The Bible

Now we pass on to another work that has been perhaps translated into countless languages—the Bible. The Bible was originally in Hebrew, the language of the Jews. As Christianity flourished and spread, it became necessary to translate the Bible alsointo the language of the region. It was not as if everybody was convinced that the Bible should be translated. In fact there were sections of the clergy who believed that it was a sin to translate the word of God into what they believed to be inferior languages. The translations of the Bible into various languages also helped in the evolution and standardization of those languages.

One of the early translations of the Bible was into Latin when Rome came under the influence of Christianity. We do not know today who those ancient translators were. In 382 CE Pope Damasus entrusted the revision of these versions to St. Jerome, a saint of the Catholic church. Jerome revised the Latin versions and translated parts of the Greek Bible into Latin. He also claimed to have translated parts of the Hebrew Bible. However its authenticity has been questioned because St. Jerome knew very little Hebrew. The revisions of Jerome and his translations became a part of the Bible that later came to be known popularly as the Vulgate, the definitive Latin Bible officially accepted by the Catholic church.

Translations of the Bible were to pave the way for the development of English as a language. After the end of the Roman age, England was a land split up into small kingdoms like Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex etc. Christianity came to England through the Romans. However the Bible came to be translated only much later, when England began to think of herself as a nation that could stand on her own feet. This happened in medieval times. The English translation was done in defiance of the clergy who believed that the right to understand and interpret the Bible rested only with them. So the early translators were thought of as heretics and were persecuted by the church.

One of the early translators of the Bible into English was John Wycliffe. Wycliffe believed that the Bible should be able to communicate with the ordinary uneducated person. He had a band of followers called the Lollards. Latin, in which the Bible was available in England, was known only to the clergy. So Wycliffe decided to translate the Bible into English the common man’s language. Wycliffe’s Bible was therefore written in simple English so that it could be understood by all. It was published in 1382.

There were other translations that became very important for the language. William Tyndale was a major figure. He translated the Bible from Greek and published it in 1526. He had to suffer for this, and he was burnt at the stake as punishment for making the Bible available in English. Miles Coverdale is also significant as he was the first to translate and publish the complete Bible in English. These streams of translations later joined to produce the Authorized Version of the Bible or the King James Bible of 1611. These translations strengthened the English language and weakened the position of Latin as a superior language.

This does not mean that the Bible was translated only into English; other European languages like Dutch, German, Swedish and Danish also got their own Bibles. As with the case of English, these translations also helped to standardize these languages.  The 1522 German translation of Martin Luther became an important building block for standard German.