Up until roughly A.D. 382, the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, existed for the most part in Greek. With the spread of Christianity throughout non-Greek-speaking North Africa and Spain, demand increased for a Latin translation of the work.
To meet that demand, Pope Damasus I commissioned a leading Bible scholar of the time, Jerome, to prepare a standard Bible in Latin. After a labor of twenty (20) years, Jerome completed the work in about A.D. 405. Accepted by Christians as “the common edition,” the work came to be known in English as the Vulgate. But Christianity was to flourish for more than ten centuries before the entire Bible, despite the powerful opposition of Church authorities, would appear in English.
John Wycliffe was the moving force behind this radical and dangerous project. A lecturer in religion and philosophy at Oxford University, he believed that God’s word as spoken in the Bible should govern men’s and women’s lives. To that end, he supervised the translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate into English.
Wycliffe died in 1384, before the Church could take action against him; nevertheless it condemned his teachings and banned his writings. By this time, the Reformation was well underway. With the invention of printing, the suppression of the written word became far more difficult. That, and the increasing approval of the Reformation throughout England, made the need for an authoritative translation of the Bible based not on the Latin Vulgate, but on the original Hebrew and Greek texts almost inevitable.
William Tyndale, a linguist of immense skills and fluent in no fewer than seven languages, believed like Wycliffe before him that the word of God had to be made available to the British people in their mother tongue. Tyndale commenced work at his London home in the early 1520s, but fearing the anger of the Church, he moved to Germany where in 1525 he completed and printed his New Testament, thousands of copies of which were then smuggled back into England. He was immediately charged with “the advancement and setting forth of Luther’s abominable heresies.”
In hiding now, living almost as a fugitive, Tyndale turned his attention to the Old Testament, publishing in 1530 his translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. He did not live to see his work completed. While in Antwerp Belgium, he was betrayed and condemned as a heretic, and in 1536 he was burned at the stake.
The previous year, another English scholar, Miles Coverdale, had published a complete English Bible, the first ever. But Coverdale knew little Hebrew, and his translation of those books not already completed by Tyndale was based entirely on secondary sources----either the Latin Vulgate or Luther’s German version. Following Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church, the first English Bible, essentially the Coverdale edition, was authorized by royal decree and a copy of it was placed in all English parish churches by order of the King.
Finally, in 1604, James I decreed “that a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek….” Fifty-four distinguished scholars and clerics were appointed to the task. They worked for seven years taking into account all previous editions, particularly that of Tyndale, whose basic style and cadences are evident throughout. Printed in 1611, the King James Version was generally superior to its predecessors, both in accuracy of translation and nobility of prose, and has been greatly loved by countless millions of clerics and laymen ever since.
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