Index To Reading And Understanding Your Bible       >         Bible Through The Ages II

Interpretation from the Fathers to the Reformation
How did the saints who used the Scriptures from the time of the Apostle John's death to the appearance of Luther interpret the Bible? Seminary students learn that the Bible interpreter must remember that he is dealing with an ancient text, a literary work, a historical document, and a sacred writing. From the 2nd century to the 16th, there were few who forgot that they were dealing with a sacred scripture. For that matter, most seemed to realize that they were dealing with an ancient text. But what was too often forgotten was that the Bible is also a literary work and a historical document. That is, very early in the church's history there was shift away from the grammatical-historical method of interpretation. The ancient fathers learned early to allegorize, and the accepted method of exegesis in most centers of Christianity for 1300 years was to seek the sense behind the sense by allegorizing.

The allegorical method is traceable to the Greek philosophers of the time before Christ. They were attempting to harmonize or reconcile two traditions. One was the literature of Homer and Hesiod, the source books for what could be said or written about the gods of the Greek world. To doubt or to deny their truth was regarded as an irreligious act. They were, in a sense, the "scriptures" of Greek paganism. But these philosophers had to contend with their own highly developed principles of logic, criticism, ethics, religion, and science. As lovers of wisdom they could not accept much that appeared in the classical mythology. They tried to reconcile religion and philosophy by allegorizing. They said, in effect, "Under the literal words of the stories of the gods is a real and secret meaning. Let us explain it to you."

¹² Danker, Frederick W., Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study (St. Louis: Concordia, 1960), p 151.

One hotbed of this activity was the great House of the Muses (Museum) in Alexandria. And one of the great centers of the Jewish diaspora in the centuries just before Christ's birth was also Alexandria. Now, how could a Jew living in Alexandria cling to the sacred Scriptures of his ancestral religion and at the same time do justice to the philosophy which he was learning and which he respected ? How could he make his religion intellectually respectable and his philosophy religiously orthodox ? He could allegorize. The writer who seems to have introduced the allegorical method to the study of Torah was Aristobolus (160 B.C.). His work survives only in fragments and in quotations by other writers. Aristabolus believed that Greek philosophy had borrowed from the Old Testament, especially from Moses, and that one who employed the allegorical method could find the teachings of Greek philosophy in Moses and the Prophets.

Better known to us, because he left a considerable body of writing, is Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary (20 BC to 40 AD) of Jesus of Nazareth. It is his name which is usually associated with the beginnings of the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. Philo did not completely disregard the literal meaning, but he believed that it represented an immature level of understanding. For him, the literal sense was only the body of Scripture, while its soul was to be found in the allegorical sense. Of course, every Platonist and every Stoic knew that the soul was more important than the body. Philo did not deny the historical data which the Scriptures present. He simply regarded the literal interpretation of those data as inferior to the allegorical. He insisted that the text must be allegorized if it says something unworthy of God, if a statement contradicts some other statement or in any way presents us with an intellectual difficulty, or it the text itself is clearly allegorical in nature.

How did this theory work out in practice? With reference to the creation of Eve, Philo wrote: "That which is said here is mystical….For how could anyone accept that a woman, or any human being at all, came out of a man's side?" His solutions to such "embarrassing" accounts in the Scripture sound very much like modern demythologizing. Perhaps we understand where his heart really lay when we notice he habitually refers to the Creator as to on, the Existent One (impersonal and neuter) rather than qeoj or kurioj. There is more of Athens than of Sinai and Moriah in his approach to Scripture. There is more of the Tempter's, "Yea, hath God said?" than of Samuel's, "Speak, Lord." Philo made the superficial observation that Genesis contains two accounts of the creation of man. He explained this as a good Platonist: The man of Genesis 1:27 is the idea of man that lies behind humanity, but the man of Genesis 2:7, fashioned from the clay, is earthy, material man.

This method of biblical interpretation ticked away like a time bomb in Alexandria. It went off in the Christian church near the end of the 2^nd century. Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, Dionysius, and Cyril all used the method there. Origen's ingenuity provided models for the rest of the church's Bible interpreters for the next 13 centuries. These theological leaders were, of course, correct in perceiving that the Old Testament is really a sacred scripture of the Christian church. But their treatment of the Old Testament also reveals a spirit not too different from Philo's in that they often strove to interpret along lines which accorded with their philosophical presuppositions. Thus Clement of Alexandria handles the story of Hagar and Sarah in a way quite different from Paul's method in Galatians. For Clement regards Hagar as worldly paideia and Sarah as heavenly sophia. As Abraham progressed from Hagar to Sarah, so must we grow from worldly lore to the heavenly wisdom. For Clement, and for his successor Origen, salvation was not so much the gracious forgiveness of sins as it was instruction in true knowledge and wisdom.

Clement's treatment of the Sarah and Hagar story is an example of what the Alexandrians called "spiritual" exegesis. That is, it pointed to spiritual truth which required considerable "spiritual" insight to understand. A moral interpretation (which must also be sought in every text) would have to do with monogamy and the way in which God withheld his full blessing from concubinage. The literal meaning was simply the story as it appears in Genesis.

This was the threefold interpretation which became standard in the church: literal, moral, and spiritual. Origen recognized that the principle did not always stand up in practice. He even allegorized to find a "scriptural" explanation for this difficulty. He said that just as the water jars at Cana held two or three firkins apiece, so each portion of Scripture holds two or three meanings.

Now, that seems more humorous than harmful. What was harmful in the history of Scripture interpretation was that less and less time was spent on what the Bible really says and more and more time was spent on fanciful hidden meanings. Jerome and his sometime friend, Rufinus of Aquileia, translated Origen's work into Latin. Gregory I, the Great (590-604), popularized it in the West and so set the course for medieval exegesis. Support for dogma was found in allegorical readings, something the Alexandrians themselves had not done. The grammatical-historical approach was simply forgotten. Among a few exceptions, people who still tried to do legitimate exegesis, were the School of Antioch (until the 6^th century), Druthmar of Corbie (in the Carolingian age), and the Abbey of St. Victor (during the High Middle Ages).

Still, let it be said that if Origen and all who used him had not believed the Scriptures to be God-breathed, the vehicle of Christ, the Word of the Spirit, they would not have bothered at all. They did still regard the Bible as sacred Scripture. There is still gospel in Origen's treatment of the parable of the Good Samaritan:"…The injured man is Adam, Jerusalem is Paradise, Jericho is the world, the bandits are hostile powers, the Samaritan is Christ, the wounds are disobedience, the ass is Christ's body, the inn is the church, and the Samaritan's promise to return refers to the Parousia . . . ."¹³ Luther's treatment was not so different.

The schoolmen of the Middle Ages refined and defined the methods of interpretation until they could speak of literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings. What had been added was the anagogical, which we could call eschatological, for it dealt with the expectations of the Church Triumphant. An example: Literally, the city of Jerusalem is that geographical place. Allegorically, it is the Church Militant. Tropologically (morally), it represents the faithful soul whose conscience is at peace. Anagogically, it is the Church Triumphant. This and similar treatments compelled Geiler of Kaisersberg to say, about 1500, that this was making the Bible into a nose of wax, to be twisted every which way to suit the allegorical artist. A generation later, Martin Luther would have even stronger things to say about such hermeneutical methods.

In the second lecture we spoke of the efforts of those who contributed to the preservation and determination of the text of both Old and New Testaments. The Masoretes, the editors of polyglot Bibles, the Renaissance and Reformation scholars, the archaeologists and the text critics of the 19th century all faced up to the implications of the fact that in biblical interpretation we are dealing with an ancient text. For faithful and accurate interpretation it is necessary to have that ancient text in as complete and perfect form as possible. The Western Catholic Church before the Reformation was in practice already violating this hermeneutical canon when it made the Vulgate the authentic version for public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions. In 1546 that practice was regularized by the Council of Trent, and from then until this century the ultimate textual authority in the Roman Church was the Vulgate—not the Hebrew or Greek Scriptures.

Interpreting an ancient literary text
We must not overlook some of the people who, through two millennia, have tried to uphold the principle that in biblical study we are dealing with a literary work. These were people who at least reminded biblical theologians that there are rules of language which must be observed, even when dealing with an ancient text. While they did not always live up to the principle, and while they often deliberately diluted it by their spiritualizing and moralizing, they did give expression to the principle, so that it was never completely forgotten.

Palestinian Jewish hermeneutics "...insisted that a word must be understood in terms of its sentence and a sentence in terms of its context....A clear passage is to be given preference over an obscure one if they deal with the same subject matter. Very close attention is to be paid to spelling, grammar and figures of speech."¹⁴ When Augustine set forth his principles of interpretation, he correctly perceived that "no verse is to be studied as a unit in itself. The Bible is not a string of beads, but a web of meaning. Therefore we must note the context of the verse, and what the Bible says on the same subject somewhere else."¹⁵ To that he appended the thought that "we cannot make the Holy Spirit our substitute for the necessary learning to understand Scripture."¹⁶ Augustine himself did not learn Hebrew, but Origen and Jerome certainly demonstrated a commitment to the grammatical approach when they studied Hebrew and the cognate languages at a time when very few churchmen (including great church fathers) bothered to do so. ¹³ Source unknown.

¹⁴ Ramm, Bernard, Protestant Biblical Interpretation (Boston: W. A. Wilde, 1956) p 46f.

In Anglo-Saxon England, after control of the English church had passed from Celtic to Roman hands, the Venerable Bede preserved the wholesome Celtic influence by teaching Hebrew, Latin, and Greek to his monastic pupils. In the 11th century the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris became a center of exegetical labors which paid more attention to language and less to traditional glosses. There had been philosophical and scholastic reasons for assigning a certain shape and dimensions to Noah's ark in the traditional exegesis. Hugh of St. Victor questioned whether that shape and those dimensions could be ascribed to the ark on the basis of the language in Genesis. He built a model according to the traditional view of what the ark's structure must have been. It kept tipping over! He built a model according to the grammatical sense of the Hebrew words. It was stable. His pupil Andrew continued the Victorine approach to the Scriptures with his zeal in the study of Hebrew.

"The Council of Vienne (1311-12) decreed that chairs of Greek and oriental languages be set up and endowed in the principal schools and universities of Christendom. In England, at least, the ecclesiastical authorities took steps to enforce the decrees by allotting revenues to the proposed chairs. Nothing came of it either at Oxford or Paris; perhaps it was too hard to find competent teachers....(In general) students of theology got no preliminary training in language.”¹⁷ It seems that the theologians of the European universities regarded Greek as the language of the notorious heretics and schismatics of the East. That naturally dampened enthusiasm for the study of Greek. The study of Hebrew was handicapped by the suspicion that it would lead to Judaizing tendencies.

And so, in the providence of God, it was renaissance humanism rather than the theological schools that provided the linguistic tools for the Reformation. Erasmus, Reuchlin, and others may have been moved chiefly by their concern for human dignity and by their intellectual honesty, rather than by a concern for the Word of God. But Luther and his co-workers and the other Reformers used the tools of the humanists for their biblical work in the interest of God’s truth. One of the earliest lasting developments of the Reformation used the tools of the gymnasium (a high school-college). In Magdeburg, in 1524, a school was opened for the study of the traditional liberal arts in Latin, with a view to training boys in the biblical languages and thus preparing them for theological study and the gospel ministry. The goals and methods and curriculum of the gymnasium live on in modified form in preseminary training schools of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

There are several post-Reformation developments in the understanding of the Bible as a literary work which are worth mentioning here. In the 18^th century the Oxford professor Robert Lowth detected and pointed out the principle of parallelism which underlies Hebrew poetry, and thus made a considerable contribution to the understanding of the Old Testament. His German contemporary, J. D. Michaelis, revived the idea of the importance of the cognate languages for the understanding of Hebrew. The culminator of such work in Hebrew and cognate languages was Wilhelm Gesenius with his Hebraeiches und Chalaeisches Handwoerterbuch (1810-12), and its successor in three volumes: Thesaurus Philologus Criticus Lingune Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti (1829-58), finished posthumously.

Early in his career Joseph Barber Lightfoot suggested that New Testament Greek was probably not a unique language which had never been used by anyone except the Holy Spirit. Rather, he conjectured, it was an everyday language spoken and written for everyday purposes during the first Christain century, a language which the Holy Spirit chose to use as his vehicle in the inspired Word. Letters and documents which would prove this had actually been discovered and some of them were already in Europe at the time Lightfoot was engaging in his speculation. Till then, however, on one had paid them much attention, and no one had yet connected them with the language of the New Testament.

¹⁵ Ibid, p 37.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Lampe, G. W. H., ed. The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, p 218.

Then, in 1877, a large number of Greek papyri were discovered at Arsinoe in Egypt. A decade later, 1888-90, Sir Flinders Petrie found another quantity of such papyri in a cemetery at Hawarah. A decade after that, 1897, the site of the ancient Oxyrrhyncus yielded many more. Since then, many thousands of these and other koine texts and documents have been published.

These papyri are not literary texts. They consist of legal papers, notices, personal letters, lists, and business accounts. And all of them were written in the everyday Greek of the New Testament times. In the early 1890s a young German pastor, Adolf Deismann, was looking over some recently published Greek papyrus documents and was struck by the similarity of the Greek in the documents to that of the New Testament. He saw as fact what Lightfoot had nurtured as conjecture.
 

Interpreting a Historical Text
The other necessary ingredient of the grammatical-historical approach is that we realize that the Bible is a historical document. It not only records history (which the allegorists and gnostics and demythologizers deny or ignore), but it was also written in a historical context (which even those who want to uphold the Bible’s authority and believe the Bible’s message can easily forget). The ancient church’s best and most consistent advocates of a historical-grammatical treatment of Scripture were the fathers of the School of Antioch. “School” here has reference to a school of thought rather than to a particular institution (although there were a number of such institutions). Also known as the Syrians, these 2^nd-, 3^rd-, and 4^th-century teachers rejected the allegorism of Alexandria and the arid traditionalism of the West. They practiced a literal and historical exegesis. They recognized that there is such a thing as figurative language, but they insisted that straightforward prose. They insisted on the reality of the Old Testament events, which the allegorists were explaining away in the manner of Philo. Outstanding among them was a man who has vanished from the list of orthodox fathers because he was posthumously condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council as a Nestorian: Theodore of Mopseustia (c. 350-428). He saw that if Adam and the story of the Fall are not treated historically, then Paul’s theological treatment of Adam’s sin and its consequences for all men has no basis in reality. Theodore read the Old Testament as the account of God’s grace in dealing with a rebellious people (which is not to say he ignored God's judgments on those same people). He saw that the purpose of Israel's history was to provide the setting for God's world-redeeming act in Christ.

Why did not such exegesis find a lasting and honored place in the catholic orthodox church? Unfortunately, the School of Antioch came to be identified (with some justice) with heresies. Paul of Samosata, Arius, Apollonaris, Nestorius, and the three men condemned by the Fifth Council—all had received training in the School of Antioch. What led Arius and the rest into heresy was not their grammatical-historical exegesis but their philosophical presuppositions, which they could not completely leave behind when they studied the Scriptures or tried to formulate a Christology. So the school and its method were discredited by a number of its "graduates." The ancient church was not ready to distinguish between an exegetical approach and a philosophical bias, and so it threw out the baby with the bath. Allegory which supported orthodox dogma was preferred over honest exegesis that seemed to spawn heresies.

It is not that the grammatical-historical exegesis was completely lost from then until the time of the Reformation. We have noted some exceptions to the rule, and we have seen that in the midst of all the allegory there were those who did not succumb completely. Even in the time of high scholasticism Aquinas did not lose sight of the need for literal interpretation. He even stated that no dogma could be based on "spiritual exegesis." But the emphasis, the main thrust, the old reliable approach lay in the traditional and allegorical and safe glosses of the fathers. It is generally recognized that from the rejection of Theodoret and the other Antiochenes to the Reformation there was no sustained and widespread and broadly influential grammatical-historical exegesis.

We are familiar with Luther's hermeneutics. We hope it is our own. But let us, before we leave this survey of interpretation in the ancient and medieval churches, recall that he rejected allegory. Commenting on Genesis 3:14, he said: "I adhere simply to the historical and literal meaning, which is in harmony with the text."¹⁸ He insisted on the primacy of the original languages. He said: "In proportion then as we value the gospel, let us zealously hold to the languages."¹⁹ He insisted that the interpreter must give attention to grammar, to the time, circumstances, and conditions in which the biblical writers worked; that the context must never be ignored; that Scripture interprets Scripture; that the Scriptures "urge Christ" (Christum treiben).

Five epochs in the history of interpretation
To summarize what we have surveyed, it might be useful to outline the history of Bible interpretation. Someone has divided that history into five neat epochs.

First, there was the ancient period, in which the Word of the Prophets and Apostles was ultimately authoritative. Despite a certain reliance on the episcopacy, the rule of faith, and tradition, the Scriptures were recognized as the Word of God as no other authority could be. It was a time in which the laity was encouraged in Bible reading and in which the allegorical method was adapted for Christian use.

Second, there was the long medieval period during which scriptural and traditional authority were fused and confused. Allegory was refined to a low art, the use of the Bible by the laity was generally discouraged, and the papacy established itself as the ultimate authority in the western church.

Third came the Reformation. The principle of sola Scriptura was articulated. Hermeneutic insisted on one literal sense. Scripture was to interpret Scripture. The Protestants began to systematize scriptural doctrine for use in polemics against Rome and against one another. And, early on, the principle of private judgment (which is traditionally Protestant but not historically Lutheran) began to result in false interpretations and exotic sects. Pietists began to dwell on personal feelings and attitudes and reactions to the inspired Word, and the hermeneutical thrust centered once again on man instead of on the meaning and message of the objective Word.

This, of course, prepared the way for the fourth epoch, Rationalism. Reason became the supreme arbiter in all matters, including biblical study. Inspiration and everything else supernatural was ridiculed as superstition and rejected as irrational and unworthy of an enlightened age.

The fifth epoch is the one in which we live. All of the aforementioned attitudes have carried over into our time. The situation has been further complicated and confused by the almost universal acceptance of evolutionary thought among educated and uneducated people, liberal and conservative attempts to reconcile the Bible with evolutionary thought, and fundamentalism. In the lecture (which follows) on the authority of Scripture we shall speak from the vantage point of the fifth (modern) epoch and proceed on the assumption that all the attitudes of all previous epochs really are still represented in our time.

IV. The Translation And Dissemination Of Scripture

“The translator is a traitor," said an old Latin proverb. The Babylonian Talmud expressed it this way: "He lies who renders a verse as it reads, with strict literalness; he blasphemes who makes additions."²⁰ A modern writer has said: "Literalness is wrong because it doesn't really transfer the thought of the original; paraphrase is wrong because it reads in other meanings."²¹ But, ever since there have been Jews who could not read Hebrew, it has been desirable to translate the Old Testament into other languages. And, ever since the gospel has gone out beyond the bounds of the Greek-speaking Roman Empire, it has been necessary to translate the New Testament into the languages of the people. The reasons usually assigned to the need for translation and for providing new translations are liturgical, literary, educational, and evangelistic.

¹⁸ LW 1, 185.

¹⁹ LW 45, 359.

²⁰ Reumann, John H. P., The Romance of Bible Scripts and Scholars: Chapters in the History of Bible Transmission and Translation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p 2.

²¹ Ibid.

The Septuagint
One of the earliest translations of the Old Testament, perhaps the earliest, is still in use in the Greek Orthodox Church today. That is the Septuagint, used by the early Gentile Christians and quoted more frequently than the Hebrew Old Testament by the apostolic writers. The purported origins of this translation are described in "The Letter of Aristeas." The writer was an official in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt (285-247 B.C.), one of the great patrons of the Museum in Alexandria. Since the goal of the Museum was to gather, catalog, and analyze all of the world's literature, it was suggested to Philadelphus that the collection could not be complete without a copy of the Jewish law. He moved to correct the deficiency. He asked for and got six scholars from each of the Twelve Tribes and set them to work on the Island of Pharos. Seventy-two days later, according to tradition, the seventy-two translators presented the king with their completed work, the Scriptures in Greek. The product was read to the assembled Jews and acclaimed by them as faithful. How the translation came to be called "The Seventy" (Septuagint) instead of "The Seventy-Two" is a mystery. Perhaps it is simply an abbreviation.

It is, of course, much more likely that the process took much longer than 72 days and that it was done in stages. That is the case with translating work generally. Many scholars believe that the Pentateuch was completed before 250 B.C., the Prophets around 200 B.C., the Writings somewhat later. This is the traditional view, set forth by Professor Paul Anton de Lagarde of Goettingen in the 19th century.

We are accustomed to think of the three great uncial codices—Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, and Vacticanus—as New Testament manuscripts. They are that, but they also include considerable portions of the Greek Old Testament. Most printed editions of the Septuagint represent the text of one or more of those three great uncials. Either because the Septuagint was corrupted by copyists and editors, or because there were actually a number of Greek translations, there were text-critical problems almost from the beginning of the Christian era. We shall see in a moment that a number of translators made early attempts to remedy that situation. Just now, though, to demonstrate that there were differing textual traditions, we shall quote from Jerome's polemic "Against Rufinus": "Alexandria and Egypt praise Hesychias as the author of their Septuagint. Constantinople as far as Antioch accepts that of Lucian the Martyr. The provinces between these areas read the Palestinian codices edited by Origen and published by Eusebius and Pamphilus. The whole world is at odds with itself over the three-fold tradition."

Professor Paul Kahle argued that there never was just one Septuagint, at least before the 1st century A.D. Rather, in his theory, there were in all the great centers of diaspora Judaism versions produced locally and varied as to their quality. Kahle believed that about 130 B.C. the Jews in Alexandria published a kind of "Revised Standard Version," which was to be normative for all Greek-speaking Jews. The "Letter of Aristeas" was an attempt to give this edition the authority of age and of an inspired translation. But this did not put an end to the use of other Greek translations. Thus, when Christians in various locations cited the Old Testament, they borrowed from a variety of Greek versions.

Opposed to this theory and favoring the more traditional views of Professor de Lagarde is the opinion of Professor Frederick Kenyon: "It is at least possible to maintain that what Kahle has taken to be rival translations might instead be different recensions of the basic Septuagint text, which had been revised at various times so as to bring it into close agreement with the Hebrew as it was received in the Jewish community."²² In short, the existence of other Greek versions in the early Christian centuries does not preclude the existence of the Septuagint as a recognized version before the Christian era.

As the Septuagint gained favor and currency among Christians, it lost its position in the synagogues. One Jew who tried to provide a Greek translation which would not have the disadvantage of being quoted extensively in the New Testament and the fathers was the 2nd century scribe Aquila. Until recently his work was known chiefly from fragments, but the discovery of the Old Cairo Genizah has provided a considerably increased and improved knowledge of his translation. His anti-Christian bias is apparent in his translation of mashiach, in Daniel 9:26 as eleimmenos instead of Christos. In Isaiah 7:14 he translated almah with neanis, young girl, rather than with parthenos. Now this man was a scribe, not working for a translation that would be read in the synagogue service but for a translation that could be used by rabbinical scholars. His method was to render a given Hebrew word with the same Greek word wherever it appeared. All Hebrew words based on a particular word must be translated by Greek words derived from a single equivalent root, even when that meant inventing Greek compounds that were never used before and have not been used since. He insisted that even particles like eth must have a consistent equivalent in the Greek. Since the sign of the accusative can also sometimes be translated as "with," he used the Greek sun wherever eth appeared in the Hebrew—even for direct objects. The result was sometimes sun followed by the accusative, an impossible construction. But Aquila was not acting from ignorance. He was showing with Greek symbols what stood in the Hebrew text. His translation was to be a scholar's tool, not a people's Bible.

²² Kenyon, Sir Frederick, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, rev. by A. W. Adams (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1958), p 112.

Somewhat later than Aquila's work was the effort of a Jewish Christian (possibly from Ephesus), who undertook to revise the Septuagint or some other Greek version on the basis of the traditional (Palestinian) Hebrew text. That was Theodotion. His method was just the opposite of Aquila's. Theodotion's rendering tended to be more free, even paraphrastic. His translation was generally well received by the church, and his rendering of Daniel actually replaced that of the Septuagint in the church's manuscripts.

About 200 A.D. Symmachus rendered the Hebrew into good and idiomatic Greek. A rabbi who tended to soften anthropomorphisms, he was not accepted by either Jews or Christians. Two hundred years later, however, Jerome made considerable use of his work in the preparation of the Vulgate. Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus were all represented in Origen's six-column comparative text, the Hexapla.

It was sometime before 250 when Origen laid out his Hexapla: Hebrew text, transcription of Hebrew text in Greek letters to provide vocalization, Aquila, Symmachus, Septuagint, and Theodotion. The bulk of his work has been lost, and the chief source for trying to reconstruct it has been a Syriac translation of 617. His goal was to bring the Greek Old Testament (the Old Testament of the Greek-speaking Christian churches) in line with the Hebrew original. In the early 4th century, in keeping with Origen's intent, Eusebius and Pamphilus of Caesarea used resources left behind by Origen to prepare an edition of the Septuagint which was widely used in the East.

Syriac and Coptic versions
One of the earliest translations of the New Testament or a part of it was the work of Tatian. About 150 he produced a harmony of the Gospels which we know by the Greek name Diatessaron, "through the Four (Evangelists)." He was a Syrian, and his harmony marks the beginning of New Testament versions in Syriac. Tatian was an Encratite, an "abstainer," and so references to the marriage of Joseph and Mary were edited out of his version. He had John the Baptist drinking milk instead of eating locusts with his wild honey in the desert. His merging of the Gospel accounts is responsible for many of the variant readings in the Gospel manuscripts. Perhaps his heretical views or more likely a simple preference for the Gospel in its four constituent parts prompted his countrymen to produce the Old Syriac translation.

Probably in the 4th century (some say the 5th), both Tatian and the Old Syriac were superseded by the Peshitto, that is the simple or popular or vernacular Syrian Bible. The earlier date seems more likely, since the Peshitto did not include 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, or Revelation. These books were being accepted by the Syrian Church in the late 4th century. Although the language of the people has changed through the centuries, the Peshitto is still used in public services by Syrian Christians. Scholars are generally agreed that it is the most faithful and literary of ancient versions in any language.

In the 5th century, remaining copies of Tatian's Diatessaron were searched out and destroyed. Among the burners was Theodoret of Cyrrhus, another of the Antiochene fathers who was condemned posthumously by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. He personally destroyed 200 copies. The version does not survive in Syriac, but it served as the basis for Gospel harmonies in other languages. The library of Samuel Pepys contained the single surviving Middle English version.

Other early translation work was done in Coptic, the native tongue (or rather tongues) of the Egyptians. "The Sahidic version of the Old Testament...was probably made before the end of the second century; the Bohairic somewhat later. The Sahidic New Testament version may be assigned to the late second century; the Bohairic version to the first half of the third. Versions of the New Testament have been identified in manuscripts written in all the main Coptic dialects."²³

South of Egypt, Ethiopia was Christianized in the early 4th century. According to tradition the first bishop produced the Ethiopic version of the Bible, "which is highly prized by scholars for its fidelity and beauty."²⁴ The language is Geez, now used only in worship. In its written form it is boustrephedon, "as the ox plows." That is, the lines are written and read alternately left to right and right to left, as the ox plows.

The Vulgate
The references to Itala in the Nestle text apparatus often refer to a group rather than to a single Latin version. It is likely that the New Testament was translated into Latin in North Africa before it was done in Italy. In Italy itself, it was Milan rather than Rome that first turned from Greek to Latin in its liturgy. The churches of Italy did, however, produce an Old Latin Version which succeeded the Itala and preceded Jerome. It was this Old Latin Version which already had the name "Vulgate" when Pope Damasus in 383 commissioned Jerome to produce a new Latin rendering. Before the name was applied to Latin translations, the term Vulgata had been used in the West with reference to the Septuagint.

Jerome was instructed to base his revision on a careful comparison with the Greek text. He went far beyond his instructions and paid a Jewish teacher from Lydda to help him with the translation of Job. Before that, he had studied not only Hebrew but also Aramaic and Arabic. His translating work occupied him for more than twenty years. For some books he made a fresh translation; in others he simply revised earlier Latin work. Some of his fresh translating was based on the Greek Old Testament; some of it was based on the Hebrew and Aramaic. In short, what we know as The Vulgate was from the beginning of mixed origin and mixed quality.

As we have seen in an earlier essay, "The Canon of Scripture," Jerome's version of the Old Testament was not welcomed with open arms in the West. Because of his attitude toward the Apocrypha, it was resisted by Augustine and the North African church. Pope Innocent I concurred with this reluctance to accept a "Hebrew" version of the Old Testament. But by the early 7th century Isidor of Seville could write of a general preference for Jerome's version as more faithful and clearer than the Old Latin. Jerome's translation had become the Vulgate. Its official acceptance as the normative text of the West, however, did not occur until 1546, at Trent.

In recent years historians have questioned whether the Vulgate was really the first book to be printed by Gutenberg, using the movable type. Gutenberg's production was five years in preparation, and it is not likely that he suspended all other printing activity during that time. In any case, the Vulgate was the first Bible version to be printed with the movable type process.

The German Bible
The first missionary to a Germanic people of whom we know was a Mesopotamian monk, Audius, who worked among the Goths in southern Russia and died there in 370. Better known is the son of a Gothic father and a Cappadocian mother named Little Wolf, Woelfli, Ulfilas (310-383). At the age of 30 he was ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia. For 33 years he worked among the Visigoths along the Danube in Moesia, in what is now Bulgaria. He was an Arian, and his Visigoths later took Arian Christianity to numerous other Germanic tribes. His translation of the Bible into Gothic marks the beginning of Germanic literature. The version is preserved only in part, but it is said that Ulfilas did not give his people the Books of Kings, lest their warlike nature become even more warlike. He translated euaggelizomai in Luke 2:10 as spillo, a clear hint as to the origins of our word gospel.

²³ Schaller, John, The Book of Books: A Brief Introduction to the Bible for Christian Teachers and Readers (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1924), p 293.

²⁴ Ibid., p 293.

The most famous manuscript of Ulfilas' Gothic Bible is the Codex Argenteus (CA), "the Gospels written on purple parchment in silver and gold ink....(It) contained 330 folios; 187 have survived. This manuscript is mentioned for the first time between 1550 and 1560 in the correspondence of German scholars. At that time...it was at the monastery of Werden near Cologne. It is conjectured that it was brought there from Italy in about 795 by Liudger, a disciple of Alcuin and founder of the monastery. At the beginning of the 17th century the manuscript was at Prague in the collection of the Emperor Rudolph II. In 1648 the Swedes took the town and the Codex Argenteus formed part of the booty they carried away. After passing through several more hands, the codex was bought by Count de la Gardie, chancellor of Sweden, who had a silver binding made for it and presented it in 1669 to the University of Uppsala, where it still is."²⁵ There are other Gothic codices.

Ulfilas followed a system somewhat like that of Aquila in his translating work. He aimed to render every word in the Greek by a corresponding word in Gothic. Even particles like men and de received their equivalents, regardless of idiomatic sense. The word order of the original was also followed without regard for Gothic idiom. This is really a sign of his respect for the sacred text, and it actually makes it easier to reconstruct what the Greek text was which underlay his translation. It was, not surprisingly, Byzantine.

Another landmark in German Bible translation dates from the time of Charlemagne. An early 9th century manuscript, found near Salzburg, contains fragments of the Gospel of Matthew in a Bavarian dialect. It was translated from Latin. There are some mistranslations, but the German is often idiomatic, except where the order of words has been influenced by the Latin. It probably represents the pastoral and missionary concern of a single monk rather than official activity on the part of Charlemagne's government.

About 830, in Fulda, Tatian's Diatessaron was rendered in East Franconian German, with Latin and German in parallel columns. "The Diatessaron was the primary source of another vernacular translation, the Heliand (sic), so called by its first modern editor. (It) is a versified Gospel in the form of a book epic..., written in a Saxon dialect. A second poem, worthy to be compared with the Heliand, was produced a generation or two later. This was the Liber Evangeliorum composed by Otfrid, a monk of Weissenburg in Lower Alsace....His dialect is Rhenish Franconian. "²⁶ In an introduction to the work Otfrid asks why a people as great as the Frankish Germans should not have God's Word in their own language, as the Greeks and Romans had it in theirs. "It is perhaps not irrelevant to recall that Otfrid was composing his German work at the time of the con-troversy about the use of Slavonic instead of Latin in the Moravian church. Both the Roman papacy and the German bishops were interested in drawing Moravia into the western orbit and were opposing the official use of Slavonic. They realized that this would mean a neglect of Latin and strengthen connections with the East. As the underlying political conflict was being fought out, partly in terms of Latin versus a vernacular, the time would hardly be auspicious for writing in German either."²⁷

Notker of St. Gall (c. 950-1022) made translations into German of the Psalter and Job. From that time to the time of Gutenberg's movable type (1455) various complete translations appeared in manuscript form. Many of these were lost when the Inquisition worked in southern Germany, when councils were leery of translations, and when the Bible became more and more a book for specialists.

The first Bible printed in a modern European language was the Mentelin Bible of 1466, which "actually reflects the language and translation technique of about the beginning of the 14th century."²⁸ Mentel used a "version which was then at least 150 years old."²⁹ The point is not that Mentel used old material but that in about 1316 there was a German Bible which a modern reader of German could have read. In all, four Low German and 14 High German versions had appeared in print before Luther ever began his work. Eight to ten thousand copies were on the market, each costing the equivalent of a town house or fourteen oxen. "From the evidence of bequests, most vernacular Bibles were owned by laymen—which is what one would expect....Early German Bibles tended to be huge cubes of board and paper, almost impossible to carry and even to use. (After) 1478 the bulk was greatly reduced in several editions from Augsburg."³⁰ Just before Luther's translation appeared, German Bibles began to dispense with marginal notes. This resulted in a price reduction, so that where the purchase of a Bible had once been comparable to buying a house in today's market, it was now comparable to buying a car.

²⁵ Lampe, G. W. H., ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge: The University Press, 1969), p 340f.

²⁶ Ibid., pp 418-420.

²⁷ Ibid., p 422.

²⁸ Ibid., p 433.

²⁹ Ibid.

Luther's adversary John Eck was critical of the pre-Lutheran Augsburg translation. He said that the translator "tried too hard to translate word for word into German, so that he often became impossible to understand, and the simple reader can make no sense of it."³¹ The Lutheran Johann Mathesius found it "un-German," "dark," and "difficult."³²

Luther began translating the New Testament from Greek to German in late November or early December, 1521. He completed it in March of 1522 before leaving the Wartburg. It was published in edition after edition and was widely pirated. Although Eck found 100 heresies in it because it did not agree with the Vulgate, it was necessary for Emser to rely on it after all when the papists countered with a defective version in 1527. Translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew was a larger and longer undertaking. Beginning in 1522, Luther, Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, and others worked until 1534. Luther continued to improve this Old Testament in succeeding editions. "At the time of his death in 1546, corrections were still being made by the faithful Roerer from marginal notations in Luther's...personal copy. Traditionally, however, a 1545 edition, which lacks some of those last alterations which Luther did not personally see through the press, has been regarded as the ‘Textus Receptus’ of German-speaking Lutheranism."³³

It was not only the Catholic Emser who relied heavily upon Luther's version. Two Anabaptists, Ludwig Haetzer and Johannes Denck, based a translation of the Prophets on the Hebrew text. It was a linguistic success, and after 1529 it was published in combination with those parts of the Old Testament which Luther and his coworkers had completed. Luther was critical of their work because they were "Rottengeister," but he did use it as an auxiliary in certain difficult passages—usually for particular words and phrases but never for longer sections. The manuscript of his translation bears the marginal note at Hosea 10:14, "Vide Haetzer." Before we leave the subject of German versions, let us note that "the first German Bible printed in America was published in 1743 by Christoph Saur, at Germantown in Pennsylvania."³⁴

Other Early European versions
Returning for a moment to pre-Reformation vernacular Bibles, the 19th century saw the recovery of the New Testament which the Catharists or Albigensians of southeastern France produced. Although the cult was Manichaean and anti-Catholic, its Provencal translation of the New Testament was accurate and readable. The followers of Peter Waldo also had a Provencal translation, as well as one in Flemish. The Inquisition in Germany uncovered German versions of the New Testament and at least part of the Old, in 1260. The Inquisition assumed that these must be heretical, and one of its agents wrote of unlettered countrymen who could recite Job word for word and of others who knew the entire New Testament verbatim.

"From the last quarter of the twelfth century onward the southern Netherlands and also the area around Cologne were the scene of popular religious revival. Great numbers of lay people, men and women, banded themselves together into communities to live apart in apostolic simplicity. These were Beghards and the Beguines....Gospels were needed, and this need was in part met...(by a translation of) Tatian's Diatessaron."³⁵ A Dutch version of about 1250 "is the earliest surviving biblical vernacular text in the Netherlands apart from the Low Franconian Psalms. The Liege Diatessaron is regarded as the Dutch peer of Luther's translation. Though the vocabulary is now archaic, the idiom is substantially the same as in modern Dutch."³⁶

³⁰ Greenslade, S. L., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: The University Press, 19xx), pp 423f.

³¹ Ibid., p 104.

³² Ibid.

³³ Reumann, John H. P., The Romance of Bible Scripts and Scholars (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p 70.

³⁴ Schaller, p 304f.

In connection with the Hussite movement, two Czech versions appeared at Prague and Kuttenberg in 1488 and 1489. A Spanish version appeared at Valencia in 1478 but was burned, and no complete copy survives. Another Spanish version was published at Barcelona in 1492.

Luther's work signaled a burst of translating activity throughout Europe. In his lifetime Low German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Bibles were completed. Before the Reformation century ended, Icelandic, Finnish, modern Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Wendish, Slovenian, and Croatian versions had been printed. The New Testament was translated into Hebrew for use in mission work among Jews. The Czechs produced the Kralice Bible, which became not only a Protestant treasure but also a symbol of resistance to Catholic rule in Moravia and Bohemia. Copies were printed in Berlin, Silesia, and Hungary, to be smuggled into Bohemia. At the beginning of the 19th century, Czech nationalists tried to revive their neglected native tongue on the basis of the Kralice Bible.

A Calvinist edition of the Brest Bible appeared in Danzig in 1632, under sponsorship of Prince Radziwill. It became the official Protestant version for Poland. The Counter-Reformation was even more successful in Poland than it was in Bohemia, and it was another Radziwill, Prince Nicholas Christopher, who bought up the copies of the Brest Bible which his father had underwritten and caused them to be burned with other Protestant books in the main square of Wilno.

The English Bible
And now, the Bible in English. In the 7th century there was an Anglo-Saxon version of the creation account upon which Caedmon, "the father of English song," drew for his poetic rendering of Genesis 1 and 2. An Anglo-Saxon version, of course, belongs to German history as much as to English, but we must begin somewhere. In the next century Bede worked at translating, but did not complete the entire Bible. Alfred the Great encouraged translation in the 9th century. Aelfric Grammaticus undertook to prepare a Heptateuch, a text comparing seven versions, for the purpose of preparing an Anglo-Saxon translation. Recent scholars have questioned his part in this work and doubt that he really prepared the Anglo-Saxon column. However, it was done. More significant in Aelfric's lifetime was the work of someone else, anonymous: a complete, accurate, and readable translation of the Gospels called the West-Saxon Gospels.

The Norman invasion of 1066 undid whatever had been accomplished in English Bible translation to that time. The new official language of England was Norman French, and until it became AngloNorman the people would not have Bibles or preaching or justice in their own language. An unknown priest of the time lamented: "Saint Bede...(and) Abbot Aelfric...taught our people in English....Now is the learning lost and the people forlorn....Those who teach the people now are men of other tongues."³⁷

Sometime in the early 14th century a partial English translation appeared, despite the attitudes of people like a certain Friar Claxton, D.D., who said that Holy Scripture was a false heresy. Then, in 1366, John Wyclif produced De Dominio Divino. In it "he appealed to Scripture as the highest expression of the divine law, in opposition to the manmade statutes of the church. From his assertion of the supreme authority of Scripture he argued the need for making the Bible readily available to every Christian, and hence the need for translating it from Latin into the...language of the people."³⁸ He argued for a translation from Latin, and worked from Latin, because he had no Greek. Greek was really a dead language in England at the time. Wyclif's work is dated in 1382. It is uncertain how much of the work is Wyclif's and how much his followers did. Nicholas of Hereford seems to have translated the greater part of the Old Testament.

³⁵ Lampe, p 428.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ackroyd, P. R., and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (Cambridge: The University Press, 1970), p 378.

³⁸ Source unknown.

Wyclif's followers, called Lollards, traveled around the country reading "Goddis lawe" and "Christis lawe"—the Old and New Testaments—to the common people who could not read the Scriptures for themselves. In 1407 Archbishop Arundel condemned the Lollards as heretics and forbade the reading of any translation of any part of the Bible until approval had been gained from the diocesan bishop. In 1411 he wrote to the pope: "This pestilent and wretched John Wyclif, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent...endeavored by every means to attack the very faith and sacred doctrine of Holy Church, devising to fill up the measure of his malice—the expedient of a new translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”³⁹ A short time later an English chronicler wrote: "This Master John Wyclif translated into English—the Angle not the angel speech—the Gospel that Christ gave to the clergy and doctors of the church...so that by this means it has become vulgar and more open to laymen and women who can read than it usually is to quite learned clergy of good intelligence. And so the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine."⁴⁰ John Purvey completed a revision of Wyclif's translation in 1388, and it is this version that appears in most extant manuscripts, which number 180. Wyclif was condemned and burned posthumously by the same Council of Constance (1414-1418) which consigned John Huss to the flames.

But God raised up another man for England whose work would be printed, not only in the version which bore his name but also in the King James Version. Goodspeed says that "92% of the King James Version is still just as William Tyndale wrote it."⁴¹ Tyndale (c.1490-1536) received the master of arts degree from Oxford in 1515, studied for a time at Cambridge, then took a job as tutor in the home of a country knight. There he met many distinguished clergymen and said to one of them: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou dost." He probably borrowed the challenge from the similar expression found in the preface of Erasmus' 1516 Greek New Testament.

Finding no patronage or employment to support his translating work in England, Tyndale went to Germany in 1524. Authorities in Cologne stopped the printing of a New Testament there just as the printer was setting the type for Mark's Gospel. Tyndale fled to Worms, and in 1525 a 6,000 copy edition was printed in that city. It was available for sale in England by April of 1526. Much of that edition was lost to the fires of the Archbishop of Canterbury. A single copy survives at Baptist College in Bristol. The final authoritative edition of Tyndale's testament was printed in 1535. Meanwhile, he had begun to work on the Old Testament. He never finished it.

Tyndale worked from the original languages of the Bible. For the New Testament he used Erasmus' text, with help from the Vulgate, Luther's German, and Erasmus' Latin rendering. For the Old Testament he used the Hebrew text, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and Luther's German translation. Scholars generally agree that "Tyndale made of the spoken English of his day a fit vehicle for the communication of the Holy Scripture."⁴²

From the point of view of church authorities in England, his version had to be banned and burned because it was a Lutheran document. "Tyndale wrote repent, not do penance; congregation, not church; senior or elder, not priest....(He) printed prefaces which...drove home the basic Lutheran principle of justification by faith. Many of the prefaces, not only the important Prologue to Romans, are essentially translations from Luther."⁴³ Not satisfied to ban his work in England, the English ecclesiastical authorities effected Tyndale's arrest in Europe. He spent his last year in prison near Brussels, still trying to complete the Old Testament. On October 6, 1536, he was burned at the stake in Antwerp, his final prayer being: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Incidentally, the word "trespasses" in our version of the Lord's Prayer derives from Tyndale.

³⁹ Ackroyd, p 388.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Source unknown.

⁴² Greenslade, p 145.

⁴³ Ibid., p 145f.

The first English printed complete Bible came out the year before Tyndale's death. An Augustinian by the name of Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) made use of Tyndale's work and then translated the rest of the Old Testament from the best German and Latin versions available, thus giving Luther's version another "in" to the translation of the Bible into English. No one knows who the printer was, where it was published, or who paid the cost of publication. Coverdale simply said, "God moved other men to do the cost hereof."

The first licensed English translation of the Bible was dedicated to "The Most Noble and Gracious Prince King Henry VIII." It was known as "Matthew's Bible." It was later recognized that John Rogers (1509-1555), alias Thomas Matthew, had published it at Antwerp in 1537. It was a compilation of Tyndale's Old Testament manuscript, Tyndale's corrective edition of the New Testament, and parts of Coverdale's Old Testament. The license was withdrawn, and John Rogers was burned under Bloody Mary at Smithfield in 1555, not for plagiarism but for heresy.

In 1537 the English theologian Edward Foxe wrote: "The lay people do now know the Holy Scripture better than any of us; and the Germans have made the text of the Bible so plain and easy by the Hebrew and Greek tongue that now many things may be better understood without any glosses at all than by all the commentaries of the doctors."⁴⁴ In 1534 royal injunctions "commanded the clergy to set up in every parish church (parishioners paying half the cost) one book of the whole Bible of the largest Bible in English."⁴⁵ This authorized version was the Great Bible of 1538. It was called great because it was a huge book, so huge that no London printer could produce it. The work was sent to Paris, but the Inquisitor General of France ordered the seizure of 2500 completed Bibles. The printer and his crew barely escaped with their lives. Through the intervention of the English ambassador, the King of France finally released manuscripts, paper, type, and printers; the job was finished in London after all. Miles Coverdale was the editor, commissioned by Thomas Cromwell. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote the preface. It was released in 1539 and in most parishes it was chained to the reading stand, lest the people be tempted to carry it away. It passed through several editions, one of them called Cranmer's Bible, and survived the persecution under Queen Mary.

Refugees from Mary's rule published a cross between Tyndale's version and the Great Bible in 1560. This was the Geneva Bible, greatly influenced by Reformed as distinguished from Lutheran theology. It was the first English Bible to use Stephanus' verse divisions. It used italics for words not found in the original. It was about 10 inches in height, a hand Bible rather than a pulpit Bible. Its marginal notes were so extensive that the editors believed they had left no verse of Scripture without a clear explanation. This was the Bible of Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans, and the Pilgrim Fathers. Its publishers knew Greek and Hebrew and made some necessary improvements in the latter half of the Old Testament. This Geneva Bible was also known as the "Breeches Bible" because it has Adam and Eve sewing "breeches" for themselves out of fig leaves.

A certain confusion set in because the Great Bible was being used in the churches and the Geneva Bible was very popular in homes. For that reason the bishops of England rather hurriedly prepared a revision of the Great Bible. It appeared in 1568 as the Bishops' Bible. It could not replace the popular Geneva Bible, but it served as the forerunner of the King James Version.

During much of the foregoing period, English Roman Catholic theologians and clerics were in exile in Europe. There were still Romanists in England and Scotland, and there was a desire for an English translation which had the "old church's" sanction. The English College at Reims produced a Catholic New Testament in 1568. In a few years the faculty moved to Douay, and there Gregory Martin worked at the rate of two chapters a day to complete the Old Testament within four years. In 1610 a complete Bible was published, the Douay-Reims, more often simply called the Douay. It was frequently revised, the last time by Challoner in 1749. One of its notes in 1 Corinthians says: "The Corinthian speakers of tongues are much like to some fond linguists of our time, who think themselves better than a Doctor of Divinity that is not a linguist."

At a conference of churchmen at Hampton Court it was suggested that a revision of the Bible, with the Bishops' Bible as its basis, be undertaken. King James I favored the idea, and 47 scholars and theologians used the original languages, earlier translations, and the Bishops' Bible to produce the King James Version, published in 1611. "For eighty years after its publication...it was denounced as theologically unsound and ecclesiastically biased, as truckling to the king and unduly deferring to his belief in witchcraft, as untrue to the Hebrew text and relying too much on the Septuagint. The personal integrity of the translators was impugned....They were accused of ‘blasphemy,' ‘most damnable corruptions,' ‘intolerable deceit,' and ‘vile imposture.' But the King James Version quickly displaced the Bishops' Bible in...the churches. The Geneva Bible continued to be printed until 1644, and only gradually fell into disuse....No evidence has been found that the King James Version received final authorization by the convocation of bishops of Parliament or by the king in council. It did not need that."⁴⁶ It was revised from time to time, the last time under Benjamin Blayney of Oxford in 1769.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p 149f.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p 150f.

We shall leave the translation of the English Bible there, confident that the reader is somewhat familiar with most of the significant translations produced since 1611, and especially in the 20th century. We are privileged to live in one of the two great ages of Bible translation. Under God, this may still result in another great age of Reformation, of free course for the unconditioned gospel. In October of 1978 the complete New International Version was published, following the publication of the New Testament in 1973. Professor Fred-eric Blume had served as a consultant to the New Testament translation committee. Professor John Jeske was part of the translation committee for the Old Testament.⁴⁷

The Bible as a mission tool
It is a commonplace that from the 12th century onward the Roman Church censored, discouraged, and sometimes persecuted to death those who translated and distributed the Holy Scriptures. It is also true that in the mission ages before Rome controlled the West, the efforts of missionaries—especially non-Roman missionaries—involved Bible translation and distribution. After the Reformation, the vernacular Bible once more became a mission tool. The first translation of any portion of Scripture into a non-European modern lan-guage was done by a trader. "In 1629 Albert Cornelius Ruyl, an agent of the Dutch East India Company, translated the Gospel of St. Matthew into Malay and later added St. Mark."⁴⁸ This was the beginning of a complete Malay Bible, which was completed in 1735. "Netherlands traders were also responsible for the beginning of translation into Formosan Chinese (1661) and into Sinhalese (1739). In the New World, John Eliot, working among the Mohican Indians, prepared the first version in any North American Indian tongue (1663); and Danish missionaries translated the New Testament into Eskimo (Greenland) in 1766. A beginning was also made on the languages of India by another Danish missionary, Ziegenbalg, who completed the New Testament in Tamil in 1715."⁴⁹

The work has continued and multiplied. As of 1983 there were 1,763 languages and dialects in which at least one book of the Bible was available. The New Testament has been translated into 551 tongues, the complete Bible into 279. Dr. E. R. Wendland of the Lutheran Church of Central Africa has been part of a translation team which has rendered the entire Scriptures into Chewa and the New Testament into Tonga.

It has been pointed out, perhaps a bit simplistically, that while Catholic missionaries tried to bring people into the church so that they could learn the gospel, Protestants of Europe and North America sent the gospel to nations in order that the church might be born among them. This really did happen in Korea. Korea was not opened to westerners until 1882, but two Gospels had been translated into Korean and smuggled across the Manchurian border in quantity for some time before 1882. When western missionaries were finally admitted to Korea, they found a considerable number of Christians in Seoul, awaiting baptism. They had been converted by those smuggled Gospels.

^{46 Ibid. p 361.}

^{47 See Jeske, John C., "New International Version Completed," Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly, Vol 75, No 4 (October 1978), pp 292-305.}

^{48 Greenslade, p 385.}

^{49 Ibid}.

We might think of Bible Societies as an invention of the Great Mission Century, the 19th. The first such undertaking was, however, sponsored in the early 18th century by Baron Hildebrand von Canstein. In 1710 he underwrote the Canstein Bible Institute at Halle, joining it with the other institutions of August Hermann Francke in that city. The purpose of this institute was to place Bibles in the hands of those who could not afford to purchase them.

Other German societies which grew out of the Awakening and were instructed by von Canstein's example were the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft at Basel (1780), the Priviligierte Wuerttembergische Bibelanstalt at Stuttgart (1812), and the Preussische/Saechsische Hauptbibelgesellschaft of Berlin and Dresden (1814).

In England, the Naval and Military Bible Society was founded in 1780 for the purpose of distributing Scriptures among soldiers and sailors. The French Bible Society was founded in London in 1792, a safer base of operations just then than anywhere in revolutionary France. The great British and Foreign Bible Society was established in 1804, the American Bible Society in 1816. The field agents, the frontline soldiers of these organizations, were, and in many places still are, the colporteurs. "The colporteur...is usually a native of the country, a man of humble origin but of deep personal conviction; he goes out alone, day by day, with his bag of books, often uncertain of his reception....Broadly speaking, it has been the colporteur who has carried the main burden in Muslim countries and in the Far East."⁵⁰

A Russian Bible Society was organized in 1812 with the Czar's approval, but it was dissolved 14 years later when he withdrew his patronage. In Greece the authorities of the Orthodox Church first welcomed the Bible Society movement wholeheartedly, but the Greek constitution of 1911 forbade the use of Scripture in modern Greek. At least two popes of the 19th century resisted the movement, and one of them had to deal with Scottish smugglers at Leghorn who were bringing Bibles into Italy for the Waldensians. An Arabic translation which had been prepared by Jesuits in Beirut was, however, distributed by Bible Society people, and more recently the Vatican has taken a more tolerant attitude toward Bible Societies. In fact, it has cooperated in recent translation work.

From the anonymous translators of the Septuagint to the committees of the New International Version, from Bede to Coverdale, from Jerome to Canstein, the translators and distributors of the Word of God are some of the real heroes of church history. It is said that Ambrose of Milan liked to "insert a word of thanksgiving for translators and grammarians" into the litany of his church. We would do well to imitate him in this thanksgiving. We would do well to emulate them in their zeal for making plain the Word of God.

V. The Authority Of Scripture
What do we mean with the hermeneutical maxim that we must interpret the Bible as a sacred scripture? We mean that it is the Word of God, that all its words are God-breathed, that these words of the Spirit of Truth are self-evidently true and without error, that central to the Scriptures is the message of Christ the Savior, and that these Scriptures must be understood according to the law-gospel principle.

This approach to the Bible was not invented by the Lutheran Reformation and Lutheran orthodoxy. It was, rather, rediscovered, emphasized, and articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries in a more consistent way than it had ever been before. Origen had said that "Christ is the inner principle of Scripture and only those with the Spirit of Christ can understand Scripture,"⁵¹ but he had gloried in gnosis more than in the gospel of the Crucified. Augustine regarded the Old Testament as christocentric and tried to practice his conviction that "the expositor is to get the meaning out of the Bible, not bring a meaning to it,”⁵² but we know that in the crunch he was too ready to submit to the authority of the church: "Roma locuta, causes finita." Gregory the Great wanted to operate with the principle that the Bible's single subject is the revelation of God in Christ, but we know that he more than anyone else introduced Origen's allegories to the western church.

⁵⁰ Ibid., pp 399f.

⁵¹ Ramm, Bernard, Protestant Biblical Interpretation (Boston: W.A. Wilde, 1956), p 32.

⁵² Ibid.

Luther's view
For Luther the Bible was the only authority. "To say that the church takes precedence over the Bible because (the church) existed before the canon of the Scriptures was complete is as foolish as if you would hold John the Baptist in greater honor than Christ because of John's temporal precedence over Christ."⁵³ The truly revolutionary thing which Luther did at Leipzig and Worms was to place the Scriptures over the church and the individual conscience to the exclusion of popes and councils. The Lutheran Confessions sounded the same note: "We believe, teach and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with all teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and New Testament alone.”⁵⁴

Also See Martin Luther... An Ill Earned Reputation Based Upon Total Ignorance of the Facts?

Calvin and other Protestants wanted to follow the same principle, and they said so. This, and not the so-called "right of private interpretation" which was soon perverted into an anarchic subjectivism, is the true "Protestant principle" regarding the interpretation of the Bible. Article 6 of the Church of England's Thirty-nine Articles declared: "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."⁵⁵

InPlainSite.org Note: There is no question that Calvin imposed upon the Bible certain preconceived ideas from his Roman Catholic background (rather than deriving it from a diligent study of the Bible) which locked him into an erroneous interpretation. See Doctrines of Grace or Calvinism

Subversive legalism
Before we leave the reformers it is necessary to say that nothing undermines the power of the gospel and therefore the authority of the Word so much as does any form of legalism. And Calvin did regard the Bible as a legal document. He and his spiritual heirs have used the Scriptures as the legal basis for forms of church government, ideals of civil government, a sabbatarian doctrine of Sunday, views of the sacraments which stress obedience rather than grace, and a confusion of the functions of church and state. Anyone who seeks to establish a theocracy on the basis of the Scriptures must operate with the Bible as a book of laws, to the detriment of the evangel. Bearing the name Lutheran does not, of course, guarantee an immunity to legalism.

Subversive Subjectivism
Almost at once, in the years following 1517, an unwholesome subjectivism or anthropocentricity began to undercut the sola Scriptura principle. The devil, who taught people to concentrate on their own works and attitudes under the papacy, was ready to teach people to concentrate on their own feelings and responses outside the papacy. Karlstadt spoke of a special illumination through which alone the Scriptures are truly efficacious. Schwenckfeld denied the power of the Scriptures to produce spiritual life in man. They can only be properly understood, he said, by one who has experienced spiritual renewal apart from them. For Sebastian Franck "the Scriptures are in the last analysis the human letter as contrasted with the divine Spirit."⁵⁶ He believed that the Holy Spirit is a natural possession of man: "The light is already kindled in the lantern of our hearts, and whosoever would but allow this flame to burn, rather than to prefer the lamp of the flesh [the Bible]..., would not be forced to look for it in heaven, for the Word is in us."⁵⁷ In the next generation Theobald Thamer (d.1569) taught that "the original revelation of God lies in conscience and nature. The Bible is the truth only where it agrees with both of these."⁵⁸

⁵³ Neve, J. L., A History of Christian Thought, Vol 1 (Philadelphia: The United Lutheran Publication House, 1943), p 237.

⁵⁴ Formula of Concord, Epitome, Introduction, 1; Conocordia Triglotta, 777.

⁵⁵ Schaff, Philip, Creeds of Christendom, Vol III, The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations (New York: Harper Brothers, 1919), p 489ff.

⁵⁶ Neve, J. L., A History of Christian Thought, Vol 2, History of Protestant Theology, by O.W. Heick (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1946), p 43.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Ibid, p 44.

This rejection of the written Word in favor of a personal inner illumination found its most famous exponent and greatest following in the 17th century, in England. George Fox (1624-1691) began to receive mystical revelations when he was 19 years old. The voice of God, he said, told him to be directed by the "inner light" rather than by Scripture. "He described his experience as coming to him while he waited in an absolutely calm frame of mind," and the revelation "was signaled by violent physical agitation or, as he called it, ‘quaking.’”⁵⁹ Thus he and his Society of Friends came to be known as Quakers.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, zealous Christians who wanted to see the fruits of right teaching in their lives and in the lives of their fellow Christians developed an approach to the Christian life which came to be known as Pietism. With regard to the Bible, their emphasis was away from the objective Word and toward the individual's subjective feeling and reaction toward the Word. Their spiritual descendants are still with us under a variety of names and movements. A striking example of where the emphasis on subjective Christian ex-perience at the expense of the objective Word leads is the 19th century dogmatician Schleiermacher. He wrote a four-volume dogmatics without basing a single one of his fundamental theses on Scripture. He said: "Not he has religion who believes in a Holy Scripture, but he who needs no Scripture and himself might be able to make one."⁶⁰

Needless to say, where the objective truth of the Word is deprecated, objective justification will be lost sight of, the objective truth of the resurrection will recede in importance, the objective validity of the sacraments and the objective power of the gospel in the sacraments will be forgotten. The end result will be that a pan-protestant enthusiasm replaces evangelical truth.

Subversive Catholicism
But if subjectivism with its emphasis on the individual's reaction subverts the place of the Word in the church, so does the spirit of Catholicism which regards the Word of Scripture as a coordinate authority rather than the sole authority. In fact, that principle was strong in the West, particularly in Rome's sphere of influence, from the second century onward. Then the authority of the bishop and the traditional rule of faith were pitted against gnosticism, and there was at least as much reliance on those authorities in coping with the soul-destroying errors of the speculative systems as there was on biblical exegesis.

During the Middle Ages there was implicit acceptance of the fathers, the councils, and the pope as authoritative with the Bible. Where the Bible must share authority, however, it does not really have authority at all. It is the Scriptures alone, or it is not the Scriptures at all.

The Fourth Session of the Council of Trent regularized this situation in 1546. This means that the Catholic Bible interpreter "accepts all verses which the church has officially interpreted in the sense in which they have been interpreted....The Catholic Church is the official interpreter of Scripture..., custodian of Scripture." ⁶¹ In practical terms, it means that the Catholic Christian does not ask what the Scriptures teach, but what the church (as represented by fathers, councils, and popes) teaches. The Second Vatican Council has not changed that situation. The ancient tradition and the living teaching authority of the church are equally authoritative with the Scriptures.

But this kind of subversion of biblical authority is not limited to the Roman Church. One of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles also assigns to the bishops the authority which Article 6 had earlier given to Scripture. Another so-called Protestant manifestation of this Catholic spirit appeared in the 17th century in Germany. Urging the reunion of all Christian churches on the basis of the things in which they agreed, Calixtus insisted that the early church's rule of faith constituted the real criterion of essential truth. The Ecumenical Creeds were not to be regarded merely as normae normatae but as real normae normantes.

John Henry Cardinal Newman went so far in his traditionalism as to say that allegorical interpretation and orthodox Christianity would stand or fall together. As we speak of these things and make judgments concerning them, we do not lose sight of the fact that we face the temptation to let Luther, the dogmaticians, the congregational constitution, or the synodical resolution decide. These must not be the ultimate authority, because someday they might be wrong.

_{59] Source unknown.}

_{60] Neve, p 108.}

_{61] Ramm, pp 40-42}.

Subversive Rationalism
Another great foe of biblical authority with which we have to contend and which is probably most obvious to us in our work is rationalism. It has taken the form of many isms goes by many names, has been disguised in various movements but remains in essence the same. It makes human reason the ultimate judge of what the Bible teaches and what is to be believed concerning that teaching. The phenomenon is one of the oldest in the world, for it is embodied in the first recorded false witness of the Father of Lies: "Yea, hath God said?"

What concerns us particularly as we consider "the Bible through the ages" is the development of that lie within the church. The rationalist's approach to Scripture and to Christian doctrine was already there in the apologists of the 2nd century. The method of apologists, medieval scholastics, and some dogmaticians was to argue that certain things which Scripture teaches must be true, and to argue that on rational rather than on scriptural grounds. If a new genius could demonstrate that the argument was not that compelling, the next generation of apologists and scholastics was reduced to arguing that it might be true. When still more rational arguments were marshaled against a biblical teaching, it was finally abandoned.

This has happened in the case of inspiration, vicarious atonement, miracles, resurrection, creation, heaven, and hell. It was not sects or schools outside the church setting out to attack the church so much as it was rationalists within the church who approached the Bible with presuppositions which made it unacceptable to believe what could not be supported by experience. Socinianism, deism, humanism, naturalism, criticism, objectivism—all grew up in the circle of baptized Christians and called servants of the Word. Men who had been entrusted by the church with the responsibility of teaching in the church and of teaching the church's teachers forsook the sound hermeneutics of Luther and the relatively sound hermeneutics of Calvin. They did not set out to overthrow the Word and the church and the truth. They did set out to test all things in Scripture by the criteria of rationality and rational ethics. And then they did overthrow the Word's authority and robbed the church's faith of its foundation. They did give the lie to God's truth.

As Lutheranism has made Scripture the formal principle and justification the material principle, so Rationalism made reason the formal principle and morality or ethics the material principle. Kant stated philosophically what the Old Adam has always wanted to believe: that man knows better than God and that man can satisfy God. Kant did not invent that with his "Thou canst because 'Thou shalt.’” He only stated it in a way which seemed to be intellectually respectable. And those who tried to defend the Scripture and the Christian doctrine, those who wanted to be apologists for the truth, too often also relied on rational argument rather than on the Word's authority.

Subversive Fundamentalism
It seems at times that we are too ready to buy books and borrow ideas from other Christians who also affirm the authority and inspiration of Scripture. We should not forget that the very authority of the Word which we want to uphold is undermined in a very dangerous way when certain fundamentals are insisted upon as necessary for salvation and for fellowship, while other so-called "nonfundamentals" are dismissed as nonessential. This, too, is a form of rationalism—reasoning that some parts of God's Word are less important than others.

Conclusion
We have not named many names or traced all the movements or marked every development in the history of unbelieving criticism. But let us not be fooled into believing that the views espoused, even by people who bear the name Lutheran, are the necessary fruit of modern biblical scholarship. Such expressions as "The Bible is not a manual of theology," "The Bible is a record of religious experience," "The Bible's authority and veracity do not extend beyond the doctrinal," "Not the words but the writers are inspired," "The Bible is not revelation but the record of revelation," and "The Bible is not a science textbook" are at least a hundred years old. The same spirit that produces these views produced such "assured results" of the past as that Acts is unhistorical, that John's Gospel could not have been written in the first century, that Paul was not the author of half his books, that Moses could not have known how to write. In the grace and providence of God certain conclusions of the negative critics of the Old Testament with regard to place names and religious terminology have once again been disproved by the early findings in the recently uncovered royal archives of ancient Ebla. [See Academia’s Asinine Assault on the Bible]

We should never fail to remember with gratitude that there have always been some men who worked at drawing out the meaning of the Scriptures. What does the Bible actually say? Not what do this age's "assured results" permit it to say, or what is the accepted meaning according to tradition, or what is intellectually respectable? But, as Professor John Meyer used to ask, "What does the text say?" As Dr. Paul Peters used to insist: "Let the prophet speak." As Professor Carl Lawrenz has said: "Do an exegetical study of the issue." This is the single great thing a seminary can do: Take the Word of God on its terms and hear what it says. Then train men who can stand up and say: "This is God's Word. This is what it means. This is what it means for your life."

The kingdom of God comes not with argument and apologetic and appeals to the reasonableness of our confession. The gracious rule of God operates in the lives of sinners by the gospel of forgiveness, by a proclamation based in historical events recorded in the Bible. The truth about God's creating activity is presented factually, not mythically, in Genesis. The truth about Jesus Christ's triumph over death and hell is based on the facts, not the myths, of his resurrection and ascension. The truth of our forgiveness and our eternal hope is rooted in the factual account of what God has done in Christ, as presented in the Bible. We do not argue these things because they are logically necessary. We proclaim them because they are God's truth.

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