IB World Religions 3.3.5. Language: Hebrew, Greek and the Vernacular Bible Notes

3.3.5. Language: Hebrew, Greek and the Vernacular Bible

Hebrew and Aramaic

1. The books Christians call the Old Testament were written almost entirely in Hebrew, the language of ancient Israel, and Christians inherited them in that form from Judaism.
2. A few passages are in Aramaic, the everyday language of the Persian empire and later of Judea. Sections of Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic, along with a single verse of Jeremiah.
3. Hebrew was written with consonants only, so the same letters could be voiced in more than one way, and readers supplied the vowels from memory and context.
4. Between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries Jewish scribes called the Masoretes added vowel points and accents. Their work produced the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew Bible that Christian translators still use.
5. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran from 1947 supplied Hebrew manuscripts about a thousand years older than the oldest previously known. The great Isaiah scroll matched the Masoretic wording closely.
6. Aramaic survives inside the New Testament as well. The Gospels keep phrases such as talitha koum, abba and the cry from the cross, Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani, which most scholars take as evidence of the language Jesus actually spoke.

The Greek New Testament

1. Every book of the New Testament was written in koine Greek, the common speech that spread across the eastern Mediterranean after the conquests of Alexander.
2. The choice was practical. Koine was the trade and administrative language of the region, so a letter written in it could be read from Jerusalem to Rome without translation.
3. Christians read the different books as aimed at different audiences. Matthew assumes readers who know Jewish scripture and custom, while Mark stops to explain Jewish practice and to translate Aramaic words for readers who do not.
4. Style varies with audience as well. Luke opens with a formal dedication in polished Greek, and John uses a small and simple vocabulary while giving ordinary words such as Logos, light and life a heavy theological load.
5. Paul dictated letters in Greek to congregations in Greek speaking cities, which is why his arguments use the vocabulary of Hellenistic rhetoric and the marketplace.
6. The Greek carries Semitic habits underneath. Many sentences follow Hebrew and Aramaic patterns, which suggests writers thinking in one language and writing in another.

The Septuagint and the Vulgate

1. Greek speaking Jews in Alexandria translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek from the third century BCE. The result is called the Septuagint, from a tradition that seventy or seventy-two scholars produced it, and is abbreviated LXX.
2. The Septuagint mattered enormously to the early Church. Most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow its Greek wording rather than the Hebrew.
3. Latin versions multiplied as the faith moved west, and their variety became a problem. Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce a reliable Latin Bible in 382.
4. Jerome made a decision that shaped Western Christianity. Rather than translating the Greek, he learned Hebrew and worked from the Hebrew text, a principle he called the hebraica veritas.
5. His Latin Bible became known as the Vulgate, the common version, and served as the Bible of Western Europe for over a thousand years. The Council of Trent in 1546 declared it the authentic text for public reading and debate.
6. Other ancient churches made their own versions early. The Syriac Peshitta, the Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopic Bibles all date from the first Christian centuries and remain in use in those communities.

Into the vernacular

1. Translating Scripture into the vernacular, the ordinary language of a people, has been one of the most contested activities in Christian history.
2. In late medieval England the question turned political. Followers of John Wycliffe produced English versions from the Latin in the 1380s, and church authorities restricted unlicensed English translation in 1409.
3. Printing changed the scale of the argument. Erasmus published a printed Greek New Testament in 1516, giving translators direct access to the original language for the first time in centuries.
4. Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in 1522 and the whole Bible by 1534, and his version did as much to shape modern German as it did to spread his theology.
5. William Tyndale translated into English from Greek and Hebrew rather than Latin. He was executed in 1536, and much of his wording passed almost unchanged into later English Bibles.
6. Catholics translated too, though more cautiously. The Douay-Rheims Bible gave English speaking Catholics a version made from the Vulgate, with the New Testament appearing in 1582.

The King James Version

1. The English translation with the widest influence came out of a conference at Hampton Court in 1604, where James I agreed to authorize a new version for use in churches.
2. The work was organized rather than individual. About forty-seven scholars worked in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, each reviewing the others' drafts.
3. The King James Version appeared in 1611, translating the New Testament from the printed Greek text then available and the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and including the Apocrypha between the testaments.
4. Its translators borrowed heavily from Tyndale, and scholars estimate that a large share of its New Testament wording is his. The version's rhythms were shaped for reading aloud in church.
5. Its effect on English reached far beyond religion. Phrases such as the salt of the earth and a house divided entered ordinary speech, and English literature is saturated with its cadences.
6. A minority of churches still treat it as uniquely authoritative. Most English speaking Christians now use later translations, while many keep the King James Version for memorized passages and for public reading.

Contemporary versions

1. Modern translators face a choice about method. Formal equivalence follows the wording of the original closely, while dynamic equivalence aims to reproduce the effect of the original in natural modern language.
2. Both approaches are widely used. The New Revised Standard Version leans formal and is common in universities and mainline churches, the New International Version is widespread among evangelicals, and the Good News Bible is written for readers with limited English.
3. Catholic versions have followed the same shift. The Jerusalem Bible and translations approved for the lectionary are made from Hebrew and Greek rather than from the Latin, a change made possible by twentieth century Catholic teaching.
4. Language about people has become a live dispute. Some versions render terms for humanity inclusively where the original is generic, and others regard such changes as altering the text.
5. Translation is also missionary work. Bible societies and translation agencies have put the complete Bible into more than seven hundred languages and parts of it into thousands more.
6. Worship languages have moved as well. The Roman Catholic Church permitted vernacular liturgy after the Second Vatican Council, while Orthodox churches still use Greek and Church Slavonic alongside growing use of local languages.