Chapter 6
Principal Versions of Scripture, Ancient and Modern

The primary biblical languages are Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Most of the Old Testament books were written in Hebrew, though some of the deuterocanonical books were written in Aramaic and Greek. These two had become the more common languages in the Middle Eastern world and had replaced older languages like Hebrew.

About the third century B.C., a group of Hebrew scholars undertook a translation of the sacred writings from Hebrew to Greek, for the benefit of those Jews who lived in cities outside of Israel, for instance, in Alexandria, Corinth, and Ephesus.

According to tradition, this translation was completed by seventy scholars who were sent by the high priest Eleazar from Jerusalem to Egypt around 250 B.C., where they translated the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) into Greek. The work was continued by others, and all the sacred writings were translated by 100 B.C. This translation is called the Septuagint translation, according to the above-mentioned tradition that seventy scholars ( in Latin septuaginta) initiated it.

Though the Septuagint translation of the books was of unequal value (the Pentateuch and earlier prophets are considered by scholars to have been the best), there was an effort to present difficult passages more clearly, and some messianic texts were also rendered more forcefully.

One famous example of this more specific rendering is Genesis 3:15, where God is addressing the serpent after the Fall and predicting his punishment, and which the Septuagint translates as "He shall bruise your head," instead of the more literal "It [the seed] of the woman shall bruise your head."

This translation will have great importance and resonance with the coming of Christianity, and the belief in Christ the Messiah who conquers the devil who is the enemy of mankind.

Similarly, the Septuagint translates Isaiah's prophecy to Ahaz (see Isaiah 7:14) as "a virgin shall conceive and bear a son" instead of the more general "a young woman shall conceive and bear a son," which was in the original Isaian text.

This translation paved the way for the Christian belief that Christ the Messiah was not conceived by the physical union of man and woman, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that he was born of a virgin mother.

The Septuagint was used extensively by the Jews in various parts of the world and by the early Christians. Many of the prophecies quoted in the Gospels are rendered in the Septuagint text, which shows how respected it was in the early Church.

Because of its use by Christians, the Septuagint became suspect to the Pharisees meeting in the Council of Jamnia in 100 A.D., and they rejected it as a valid translation. As a result, several other Greek translations were undertaken by Jewish writers in the first three centuries. Most notable of these were the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Thedotion.

In the year 220 A.D., the great biblical scholar Origen undertook one of the earliest exercises in textual criticism.

His famous Hexapla listed in six columns the Hebrew text, the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, the Aquila translation, the Symmachus translation, the Septuagint, and the Theodotion translation. His purpose was to reconstruct the best Greek translation, since the proliferation of the other versions was quite confusing.

In this way he hoped to provide a uniform translation for all, and to help the Christians in their disagreement with the Jews about what the Hebrew Scriptures really said. He devised groups of critical symbols that showed which of the Septuagint texts were missing from, or added to, the original Hebrew - thereby anticipating the work of textual criticism fifteen centuries later.

Unfortunately, this great work, reputed to be some fifty volumes, was lost, and the only extant portions are a few verses from Psalms 22 and 45. A good portion of the Hexapla however is preserved in the writings of the Fathers of the Church and in the margins of several manuscripts.

Other important translations of Scripture included the Old Latin, the Syriac, and the Coptic. Many of them were conserved in papyri and codices.

Because of the many variant readings in the Old Latin texts, Pope Saint Damasus in the year 383 asked a traveling scholar by the name of Eusebius Hieronymus (later Saint Jerome) to translate the Gospels. Though we do not know the exact texts that he used, it appears that they were closely related to the Alexandrian family of which the Codex Vaticanus is the chief representative.

About the year 387, while in Palestine, Jerome revised the Latin text of the Old Testament protocanonical books according to the fifth column of Origen's Hexapla, which at that time was available in the library of Caesarea.

Finally, in order to answer the accusations of the rabbis that Christians did not understand the Old Testament because they lacked a genuine scriptural text, Jerome began in Bethlehem a huge project. It was the Latin translation of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew texts which he had available there.

After sixteen years he completed his project. He translated all the books of the Old Testament, except the deuterocanonical books of Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

Though Jerome's work was not immediately accepted by everyone in the Church, it later came to have a great authority so that by the ninth century it was used universally. The name "Vulgate," that is, the edition for the "people," was probably coined in the thirteenth century. Saint Jerome’s translation is noted for the clarity of its expression, for the elegance of its diction, and above all for its fidelity to the original text.

Because of the controversies with the Protestants, and the proliferation of translations, the Council of Trent in 1546 declared that Jerome’s Vulgate was a text free from errors in faith and morals, and that it should be henceforth used in the public liturgies of the Church.

For the next 400 years this was the case, until the vernacular languages began to be used in many parts of the world after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). We should note here that the Council of Trent did not state that texts in the original languages were of no value, or that the Vulgate was the best translation possible, but simply that it was an authentic witness of the original texts, and that it contained no errors of faith or morals.

Later improved editions of the Vulgate were mandated by the Church, the first appearing in 1592. Pope Saint Pius X in 1907 asked the Benedictines to carry out a farther revision of the Vulgate by using the best texts and codices then available, some of which - because of nineteenth-century archeological finds - were even better than the texts that Saint Jerome used.

This enormous task was completed in 1979, and the New Vulgate was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in the apostolic constitution Scripturarum Thesaurus.

We know of several English versions appearing before the sixteenth century, such as the translation of Saint Bede in the eighth century, and that of the dissident John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, but they have been lost.

We do know that Stephen Langton of Canterbury divided the Bible into chapters in the year 1206 while teaching in Paris. But with the sixteenth century, and the appearance of Protestantism, there was a greater demand for Bibles in the vernacular tongue.

Thus, the Protestant versions of Tyndale, Coverdale, and the so-called Bishops’ Bible were produced in England, followed by the famous King James version in 1611. This version was completed by Anglican scholars who drew from Hebrew and Greek texts, but unfortunately its translation of the New Testament is quite faulty because these scholars refused to use the Vulgate as a source, which drew from far more ancient manuscripts.

Twenty years earlier, an English version of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate was produced by English Catholic scholars who had been exiled from England and worked across the channel in the two French towns of Douay and Rheims.

Their translation, known for its fidelity to the original Latin, was henceforth called the Douay Rheims version, and was used for over 350 years by English-speaking Catholics. Its style also had a profound influence on the vocabulary of the King James Version.

Updates of the Douay Rheims were the Challoner version of the eighteenth century and the Confraternity Version of 1940. In 1956, Monsignor Ronald Knox published a translation of the Bible from the Vulgate, which has a very elegant style noted for its longer sentence structure and paraphrases.

Other English versions published during the past century include the Revised Standard Version (1901), which was the Protestant revision of the King James Version; the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (O.T. 1946, N.T, 1952) ; the Jerusalem Bible, published by the Ecole Biblique (1966); the New American Bible (1970), and the New Revised Standard Version (1990), with a Catholic Edition (1993). All of these versions were taken from original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts, though their quality is not equal.

The best of them for elegance of style, accuracy, and fidelity to Church teaching is the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, which is used in this book. Unfortunately, the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (1993) misuses inclusive language and has mistranslated the original text in some instances.