The Pressure For Translation Of The Bible
THE PRESSURE FOR TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE
By 1525, Luther was widely seen as the leading light of the growing movement for reform within the Western European church. His ideas were being debated and discussed across Europe. Two ideas can be seen as underlying both his critique of the Church and his proposals for reform.
The church had lost sight of the basic New Testament idea that salvation is given by God as a gift, not earned as a reward;
That the key to the reform and renewal of the Church was to put the Bible in the hands of lay people.
Luther developed this second idea with special force in his 1520 writing The Appeal to the German Nobility. The reform of the Church and the correction of its errors depended on increasing the biblical literacy of the laity. That vision was shared by Erasmus, and set out in his Handbook of the Christian Soldier. While Erasmus preferred to use Latin, he knew the limitations of many of his readers. If he did not understand Latin, then the most humble layperson must be able to read the Bible in his own language—French, German, Flemish, or English. Erasmus himself was well aware of the power and lure of this vision:
I totally disagree with those who are unwilling that the Holy Scriptures should be translated into everyday languages and read by unlearned people. Christ wishes his mysteries to be made known as widely as possible. I would wish even all women to read the gospels, and the letters of St. Paul. I wish that they were translated into all the languages of all Christian people—that they might be read and known not just by the Scots and Irish, but even by the Turks and Saracens. I wish that the farm laborer might sing parts of them at his plow, that the weaver might hum them at his shuttle, and that the traveller might ease his weariness by reciting them.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (apart from a few sections in Aramaic), and the New Testament in Greek. The most widely available text of the Bible was a Latin translation known as the “Vulgate.” The origins of the Vulgate lie in the translation work of some early Christian writers such as Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. For Jerome, it was important that the Bible should be available in the official language of the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century did not, however, lead to the end of Latin as an international language. If anything, Latin became increasingly important as time progressed, and was well placed to become the language of scholarship and diplomacy when the so-called “Dark Ages” finally lifted over Europe around the year 1000.
Jerome's Latin translation now became increasingly important as a business proposition, as demand for the Bible in Latin increased. A twelfth-century syndicate of stationers in Paris reckoned they could make a quick profit by publishing—in manuscript form, of course—a Latin version of the Bible. It is this Paris version of the Vulgate that would go on to become widely used and accepted within medieval Christianity. When a medieval Christian writer talks about “the Bible,” it is quite likely that it is this specific Latin translation of the Bible that is being referred to.
Not everyone could read Latin; in any case, as Erasmus would make clear, there were some big problems with the accuracy of the Vulgate translation. In 1516, Erasmus declared that this traditional Latin translation of the Bible was awash with translation mistakes. Once Erasmus began his scholarly work in earnest, it did not take him long to expose problems with this widely used Latin translation. Convinced of the importance of studying the New Testament in its original Greek, Erasmus traveled to various libraries to take notes on the best Greek manuscripts of the original text. The outcome was devastating. The Latin text was shown to include seriously misleading errors in translation. Erasmus's solution was simple: he would point out these errors, and offer a new Latin translation of the New Testament, which would correct them. In 1516, he combined in a single volume the first printed Greek New Testament and a new Latin translation, based directly on the original Greek, which avoided the errors that had crept into the Vulgate.
Erasmus, who had always been noted for his waspish wit, seems to have rather enjoyed pointing out these errors, perhaps anticipating the pandemonium they would cause. Two of these translation mistakes are particularly interesting, as they illustrate how easily some contentious theological ideas came to be based on rather shaky biblical foundations.
The opening of the third chapter of Matthew's gospel tells of how John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, and proclaimed the need for repentance on the part of his audiences. The Vulgate offers the following account of the ministry of John (Matthew 3:1–2):
In those days, John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying: “Do penance, for the kingdom of the heavens is close to hand.”
Few of the late medieval readers of this text could miss the implications of what was being said, given the highly developed theory and practice of penance of the era. John seemed to be demanding that they “do penance”—that is to say, to find a priest, confess their sins, and carry out any acts of penance this priest might require of them. The Vulgate version of the passage suggested that John's words were firmly connected to the penitential system of the Church, so that this network of penitence was sanctioned by Holy Writ.
Erasmus would have none of this. The Greek original could not possibly mean “do penance.” The most natural translation was “repent”—a demand for an inward change of mind and heart. What might, therefore, be taken as an endorsement of the Church's complex and somewhat cumbersome mechanics of penance was thus converted, at a stroke, into a simple demand for a personal change of heart. It was subjective change that was required of converts. The involvement of the institution of the Church was no longer necessitated—or even implied—by the passage. Repentance was now a private matter of the individual before God.
The first two chapters of Luke's gospel narrate the events linked with the birth of Jesus Christ. One of those events is what Christians often refer to as the “annunciation”—that is, the message of the angel Gabriel, delivered to Mary, that she was to bear a child who would be the savior of the world. The Vulgate translation of the opening section of this account reads like this (Luke 1:28).
And the angel went in, and said to her: “Hail, O one that is full of grace! The Lord is with you! Blessed are you among women!”
Erasmus was scathing about this translation. The words of the angel could not possibly be translated as “Hail, O one that is full of grace!” Perhaps it could be rendered as “Hail, O one that has found grace!” or “Hail, O favored one!” The implication of the passage was that Mary had found God's favor—not that she could bestow that favor on others.
The angelic words we have just noted (in Latin: ave gratia plena!) were often interpreted in the Middle Ages as meaning that Mary was like a reservoir, full of God's grace. She could, therefore, be a source of God's grace to those who needed it, and who could access this grace through prayer to her. Whatever Erasmus may have thought of this belief—which lay behind much Marian theology of the Middle Ages and beyond—he had no time for the translation that ultimately lay behind it. It seemed to him to be a clear example of a theological opinion that was firmly grounded in an untenable Latin translation.
The importance of these points for existing English versions of the Bible must be noted. The famous Wycliffite versions of the gospels, for example, were not translations from the original Greek, but from the
Latin of the Vulgate. The Wycliffite versions thus reproduced the translation mistakes of the Vulgate, more or less faithfully, in English. While the resulting text had the undoubted advantage of being an English translation, it nevertheless had the severe disadvantage of being an inaccurate English translation.
So what other treasured theological opinions of the Middle Ages might be shown to rest on untenable biblical translations? Erasmus's work was seen as opening a Pandora's box, scattering doubt and uncertainty within the Church. What other beliefs might need to be revised? And an additional point emerged from the two examples we have noted. Both can be argued to privilege certain parts of the Christian community. The Matthew text suggests that the clergy have superiority over the laity; after all, penance was provided by clergy to laity. The Luke text implies the superiority of Mary over other Christians, in that she is replete with the grace that others are so desperately seeking.
Might there not be other errors, which would lead to a radical revision of the existing order of things? Might not the process of more accurate translation show that the clergy had kept the laity in submission to them without good reason? This was certainly an idea that Martin Luther explored in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), which argued that the institution of the Church, and especially its clergy, had oppressed the laity. It was time, Luther declared, for the tables to be turned. There was one certain remedy by which this captivity of the laity could be ended—biblical translation.
These developments may have taken place on the Continent of Europe, far away from the shores of England. Yet they can be seen to have been essential to the long process that led to the production of the King James Bible. The pressures that led Luther to translate the Bible into German were being felt throughout Europe. It would only be a matter of time before the tidal waves of the Reformation crashed against the shores of England. The seeds of the King James Bible were sown in the 1520s, as the pressure for a Bible in the English language gradually became irresistible.
Portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543)