The books were published individually over several years. His New Testament was completed in The Pentateuch was completed in Tyndale also translated, Jonah published He later translated Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles, but these translations were never published.
Was Tyndale hailed for his work? Surely he was appreciated by some, but the established church of the day definitely did not appreciate Tyndale giving the Bible to the common people. He was hounded and went into hiding. Finally he was betrayed, arrested and martyred in Such attempts to keep the Bible in English from the hands of the people were ultimately unfruitful.
Amazingly, the Church that Saul intended to persecute in Acts 9 became a centre for mission. Bible translation activity then spread out from Syria over the following centuries into Armenia, Georgia, Samarkand and beyond.
The Septuagint was almost always the source text for the Old Testament at this stage. It was what Paul used when quoting the Old Testament. One man not convinced by this argument was Jerome. Around AD the Pope commissioned his secretary, Jerome, to produce a new translation in Latin, as the Septuagint-based versions were, shall we say, rather messy.
Jerome set about the task with reported trepidation, but also with great seriousness. He learnt Hebrew and, thanks to the work of Origen, was able to access Scripture texts in both Hebrew and Greek. The resulting translation, produced in the Latin of the people, is known to us as the Vulgate.
Words like Scripture, salvation, justification and regeneration made their way into English via their Latin form in the Vulgate. It was, surely, the time when Islamic expansion caused the Church to go into lockdown mode and look inwards. And yet this was the time of Cyril and Methodius, missionaries and Bible translators for the Slavs. There was also impressive activity in translating passages of Scripture into Arabic in Seville, Baghdad and Damascus. Peter Waldo did similar things in France.
John Wycliffe emerged in 14th century England as a high profile opponent of privilege and power in the Church. Towards the end of his life he gave expression to his convictions by translating the Scriptures from the Vulgate into Middle English for the ordinary people. After his death Wycliffe was excommunicated, his body exhumed and burnt.
But unlike those before him, Wycliffe had an effect that rippled across Europe: Jan Hus and others in Prague produced Scriptures in Hungarian and Bohemian. Hus was declared a heretic and promptly burnt at the stake.
Two events in the 15th century changed the course of Bible translation like little else. Knowledge of and access to the Greek and Hebrew texts had dried up in the Western Church. It was the Eastern Church that had kept this old knowledge, so when Constantinople fell, scholars fled westwards clutching their Greek and Hebrew texts.
So the lord God casts a deep sleep on the man And he sleeps. Then he takes one of his ribs And closes up the hole with his flesh,. And the rib the lord God takes from the man He makes into a woman and brings her to the man. My heresy is, of course, quite different from what the early translators of the Bible went through — the men who did the pioneer dirty work of turning Hebrew and Greek scriptures into English rather than the authorized Latin.
The heresy there was opening up the text to commoners, who would be able to read the Bible on their own for the first time. The history of these early Bible translators is like the history of religious wars: two sides in horrible conflict over religious choice.
Likewise, these early translators lived and died according to prevailing doctrine. For their iniquity, the brave decoders were often mortally punished, though today these vile scholars are celebrated. The history of Bible translation is as terrible as it is enthralling. War, of course, dominated the European continent for much of early modern history. These civil and international wars annihilated national and daily being; populations suffered and diminished.
Losses in the millions were not uncommon during those years: three million people died during the Crusades, the great war between Christianity and Islam.
At the same time, clergy and scholars were waging a hot war over Bible translation. The clergy wished to maintain exclusive knowledge of the text while scholars sought to open the Bible to the common reader.
These scholars, however, even if they were professors at Oxford or Cambridge, were completely unprotected by their institutions. One of these men was John Wyclif ca. Poor sap — to be so virtuous and courageous!
0コメント