THE BIBLE-ITS HISTORY AND TRANSLATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 1925, 8 January 1891, Page 32

THE BIBLE-ITS HISTORY AND TRANSLATION.

In the year 285 b.O. 70 of the wise men of Alexandria engaged themselves in compiling and collating the Hebrew Scriptures into their present united form and further simplifying the works by translating them into Greek for th 6 benefit of the Jews then in Egypt. The results of their labours have since been known collectively as the Septuagint, from the fact that it was the work of the 70 translators. About 400 years later, in the second century a.d , the books of the New Testament were, added, and the whole translated into Latin. The .Italia, or Latin version, soon became the standard of the primitive Christians, and was used to the exclusion of both the Hebrew and Greek versions for two centuries, until the St. Jerome revision of A.D. 405. After St. Jerome had finished his crowning work, a great deal of which he performed in the village of Bethlehem, almost in sight cf the birthplace of Jesus, the Dalmatian and Panonian monks hid away their old versions of the Bible and would use no other except the one which had been given them by their patron Jerome himself. The Jerome version was as superior to the work of the 70 as their work was to the old semi- barbaric work which existed prior to the translation of 285 B.C. The most carefully written copies of the Bible ottainable were consulted by the scholarly saint and compared with the Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac versions, in all of which he made emendations and corrections which have stood the test of all subsequent time. The Herculean task undertaken by St. Jerome will be better understood when the reader has been informed that over 200 versions of the Evangelists, each differing from the other in many of its essential details, were presented for the consideration of the sages at the Council of Nice in 325 a.d. For hun.dreds of years copyists had added to and taken from the Scriptures to such an extent as to make it extremely difficult for even the most learned to decide what should remain for the edification of future generations, or what should be eliminated from the sacred pages as apocryphal. The word " bible," meaning book, or a3 applied by the early writers, " the book," was first used by Chrysostom as early as the fifth century, where he speaks of the sacred writings collectively as the Biblia or the T " Books." , The infinite variations which occurred in the manuscripts written by the early Christian fathers have caused a great deal of contention among churchmen, some admitting certain books as canonical, which are rejected by others as apocryphal. This you can find illustrated by comparing a Douay and a King James Bible of to-day ; the former admits several books which the King James tran>lators would not. The books as arranged and accepted at present are the results of years of labour and of countless councils and revision assemblages. For 1200 years after the Saviour of Men ended His brief career on the rugged heights of Calvary, the touching details of which are known to over 700,000,000 of people and in every land on the globe, each book of the Bible was one continued story, undivided into chapters, paragraphs, or verses. Prior to the time of the Spanish Babbi, the Jews employed a system of dividing the chapters into verses in the Old Testament, a system which had never been adopted by the Christians, and was discarded for that of the learned Spaniard by the Jews themselves. The New Testament was not divided into verses until after the invention of the, art of printing, by the Robert Stevens Greek edition in 1551. Of the early translations of the Bible, the most important, aside from the Septuagint and the St. Jerome versions, are the threefold Egyptian translations of the fourth century (this remarkable work of the copjist was in three languages, and was intended for all parts of Egypt) ; The Versio Figurata, collected by Jacob of Edessa in the eighth century ; that of Paul, Bishop of Tela, in 617, and the eighth, ninth, and tenth century translations, made respectively by Bede, Alfred and JKfric. During the Dark Ages and on down to the time that Luther gave his masterpiece to the world, several translations were made, including that of Notker-Labeo. 980 A.D. ; that prepared under the supervision of Petrus Waldns, 1170 ; the important work of Louis the Pious, 1227 ; that of Charles the Wise, 1380 ; the Guyars version of 1286 ; the thirteenth century version in Spanish during the reign of Alphonso V, and the two excellent works of Wickliffe and Huss, the latter for the Bohemians and the former for the Knglish-speaking people. With the invention of printing eyery person who had ever laid claim to literary abilities seemed to think that he had been specially commissioned from on high to retranslate the word of God, as one would naturally infer from the fact that not less than seventeen German translations alone were given the public between the timecf Guttenberg and Faust and that of Martin Luther. The Wickliffu (sometimes spelled WyclifrV) version of 18S-1 waft the first English translation. John Wickliffe, the translator, was condemned to be burned for presuming to do such a thing without the consent of the clergy, bat was finally allowed to die a natural death. His Bible was never printed ; however, there are many manuscript copies of it— Crlobe Peinocrat.