THE BIBLE INTO ENGLISH

How did the Bible get into the English language? After all, the Bible was written long before the English language was invented.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew between 1000 B.C. and 165 B.C. The New Testament was written in Greek between 50 A.D. and 110 A.D. It was written in Greek because Christianity quickly spread from Israel-Palestine where Hebrew was read and Aramaic was spoken, to Asia Minor (Turkey), Greece and Italy where Greek was spoken. For some time the early Christians were Greek speaking so it was natural for the New Testament to be written in Greek.

However, the Western world soon began using Latin as the common language. So St. Jerome translated the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into Latin. He worked in Bethlehem and completed his work in about 410 A.D.

St. Jerome’s Latin Bible was called the Vulgate (meaning not “vulgar”, but common, everyday Latin). The Latin Vulgate soon became the official Bible of the Western (Roman) Catholic Church. The Mass and liturgies were then written in Latin. Latin was used in works of history, theology and philosophy. And the Latin Vulgate remained the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.

However, as time passed, fewer and fewer people spoke Latin, let alone read it. That was especially true in England. So Bede, the great historian of Anglo-Saxon England, began to translate portions of the Latin Vulgate into the English of his day.

Legend says he died in 735 A.D. just as he completed translating the Gospel of John. In the 10th and 11th centuries the Gospels and Psalms were translated into the English of that time. But the big breakthrough came in about 1384 A.D. when John Wycliffe began translating the Latin Vulgate into English. This was the first major step toward having the Bible in English as we have it today.

But there is much more to this exciting story to be continued next time!!!