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INTRODUCTION
To many people the Bible is a closed book and although it is still the world’s
best seller, one may ask the question, is it the world's most read book; the
honest answer may well be "no it is not". Here is a paper which
was written towards my Doctorate in Theology some years ago.
One reason may be that Bibles are bought as presents at Confirmation or given as
prizes for good attendance at Sunday School or supplied by organisations such as
"Gideon's International", and thus fall into the category of
‘unwanted’ gifts. Unless the recipient is a keen committed Christian (in
which case that person would probably have a much used Bible already) the Bible
may remain for a lifetime on a bookshelf or in a drawer and to this day be in as
good a condition as the day when it was bought.
In recent years, Bible Scholars have made Bible reading easier by their many
translations, but all their translations may have caused confusion. I hope the
information here will help to explain why and how these translations were made;
I hope you will read all of it, and when this done, know which Bible is the one
most suited to your needs when you buy one either for yourself or for someone
else.
Some space has been devoted to the cost involved and I have also provided some
useful "up-to-the-minutes" statistics which you might find
interesting.
I wish to express my
gratitude to all those who have made useful suggestions and given me
encouragement, but my special thanks must go to the person who collated the bulk
of the material contained in this article.
Cardinal Dr. Peter R. Edwards DM,
DRTh, KnSt.F, AD
Patriarch
of Yeshua International & Archbishop of All of England
Yeshua International
& The Old Roman Catholic Church in England
THE PROBLEM OF THE TRANSLATOR
Translating the Bible from the Hebrew of The Old Testament or the Greek of
The
New Testament, involves far more than simply finding equivalent words in
English.
In the
first place, (and this is especially true of the Hebrew of The Old Testament,
the Books have not been handed down to us complete with a glossary of difficult
words which we can look up in the back!! This means that we have to resort to
all sorts of tricks to try and establish what an otherwise unknown word might
mean.
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We
can find the places in which the word occurs, and compare them. Often this
comparison will help us establish the approximate meaning of the word. For
example, if there was a word "xyz" whose meaning was
unknown, we could look at the sentence in which it occurred. ‘He cut this
with the "xyz" would suggest that "xyz"
meant saw, or axe, or perhaps knife. Suppose then, that another example of
the word was discovered, in a sentence reading "she cut the cake with
an "xyz", we should then be able to say that "xyz"
was more likely to be "knife" than axe or saw. And so on ..... That was
a light-hearted example to give, but it is the sort of process repeated
thousands of times, and involving prodigious feats of memory upon the part
of those engaged in translation in it, which has enabled so much of the lost
and obscure parts of our Bible to be translated.
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For
the Old Testament we can compare other older translations, especially those
into Greek, which were made before the Christian era. At that time, Biblical
Hebrew was not an ancient tongue, but one in which books had been written
until a short time previously. It is sometimes the case that the translators
from Hebrew into Greek knew the meanings of words in the Hebrew which the
course of subsequent handing on has made more obscure for us. By looking at
these earlier translations we can sometimes throw light upon the problems.
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It
is also possible to look at the Bible commentaries of Jewish Scholars from
e.g. mediaeval times, to see if there is any thing in their great body of
tradition which can help us to establish the meaning of different words and
passages.
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Finally we can look into vocabularies of other languages which are related
to Hebrew. These are called Semitic languages, and the greatest of them
still spoken today is Arabic. Many words in one Semitic language bear a
family resemblance to those of another. It is sometimes possible by
comparing the known words of an ancient Semitic language, such as Aramaic,
to gain a clue as to the meaning of some of the Hebrew ones, and, (but this
is a more complex process) it is even possible to work backwards from a
living language such as Arabic.
All
these processes are constantly at work in the process of translating the
Scriptures. When a new translation appears, it is not simply the up-dating of
the existing English. It contains the fruits of many lifetimes of study which
have been brought together in a clearer, and one hopes, better, rendering of the
Bible. Such processes are the concern of all denominations of Christians. Roman
Catholics and Protestants of all shades work together, usually unaware of their
differences. The problems arise at a later stage.
Having
established as well as possible the meanings of the individual words, we then
have the problem of conveying the meanings of these words when they have been
put into sentences. Every language has its figures of speech, its allusions to
customs, myths and well known events, its proverbs etc. Hebrew and Greek were no
exception. If, for example, I wish to render into another language ‘He has
met his Waterloo’ I should not do this by word for word translation, but
by giving an equivalent to the sense of the sentence. The Biblical languages are
full of these sorts of phrases, especially in The Old Testament, where the
prophets are full of poetic imagery and allusions to customs and beliefs now
forgotten. What is the translator to do ? Is it more honest to translate word
for word, and leave an unclear English, or should he attempt to convey the
meaning ?
Most of
us would opt for an attempt to convey the meaning, but it here that the great
differences between the denominations and translators arise, because it is
possible to have your reading of the Bible coloured by what you find in it, and
what is presented in good faith by a translator as a clear version of a text,
may well be his honest attempt to make it into what he thinks of as sense. Once
in Holy Writ, these renderings are then quoted as Scripture, and become the
basis of teachings, when what is really being taught is the version which the
translator wished to find. It is disputes such as those which underlie many of
the free modern renderings, such as Good News, or The New
International Version.
WHY DOES THE ROMAN CATHOLIC
BIBLE HAVE DIFFERENT BOOKS IN IT ?
If
you look in the Roman Catholic Church Bible you will find that there are in it
some books which are not in other Bibles. In order to understand why this is the
came about we have to go back several centuries BC, to the time when the ups and
downs of history had caused many of the Jews to leave their homeland and settle
in Egypt. Some came as prisoners of war, others had come to find work. By the
third century BC there was a flourishing community in Alexandria, and these
Jews
spoke Greek. Gradually their ancient writings were rendered into Greek for them,
and the earliest example of the translator’s dilemma we have comes from this
time. The book of Jesus, son of Sirach, which we find in the Apocrypha as "Ecclesiasticus"
opens with the plea - "Be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent
labour in translating we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For
what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense
when translated into another language".
There
is a nice Jewish legend about this process of translation. Ptolemy, the ruler of
Egypt, wanted to have in his library, a copy of every book in the world. He
therefore sent to Jerusalem, to ask for copies of the Jewish Scriptures.
Eventually it was arranged that they should be translated for him into Greek,
and they sent out to Egypt, six men of every tribe to work upon the translation.
These seventy-two men worked independently upon the translation, and produced
identical versions, a sure sign that there was a hand of the Lord! Their version
was accepted as authentic, and became known as the work of the seventy, the
Septuagint (Greek for seventy) and it is usually written in abbreviation as the
LXX.
These
Alexandrian Jews traveled the world as merchants and traders, (such as Apollos,
Acts 18 v 24) and when they traveled they took with them their Greek version of
The Old Testament. When The Apostle Paul came to preach the Gospel
in Europe he
naturally used the Scriptures in the Greek language, and this Egyptian version
of The Old Testament, known as the Alexandrian Canon, became the first
Bible of The New Church.
Meanwhile,
back in Palestine, the Hebrew version of The Old Testament had had its own
history. There is a Samaritan version of the books of the law (Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) of whose origin nothing is known. The
Samaritans whom we meet in the Gospels, did not accept the rest of The Old
Testament, but had books of their own, their own Book of Joshua, for example and
their own ‘Chronicles’. It is impossible to know whether it was the
Samaritans who altered the Hebrew text in certain places, or the Jews, because
the writings found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls show quite clearly that people
were still altering and adding to The Old Testament even in the time of Jesus.
After
the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, Rabbi Johannon ben Zakkai the great leader of
his people took steps to ensure the survival of Judaism by ensuring the survival
of its Holy Books. A council met at Jamnia and decided which of the
Hebrew books
were to be considered as Scripture. The group which they chose corresponds to our
Old Testament, and was not the same as the group chosen by the Egyptian Jews for
their Greek Bible.
How this came about is a long and complicated tale. When the earliest Christians
set out to Preach, there were two versions of The Old Testament, the
Hebrew used
by Jews in Palestine, and the Greek used by early Christians, and not all the
Books were in each version.
WHAT
HAPPENED TO THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE CHURCH ?
From the outset, the Christians used the Books of the Alexandrian Old Testament,
The Greek Bible. Nobody knows when it was that the Church began to divide the
Books up into two groups which they form today, the "Canonical" and
the "Apocryphal" Books. One of the landmarks is the work of
St
Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. He was not the first to attempt a
translation, but since he lived and worked near Bethlehem he produced a
translation of the Books from the Hebrew version of The Old Testament, and not
from the Greek one. He did a very hasty rendering of the other Books, but
St Jerome
carried little weight in the Church Councils of his day, and the great Synods at
Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, both North African cities who had strong ties
to Egypt and its Alexandrian Canon, declared that The Old Testament should
contain all the Books of the Egyptian Old Testament instead. After the time of
St Jerome, there was observed his distinction between the Canonical and
Apocryphal Books (the latter being his name for the extra Books in the
Egyptian
Greek Old Testament) but the Roman Church kept to the larger version of the
Old
Testament.
When the Protestants wanted to translate The Old Testament into their own tongue
in the time of the Reformation, they went back to The Jewish Old Testament,
believing it to be the more authentic text. They therefore translated the
shorter Jewish version of The Old Testament for our Protestant Bibles, but they
kept the order of the Books in the Egyptian Canon.
THE
FORMATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Nothing has been said so far on The New Testament. The problems associated with
its origin and growth are not quite as complicated as those of The Old
Testament. We must not think that all the writings of the earliest Christians
became our New Testament. There were many Books written in those early years
which did not become Scripture, for example the Epistle of Barnabas, the
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, and the Letters of St Ignatius. Nevertheless,
in the course of time a certain selection of Books came to be accepted as
authoritative. Many factors were at work in this process. One was the "panic"
felt by the first generation of Christians as they grew old, and realised that
they would have to pass on the teaching of Jesus to another generation, since
the expected end of the world had not arrived. Another was the rise of dubious
versions of Christianity, which were later condemned as heresy, and which
produced their own versions of the teaching of Jesus. A leading thinker of the
second century was a man named Marcion, who was later rejected as an heretic. He
made a list of the Books which he thought suitable for his converts to use, and
did not even allow them to use The Old Testament !! It may have been in reaction
to moves like this that the Church decided to make its own list of what was good
and authentic teaching. Nobody can be sure, however.
It is thought that the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels were first made into two
separate collections. By the middle of the second century, according to the
writings of Justin Martyr, the Gospels were read in Sunday Worship, along with
The Old Testament Prophets, but Justin Martyr does not seam to have had such a
high regard for the Letters of the Apostle Paul. Nevertheless, it is fairly
certain that collections of the Apostles Paul’s Letters were known to Clement,
the Bishop of Rome at the end of the first century, and to Ignatius, the Bishop
of far away Antioch some twenty years later.
A list of New Testament Books from the end of the second century shows that at
the very early date, The New Testament was not so very different from what we
have now.
This list came from the Roman Christians, and is written as a very poor Latin
translation of an official Greek document concerning Books suitable for reading
in Church. It lists the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, thirteen letters of the
Apostle Paul, 1 & 2 John, the Revelation to John, Jude and an Apocalypse of
Peter.
One century later, the historian Eusebius, shows that The New Testament was
almost completely settled, and that the early Church had shed all the vast
numbers of "other" Gospels which were circulating in the Mediterranean
world, and which we can now read as "New Testament Apocrypha".
ENGLISH
VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE
We must now skip over several exciting centuries, in the interests of brevity,
and come tom our own shores. There were some translations of the Bible in Saxon
times, for example Bede’s version of St John’s Gospel completed in 735, or
the selection from the Psalter attributed to Alfred the Great. There are also
the additions to the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Wessex Gospels, from about
1,000 AD. The real story of the Bible in English begins with the work of
John
Wycliffe, who died in 1384, and whose work to ensure that the people could read
the Bible in their own language has lead to him being called the father of
English Protestantism. Dozens of copies of the Bible were circulated in
English
as a result of his work, but he was far from popular with the Church of his day.
The next milestone was the work of William Tyndale, who had some three thousand
copies of The New Testament printed in Germany, all but a few of which his
enemies managed to destroy. He himself was put to death on a heresy charge in
1536. Soon after his death, Miles Coverdale took up the task of translating, and
it is his version of the Psalms which appear in the Book of Common Prayer. He
later helped to produce Thomas Cranmer’s "Great Bible", but the ups and
downs of history under the Tudors put The English Bible under a ban for several
years.
Several prominent scholars took refuge in Geneva, where they produces The Geneva
Bible, and then dedicated it to the new Queen Elizabeth 1st. It became
The
English Bible. King James, who succeeded Elizabeth 1st, appointed a committee to
produce yet another English Bible, and after half a century or so this replaced
the older versions in the affections and the usage of the English people. This
Bible became known as The Authorised Version, by no means the first of the
English translations, but one which the great number of modern translations has
been designed to replace. Dozens, literally dozens, of English versions of the
Bible followed in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but none
really succeeded in displacing The Authorised Version from the central position
it had come to enjoy. Our present dilemma of finding a mass of different
translations being produced is by no means a new one.
THE MODERN
VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE
By the year 1870, it had been decided that a revision of The Authorised Version
was needed in the light of the advances in Biblical scholarship. A committee was
appointed by the Convocation of Canterbury which laboured for fourteen years and
produced The Revised Version. Sixty years of other translations followed,
produced by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually in 1930 work
was begun in The United States of America upon a version which we now know as
The Revised Standard Version. It was a version which aimed to retain the
traditional phrases of the older version, but to update them where advances in
scholarship had made greater accuracy possible. The New Testament was published
in 1946, The Old Testament in 1952. Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic,
scholars had begun to plan The New English Bible. The committee was set up in
1946, and The New Testament of The New English Bible appeared in 1961 followed
by The Old Testament in 1970.
Other versions were also
appearing. There was The Jerusalem Bible in 1966, The Living Bible in 1973,
The
Good News Bible in 1976, and The New International Version in 1979.
In addition, there was The American Bible,
in effect the transatlantic version of The New English Bible, and The
Common Bible which was simply The Old Revised Standard Version expanded to
include also the Books of The Roman Catholic Bible which were not in the
older Protestant version ..... hence the name "Common Bible", a name
accepted by all the various Churches and denominations, Orthodox, Roman Catholic
and Protestant.
WHAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE VARIOUS VERSIONS
The Jerusalem Bible was produced by
French Roman Catholic Scholars who worked in the Great Bible School in
Jerusalem. It was originally intended as a translation into modern French, but
the idea was taken by an English team and published as an English Version using
the style and techniques of the very successful French original. Its name The
Jerusalem Bible comes from the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem where the original
work was done. The translation is an elegant one, setting out to use modern
words but not modern imagery, and trying to let the characteristic style of each
of the Biblical writers come through even in translation. There are useful notes
and indices.
The New English Bible
is perhaps the modern version which we are most familiar. It set out to go
behind the traditional text to discover the ancient writer’s meaning, and in
the process came in for great deal of criticism. It abandoned the Hebrew text
with great regularity, often resorting to the ancient versions, but sometimes
just to the whim of the translator, and although the translation was into a
clear English, in no way was it an accurate rendering of the original. This is
especially true of The Old Testament, upon which extensive revision is now in
progress. The actual order of verses is often altered (look at Zechariah) and
there are has been acrimonious debates in the scholarly world for several years
over the methods used for establishing the meaning of the obscurer passages. In The New Testament the picture is a little brighter, for the marginal notes of The
New English Bible do give a better indication of the alternative rendering
than do any other modern versions.
It includes for example, both the versions of the endings of St Mark’s
Gospel, but there other points where the interests of the translator are
apparent. The Great New Testament Scholar C. H. Dadd who masterminded the
New Testament Project, has left his mark in many passages
where the translation now gives his clarification of an obscure passage .... and
not every one agreed with his line of clarification !
The Good News Bible or to use the other name for this edition Todays
English Version was produced by The American Bible Society at the
request of The United Bible Societies. It states in the preface that its
primary concern is to provide a faithful translation of the meaning of the
original texts. This of course is a great area of dispute, for it is debatable whether or not it is the translator or the reader who should decide upon the
meaning of a difficult passage. The language is clear, simple and unambiguous.
It is inevitable, therefore, that there is a danger of obscuring possible
nuances of meaning by this very simplicity. The volume is well supplied with
readers notes as to cultural and historical notes, cross references, indices,
etc., but none of these valuable aids to understanding the Bible must allow us
to be distracted from the main exercise, which is the rendering of the actual
text. The Good News Bible claims to be "a dynamic equivalence
translation" a type of paraphrase. The patterns of speech and word order of
the original are not kept, (in the way that, say, The Jerusalem Bible
tries to do it), and information known to the original readers of the books but
not to modern readers, is included in the text by way of explanation. There is
no doubt that this is a lively, common language rendering of the texts. The
question arises, though, as to whether or not it is the job of the translator to
paraphrase and to interpret, or whether that is the job of the teacher and the
preacher who uses the text. There is a great danger in taking our sectarian
positions and reading them into a biblical text. The Good News
Bible makes good uses of modern research into word meanings, the like,
without going into quite the extremes of conjecture which appear at places in The
New English Bible. The feminist lobby is also apparent in renderings such as
‘Happy are those’ in Psalm 1 where other versions read "Blessed is the man"
!!!
The New International Version was produced by Conservative Protestant
Scholars who have tended as a group to regard The Revised Standard Version
with suspicion. Over one hundred leading scholars were involved in the project
which began in 1965 and which brought the entire Bible into print in 1979. The
scholars declared themselves "United
in their commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s
Word in written form". The translation used the full armoury of
scholarship, and was submitted to stylistic experts who advised upon clarity and
presentation. The version is well set out, with shorter paragraphs than in
The New English Bible, and several sub-headings for ease of locating
material. The style of the English is about midway between the
traditional renderings of The Revised Standard Version and the
consciously trendy ones of The New English Bible. There are,
however, certain passages where the old problem of translation versus
interpretation crops up, and where this does appear, for example in certain
parts of Isaiah, it is only fair to warn readers that these renderings do
represent a possible meaning of the text, but by means the only possible one and
certainly do not give adequate basis upon which to preach a particular
theological position over against other denominations simply on the grounds that
the "Bible says so".
WHICH
ONE IS BEST ?
WHICH
SHOULD I USE ?
There is no such thing as the best translation nor is there such a thing as the
correct version. All the mass of new translations are to be welcomed
as a sign that there is still great interest in preserving and transmitting the
Bible for the people of our own time. None of the translations are
produced by anyone who is not an expert in the field of translating, and the
merest glimpse at the amount of work involved in learning the tools of the
translator's trade will testify to the fact that nobody embarks upon a
translation for anything but the highest motives. This must not obscure
the fact, however, that the different renderings set out from different starting
points, and are written by people who have different ideas as to what is the
most important in the business of translating theses texts.
If you want a traditional sounding Bible which is accurate but not wildly
trendy, (and incidentally is the choice of most scholars working in the field)
then choose The Revised Standard Version or The Common Bible if
you would like to have the Apocryphal Books to, and thus have all the Books of
the oldest Christian Bibles. If you want a very trendy version with lots
of notes, and examples of great skill in the reconstruction of ancient languages
then use The New English Bible, but remember that it does bear heavily
the marks of the scholars who masterminded the translation. Not everyone
agreed with their methods, but they were nevertheless acknowledged as the
greatest scholars of their day, and are remembered with affection and gratitude
by their pupils.
If you want a modern version with lots of explanatory notes embodied in the text
itself, almost a commentary and a translation combined, then use The Good
News Bible, but remember that it has already made some of the interpretation
for you, and consult a commentary before using one of its renderings as the
basis for a dispute with another denomination or sect over what the Bible says.
Much of the same can be said for The New International Version, except
that its style is somewhat more conservative, as indeed is its theology.
Provided that the reader is aware of the position of the translator, then there
is no problem, and every translator has to have a position, something to guide
him or her as they make the numerous choices necessary for the rendering of the
text.
The Jerusalem Bible is a Roman Catholic translation, ( not that
that makes any difference except in the actual order of the books in The Old
Testament, which unwarned reraders might find confussing !). For
clarity of presentation, and sheer elegance it is hard to beat.
EPILOGUE
This survey has been very brief, but I have hope that it is not inaccurate as a
result. There are many aspects of Bible History which I just could
not even mention, such as the traditions of scripture in the Great Churches
of Syrian, Ethiopia, Egypt, Armenia, Georgia and the remoter parts of Asia.
The very fact that we have a Bible at all which we share with all these
fellow Christians, many of whose ways would be strange to us, should make us
pause for thought, and then take a new look at the great treasurers which is our
common heritage.
STATISTICS
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The
number of languages into which at least one book of The Bible has
been published is 1,800.
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The
New Testament has been translated into 800 languages.
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The
complete Bible has been translated into 300 languages.
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The
United Bible Societies distributed over 800,000,000 items in the year 2000,
though only 20,000,000 were New Testaments and 15,000,000 were complete
Bibles.
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Simple
translations have been produced for "new readers" in 330
languages, mostly the languages of Asia and in the South Pacific including
Papua New Guinea.
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It
has recently been claimed that Chinese is spoken by more than 1,000 million
speakers as their mother tongue, with English 350 million a very poor
second. Then follows Russia 209 million, Spanish 206 million and
German 117 million.
The
Revised Standard Version is published by the British & Foreign Bible
Society
The
International Version is published by Hodder & Stoughton The
New English Bible is published by Oxford or Cambridge University Press with
or without The Apocrypha The
Living Bible is published by Kingsway and there is a Children's Edition
published by Tyndale The
Common Bible is published by Collins The
Good News Bible (Today's English Version) is published by Collins The
Jerusalem Bible is published by Darten, Longman & Todd
Cardinal Dr. Peter R. Edwards DM,
DRTh, KnSt.F, AD
Patriarch
of Yeshua International & Archbishop of All of England
Yeshua International
& The Old Roman Catholic Church in England
Yeshua01@btinternet.com
Serving
Yeshua International
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