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English Bible
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Hi, I'm Dave DeWitt, and today I want to talk about how we got our English Bible.
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Originally, the Bible was written primarily in two languages, the Old Testament in Hebrew
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with a few passages in Aramaic, mostly in Daniel and Ezra, and the New Testament in
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Greek, the largest Aramaic section is Daniel 2, 4 through 7, 28.
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There's a few words and phrases in the Gospels in Aramaic, such as Eli, Eli, Lama, Sabachthani
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in Mark 15, and Hosanna in Matthew 21, but for the most part, we can think of the Bible
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as being written in Hebrew and Greek.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls provided the most significant discovery of Hebrew manuscripts in existence.
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Today, there are about 40,000 handwritten manuscripts in the original languages of the
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Bible, with more being discovered regularly.
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The Apocrypha is a collection of 14 books written in Greek during the Intertestament
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period.
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These books were included in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, but not in the Western Roman Catholic
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Church.
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The Western Catholic Church followed only the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, and
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the 27 Christian books written in the first century, known as the New Testament.
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Should be noted that there are no other Christian writings of the first century, which the church
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left out.
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There are only 27, and they're all in the New Testament.
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The Roman Catholic Church did not include the Apocrypha until 1546.
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It was a part of their Counter-Reformation, apparently to support the idea of people paying
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indulgences to the church to pray for the dead, as noted in 2 Maccabees 12, 39-41.
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The 400s was the first major translation of the Bible into Latin, done by a Balkan monk
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named Jerome in the 400s, and he started it in Rome.
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It was completed in Bethlehem.
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It was known as the Latin Vulgate, simply means common Latin, and it became the official
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Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Between the 500s and the 1200s came the Dark Ages, where the Bible was kept from the people
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in the Western Church by maintaining the Latin Vulgate, which only the priest could read.
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The original texts were studied and copied by monks in monasteries preserving the Bible
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through the Dark Ages.
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The 1300s, the Wycliffe Bible was the first English Bible.
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It was translated from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his friends in the 1380s.
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Over 30 years after his death, Wycliffe was labeled as a heretic and his bones were dug
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up and burned by the Catholic leadership.
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It was feared that translations of the Bible into English would lead to wrong interpretations
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and limit the power and influence of the clergy in the church.
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The 1400s is known as the Renaissance.
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The 1400s saw the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg.
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The first book printed was the Gutenberg Bible in 1454.
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It was printed in Latin.
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It was printed in Mainz, Germany.
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It was an edition of the Catholic Vulgate, which was carried to America by Columbus.
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So the first Bible to reach America was the Latin Vulgate in 1492.
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The 1500s is the century of the Reformation.
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In 1516, Erasmus produced a parallel New Testament in Greek and in Latin.
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Erasmus corrected errors that had been cripped into the Latin, producing a better Latin text.
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Erasmus' text was used by Luther in translating the Bible into German and for the Tyndale
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Bible into English.
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William Tyndale, who died in 1536, his translation in the 1500s was more accurate than Wycliffe's
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translation in the 1300s because it came from the Greek rather than the Latin.
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He was finally arrested and burned at the stake in 1536, praying God would, quote,
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open the eyes of the king.
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His prayers were answered three years later when Henry VIII of England renounced the Roman
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Catholicism and had himself declared the head of the Church of England and, in 1539, funded
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the printing of the English Bible known as the Great Bible.
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Henry VIII was succeeded by his sickly son, Edward, who died young, and was succeeded
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by Henry's first daughter, known as Bloody Mary, for obvious reasons.
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Mary tried to return England to Catholicism and killed anyone who produced an English
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Bible.
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At this time, a group of English Protestants fled to John Calvin's domain in Geneva and
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translated the first complete English study Bible known as the Geneva Bible.
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So here we have the first study Bible.
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The Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to use our Roman-style letters and verse numbers
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based on the work of Robert Stephanus, a Protestant confort from Paris.
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So this is also where we get our first verse divisions in the Geneva Bible.
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This was the primary Bible of William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, John Bunyan of
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his Pilgrim's Progress, and it was taken to America on the Mayflower in 1620.
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In the 1600s, Bloody Mary was succeeded by her sister, Elizabeth, who had a long reign
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and returned England to Protestantism, but she had no children.
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To find a king, Parliament went to the line of Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII,
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who had married James IV of Scotland, and they had James V, who had married Tudor, who
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had James VI, who became James I of England and ruled from 1603 to 1625.
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James I commissioned a team of 54 scholars to translate the King James Bible, completed
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in 1611.
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The King James Bible, also usually known as the KJV, King James Version, was carried to
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American colonists by John Wycliffe in 1630 and gradually replaced the Geneva Bible in
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America.
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The KJV, King James Version, has become the most printed book in the world with over a
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billion copies.
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In the 1700s, the British ruled.
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It was legal to print the Bible in other languages, but illegal to print an English Bible in the
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Americas.
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But with the American Declaration of Independence, American independence changed all that.
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In 1782, the United States Congress authorized the printing of the Robert Atkins English
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Bible for use in schools.
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The 1800s saw the development of Bible distribution societies.
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The first was the Philadelphia Bible Society in 1808, then the New York Bible Society in
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1809, followed by Bible societies in Baltimore, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine.
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In 1833, Noah Webster of the Webster Dictionary, realizing the English language had changed
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a lot since 1611, produced a modern variation of the King James Bible.
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Possibly the Webster Bible was ahead of its time because the translation didn't sell very
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well.
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Apparently, people weren't ready for it.
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In the 20th century, we have a controversy between the King James-only people and those
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who saw a need for a modern translation.
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The problem was more than the Elizabethan English of the 1600s.
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The bigger issue was the discovery of thousands of more Greek manuscripts.
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The King James came from the Greek text called the Majority Text because it selected the
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word used the majority of the times in the available manuscripts.
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The modern translation used what was called a Minority Text.
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Due to thousands of new discoveries of manuscripts, it was possible to use other criteria, such
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as geographic location of variants, as a way to determine an accurate text.
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Although there are many others available, we'll comment on just four translations.
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First of all, in 1971, the Living Bible pioneered the idea of an idea-for-an-idea paraphrase
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of the text.
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Also, in 1971, the New American Standard Bible was an attempt to use the textual analysis
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available through the increased number of manuscripts to produce a word-for-word translation
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into the English language from a better Greek text, but it does sometimes consider the dynamic
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equivalent of a word rather than the lexical definition.
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In 1973, the New International Version used the later Greek text but produced a phrase-for-phrase
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translation.
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The NIV employs the dynamic equivalent principle to a greater extent.
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The idea the committee used was to render what they believed to be the dynamic equivalent
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of the original author's intent into 20th-century vernacular.
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Then in 1982, we have the New King James Bible, which followed the manuscript evidence of
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the original King James but updated the grammar and vocabulary to Modern English.
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Well thank you for listening.
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A paper on this subject with the dates and footnotes is available on our website relationalconcepts.org.
