The next major step forward
Up to the early centuries after Christ, the Old Testament manuscripts in Hebrew had been copied and copied for generations. The originals were no longer in existence but great care was taken in the copying and every manuscript was checked and rechecked. Because the books were sacred to the Jews, every letter of the text was counted before any copy was regarded as authoritative. The Greek translation was also available and many copies of this had been made too.

The New Testament manuscripts written in Greek were also being copied. As Christianity spread, so the copies were taken all over the Roman world. But, language was also changing. Latin was now the language of the Roman Empire and fewer and fewer people could read Greek. Because of this, a monk called Jerome made it his life’s work to translate the Bible – both Old and New Testaments into Latin. His translation was called the ‘Vulgate’. The English word ‘vulgar’ really means common or ordinary and the Vulgate was the Bible in the common or ordinary language – the language of the people. It was the Vulgate that was to be the Bible of Christianity for many centuries.

It was this Bible, which came with Augustine to bring Christianity to the British Isles; it was the Vulgate which went with Christianity to Spain, to North Africa and to other parts of the world. Sadly, with the break up of the Roman Empire, fewer could read the Bible for themselves. Latin was no longer spoken and they had to rely on priests and missionaries to explain what the Bible taught and often their teaching was biased.

Times change and language does too
As the years went by the cycle of change repeated itself. When Greek was spoken, the Hebrew Old Testament could not be read by people who did not understand Hebrew.

Under God’s good hand the Jewish Scriptures were translated into Greek (see chart opposite). In the early centuries of the Christian era, the official language of the Roman Empire was Latin and so the work of Jerome was essential in enabling both Old and New Testaments to be read.

The English translations
As has already been explained, it was the Latin Vulgate that came with Christianity to Britain with Augustine in AD 597 – but people in England did not speak Latin so the work of translation had to continue. The next article in this series traces how the Bible was translated into English (see page 22).

The Anglo-Saxon spoken by the people of Britain was very different from the English spoken today, but the Bible was needed in Anglo-Saxon. By AD 709 Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherbourne, had translated many of the Psalms into West Saxon and 25 years later the Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of John. King Alfred, who many people only know about because of the story about him burning the cakes, translated a number of the Psalms in the early part of the 10th century AD.

History was moving on and so was the language of the people. 1066 was the date of the Norman invasion of England and the language was now being changed by its mixing with Norman French. No more Saxon translations appeared but the foundations of our modern English Bible were being laid. John Wycliffe was Master of Baliol College, Oxford. He resigned from this post and became priest of Lutterworth and by the year of his death in 1384 he had completed his life’s work of translating the whole of the Bible from Latin into English with the help of a group of faithful followers. This Bible was hand-written and it would have taken about 10 months for a written copy to be made. So although the Bible was being made available in the language of the people, it was not freely available.

The Church in control
The extent to which people understood the teaching of the Bible was under the control of the priests who could quote from the Latin text and could not be contradicted. However, two great developments meant great changes in the Bible translation story.

Firstly, more Bible manuscripts were coming to light and scholars were able to study the Bible not only in Latin, but by looking at copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew and of both Testaments in Greek. These could be compared with translations into Saxon but the authority of the church still limited the access that ordinary people had to the Word of God.

This was altered by the second great change. The development of printing meant that once the type had been set up, copies could be made available in great numbers instead of it taking nearly a year to copy the Bible by hand. By the end of the 15 th century Bibles were being produced in French, German, Italian and Spanish and in 1530 the first printed Bible in English appeared. This was the work of William Tyndale, whose aim was to make the Bible widely available so that even a ploughboy could read it.

William Tyndale said that if God spared his life, before many years he would cause the boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scriptures than did the Pope.

His work was not approved by the clergy who saw their authority being eroded. Tyndale’s copies of the New Testament were confiscated and burnt at the instigation of the Bishop of London. However, as the copies were taken, so more were printed on the continent and smuggled into this country. Eventually, Tyndale himself was betrayed, arrested and tried for teaching that people could learn the Gospel themselves from the Bible and he was burnt at the stake on 6 th October 1536.

'Se that ye gaddre not treasure vpon the erth, where rust and mothes corrupte, and where theves breake through and steale. But gaddre ye treasure togeder in heven, where nether rust nor mothes corrupte, and where theves nether brek up not yet steale. For where soever youre treasure ys, there will youre hertes be also. The light of the body ys thyne eye. Wherefore yf thyne eye besyngle, all thy body shalbe full of light. But and yf thyne eye be wycked then all thy body shalbe full of darckenes. Wherefore yf the light that is in the, be darckenes: how greate is that darckenes'.
[Matthew 6.19-23 Tyndale’s translation]

Erasmus
Deciderius Erasmus was born in Rotterdam in 1466. He was a scholar and a reformer who worked for many years in England and was Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He published an important Greek text of the New Testament with his own translation into Latin. He could not understand why the church spent so much time studying the supposed miracles of those they called saints and ignored the wonders of God’s plan of salvation (‘In Praise of Folly’). Erasmus influenced Martin Luther and provided a basis for the work of Tyndale.

‘I wish the sacred Scriptures were translated into all languages of all people, that they might be read and known, not merely by the Scots and Irish, but even by the Turks and Saracens. I wish that the husbandman may sing parts of them at the plough, that the weaver may warble them at his shuttle, and that the traveller may with his narratives lighten the weariness of the way.’

If you look at this quotation from Tyndale’s English translation you will see that language is still changing. This is not the language that we speak today. There was also another problem. Bibles being translated by Protestant scholars often had footnotes which were anti-Roman Catholic. So when the Old Testament records the time when the people were told that there was no need to bring any more gifts because there was enough for the work of building [Exodus 36.6,7] , a footnote in one Bible says, ‘When will the pope say “Stop” and prevent people still bringing gifts to build St. Peter’s?’ The Catholic scholars put anti-protestant footnotes in their Bibles.

There were arguments about the footnotes and there were arguments about which was the best translation. In 1604 a conference was held at Hampton Court Palace that resulted in King James ordering a new translation to be made:

‘In the Geneva translation some notes are partial, untrue, seditious and savouring of a traitorous conceit. To conclude the point, let errors of matters of faith be amended and indifferent things be interpreted and a gloss be added unto them’

More information
The arrangement of the books in the Bible
Divine inspiration of the Bible
How the Bible was written and first translated
The scriptures of Jesus and the apostles
The Authorised Version and more recent translations of the Bible
Why today's Bible can be trusted