The Early Versions
Tue story of the Bible is intricately bound up with the story of its translations; for it is in languages other than those in which it was originally written that it has reached the whole world. Today, for one Hebrew Old Testament or Greek New Testament, there are literally thousands of translations in every tongue and in every dialect known to man.
In this respect no fair comparison can be made between the Scriptures and other ancient writings. Old translations of classic authors are not extant in large numbers. The bulk of those that have come to light are the Latin translations of the Greek classics, inevitably made because of the inter-relation of the two civilizations. But as for Gothic versions of Homer or Coptic translations of Virgil, one may seek in vain. Yet Ulfilas translated parts of the Bible into Gothic in the fourth century, and among the oldest sacred manuscripts are the Coptic versions. We find the Gospels in Ethiopian and in Anglo-Saxon; we do not find the orations of Cicero, the dramas of Aeschylus, or the odes of Horace in these obscure tongues. ‘The barbarians fell upon Rome and razed it to the ground. They trampled under foot the literary and artistic treasures of antiquity, extinguishing a great but decadent civilization. And then, ignorant and ferce, they in le to the wilderness whence they came.s They cared little for the polished ies of Ovid or the ready wit of Plautus and Terence. {Their thoughts were of war and deeds of violence. Yet, although they sacked Rome, they could not escape all that was in Rome. One book, among a few others, remained with them. Part of it, indeed, through the work of Ulfillas, had been with some of their tribes even before
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“LIBRARY OF
eon Or
THE EARLY VERSIONS
the fall of Rome. As time went on, this book was translated into many dialects. And within a few centuries the descendents of the very barbarian hordes who had sacked Rome were carrying the torch of civilization. Much later, when the revival of learning came and men began to delve into the intellectual history of their kind, many of the classics were found, hidden away in musty libraries and old, forgotten corners of monasteries. But, during the long centuries that intervened between the fall of Rome in 476 and the Italian Renaissance in the early fourteenth century, the one book that, in conjunction with a few fragments of classic literature such as the works of Aristotle, kept men in touch with the things of the mind and the things of the spirit was the Bible.
The first of the long line of translations, made presumably in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt about 277 B.C. by seventy scholars of Alexandria, derives its
23 name of Septuagint from the Greek word meaning “‘seventy.”’ It is a translation into Greek of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament. Many variant readings of it exist. In its relation to textual criticism and in its influence upon subsequent versions, the Septuagint is of great importance.
The early centuries of the Christian era witnessed the supremacy of the Roman Empire. Latin was the universal language. It was inevitable that the Bible should be put into the common tongue. By the beginning of the second century, there were already many Latin versions of the New Testament, and in the fourth century their number was so great and they differed in so many details that careful revision was demanded. At the request of Pope Damasus, Jerome, one of the greatest of the partistic scholars, undertook this work. Jerome’s Old Testament was probably based upon the Hebrew manuscripts; his New Testament was essentially a revision of the Old Latin Testaments. The Latin Bible thus produced by Jerome was published about 384 A.D. and adopted as authentic by the Church. From the time of Alcuin in the ninth century down to 1592 when Pope Clement VIII ordered the recension which is now the Standard Roman Catholic Version, it has been the subject of continual revision. It has long been known as the Vulgate, a name taken from the Latin word Vuigata, which means “commonly used.”