The Book of Acts tells the story of how the gospel spread from Jerusalem westward, until it reached the heart of the empire, Rome. The apostles had no insurmountable language barriers to overcome in the first century, since Greek was spoken in all the great centers of the Roman world. When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans in the middle of the first century, he could write it in Greek. And when Clement of Rome at the end of the first century wrote to the Corinthians, he wrote in his readers’ native Greek. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote a letter to the Romans about A.D. 110, and again it was in Greek.
About the middle of the second century Hermas of Rome wrote his famous Shepherd in Greek. A little later Polycarp of Smyrna visited Rome because of the controversy over the date of Easter, and he was asked by the Roman church to lead in the celebration of the Eurcharist in Greek. Greek remained the language of Roman theologians until the beginning of the third century.
However, the official language of the Roman government, of the army, and the law courts, was Latin, and gradually the West became Latin speaking. The last Roman theologian to write his works in Greek was Hippolytus (died 236). Although Pope Victor (c. 190) wrote in Latin, his writings have not survived, and the first Christian writer of repute to write in Latin was Novatian (c. 250). The change from Greek to Latin in everyday life came perhaps around A.D. 150, although many ordinary folk had probably never learned to speak Greek. By 250 Latin had become the language of Christian writers and theologians. Since the liturgy of the church is usually last to change, it is estimated that some Greek continued to be used for another hundred years; by then the West was Latin. Nevertheless, the publisher of Codex Bezae, at the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century, for some reason or another still thought it worth the effort to publish a Greek/Latin bilingual codex of the Gospels and Acts.
As the West became Latin in speech the need for a Latin Bible arose. And this led to various efforts to render the Bible into Latin. These early versions that preceded the work of Jerome are called Old Latin versions.
It appears that the need for a Latin Bible arose first in the Roman province of Africa, covering the territory now represented by Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Some of the most flourishing churches of early Christianity were located here, before Islam snuffed out the light of the gospel in the seventh century. Several of the great teachers of the church came from North Africa; one might mention Tertullian, Cyprian, and the famous Augustine. Students of the history of Christian missions have observed that in territories such as Egypt and Syria, where the Bible was translated into the languages of the common people at an early stage, the Muslim conquest was unable to wipe out Christianity. In North Africa, however, where no translations into the languages of the Berber peoples were made, hardly a trace of Christianity is left.
The official language of the Roman province of Africa was Latin, although indigenous people had their own languages. This was particularly the case in the great city of Carthage. And it was here that the need for a Latin version came to the surface.1
In A.D. 180 there was an outbreak of persecution in Numidia (modern Tunisia). A record of the trial of Christians in a town named Scillium has come down to us. This account, drawn up in Latin, identifies those who were beheaded for their faith. When the proconsul asked Speratus what he had in the box that he carried, he replied: “Books and letters of a just man, one Paul.”2 It is generally assumed that if Paul’s letters were available in Latin in A.D. 180, then Latin Gospels must have been available also, since the Gospels are usually translated first.3
Since the earliest evidence for a Latin NT comes from North Africa, we may have to conclude that the first attempts to render the Greek NT into Latin were made in Africa. On the other hand, there may have been parallel efforts to make Latin translations of the Greek NT in Italy. The fact is that the Old Latin version is not the product of one man; nor was it, as far as we know, an official project of the church. Rather, individuals in different parts of the Western Empire took it in hand to prepare Latin versions for those who could not speak Greek. Augustine in his day complained that “in the early days of the faith, every man who happened to gain possession of a Greek manuscript and who imagined he had any facility in both languages, however slight that might have been, dared to make a translation.”4
The NT books were translated a number of times and no single translator did all twenty-seven books. Perhaps the first translations were made orally. Just as the Jews, when they could no longer understand the Hebrew Bible, had translators who gave synagogue audiences an Aramaic paraphrase, so the Greek Scriptures were probably translated orally into Latin in those churches of the West where Greek was not understood. Finally, instead of translating into Latin orally, written versions were prepared in advance. This resulted in a great multiplicity of translations, and Jerome later complained that there were almost as many Latin versions as there were manuscripts.5
We know that the Bible was available in Latin by the time of Tertullian, for this great jurist/theologian quotes the NT in Latin (died c. 220). Also, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who died about 258, quotes copiously from a Latin version of both Old and New Testaments.6 It is even possible that in the case of the OT, African Jews had already translated the OT into Latin, just as Alexandrian Jews had a Greek version prepared, and that Christians took over this Latin OT, just as they had adopted the Septuagint.
In any case, we are not dependent on the quotations of the early Latin Fathers for our knowledge of Old Latin, even though these quotations are extremely important in establishing the best Old Latin text; we have a number of manuscripts that have retained for us the Old Latin text.
As compared with the more than 10,000 manuscripts of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, the manuscripts of the Old Latin versions are few in number, and often quite fragmentary in form. The Gospels are represented by about thirty-two mutilated manuscripts. A few brief comments on several of the most important codices is in place.
Representing the African family there is Codex Palatinus, a fifth-century copy of the Gospels, now at Trent. It is written with silver and gold ink on purple vellum. The text contains the Gospels in the Western order (Matthew, John, Luke, Mark). More important, and also belonging to the African family, is Codex Bobiensis, now at Turin. Although it is rather fragmentary it is a fourth-century manuscript that has preserved the Old Latin text for us better than any other manuscript.
Of the European family the most outstanding is the fourth-century Codex Vercellensis. It has been held in such high regard that the kisses of the faithful over the centuries have damaged the text. It is now under glass at Vercelli in northern Italy. It is also written in gold and silver letters on purple vellum, and has the Gospels in the Western order. Codex Veronensis, stored at Verona, Italy, is a purple parchment manuscript written in the fifth century with silver and gold ink. It represents the type of text Jerome used as the basis for the Vulgate. Codex Colbertinus comes from the twelfth century but has the Gospels in Old Latin. It is also a representative of the European family.
One of the largest manuscripts in the world is appropriately called “Gigas” (giant), requiring two men to lift it. Its pages are twenty by thirty-six inches and besides some other writings, it contains the whole Bible in Latin. Formerly it was in Prague, but it was moved to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1648. It is sometimes called the Devil’s Bible because it contains a huge painting of this potentate in garish colors. Actually only Acts and the Book of Revelation are in Old Latin, elsewhere Gigas is Vulgate.
The Old Latin versions contain some interesting readings. In the parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Luke 13:7), several manuscripts have: “I will throw on a basket of dung.” They have the comment on the descent of the angel to trouble the waters (John 5:3-4) and the story of the woman taken in adultery. When Jesus was baptized “a great and tremendous light flashed forth from the water, so that all who were present feared” (Matt. 3:15). In Luke 23:5 it is reported that Jesus was charged with alienating “both our sons and our wives from us, for he does not baptize as we do.” The Resurrection account in Mark 16:3 is expanded; Jesus “rose in the brightness of the living God, and at once they (the angels) ascended with him, and immediately there was light.” And the bystanders, instead of saying that Jesus was calling Elijah as he hung on the cross, say, “He calls the sun” (Mark 15:34).
The Old Latin Bible was printed in several volumes at Oxford, beginning in 1883, and another series was begun in Rome, in 1912. At the moment an ambitious project is under way at the Monastery of Beuron in Wirttemberg Germany, in an effort to publish the most trustworthy Old Latin Bible to date.
Since various people at various times and places, with greater or lesser degree of success, had attempted to render the Bible into Latin in the early centuries of the Christian era, the result was chaos. Hardly two manuscripts could be found that agreed in detail. Accordingly Pope Damasus (366-384) undertook to remedy the situation, and the man he chose to create order out of this confusion was the great biblical scholar, Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus, known to us as Jerome.
Jerome was born about 346 at Stridon, on the borders of Dalmatia and Pannonia, not far from Trieste. His parents were fairly well-to-do Christians and gave their son the opportunity to study. Soon after the Emperor Julian died in 363 Jerome went to Rome to study under the famous grammarian Donatus. Jerome began building up his library by copying every book he could lay his hands on. He attended some disreputable places at this time, but on Sundays he often visited the catacombs. It was during this time that he made a formal profession as a Christian, was baptized, and embarked on the study of Greek7
From Rome Jerome and a friend moved to Gaul, where his interests shifted from classical to biblical and theological studies. As often happened in those days, he developed serious conflicts in his mind between classical and Christian studies. From Gaul he moved to Aquileia, in Italy, and in 373 Jerome set out for the East. At Antioch he had a major spiritual crisis. While suffering from a fever he had a dream in which he was summoned before the Judge of all the earth who asked him to state who he was. Jerome answered: “I am a Christian!” But the Judge answered, “You lie; you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” He was then taken away for punishment, but Jerome begged for mercy and promised never to read a pagan book again. Evidently Jerome did not take his oath, made in a feverous condition, too seriously, for he always did treasure the classics.
Nevertheless, it was a turning point in his life. He now sought seclusion and joined the hermits in the desert east of Antioch for four or five years, devoted to sacred studies. He got a converted Jew to teach him Hebrew and so he added a third tongue to his equipment as translator.
Jerome had already published several works when he went to Rome in 382, where he became the secretary and confidant of Pope Damasus. It was here that Damasus commissioned him to revise the Latin versions in the light of the Greek. With this he launched on his life’s work. He realized, scholar that he was, that the task of a Bible reviser/translator can be a very thankless one. Moreover, Jerome was by nature quite sensitive to criticism. He asks Damasus in his preface to his revision of the Four Gospels:
Is there a man, learned or unlearned, who will not, when he takes the volume in his hands, and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, break out immediately into violent language and call me a forger and a profane person for having had the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections therein?8
When Damasus died in 385 there were those who would have been glad to see Jerome become his successor. But that did not happen, and the new pope did not hold him in such high esteem as had Damasus. Jerome, therefore, left Rome and went to the East, settling finally in Bethlehem. A wealthy high-born woman, Paula, established three convents for women there, of which she was the Superior. Jerome directed the monastery for men. Here they spent the remainder of their lives. Jerome wrote a great number of scholarly works here in Bethlehem, but it is his revision and translation of the Bible that has made him world renowned.
Before Jerome left Rome he had already revised the Gospels and the Psalter; this is known as the “Roman Psalter.” At Bethlehem he prepared a more thorough revision of the Psalter that, because it was first adopted in Gaul, is called the “Gallican Psalter.” Both of these had been done on the basis of the Greek OT and Jerome soon realized this would not do. So, finally, he produced the “Hebrew Psalter,” by translating the Hebrew into Latin.
Meantime he was improving his Hebrew and translating other OT books. Jerome’s productivity did not cease with the completion of his translation of the Bible into Latin. In spite of failing eyesight he continued to put out scholarly works. The feared criticism of his version was not slow in coming either and he defended himself sharply against his critics, whom he called “two-legged asses.” He confesses that it would have been easier to weave mats out of palm leaves than to be a translator, for, as he wrote in the prologue to his version of Kings and Samuel, “If I correct errors in the Sacred Text, I am denounced as falsifier; if I do not correct them, I am piloried as disseminator of error.”
As one might expect, Jerome’s version of the Bible was not immediately accepted everywhere. People had become used to the Old Latin versions and weren’t about to give them up without a struggle. Jerome thought it was like refusing to drink from a pure fountain and keep on drinking at muddy streams. Some Bible readers recognized the merits of Jerome’s version and so his version circulated side by side with Old Latin versions for some time. He got a measure of satisfaction from observing that many of those who criticized his version in public read it in private. Eventually Jerome’s version won out over all others and got the name “Vulgate” (in the sense of common or popular). Although he had had the joy of seeing his revised Gospels accepted in his day, he did not live to see his Bible become the Vulgate of the Latinspeaking church. The sack of Rome in 410 shocked him severely, and in 420 he died, leaving the commentary on Jeremiah, which he was writing at the time of his death, incomplete.
The Latin Vulgate was to become the Bible of Western Europe for a thousand years With the dawn of the Reformation it was realized once again that people needed the Bible in their mother tongue, and a number of translations of the Latin Vulgate into other languages were produced. In the history of Bible translation no version, other than the Septuagint, has had such a profound influence on Christianity. The influence of the Latin Vulgate was obvious in some renderings of biblical terms in the early English versions. “Do penance,” “our supersubstantial bread,” instead of “our daily bread” (or “our bread for the morrow”) came into English via the Vulgate.
Jerome had a flair for languages. In his day the linguistic cleavage between the Latin West and the Greek East had become rather pronounced, and there were few scholars who handled both languages well. Jerome was able to bridge this gap and more: he also knew the Hebrew. Moreover, through his training in the Latin classics he had become a master of style and thus was able to render the Hebrew and Greek of the biblical books into good Latin
He had, of course, not trained as a translator; he was set on this course by Damasus, and he accepted the assignment only because there was a great need for a standard Latin text, and he looked upon his task as a holy calling. Damasus had not really asked for a fresh translation of the Bible, but simply a revision of the Old Latin versions. As time went on, however, Jerome became less and less a reviser and more a translator of the original Hebrew and Greek.
Jerome admits that the art of translation is difficult to master. Languages vary in the order of their words, their metaphors, their idioms. The translator must therefore choose between a word-for-word rendering or a freer translation that exposes the translator to the charge of unfaithfulness to the original. Jerome decided to translate sense for sense, not word for word.9 Fidelity to Scripture does not mean “pestilent minuteness” in transcribing the words, argued Jerome.
Jerome’s Vulgate is not uniform throughout. That maybe due in part to the fact that he began as reviser but then became translator. Yet even as translator he was slavishly literal in some places and free in his rendering of the sense in others. Martin Luther later thought his version would have been better if he had had others to help him, rather than translating all alone. After all, as Luther put it, our Lord promised to be present only “where two or three are gathered” in his name.
Early Christians had taken over the Jewish Septuagint, which included the Apocrypha. Although the Jews later rejected this version the church continued to use it. Jerome realized that the Apocrypha were not part of the Hebrew canon and insisted that these books not be used to establish Christian doctrine. But Jerome’s contemporaries looked with even less favor on his championship of the “Hebrew” canon than they did on his new “Hebrew” translation.10 Augustine particularly opposed Jerome on this point and argued that long tradition demanded that they be retained in the canon. Jerome had an appreciation for apocryphal literature, but he did not want them to be treated as Scripture. Nevertheless, they were included in his version (mostly in their Old Latin form) and it was left to the Reformers of the sixteenth century to revive Jerome’s view of the canon.
So completely did Jerome’s Vulgate eventually conquer all rival versions that later, when church councils were held, the Vulgate was carried in triumph in a golden reliquary (a repository for relics). The tragedy was that the Bible was left too much in the reliquary, and while medieval writers knew their Vulgate well, and priests knew at least those parts that were included in the service books, the common people seldom read the Bible.
Just as the Old Latin versions had become corrupt through repeated copying, so the Vulgate copies also differed considerably one from another as time went by. Attempts were made by Cassiodorus in the sixth century to revise the Vulgate. Again, about A.D. 800 Charlemagne had the famous British monk, Alcuin, carry out a revision. In the thirteenth century scholars at the University of Paris revised it, and it was this edition that formed the basis of the first printed Bible by Gutenberg in 1456. One scholar who participated in this project was Stephanus who introduced a standardized set of chapter divisions into the Vulgate.
When Protestant Reformers advocated the principle of sola scriptura, which included among other things the rejection of the Apocrypha as Scripture and a return to the original languages, the Council of Trent in 1546 decreed that the Latin Vulgate was to be held as authoritative in lectures, disputations, sermons, and expository discourses. When the Council made this decree not only were the many copies of the Vulgate quite diverse, but others, such as Erasmus, had already taken it in hand to make fresh Latin translations. In a sense, then, the decree of Trent was meaningless, since the Vulgate manuscripts were no longer uniform. And so along with this decree it was also decided that the Vulgate would need to be edited and printed as accurately as possible.11
This work was entrusted to a papal commission, but after forty years the task was far from complete. The reigning Pope, Sixtus V, then took the matter in his own hands and his edition appeared in 1590. He then forbade any questioning of this authoritative edition. Soon after he died, however, his successor, Gregory XIV (1590-91), made a start with a drastic revision of the Sixtine edition, and this was completed in the reign of Clement VIII, and published in 1592. This revised edition is commonly known as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, and has remained the “authorized version” of the Roman Catholic Church.
A critical edition of the Vulgate was begun in 1889 by Wordsworth and White and was completed at Oxford in 1953. In 1907 a critical edition was begun by papal authority and is now being prepared by a community of the Benedictine Order.
There are thousands of manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate extant. Some of them are deluxe copies, written on purple parchment with gold and silver ink. The influence of the Latin Bible on the language and thought of Western Christianity can hardly be overestimated.
During the Middle Ages several Bible versions that made their appearance in Europe were made from the Latin Vulgate, including the translation into English made by Wycliffe in the fourteenth century.
The ancient Goths founded an extensive empire north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea. Gothic warriors occasionally made forays into lands that lay within the Roman Empire, and by the third century, Christians, captured on such raids, had begun to propagate their faith among their captors.
About A.D. 264 the grandparents of Ulfilas, who was to give the Bible to the Goths in their mother tongue, were deported from Asia Minor to what is today Rumania. Ulfilas was probably the son of a Gothic father and a Cappadocian mother. The name Ulfilas is Gothic for “little wolf.” Although Christianity had already come to the Goths, Ulfilas has been rightly nicknamed “Apostle of the Goths.” Born about 311, he labored faithfully until his death (381 or 383) as bishop.
For years he labored north of the Danube. Resistance to his work led him to take his flock across the river into what is now Bulgaria. Consequently he is known also as “the Moses of the Goths.” When the Goths in 410 sacked Rome, Augustine was thankful they had been Christianized, else Rome’s fate would have been much worse.
Ulfilas’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of an alphabet—primarily from Greek and Latin characters, but also some Gothic runes—and the translation of the Scriptures into his native tongue. Since he translated the OT from the standard Greek version and not from the Hebrew, the Gothic OT is a secondary version. We are told that he left the two books of Kings untranslated, for the warring Goths did not need the war stories of these books to spur them on.12
For the NT Ulfilas followed the Greek text that had established itself at Byzantium, and so the Gothic version is of limited value in establishing the best text of the NT. Since, however, he translated almost word for word, it is possible, as a rule, to detect the Greek words that lie behind the Gothic. The Gothic Bible is of historical significance, for it is not only the oldest Bible, but the oldest written literature in a Germanic tongue.
There are several fragmentary manuscripts of the Gothic Bible available: the most famous is known as Argentius, that is, “the Silver Codex.” It is written in silver letters on purple vellum, and is now in Uppsala, Sweden.
We do not know whether Ulfilas ever completed the translation of the entire Bible, but twenty years after his death his helpers were in correspondence with the famous Jerome about translation problems. It was a pleasant surprise when a parchment leaf of a bilingual codex, with Gothic on one side and Latin on the other, came to light in Egypt in 1908. Ulfilas was a forerunner of the modern Bible translator’s movement.
In the ninth century there was but one Slavic language in Eastern Europe, of which the various Slavonic languages of the present day were but dialects. About the middle of the ninth century a Moravian Empire was formed in Eastern Europe that professed Christianity. Rostislav, the founder of the empire, in order to check the growth of Frankish influence from the West, asked in 863 that Slavonic priests be sent from Byzantium.13
In response to this request the Eastern Emperor, Michael III (842-867), sent two brothers, Constantine and Methodius, to preach in the Slavonic language. The brothers came from Thessalonica where masses of slaves had settled, and so they knew the language. Constantine, who later assumed the name Cyril when he entered the monastic life, devised a Slavonic alphabet and translated the Scriptures from Greek into Slavonic. After Cyril’s death Methodius, with two or three helpers, continued the translation work begun by Constantine. The version is naturally too late to be of any great use in establishing the best text of the NT, but it is of historical significance. Like the Gothic it grew out of the missionary concern of the church.
In the three hundred years between A.D. 150 and 450 the missionary fervor of the church gave birth to numerous versions of the Bible. The second great epoch of Bible translation is the period of the Reformation. The third great age of Bible translation began with the massive missionary movements of the nineteenth century, and continues unabated into the period of modern missions.
Prior to A.D. 1000 there were several attempts to render portions of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon, and that is a good starting point for our survey of the history of the English Bible that will be our subject in the next few chapters.
Kenyon, F. G. Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, rev. ed. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. See “The Vulgate in the Middle Ages,” pp. 250-64.
Metzger, B. M. The Early Versions of the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendonn, 1977.
. The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Price, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible, 3rd ed. revised by W.A. Irwin and Allen P. Wikgren. New York: Harper and Row, 1956. See “The Old Latin and the Vulgate,” pp. 177-88.
Vööbus, A. Early Versions of the New Testament: Manuscript Studies. Stockholm, 1954.
1 F. F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, 3rd rev. ed. (Old Tappan: Revell, 1963), p. 202.
2 B. M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 289.
3 A. Vouml;öbus, Early Versions of the New Testament (Stockholm, 1954), pp. 35-37.
4 Metzger, Early Versions, p. 290
5 Metzger, Early Versions, p. 290.
6 F. G. Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manisuscripts, revised by A. W. Adams (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 140.
7 H. F. D. Sparks, “Jerome as Biblical Translator,” The Cambridge History of the Bible, eds. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Vol. 1, p. 510.
8 Metzger, Early Versions, P. 333.
9 Sparks, “Jerome,” p. 523.
10 Sparks, “Jerome,” p. 534.
11 Bruce, Books and Parchments, p. 208.
12 G. S. Wegener, 6000 Years of the Bible, trans. M. Shenfield (Harper and Row, 1963), p, 170.
13 Bruce, Books and Parchments, p. 217.