Game of Tomes

Last week I was discussing with a co-worker this blog and my on-going struggle to make it as interesting as I can, sometimes re-writing the article to do so. He compared my writing process with that used by George R.R. Martin, the author of the books on which the HBO series Game of Thrones is based. He gave me some advice on spicing up my blog:  “You should kill off some of your characters.”

The Battle Over Vernacular Bibles

To that end, allow me to introduce William Tyndale (1490-1536), the first to translate the Bible into English from the original languages. Prior to Tyndale, English translations were made from the Latin Vulgate (such as Wycliffe’s Bible, 1382) and, being handwritten manuscripts, had a limited audience. A supporter of Martin Luther, Tyndale was suspected of heresy in 1520 and fled to Germany where he continued his translation work. Before he could complete the entire Bible, he was arrested by the imperial authorities, convicted of heresy, strangled, and his body burned at the stake.

Preparations to burn the body of William Tyndale from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563). Reportedly, Tyndale’s last words were “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

The idea of a vernacular Bible, a Bible translated in the language that ordinary people read and spoke, was not a popular one at the time. When Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation in 1517, he encouraged Christians to read the Bible for themselves and did his own translation into German. It was the Reformation which led to an increased demand for a vernacular Bible, but many in positions of power thought it was the other way around.

The Catholic Church opened the Council of Trent in 1545 to confront the challenges of the Reformation. By that time there were already entrenched attitudes among some of the bishops that putting a vernacular Bible in the hands of the common folk would lead to more heresies. Since there was no consensus among the bishops as to whether to support or condemn Bibles in the vernacular, the council limited itself to defining the canon of Scripture and declared the Vulgate as the “authentic edition” for church use. Over the next 400 years, the attitude developed within the Catholic Church that only vernacular translations from the Vulgate were approved.

English Bibles from France

The professors of English College at Douay (in exile in France due to the English Reformation) took up the challenge of producing an English translation of the Vulgate. The NT was released at Rheims in 1582 and the OT at Douay in 1609. The complete bible, called the Douay-Rheims (DR), was revised dozens of times, mostly notably between 1749 and 1752 by Bishop Challoner of London. Although keeping the name Douay-Rheims, it was essentially a new translation but retained Latinisms from the original in passages like Mt 6:11: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.”

Interestingly, although the DR was translated from Jerome’s Vulgate, Jerome had access to older Hebrew and Greek texts than were available to the KJV translators. Mt 6:13 in the KJV includes a doxology for the Lord’s Prayer found in the later Greek texts: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” Only the concluding “Amen” is found in the Vulgate and therefore translated in the DR. All modern translations have no doxology at all because it is not present in the oldest Greek manuscripts.

In 1943 Pope Pius XII officially encouraged translations from the original languages. With this green light, Dominican scholars at the École Biblique in Jerusalem began work on a French translation from the original languages published in 1956 as the Bible de Jérusalem. The English translation, a product of British scholars (fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the book of Jonah), was published in 1966 as The Jerusalem Bible (JB). It was used as the basis for the Lectionary in most English-speaking countries outside of the US and Canada. One unusual feature of the JB was the use of the divine name (“Yahweh”) wherever it appears in the Hebrew text instead of a euphemism such as "the Lord." Thus, Ex 15:3 in JB was translated as “Yahweh is a warrior; Yahweh is his name,” instead of “The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name” (NRSV).

The French version was heavily revised in 1973 and the changes were considered important enough to warrant a new English edition, published in 1985 as the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB). The original JB was criticized for following the French translation more closely than the original Hebrew and Greek and for frequently resorting to paraphrase. These defects were corrected in the NJB. A revised NJB based on the 1998 edition of the French version will be published in late spring 2018.  

A Reading from the Letter of John Paul to the Americans

The New American Bible (NAB) is the best-known translation to Catholics inside the US because of its use in the Lectionary. The first edition of the NAB was published in 1970. The NT was revised in 1986 and the Psalms were revised in 1991. The rest of the OT was completed in 2002, but encountered problems within the US Conference of Catholics Bishops (USCCB) during the approval process.

A translation for study or devotional reading is one thing, but a separate set of rules apply if the translation is intended to be used in the liturgy (such as lectionary readings). The use of gender-neutral language in the 1991 version of the Psalms was deemed unacceptable. The Psalms were re-revised and the fourth edition of the NAB, called the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) was published in 2011.

But despite all the sound and fury, the NABRE was still not approved for liturgical use and lectionaries continue to use a modified version of the 1970 NAB translation. In 2012, the USCCB announced plans to revise the NABRE yet again so there will be one version that can be used for private reading, study, and liturgy. Such a revised NABRE is not expected until 2025.

Psalms Not Inclusive

What was the problem the bishops had with the Psalms? Here’s an example:

The 1970 NAB translated Ps 8:5 as “What is man (Hb: ‘enosh) that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man (Hb: ben ‘adam) that you should care for him?” The 1991 Psalms translated this as “What are humans that you are mindful of them, mere mortals that you care for them?” The Hebrew ‘enosh can be translated “man” in the sense of “mankind,” but it does not have the sense of a male person like the word ‘ish. The Hebrew expression ben ‘adam (literally “son of Adam”) is a parallel expression referring to an individual human. God frequently address Ezekiel as ben ‘adam, for instance.

The 1991 translation is justifiable from a technical point of view since the psalmist is contrasting human insignificance with God’s grandeur. But the NT applies this psalm to Jesus (e.g., Heb 2:5-9) and Jesus frequently refers to himself in the gospels as “the son of man” (note the definite article). The term “son of man” thus – rightly or wrongly – takes on Christological overtones and the relationship between the OT and NT is lost when the term is translated differently.

NABRE returned to the 1970 NAB (but note the change from the definite article): “What is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him?” (For comparison, the NJB reads: “What are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?”)

As this brief survey shows, translators of the Bible can run afoul of everything from accusations of heresy to charges of political correctness. Fortunately, the worst that can happen today is that the bibles will be burned and not the translators.