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The history of the Bible

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The scholarship that has been applied to the Bible is beyond calculation. The intense intellectual labors that have been required to trace its history, decide upon the contents, and assure faithful translations began centuries ago; no doubt they will continue as long as this cherished body of writings remains the cornerstone of Judaic and Christian thought.

The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, the chronicle of the Lord’s relationship with the people of Israel, originated as a body of oral and written traditions whose beginnings date from perhaps as early as the 12th century B.C and whose formulation continued for a thousand years. None of the original, or autograph, documents is known to have survived. This growing collection of writings that in time would be canonized—accepted as divinely inspired— was passed on from generation to generation and century to century by scribes, or copyists; indeed, it was these faithful and dedicated scribes, working laboriously by hand, who remained the sole “transmitters” of both the Old and New Testaments until the advent of the first printed Bibles in the 15th century A.D. The earliest known manuscript copies of the Old Testament—the book of Isaiah and fragments of others—date from the first three centuries B.C. and were among the celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 and thereafter in desert caves bordering the Dead Sea.

qumran
The most spectacular modern-day biblical find was made in 1947 at Qumran on the weatern shore of the Dead Sea by young Bedouin Shepherd who stumbled on a cave containing what came to be known as Dead Sea Scroll.

With the exception of a few passages in Aramaic, the Old Testament was written entirely in Hebrew. As Aramaic became a common language among Jews following the Exile (6th century B.C), however, translations for the use of the faithful were made into that tongue. Greek was the next language to predominate in much of the ancient Mediterranean world, as a consequence of the spectacular conquests of Alexander the Great. The most famous early Greek translation of the Pentateuch, or the first five books (in Hebrew the Torah, or Law), was the Septuagint, named for the 70 elders of Israel mentioned in Exodus 24:1,9 as companions of Moses. There is a legendary belief that this translation was accomplished under the direction of 70 (or 72) Jewish scholars living in Alexandria’s Jewish community. These scholars had completed the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek by about 250 B.C, and over the course of the next two centuries the remainder of the Old Testament was also rendered in Greek. At the same time, the process of canonization of the Scriptures continued. By the 2nd century A.D., or perhaps even earlier, the contents of the Old Testament had been fixed, although it remained for later Jewish scholars to establish standardized spelling, punctuation, and arrangement into paragraphs of the Hebrew text.

The Old Testament’s long evolution, the relative scarcity of early documented manuscript copies, the variety (and vagaries) of its translations, and the inevitable errors and modifications made by scribes over the course of centuries are among the challenges that biblical scholarship has had to contend with. New Testament scholarship presents problems of a somewhat different sort, although they are no less intricate.

The 27 books comprising the New Testament, the portion of the Christian Bible in which the life and teachings of Jesus form the unifying thread, were originally written in Greek. The date, place of origin, and authorship are not certain for many of the books, and no autograph manuscript is known to exist. Nonetheless, the earliest (2nd century A.D.) of the large number of New Testament manuscript copies that have survived are much closer in time to the original writings than is the case with the Old Testament. The Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament was accepted by most early Christians. To this was added, by a process of canonization lasting until the 4th century, the books of the New Testament, thus completing the Christian Bible.

The spread of Christianity inspired additional Greek translations of the Bible and several into Latin that were alike only in their general lack of scholarship and uniformity. Augustine complained of the “infinite variety of Latin translations.” To remedy the problem, in about the year 382 Pope Damasus I commissioned the leading biblical scholar, Jerome, to prepare a standard Bible in Latin. For some two decades Jerome worked at the task, utilizing Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts, previous Latin versions, the Septuagint, and New Testament manuscripts in Greek. His work, completed about 405, became known as the Vulgate (“the common version”) and gained gradual acceptance as the standard Bible of the Roman Church, a status confirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546. As such, its impact on Western Christendom has been immense.

Christianity reached Britain more than a thousand years before the first translation of the complete Bible into English. Throughout the Middle Ages certain portions of the Scriptures, such as the Gospels and the Psalms, were translated into the vernacular, primarily for the benefit of the clergy in their missionary efforts, but it was not until 1382 that a complete English Bible appeared. John Wyclif was the inspiration for this radical departure.

Wyclif was himself a radical. An instructor in religion and philosophy at Oxford and rector of Lutterworth, he lashed out at the corruption and materialism afflicting the Church and at its interference in secular affairs. To Wyclif, God’s word as embodied in the Scriptures, not as interpreted by the Church, should rule man’s spiritual life, and to spread his doctrine he supervised the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English in order to bring the Scriptures within the reach of the common man. For these beliefs Wyclif has been called the “morning star of the Reformation.” The Church reacted strongly to Wyclif’s teachings, condemning him as a heretic and forbidding the use of his Bible. Nevertheless, it enjoyed widespread underground use for some 150 years. At least 170 manuscript copies have survived.

In the history of the English Bible the towering figure is William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536). Tyndale’s work coincided with, and was affected by, the revolutionary currents sweeping the Western world—the explosive spread of printing, the advent of humanism, the intellectual challenge of the Reformation. The time was ripe for a new English translation of the Bible, and Tyndale responded brilliantly.

Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale was influenced by the humanist scholar Erasmus, who published the Greek New Testament along with a Latin translation and commentary in 1516. A linguist of immense skill—he was adept at no fewer than seven languages— Tyndale first applied his scholarship to the New Testament, which he began translating secretly in London. Fearing the wrath of the Church, he went to Germany in 1524, where he was influenced by Martin Luther, whose great translation of the New Testament into German had been published two years earlier. By 1525 Tyndale was in Cologne supervising the first printing of his New Testament, which he based on medieval Greek manuscripts. Threatened with arrest by the authorities, he fled with the printed sheets to Worms, where the work was completed. Thousands of copies were smuggled into England. Tyndale was promptly condemned as “the murderer of truth” and charged with the “advancement and setting forth of Luther’s abominable heresies.” Church authorities bought as many copies as they could find and publicly burned them. Tyndale had meanwhile turned to translating the Old Testament, which he based on both manuscript and printed versions of the Hebrew text. He began its publication with the Pentateuch in 1530 but did not live to see his work completed. He was betrayed in Antwerp, judged a heretic, and in 1536 was strangled and his body burned at the stake.

Qumran roll
Qumran roll

Tyndale’s scholarly fame rests not only on the fact that his work was the first in English to be based on Hebrew and Greek sources but on the magnificence of his translation as well. The richness of his language and style would serve as the model for subsequent English translations.

Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church signaled a veritable flood of English Bibles. Within little more than three decades after Tyndale’s death, half a dozen new versions went to the press. Miles Coverdale’s 1535 Bible had the distinction of being the first complete printed English version. He drew from Latin, the German translations of Luther and Zwingli, and the unfinished work of Tyndale. Two years later, in 1537, a friend of Tyndale’s named John Rogers (who published under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew”) completed the publication of Tyndale’s work, supplemented by Coverdale’s translation of those books of the Old Testament that Tyndale had not finished before his death. In 1539 Richard Taverner, an English layman, offered his own translation, which followed Tyndale-Rogers closely in the Old Testament but reflected his considerable skill in Greek in his rendering of the New Testament. That same year there appeared the so-called Great Bible, a massive work physically, with pages 15 by 9 inches. It was essentially the Tyndale-Rogers translation as edited by Miles Coverdale and bore the authorization of the king, who ordered that copies should be placed in every church in England. An official revision of the Great Bible, known as the Bishops’ Bible, appeared in 1568.

If the Great Bible belonged to the clergy, the Geneva Bible belonged to the common man. It took its name from the site of its publication in 1560, for many English scholars had fled to Geneva when the fiercely Catholic Queen Mary took the English throne. Printed in a handy size and utilizing easy-to-read Roman type instead of the ornate Old English type, the Geneva Bible was a great popular success in England where the Protestant Elizabeth I now ruled. Its publishing life included some 140 editions. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, of John Bunyan, and of the Pilgrims when they sailed to the New World in 1620.

The Roman Church continued to resist putting a translated Bible into the hands of the people, for fear its authority would be undermined. As a Catholic cleric complained in 1540: “The heretics want the Bible to be the authority, but only on condition that it shall be for them to interpret it. We have no controversy with the heretics about the Bible, but about the meaning of the Bible. . . . We say that the meaning is to be discovered in the perpetual agreement of the Catholic Church. They continue to spread the Bible abroad among the illiterate.” Bowing at last to necessity, the Roman Church authorized an English translation. Known as the Douay Bible, for the town in France where the work was undertaken, it was based on the Latin Vulgate and published in 1609-10. It remained, like its Vulgate predecessor, a work intended primarily for the clergy.

Even as the Douay Bible was being prepared for the press, a group of scholars was hard at work in England preparing the most famous of all English translations, the King James Version. The name is well deserved, for James I was very much the father of the deed. In 1604 he decreed “that a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek, and this to be set out and printed without any marginal notes and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.” He followed up his decree by appointing “certain learned men to the number of four and fifty for the translating of the Bible” and stipulating a rigorous review process of their work. James’ “learned men” included distinguished Oxford and Cambridge scholars and clerics from both the Anglican and Puritan denominations. For seven years they labored, and in 1611 the King James Version received its first printing. In their preface, the editors modestly stated their goal: “We never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one—but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that has been our endeavour . . .” History has adjudged them too modest; the King James Version has been acclaimed “the noblest monument of English prose.”

The creators of the King James Version drew on all previously published English translations (including the Catholic Douay Bible), some Latin versions, and even on Luther’s German translation, and they consulted the best Hebrew and Greek texts available to them. But their chief inspiration was William Tyndale. In the New Testament, for example, so greatly did they admire Tyndale’s achievement that fully a third of his rendering was adopted without change, and the balance owes its basic language structure to his 1520’s translation. What made the King James so notable was the extraordinary character of its language. As the biblical scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon wrote in 1936: “It was the good fortune of the English nation that its Bible was produced at a time when the genius of the language for noble prose was at its height, and when a natural sense of style was not infected by self-conscious scholarship.” The rolling cadences were particularly effective when read aloud from the pulpit, helping to make the King James Version a much-loved treasure for millions for two and a half centuries.

By the latter half of the 19th century, however, a growing number of scholars and churchmen began to call for a revision of the King James. In part this was due to the discovery of earlier, superior Hebrew and Greek manuscript copies that made revision desirable on the grounds of accuracy. But even more important was the changing nature of the English language itself. Not only had many of the common usages of the King James become archaic in the years since 1611, but some of the wording had come to mean something entirely different. The King James translators, for example, had used “allege” for “prove” (Acts 17:3); “conversation” for “behavior” or “conduct” (2 Cor. 1:12); “prevent” for “precede” (1 Thes. 4:15); “reprove” for “decide” (Is. 11:4); “communicate” for “share” (Gal. 6:6). Thus, in these and numerous additional instances the meaning of passages no longer reflected what translators of previous centuries had intended. In 1870 the Church of England appointed a committee of 54 (symbolically, the same number of “learned men” as King James had appointed) English scholars and churchmen of various denominations to the task of a major revision. The new Bible was published in 1881-85 as the English Revised Version. In 1901 the American Standard Version appeared, presenting the preferences in interpretation and language of American scholars.

Biblical scholarship is never a static discipline. The 20th century has seen the discovery of many important ancient manuscripts as well as improvements in the techniques of textual criticism. In 1952 there appeared the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, undertaken with the intention of embodying “the best results of modern scholarship as to the meaning of the scripture,” yet reflecting full respect for the magnificence of the King James Version. Unless otherwise noted, the Reader’s Digest ATLAS OF THE BIBLE takes quotations from The New Oxford Annotated Bible With the Apocrypha (Revised Standard Version), edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger and published in 1977. In respectful tribute to the King James editors, May and Metzger say in their preface: “Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one . . . but to make a good one better.”

 

Source: History of the Bible Reader’s Digest’s Atlas of the Bible

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