parley face to face, and we sooner compose our differences than by writings, which are endless: and lastly, that the Church be sufficiently provided for, is so agreeable to good reason and conscience, that those mothers are holden to be less cruel, that kill their children as soon as they are born, than those nursing fathers and mothers (wheresoever they be) that withdraw from them who hang upon their breasts (and upon whose breasts again themselves do hang to receive the spiritual and sincere milk of the word) livelihood and support fit for their estates.
Thus it is apparent, that these things which we speak of are of most necessary use, and therefore that none, either without absurdity can speak against them, or without note of wickedness can spurn against them.
The King James Version marked an end to the feverish wave of Bible translation of the century before. In 1755, John Wesley produced a New Testament that revised the KJV with the help of Bengel’s Greek New Testament. But it would take until the late 19th century before the English-speaking world would see a similar proliferation of translationsvii.
It began with the Revised Version (1881-1895), which embraced the apocrypha as well as the standard testaments. The RV, and those to follow, arose from the accumulation of texts since the 16th c., and from criticism of mss. formerly serving as bases for translation. The work of the Revised Version was notable for its cooperation between British and American scholars. However, American revisers later determined that more changes were needed and brought out a separate version known as the American Standard Version (1901).
Overlapping with the appearance of the Revised Version, John Nelson Darby produced a New Testament (1859) and an Old Testament (1890), the latter published posthumously.
3. English Translations in the 20th Century
With the first years of the 20th c., the floodgates were opened. One translation (or paraphrase) trod upon the heels of another, producing among others the New Testament of Frank Schell Ballentine, a Unitarian (1901)—The Twentieth Century New Testament (1902)—Joseph Bryant Rotherham’s The Emphasised Bible (1902)—William B. Godbey’s New Testament (1902) based on Codex Sinaiticus and in which the four Gospels are printed in parallel columns—The Holy Bible in Modern English by Ferrar Fenton (1903) which was popular for a while for the plainness of the text although riddled with errors— Richard Francis Weymouth’s The New Testament in Modern Speech, in everyday English—Adolphus S. Worrell, The New Testament, containing study notes—The Holy Bible ... An Improved Edition, by American Baptist Publication Society (1912)—James Moffatt’s New Testament in “modern speech” (1913; the Old Testament appeared 1924-5)—E. E. Cunnington’s New Covenant, a revision of the KJV New Testament and later published as The Adelphi New Testament (1919) and The Western New Testament (1926, so-called because based on the “Western” readings of the Greek Nestle text)—a New Testament by Ivan Panin—a translation by American Jews, The Holy Scriptures, according to the Masoretic Text—Harry Tompkins Anderson’s New Testament, translated from the Sinaitic Manuscript discovered by Constantine Tischendorf at Mount Sinai—as well as New Testaments by Edgar J. Goodspeed (1923), William G. Ballentine (“into the English of to-day”; 1923), and Helen Barrett Montgomery (a Baptist revision of the ASV; 1924).
It will be seen, if the reader has not already noticed, that the tendencies of 20th c. translation are of two kinds: the pursuit of exact meaning and the rendering of that meaning in the plainest terms viii.
It may seem strange that there has been no third movement devoted to ensuring the literary quality of translation. Part of this lack may be owing to a distrust of art and a conflation of dignified form with excrescent adornment—with the obfuscation of pretty words. But there is equally little doubt that the past century of artists have, by deliberation or accident, given authorities every reason to distrust their talents, as their styles have tended to be bizarre and their tones, antinomian.
James Moffatt’s Old and New Testaments were published in 1926 as a single volume, which was a critical and popular success and has been reprinted as recently as 1995.
During the same year, a translation appeared by one Adolph Ernst Knoch; a translation doubtful to some from the author’s attempt to choose words supportive of a theology involving Universalism, Arminian soteriology, and Arian Christology. Whether these charges are true, I cannot say. But I will reproduce for the reader’s edification the extraordinarily long title that distinguished the work:
Concordant version, the Sacred Scriptures: designed to put the English reader in possession of all the vital facts of divine revelation without a former knowledge of Greek, by means of a restored Greek text, with various readings, conforming, as far as possible, to the inspired autographs, a consistent sublinear based upon a standard English equivalent for each Greek element, and an idiomatic, emphasized English version with notes, which are linked together and correlated for the English reader by means of an English concordance and lexicon and a complementary list of the Greek elements.
There then appeared the following translations which, for the sake of simplicity, I will throw into a list:
1927 – The Old Testament: An American Translation, J.M. Powis Smith.
1931 – The Bible: An American Translation, Edgar J. Goodspeed and J.M. Powis Smith.
1933 – The Four Gospels, A New Translation, Charles Cutler Torry.
1935 – The Westminster Version of the Sacred Scriptures, Cuthbert Lattey (New Testament).
1937 – The New Testament, a translation in the language of the people, Charles B. Williams.
1941 – The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, translated from the Latin Vulgate, Edward P. Arbez.
The Revised Standard Version of the New Testament appeared in 1946, followed by the whole bible in 1952. As it enjoyed a period of popularity, being used by Baptists among others but also appearing in a Catholic edition in ’66 and an Orthodox version at a later date, it deserves some comment.
Despite some criticism for looseness of translation, the RSV New Testament was well-received. But the Old Testament outraged many by what were regarded as outrageous liberties. The central, though not the exclusive, focus of detestation was the RSV’s translation of Isaiah 7:14, which rendered the Hebrew almah as “young woman” rather than as “virgin”. Since the text is generally regarded as prophetic of the virgin birth of the Christ, the alteration was read as a denial of the New Testament itself. A pattern of similar alterations and consequent criticism led inexorably to a decline in its use.
As mentioned, numerous other editions and expansions of the RSV were published; an Apocrypha in ’57; an ecumenical Bible in ’73; an ecumenical study Bible in ’77; and a New RSV in ’90.
Of those I am not now going to mention of the years 1946-1976, I count 14 New Testaments, Gospels or letters of Paul (including one in “Plain English” with a vocabulary of 1700 words) and 18 complete Bibles (including one in Basic English, with a vocabulary of 1000 words). I need hardly add that these, as at all epochs of translation, were made from a wide variety of mss. and combinations of mss., not to mention those paraphrasing or aided by prior English translations.
Of the same period, let me single out two for particular mention, and each for a very distinct reason. Roman Catholic scholars produced The Jerusalem Bible, which was published in 1966. This English translation has its roots in an earlier French work La Bible de Jérusalem, produced by the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem, and the English version carries the introduction and notes of the French with slight amendments. The translation is said to be free of any noticeably Catholic program—I mean, of what would appear polemical distortions to Protestants. And it is distinguished by the contribution of J.R.R. Tolkien, who may have been no little aid to the version’s much admired style. A new version of the translation appeared in 1985 as The New Jerusalem Bible.
The Good News Bible: The Bible in Today’s English (or Good News for Modern Man, or simply Today’s English Version) is, as the title indicates, another in the line of paraphrases. This one, like the RSV, ran afoul of conservative Christians, partly through liberties taken with important phrases but also because of the open antagonism of the translator Robert G. Bratcher. At the 1981 Southern Baptist Convention, he said:
Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. To qualify this absurd claim by adding 'with respect to the autographs' is a bit of sophistry, a specious attempt to justify a patent error ... No truth-loving, God-respecting, Christ-honoring believer should be guilty of such heresy. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and infallibility is to idolatrize it, to transform it into a false God. . . . No one seriously claims that all the words of the Bible are the very words of God. If someone does so it is only because that person is not willing thoroughly to explore its implications.
The controversy also involved issues of source mss. and mode of translation. Of the latter, the three typically mentioned are formal correspondence (literal rendering of the original words), dynamic equivalence (rendering the meaning of the original into more familiar terms of the destination language) and paraphrase. The Good News Bible is in fact classed as a dynamic equivalence translation, and suspicion or rejection of that mode increased hostility to the version among some critics.
Gender-neutral, or inclusive, language is another cause of division in the reception of more recent translations. Such versions include the Good News Bible (1992), the Catholic Inclusive New Testament edited by Craig R. Smith (1994); the New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version edited by Victor R. Gold (1995), which is a revision of the New Revised Standard Version; The Holy Bible, New Living Translation (1996); and The Holy Bible: New International Version, Inclusive Language Edition (1996), which last created the most stir since earlier editions of the NIV were already in widespread use, the original having been published in 1978.
There are recent translations of Jewish origin: Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (1985) and Jewish New Testament: a translation of the New Testament that expresses its Jewishness (1989).
A New King James Version appeared in 1982; a 21st Century King James Version, in 1994, with the most archaic words eliminated.
The NET Bible (so-called from its availability on the internet) was published in 2001 and met with criticisms very similar and strictly analogous to those of the Revised Standard Version, besides criticism of gender neutrality.
The RSV was itself revised into The Holy Bible, English Standard Version in 2001.
In 2007, a Swedish publisher produced versions of the Old and New Testaments in magazine format, with illustrative photographs, called The Bible Illuminated. According to a Wall Street Journal article,
The Bible Illuminated is aimed at a more sophisticated audience interested in understanding the origins of Western morality. "We wanted to create a more ethical acceptance of others," says Mr. [Jan] Carlzon, who says he doesn't belong to any organized religion.
There is more to say on the subject of biblical mss. and translation than can possibly be covered here; a full treatment of the subject must have a book of its own. Here are two:
Our Bible And The Ancient Manuscripts: Being A History Of The Text And Its Translations by Frederic G. Kenyon (1970, with a new edition of 2007)
Concise Dictionary of the Formation of the Bible: Manuscripts and Translations by Wayne Walden (2004)
I should only add that my first proper Bible (my first without pictures) was given to me when I was nine—a Revised Standard Version—and has never led me to doubt the virgin birth. Besides which, I grew up with (and have before me) a My Picture Story Bible (the cover illustrated with Noah in his ark and surrounded by a crowd of smiling animals) and The Children’s Living Bible (fronted by a picture of Christ carrying a lamb through a rocky cleft). I also have an oversized picture Bible, which I do not have at hand to consult the title; and once had a double-album recording of Bible stories with a comic-book insert. These examples may underline no more the variety of the Bible’s representatives than the durability of the mind to variety itself.
i This number excludes ms. after the 10th c. Adding these late works drives the total into the tens of the thousands.
ii Erasmus’ Testament was based on Greek mss. in his possession and printed opposite his own Latin translation (not the Vulgate).
iii As the prevalent protestant translation of the time, the Geneva Bible and not the King James was in most common use among American colonists.
iv Robert Stephens, or Robert Estienne, was a Catholic printer and the innovation of numbering verse was his, first exercised on a Greek New Testament.
v The first King James Bibles printed were 16-inch folios which were chained to pulpits. Afterward, a smaller edition was printed for personal use. Also a discrepancy in the first edition caused some copies to read, at Ruth 3:15, she rather than he.
vi The whole can be read here: http://m2.aol.com/AVBibleTAB/av/KJVpre.htm
vii Besides the one mentioned above, Noah Webster produced a translation in 1833. There are undoubtedly others. But if they were not scant in the interval, then they fell into a remarkably consistent obscurity.
viii It will be seen, too, that those who complain about the unintelligibility of the KJV will almost invariably cite the Elizabethan prevent, meaning precede, as typical cause for incomprehension. In a work as long as the Bible (the copy at hand is over 1000 pages of close type), it is a wonder they do not have a long, standard and frequently cited list of impenetrable 17th c. words. I understand the necessity of providing words of common usage in a translation meant to be widely accessible. But when the complaints against a translation are of so single and monotonous a strain, one might be forgiven for thinking that the critics protest too much and not altogether honestly.
