Languages in Prefaces

In the 4th edition of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible traditionally used by the Catholic Church, published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft in 1994, there are prefaces to the first and 4th editions, in Latin, then in German, French and English. Just to be clear: this is the 4th edition of the Vulgate to be published by the Deutsche Biblegesellschaft. Many, many editions were published by others long before 1994, okay? This post is just about the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Okay!

In the Bibelgesellschaft's 2nd edition of the Septuaginta, the Greek translations of the Old Testament made by Jews in and/or around Alexandria in the 3rd and/or 2nd century BC, published in 2006, there are forwards to the 2nd edition in German, English and Greek, in that order, and then the forwards and introductory material to the first edition, first in German, then in English, Latin and Greek.

In their 27th edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 2007 with corrections but otherwise identical to the 1993 27th edition, there is a brief foreword to the 27th edition in German and then in English, and then a lengthy introduction, likewise first in German and then in English.

In the 1997 5th edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (so called because the Gesellschaft is headquartered in Stuttgart), the Hebrew Bible, of the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, there are forwards to the fifth and then to the first edition, first in German, then in English, French, Spanish and Latin. Then come many pages of Latin abbreviations. Then a few pages in which some of those abbreviations are translated into English. If I pretended that I was presently capable of explaining just exactly what all of these abbreviations are, I would be a fraud.

Mysteries, Solved And Unsolved

I'm still having trouble finding information about Classical Studies in Latin America. (Yes, I know I could assuage these difficulties as easily as contacting a university professor or two.) The other day, I thought that perhaps I had come across an indication of the study of ancient Latin in Peru: in Eutropii Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, edidit Carolus Santini, Leipzig: Teubner, 1992,



on p xii and p xviii, a 14th-century manuscript of Eutropius is referred to as "Perusinus H 75." Could this be a manuscript currently held in a library in Puru? I asked myself excitedly. However, an Internet search for the term perusinus quickly taught me that it does not refer to Peru, but to the Italian city Perugia, which was once an Etruscan city. Most of the Google results in my search for perusinus refer to the Cippus Perusinus,

a stone inscribed in Etruscan, discovered near Perugia early in the 19th century. There are some claims that the Etruscan text on the Cippus Perusinus has been diciphered. However, if I have understood things correctly, the academic consensus is that Etruscan remains a lost language, not yet deciphered by modern people.

Anyway: the question of "Perusinus" was cleared up very easily. Only my laziness prevents me from beginning to learn about Classical studies in Latin America. (You know, it seems I recall that someone actually told me the titles of a couple of books on that very subject, and I've been too lazy to follow that lead, or even to jot down the titles in a place I'd remember.)

It seems that another question may remain somewhat more difficult: I've heard repeatedly from various sources that "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century." The more times I hear that repeated, the more implausible it sounds.

Now, it may be that the oldest Greek manuscripts actually used by the makers of the KJV were 12th century. But much older manuscripts were found by Western scholars in Egypt beginning in the mid-19th century: complete Greek Bibles, Old and New Testament, as old as 4th-century, many other copies of individual books or of the Gospels, in Greek, Coptic or Syriac, 6th century and older, and all of this before the beginning of the excavations at Oxyrhynchus began to yield New Testament fragments as old as the 2nd century.

How much of the statement: "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century" can possibly be anything but stupid Western provincialism and sheer ignorance of non-Western Biblical scholarship? Are we to believe that no-one in those Egyptian monasteries which contained those much older manuscripts was actually studying them, before rich Westerners swooped in and bought them and took them away to the West? Not to mention scholarship done in Greece, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, etc?

That's not just very hard for me to believe, it's impossible for me to believe. That so many Western scholars, to this very day, would be wholly ignorant of whatever Biblical scholarship has existed of the West, is staggering, to be sure -- but, sadly, I can believe it.

Frankly, it's also hard for me to believe that nowhere in Western Europe, before the 19th century finds in Egypt, was there any manuscript of the Greek New Testament older than the 12th century. Frankly, it strikes me as downright odd that there would be no Greek New Testament manuscripts as old as the 9th century or older well-known in England at the beginning of the 17th century, when the King James Bible was being made. But I don't even know whom to ask about this. I google these things and get all sorts of different answers from all sorts of different people. I can easily find all sorts of statements which are clearly nonsense. It's not at all clear to me who knows what they're talking about.

Chronological List Of Early Bible Translations

I had already known for a long time that Ulfila's translation of the New Testament into Gothic was older than Jerome's Vulgate; but that chronological tidbit didn't really strike me until recently, and when it did, I thought it might be fun to chronologically list some early Bible translations.

My interest in this topic is mostly linguistic, while the interest of many or most people who have looked into it has been greatly or mostly theological. It's difficult for me to sort out the more authoritative Biblical scholars from the less authoritative, in part because there are so many of them, and unfortunately, the biased nuts do not helpfully affix labels in bold print at the head of their papers saying WARNING: BIASED NUT. DO NOT USE FINDINGS. Despite the lack of such labels, gross bias is often easy to spot, as when a member of a particular denomination affixes a significantly earlier date than anyone else to the translation most closely associated with his denomination, and acts as if he has never heard of the more conventional dating.

We do not know when some of these translations first appeared, and can only say that they are first firmly attested at such and such a date, and more weakly at such and such an early date, and speculate about the translation's beginnings.

Such is the case with the oldest-known (to me) Bible translation, the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. The best I can do is to tell you that this translation was made in the 3rd and 2nd centuries in and/or around Alexandria, where a Jewish community had resided long enough that many or most of them were more familiar with the Greek language than with Hebrew.



Next come Syriac and Old Latin translations of the New Testament. (The term "Old Latin" is used to distinguish the earliest Latin Biblical translations from Jerome's Vulgate.) There is evidence of translation of parts of the New Testament into both of these languages both as early as the late 2nd century.



Next, we have evidence of translations of parts of the New Testament into Coptic going back as far as the 3rd century.



And then comes the "Gothic Bible," or to be more exact, the Gothic New Testament translation by Ulfila. It is well-established that Ulfilia (ca 311-383) was the translator.



Next, Jerome's Vulgate, begun after 382 and finished by 405. Recently scholars have been falling all over each other in the rush to proclaim that it is not correct to call this work Jerome's Vulgate, because not every single bit of the translation is Jerome's work, which is true, but most of it is by Jerome, and he at least inspected and approved the rest in the "Old Latin" versions, and revised those parts to some extent -- so I personally have no problem calling it Jerome's Vulgate. Just be warned, some people do have a problem with that.



It is with no great confidence at all that I guess that Biblical translations into Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian began in the 5th century. I could be wrong, for all I know they could have begin earlier or later. There may be some really great and authoritative scholarship on the origins of all three of those written languages, but I haven't found any of it yet.



And finally there are Saints Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine missionaries to the Slavs. They are said to have translated parts of the Bible into Old Church Slavonic in the 860's. But some sources say they did this, while other sources say they "are credited" with doing this, which looks to me like scholar-speak for "they didn't do it, but for a long time a lot of people have thought they did, and I don't want to get into the middle of a huge argument right now." So I'm going to guess (guess!) that biblical translations into Old Church Slavonic began some time before 900, possibly by Cyril and/or Methodius.



By 900, writing in vernacular German had begun, and it would soon get underway in French and Spanish, which meant some translations into those languages of some parts of the Bible, although the Vulgate was well-established all over Western Europe and would remain overwhelmingly the preferred version there for centuries to come.

And if you're asking, Well, so what?! then I say: Well, it sort of lends a little bit of perspective to the 21st-century squabbles, in some English-speaking regions, over the 17th-century King James Version, doesn't it? and to the uproar caused by the KJV and Luther's German Bible and by the great unwashed in England and Germany learning to read at last. Every one of the translations of the Bible I've listed above, with the single exception of the Gothic version, has been continuously used by a wide reading public ever since it was first made.

Editions Of The Greek New Testament And Other Ancient Texts

If I counted correctly, the editors of the 27th edition of this version of the Greek New Testament, known as the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland,



consulted 586 Greek New Testament manuscripts, of which at least 291 were made before AD 800, and at least 35 before 300. It's "at least" because several of those manuscripts are dated 8th or 9th century, and several are dated around 300, or 3rd or 4th century. There are thousands of other Greek New Testaments available to scholars, but these editors -- Erwin Nestle, Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo Martini and Bruce Metzger -- were satisfied with these 586. However, in addition to the Greek manuscripts, they also looked at 62 Latin New Testament manuscripts, at least 44 of those older than AD 800. The current location and catalog number of each of those 586 Greek and 62 Latin manuscripts is given, so that you can look them up or find photos of them, and look at exactly what the editors were looking at when they prepared this edition. They also consulted editions (that is, printed versions) of the New Testament in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopian and Old Church Slavonic.

And in the lists of these sources they have assigned a symbol to each one -- for example, p40, 2298 and d -- and in the so-called "critical apparatus" (I love that term), which is the strange stuff at the bottom of each page below the main text, they indicate which part of their text is supported by p40, or 2298, and so on -- and also indicate which manuscripts contain some other version of the text which they consider significant. (p40 comes from a fairly standardized list of New Testament papyri, from p1 into the p120's and still counting. I assume that 2298 is from some list of other New Testament manuscripts running into I don't know how many thousands. If I knew where that entire list was I'd tell you. I bet Bart Ehrman knows.)

And the editors of series like Oxford Classical Texts



or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (that's Latin for Teubner's Library of Greek and Roman Works)



do the same in each volume: provide a list of all the manuscripts and other sources they have consulted in preparing their texts, with a symbol for each one (Usually each symbol is a capitol letter because usually less than 26 manuscripts are used for a given text. But in cases of authors like Vergil or Terrence, editors might run out of capital letters, and also use small letters, and/or Greek letters, and/or numbers or abbreviated words or what have you.), and then at the bottom of each page they indicate which sources have the same text as the one they've chosen, and indicate other versions, which they consider significant, from other sources. In addition to these major variations, the Nestle-Aland provides dozens of pages' worth of minor variations at the end of the volume. In the Oxford Classical Texts and the Teubneriana and other editions of ancient works, such as this edition of the New Testament, the editors typically describe the manuscripts they've used, and in a case like this where there are more existing manuscripts besides the ones used, they'll give their reasons for using these ones and not those, and so forth.

They show their work when editing Sallust or the Bible, is what I'm getting at. It's usually not the same guys editing the Classics and the Bible, but the techniques are similar. Classics or the Bible, it's known as scholarly editing. And so while you or I might reasonably disagree with what Bruce Metzger said about how it's certain that Jesus existed, if we're going to criticize what he said about Biblical manuscripts and how the text of the Bible changed over the centuries, we better come correct, cause he was all up in it.

You Know What? Phillip Patterson Is A Better Man Than I --

-- because I can tell already, I'm not going to be able to post the entire Vulgate on my blog as I had planned. That is to say, I'm not going to be able to bring myself to invest that much energy in it.

But I tell you what, I will give you some links. The entire text of the Vulgate, including the Prefaces, but no Apocrypha, can be found online here.

The Vatican's online version, with the Apocrypha, without the ancient Prefaces but with some other material, is here.

A third online version, again with Apocrypha and without Prefaces by Jerome et al, is here. The pages and illustrations on this website, the bibliotheca Augustana, where a large and growing number of texts in twelve languages can be found, are especially handsome, in my opinion.

This free online site allows you to search by chapter, verse, keyword or topic. It advertises itself as offering over 100 versions of the Bible. The Vulgate is among them.

This is a good printed version of the Vulgate.It's the one I have. It's includes the Prefaces, the Apocrypha, the canons, the whole nine yards. Including introductions by the editors in Latin, German, French and English. The selection of manuscripts consulted and the critical apparatus are impressive. (To me, a layman.) It's published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, they do good work. (It seems to me, a layman.) They also publish editions of the Septuagint,the Hebrew Old Testamentand the Greek New Testament.In this edition of the NT, thousands of witnesses to the text are consulted -- mostly Greek, of course, including many of those fragments from the garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus, but also Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic. Readers interested in that sort of thing who aren't already way ahead of me might want to consult the introduction of this edition of the Greek NT for references to translations into those last 7 languages.