From the time the Bible started to be written there have been many translations of the scriptures. Each time a language changed or the word was spread to different countries there was a need for the scriptures to be put into the language of the common people.
To make the Scriptures available in other languages, Bible translation became necessary. There exist today manuscripts of such early versions as the Septuagint (a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, from the third and second centuries B.C.E.) and Jerome’s Vulgate (a translation of Hebrew and Greek texts into Latin, originally produced c. 400 C.E.)
The last half of the second century C.E. saw a move on the part of the religious powers of Rome to have Latin replace Greek as the language of the Roman bishopric. Among the results of this was the production of the Latin Vulgate, by Jerome of the fourth century C.E
When John Wycliffe was born about 1330, church services in England were conducted in Latin. The common people, on the other hand, used English as their everyday language. They talked to their neighbors in English and even prayed to God in English.
Wycliffe, a Catholic priest, was fluent in Latin. Yet, he felt that it was wrong to use Latin, which he considered to be an elitist language, to teach the Scriptures. “Knowledge of God’s law,” he wrote, “should be taught in the language which is easiest to understand, because what is being taught is the word of God.” Thus, Wycliffe and his associates assembled a team to translate the Bible into English. It took some 20 years.
The church of Rome (Catholic) tried to suppress the translation of the Bible and persecuted those who tried. This did not stop the translations.
The prospect of a new translation was not welcomed by the Catholic Church. The Mysteries of the Vatican explains why the church was opposed: “The laity were thus enabled to compare the simplicity of primitive Christianity with contemporary Catholicism . . . How great the divergence between the teaching of the Founder of Christianity, and his self-styled vicegerent [the pope] really was, became first glaringly evident.”
Over 40 years after Wycliffe’s death, by order of a papal council, the clergy exhumed his body, burned his bones, and threw his ashes into the river Swift. Still, sincere seekers of the truth sought out Wycliffe’s Bible. Professor William M. Blackburn related: “Numberless copies of Wyclif’s Bible were made, widely circulated, and handed down.”
Within 200 years, the English used by Wycliffe was virtually obsolete. A young preacher near Bristol was frustrated that so few could understand the Bible. On one occasion, the preacher, William Tyndale, heard an educated man say that it would be better to be without God’s law than without the pope’s. Tyndale responded by stating that if God allowed him, before long he would make sure that even a plowboy would have more knowledge of the Bible than the educated man.
Tyndale was persecuted by the Catholic church for his Bible translating. However, before his death, his friend Miles Coverdale integrated Tyndale’s translation into a complete Bible—the first English translation from the original languages! Every plowboy could now read God’s Word. What about the Bible in languages other than English?
Today there are Bibles in over 2,500 languages.
Quite noteworthy in more recent times is the master Greek text prepared by J. J. Griesbach, who availed himself of materials gathered by others but who also gave attention to Biblical quotations made by early writers such as Origen. Further, Griesbach studied the readings of various versions, such as the Armenian, Gothic, and Philoxenian. He viewed extant manuscripts as comprising three families, or recensions, the Byzantine, the Western, and the Alexandrian, giving preference to readings in the latter. Editions of his master Greek text were issued between 1774 and 1806, his principal edition of the entire Greek text being published in 1796-1806. Griesbach’s text was used for Sharpe’s English translation of 1840 and is the Greek text printed in The Emphatic Diaglott, by Benjamin Wilson, in 1864.
A Greek master text of the Christian Greek Scriptures that attained wide acceptance is that produced in 1881 by Cambridge University scholars B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort.