PREPARING THE WAY--THE ENGLISH BIBLE BEFOREKING JAMES
THERE are three great Book-religions-- Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.Other religions have their sacred writings, but they do not hold them in the same regard as do these three.Buddhism and Confucianism count their books rather records of their faith than rules for it, history rather than authoritative sources of belief.The three great Book- religions yield a measure of authority to their sacred books which would be utterly foreign to the thought of other faiths.
Yet among the three named are two very distinct attitudes.To the Mohammedan the language as well as the matter of the Koran is sacred.He will not permit its translation.Its original Arabic is the only authoritative tongue in which it can speak.It has been translated into other tongues, but always by adherents of other faiths, never by its own believers.The Hebrew and the Christian, on the other hand, but notably the Christian, have persistently sought to make their Bible speak all languages at all times.
It is a curious fact that a Book written in one tongue should have come to its largest power in other languages than its own.The Bible means more to-day in German and French and English than it does in Hebrew and Chaldaic and Greek-- more even than it ever meant in those languages.There is nothing just like that in literary history.It is as though Shakespeare should after a while become negligible for most readers in English, and be a master of thought in Chinese and Hindustani, or in some language yet unborn.
We owe this persistent effort to make the Bible speak the language of the times to a conviction that the particular language used is not the great thing, that there is something in it which gives it power and value in any tongue.No book was ever translated so often.Men who have known it in its earliest tongues have realized that their fellows would not learn these earliest tongues, and they have set out to make it speak the tongue their fellows did know.Some have protested that there is impiety in making itspeak the current tongue, and have insisted that men should learn the earliest speech, or at least accept their knowledge of the Book from those who did know it.But they have never stopped the movement.They have only delayed it.
The first movement to make the Scripture speak the current tongue appeared nearly three centuries before Christ.Most of the Old Testament then existed in Hebrew.But the Jews had scattered widely.Many had gathered in Egypt where Alexander the Great had founded the city that bears his name.At one time a third of the population of the city was Jewish.Many of the people were passionately loyal to their old religion and its Sacred Book.But the current tongue there and through most of the civilized world was Greek, and not Hebrew.As always, there were some who felt that the Book and its original language were inseparable.Others revealed the disposition of which we spoke a moment ago, and set out to make the Book speak the current tongue.For one hundred and fifty years the work went on, and what we call the Septuagint was completed.There is a pretty little story which tells how the version got its name, which means the Seventy--that King Ptolemy Philadelphus, interested in collecting all sacred books, gathered seventy Hebrew scholars, sent them to the island of Pharos, shut them up in seventy rooms for seventy days, each making a translation from the Hebrew into the Greek.When they came out, behold, their translations were all exactly alike! Several difficulties appear in that story, one of which is that seventy men should have made the same mistakes without depending on each other.In addition, it is not historically supported, and the fact seems to be that the Septuagint was a long and slow growth, issuing from the impulse to make the Sacred Book speak the familiar tongue.And, though it was a Greek translation, it virtually displaced the original, as the English Bible has virtually displaced the Hebrew and Greek to-day.The Septuagint was the Old Testament which Paul used.Of one hundred and sixty-eight direct quotations from the Old Testament in the New nearly all are from the Greek version--from the translation, and not from the original.
We owe still more to translation.While there is accumulating evidence that there was spoken in Palestine at that time a colloquial Greek, withwhich most people would be familiar, it is yet probable that our Lord spoke neither Greek nor Hebrew currently, but Aramaic.He knew the Hebrew Scriptures, of course, as any well- trained lad did; but most of His words have come down to us in translation.His name, for example, to His Hebrew mother, was not Jesus, but Joshua; and Jesus is the translation of the Hebrew Joshua into Greek.We have His words as they were translated by His disciples into the Greek, in which the New Testament was originally written.
By the time the writing of the New Testament was completed, say one hundred years after Christ, while Greek was still current speech, the Roman Empire was so dominant that the common people were talking Latin almost as much as Greek, and gradually, because political power was behind it, the Latin gained on the Greek, and became virtually the speech of the common people.The movement to make the Bible talk the language of the time appeared again.It is impossible to say now when the first translations into Latin were made.Certainly there were some within two centuries after Christ, and by 250 A.D.a whole Bible in Latin was in circulation in the Roman Empire.The translation of the New Testament was from the Greek, of course, but so was that of the Old Testament, and the Latin versions of the Old Testament were, therefore, translations of a translation.
