Part 3

How We Got the Bible

“The people these days … are loath to hear God’s service. [And when they are forced to attend] they come late and leave early.”

“They know not that there are any Scriptures.”

“The ignorance of the priests casteth the people into a ditch.”

“For Holy Scriptures is the faith of the Church… [and] since the laity should know the faith, it should be taught in whatever language is most easily comprehended…. [After all], Christ and His apostles taught the people in the language best known to them.”

“Traduttore traditore,” or “The translator is the traitor.”

“He who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who kisses his bride through a veil.”

Translators or Traitors?

The issue is not whether Christians translated the Scripture well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark; the church would be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it…. Christianity could avoid translation like water could avoid being wet. --Lamin Sanneh

The Bible Translated into Syriac

The Church in Antioch

Edessa (modern day Urfa, Turkey)

The Diatessaron The Pesshita

Syriac Versions of the Bible

The Bible Translated into Latin

“Frequently read the divine Scriptures; rather, never let the sacred text out of your hands. Learn what you have to teach…. The speech of a priest should be seasoned with the words of Scripture.”

“I beg you, dear brother, live with [the Scriptures], meditate on them, make them the sole object of your knowledge and inquiries.”

At one point, he called his critics “two-legged asses” and “yelping dogs” who “think ignorance is identical with holiness.”

The Bible Translated into Coptic (Egyptian)

The Bible Translated into Armenian and Georgian

Armenia 65 B.C. – 115 A.D.

Old English and Middle English Translations

The Story of Caedmon

The Story of John Wycliffe

“To handle its text directly, as would be necessary in providing translation, would have been to court disaster…. All that could be provided for the unlearned had to be carefully filtered, made unequivocally clear, sterilized of infection and guaranteed to conform with the formulations of the faith which were of course made in Latin.”

“If there is one rule most necessary for virtue,” he wrote, “it is the one which demands the church forsake worldly riches for the riches of God and Christ and his apostles.”

“No man is so rude a scholar but that he may learn the words of the gospel according to his simplicity.”

“Forasmuch as the Bible contains Christ,” he argued, “that is all that is necessary to salvation, it is necessary for all men, not for priests alone.”

“The pestilent and most wretched John Wycliffe, of damnable memory, a child of the devil … who, while he lived, walking in the vanity of his mind—with a few other adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, which I shall not mention—crowned his wickedness by translating the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”