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.

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.

What You Mean, "Our" Bible, Kimosabe?

That's what I was compelled to ask after Greg Carey mentioned that

"[...]many people ask about the literature that did not make it into our Bible, and [David A] deSilva [in his bookThe Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Early Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha] shows how wisdom literature like Ben Sira, apocalypses like Enoch, legends like Tobit[...]"

I wasn't really compelled. I realized that Carey was referring to the 39 Old Testament books recognized as canonical by (most) Jews and (most) Protestants.

I think the Catholic Church may only recently have moved Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, Bel and the Dragon (as the final 2 chapters in the Vulgate version of Daniel) and I and II Maccabees from their Old Testament into their Deuterocanonical/Apocrypha section. All of those books are in the Old Testament in the versions of the complete Vulgate I've seen, and in the Deuterocanonical/Apocrypha section of a Catholic "Today's English Version," imprimi potest Bishop Keeler in 1993. All that's in the Apocrypha section of my copy of the Vulgate -- copyright 1994, Deutsche Bibelgesellschafy, no imprimi potest -- only an historical artifact after Vatican II? -- is the Prayer of Manasseh, III and IIII Ezra (begging the question: Dude, where's II Ezra?), the 151st Psalm and Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans. Back in the Old Testament it has 45 books, with Bel and the Dragon not counted as a book of its own but as the last 2 chapters of Daniel, compared to the Jewish and Protestant 39.

My copy of the Sptuagint is copyright 2006 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft has 53 books and answers the question: Dude, where's II Ezra? Turns out that what "we" in the Jewish non-Orthodox-Christian worlds call just plain old Ezra is II Ezra, if you include another book and call it I Ezra, as this copy of the Septuagint does. This volume has no Apocrypha section, but in the table of contents subtitles I Ezra, and no other book, as apocryphal.

So now you know.

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.