| Probably the most interesting reason has to do with Christology. Readers of English Bibles get the impression that the word Christ does not appear in the Bible until Matthew. Yet we also know from the Book of Acts that 1st Century Christian evangelists preached Christ from what we now know as “The Old Testament.” To understand how that happened, we need to know a little bit about how the book we know as the Bible came down to us. In the 3rd Century before the Common Era (BCE), Ptolemy Philadelphus, Greek-speaking king of Egypt, was impressed by the moral character of his Jewish subjects. On finding out that they had several holy books, he commanded that they be translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. This translation, undertaken by Jewish scholars in Alexandria, became known subsequently as The Septuagint. What had been various holy books before among the Jews became, after The Septuagint, something we today would recognize as a Bible. It is hard to overstate how important this work became. Since Hebrew had ceased being a common language even by the 3rd Century BCE, The Septuagint was the means by which Israel’s God introduced Himself, as it were, to the larger world. Around the Greek-speaking areas of the Eastern Mediterranean world, and later throughout much of the Roman empire, The Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and so- called “godfearers,” those who believed in Israel’s God yet didn’t submit to all the requirements of Jewish conversion. The Septuagint’s translators chose the Greek word Christos to translate the Hebrew word Moshiach, meaning “anointed king” or Messiah. This word and its cognates appear 42 different times just in those books of The Septuagint that found their way into the later Hebrew canon. It appears ten times in the Psalter, Israel’s ancient prayer book. Thus, to use The Septuagint for worship or study, especially the Book of Psalms, one had to interact with the word Christ. This sense of the Christological flavor of the Old Testament is completely obscured in contemporary English versions, yet is evident in both The Septuagint and The Vulgate. If for no other reason, working from Latin makes that evident. Some would say, why not translate from The Septuagint then? Of course, that would be a good thing too. Yet The Septuagint itself was a rather free translation of the earlier Hebrew. The Septuagint scholars took certain liberties with wording that later scholars avoided, perhaps the best instance of which being illustrated in The Septuagint translation of what we know as Psalm 23. When Jerome set out to craft an “authorized” Latin version in the late 4th Century of the Common Era, he had the advantage of seven hundred subsequent years of Biblical scholarship, perhaps most fully embodied in Origen’s Hexapla, the exhaustive, six-columned version of scripture he compiled in the 3rd Century at Alexandria. Where The Septuagint translators were rather free in their translation, Jerome was exacting and precise. His use of sources long-since lost to us, his place at the pinnacle of ancient biblical scholarship, his ecumenical approach (studying with multiple Jewish teachers in the course of his work), make the version he produced invaluable, especially now that the German Bible Society has done so much work in restoring his original text. These are some of the reasons for working from the Latin. As I always hasten to add, these reasons take nothing away from versions based on the Hebrew. They simply offer us another insight into what in any language remains the Bible, God’s Word to us. |
| Why Translate the Latin Bible? by John Cunyus |
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