The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  By the year 382 Jerome’s reputation as a scholar and biblical commentator had spread far beyond Antioch. He travelled as part of a delegation to Rome, a city which he knew well from his youth, and where he still had influential contacts. He was spotted by Pope Damasus, who took him under his wing, hoping to benefit from Jerome’s knowledge of the politics of the Eastern church. The Pope soon found that Jerome’s scholarship was an even greater asset; he effectively became Damasus’s secretary, helping him with his correspondence and answering questions on his behalf.19 It turned out to be the most important engagement of his life; building up to the moment when Jerome was asked to undertake his greatest work, the one for which, despite everything else he did, he is best known today.

  By now there were various Latin translations of the Greek Gospels already in circulation. They varied greatly in quality and differed significantly from each other, the result of careless translation and mistakes made by copyists. Not the least of their inaccuracies was the accidental appearance of parts of one Gospel in the middle of another.20 The confusion was so great that discerning readers didn’t know which versions to trust.

  Jerome wasn’t at all happy when the Pope asked him to review the existing translations and produce a more reliable Latin version. He complained that he was being asked to sit in judgement upon Scripture, that those who were comfortable with the old versions would be unsettled by his revisions. He feared they would revile him for having the audacity to tamper with the sacred, ancient texts.21

  Of course the Pope’s request was not something that Jerome could ignore. Nor could he be self-effacing about the opportunity to bring some clarity to the Bible text, to help people be certain about what it really said. Grudgingly coming to terms with the request, he mused, in his usual truculent manner, why should he not ‘correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?’22

  To begin his task Jerome gathered together the oldest Greek manuscripts he could lay his hands on and compared them with the Old Latin versions. Within a year, he had revised the Latin translations, coming up with a new, coherent rendition. He acknowledged the affection that many people retained for the Old Latin versions and tried to remain sensitive to their feelings. Striving to keep his new version as close as possible to the original meaning, retaining wherever he could the old phraseology even at the expense of consistency, he described his translation as ‘sense for sense, and not word for word’.23 Bruce Metzger points out that Jerome translated the words ‘High Priest’ in three different ways, depending upon how it had been rendered in the Old Latin versions.24

  Once the Gospels were complete, Jerome turned to the remaining books of the New Testament. Not all of them though; the translations of Acts, Revelation and the Pauline Epistles, which were once attributed to him, are now assumed to have been made by someone else. It may have been his one-time friend Rufinus,25 with whom he was destined to fall out very badly over their respective interpretations of Origen’s theology. Stefan Rebenich suggests that Jerome’s claim, in his treatise On Famous Men, that he had translated the whole of the Greek New Testament into Latin ‘might at best be understood as an intention that was never fully realized, unless one is prepared to explain it as another testimony to his amazing showmanship’.26

  His translation of the New Testament was only the first part of Jerome’s greatest achievement. The second part came in no small measure due to his astonishing ability to offend. Alongside his scholarly work in Rome, he waged an aggressive campaign encouraging ascetic, devout behaviour. He consorted with wealthy, attractive young women, nobly encouraging them to remain chaste and preserve their virginity. He warned them sternly to avoid long-haired, bearded men and instead to make their companions ‘those who are pale of face and thin with fasting’.27 Unsurprisingly, this relentless piety made him unpopular in Rome, particularly with long-haired, bearded men. He also did his best to offend wealthy widows: ‘Look at them as they ride in their capacious litters, a row of eunuchs walking in front of them, look at their red lips and their plump bodies, you would not think that they had lost a husband, you would fancy they were seeking one.’ Nor did he mince his words about ‘the very clergy, who . . . kiss these ladies on the forehead, and then stretch out their hands . . . to take wages for their visit’.28

  As long as Pope Damasus lived, Jerome managed to get away with this behaviour. When the Pope died in 384, Jerome’s star plummeted. His sojourn in Rome came to a hasty end. He set off on his travels again, finally settling in Bethlehem.

  Jerome’s new home was only a two-day journey from the library in Caesarea where Origen’s Hexapla was stored. This gave him the opportunity to study the mammoth, six-columned work. Never one to miss an opportunity, Jerome decided to use it to produce a new Latin translation of the Old Testament, one which would throw light upon all ‘those passages in it which are obscure, or those which have been omitted, or at all events, through the fault of copyists have been corrupted’.29 This time, he did not intend to use the Septuagint, or any other of the Greek versions, as his starting point. Instead he determined to produce a radical, new translation, directly from the Hebrew. He was certain that the Hebrew studies he had undertaken during his time in the desert would be more than adequate to equip him for this task. If he got stuck with a difficult passage, he knew he could always seek the assistance of local, Jewish scholars. He even had a strategy for pre-empting those critics who were bound to accuse him of producing an inaccurate translation; he would highlight the changes he had introduced by marking every place where his rendition differed from the Septuagint. He called his technique of reliance on the Hebrew text Hebraica Veritas.

  Jerome’s recourse to Hebrew was not popular. As ever, he defended himself robustly. He compared himself to Origen, whose name he said was even more reviled than his own. He wrote that he would gladly have Origen’s knowledge ‘even if accompanied with all the ill-will which clings to his name . . . I do not care a straw for these shades and spectral ghosts, whose nature is said to be to chatter in dark corners and be a terror to babies’.30 Elsewhere he reminds his ‘barking critics’ that his motive was not to censure the existing Latin translations but to ‘recover what is lost, to correct what is corrupt’.31

  We don’t just have Jerome’s word for the unpopularity of his work. Augustine, who as we have seen was a fierce defender of the Septuagint, wrote to Jerome in 403. He told him, peevishly, that a riot had broken out in a church in Tripoli, because a bishop had read the book of Jonah from Jerome’s translation. When deciding how to translate the Hebrew name of the plant which had sprung up overnight to provide shade for Jonah, Jerome had opted for the Latin hedera meaning ‘ivy’. The congregation had expected to hear the word cucurbita, or ‘gourd’. The idea that the plant which sheltered Jonah from the sun was no longer a sturdy, large-leaved squash, but a flimsy, creeping ivy, did not go down well. Augustine, no doubt feeling that his defence of the Septuagint was vindicated, reported that it was all the bishop could do to stop the congregation from abandoning him.32

  Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew was no less controversial than any of its predecessors. It attracted opprobrium from many quarters. He had long been accused of stirring up theological controversy, and now heresy was all but added to the charge sheet. His critics censured him, not only for departing from Christian tradition, but for denying the divine sanctity of the Septuagint and the Old Latin versions. True to form, he defended himself with a venom-tipped quill. There is little doubt that the people he upset and the enemies he had made throughout his career impeded the reception of his work. Despite its superior quality, it took four hundred years or more for his translation to become fully accepted as the Roman Church’s official Bible.

  In the sixteenth century, by which time much of Jerome’s translation had been revised, his translation became known as the Vulgate. It has had a pr
ofound impact, not just on the Church but on non-Christian religions too. Jerome’s original Latin terminology became the basis for much of today’s religious lexicon; words like salvation, sanctification, Scripture and sacrament all derive from his translation.33 Just like its author, the Vulgate did not have an easy ride. As we will see, its superiority was seriously challenged when it became one of the most closely contested battlegrounds in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.

  Jerome divided his life between the pampered nobility of Rome, and the ascetic intellectuals of the early Church. He courted controversy in both environments and upset people with his writings. Even the reception of his Vulgate was contentious. Despite all this he has gone down in history as a member of the theological elite of the early Church, one of its four Doctors.

  Jerome was raised in a privileged environment and educated well. The opportunities that came his way were in large measure an accident of where and when he was born, and his social standing. In the wilder, less developed regions of Christian Europe, not so far to the north of Jerome’s homeland, there was far less opportunity to have one’s name lauded by future generations. The challenges of a life of religious leadership were much harder, and a place in history far less easy to achieve.

  Little Wolf and Mesrop

  The emperor Constantine’s fourth-century adoption of Christianity as Rome’s official religion transformed the faith’s prospects. Christianity was soon pushing northwards, and wherever the Bible put down roots it needed to be taught in the local tongue. Unlike Jerome, not every Bible translator had the opportunity to divide their lives between the indulgent patricians of Rome and the ascetic monks of the early Church. Nor were they able to soak up the rich, intellectual currents that, although operating in diametrically opposed domains, marked the age of the Talmud and Church Fathers. In the wilder, less developed regions of Europe, not so far to the north of where Jerome was born, two men in particular faced almost insurmountable hurdles.

  Ulfilas – his name meant ‘Little Wolf’ – was a Visigoth, a member of the Western tribe of the Gothic nation which had once hailed from the eastern regions of Germany. A century or so after his birth, his compatriots would rampage through southern Europe, sacking once-mighty Rome as they went. Hastening the end of the Latin Empire they disappeared from world view almost as quickly as they had appeared, overrunning Spain and assimilating into the native population.

  Christianity had started to reach the Goths during the third century. Their first Christians had, so it is said, been converted by captives from neighbouring Cappadocia, seized by a Gothic raiding party in Northern Turkey. Among the captives were a number of Christian monks. The holy men turned the tables on their captors, preaching religion to them and wooing the Goths from their ancestral ways. By the time Ulfilas was born, some of his tribe had adopted Christianity.

  It is not easy for us to conjure up an image of life among the Goths. Unlike the Greeks or Romans they produced no great monuments or literature. We know a few limited historical facts; they provide us with a picture of a primitive tribe, dwelling in basic, unsophisticated huts, going about their daily business with a minimum of tools and artefacts. Until our attention is caught by one of the most remarkable works of calligraphy of the Dark Ages, the sixth-century, Eastern Gothic Codex Argenteus. A codex is the forerunner of the modern book, its contents contained in pages rather than on a scroll. This codex’s silver lettering, implied by the name Argenteus, is inscribed upon a purple dyed parchment. It can still be seen in the library of Uppsala University, in Sweden.34 The Goths may have been a primitive, warlike nation, but at least one of their number had a fine eye when it came to writing manuscripts.

  The sparse information we have about Little Wolf’s life comes from two extremely old sources. One is a ninth-century summary of an even earlier, fifth-century, chronicle written by the church historian Philostorgius.35 The other comes from a manuscript written by one of Little Wolf’s pupils, a bishop called Auxentius, which was discovered in 1840 in the Louvre.36 From these documents we learn that Ulfilas was born in or around 311, was ordained as a bishop at the age of thirty and spent seven years preaching to the Goths. He was not made welcome. The Goth’s leaders resisted the spread of Christianity, which they saw as a political ploy by the Roman Empire to extend their influence in the region.37 Ulfilas was driven out of the Gothic lands in the late 340s, fleeing with his supporters to Moesia in what is now Bulgaria.

  At the age of seventy Ulfilas travelled to Constantinople to take part in a disputation. Jerome was in the city around the same time, taking part in a theological showdown between warring Antiochan churches.38 The two men may have met; if so it would have been one of the last encounters of Little Wolf’s life. He fell ill in the city and died shortly afterwards.

  Ulfilas’s great achievement was to translate the Bible into his native Gothic tongue. The only books he omitted were those of Samuel and Kings. He left them out because he feared that their tales of battle between the early Israelites and their neighbours might stimulate the warlike tendencies of the Goths.39

  Translating the Bible presented Ulfilas with a far greater challenge than just transposing the words from one language to another – even though that itself is no easy task. Not every word in the Greek Bible which he used as his source existed in Gothic. There was no Gothic word to convey the act of abstaining from food. There was a word however, fastan, which meant ‘to endure’. Ulfilas adapted it for his Gothic translation. It later passed into German. It is the source of our word ‘to fast’.40

  The problem was not just one of adapting old words to new uses. Ulfilas didn’t even have the tools at his disposal to write his translation down. The Goths didn’t have an alphabet; the language they spoke had no direct written equivalent. Until Ulfilas came along, the only way for Goths to communicate in writing was by using runes, a primitive technique which was hardly practical for the Bible.

  So, before he could begin his translation Ulfilas had to create an alphabet. He broke the Gothic tongue into its component sounds and allocated symbols to each, using Latin and Greek characters. At least, that is what we surmise from the historian Philostorgius, who sums up the whole enterprise with the words ‘he reduced their language to a written form’.41 It was probably a bit more complicated than Philostorgius implies. One suggestion was that the alphabet and translation were composed collaboratively by Ulfilas and his followers, some time after they had been expelled from the Gothic lands.42

  Of course, a society which has no written alphabet is a society that cannot read. Equally, there is no point in inventing an alphabet unless people are given the skills to read it. And although creating an alphabet and translating the Bible are accomplishments in their own right, the greatest of Little Wolf’s achievements must have been providing the Goths with the skills to read his work. We don’t know how many people Ulfilas and his collaborators taught to read from his new Gothic Bible, nor how he managed to disseminate the art of reading. But we do know how another translator solved a very similar problem elsewhere.

  The Goths were not unusual in not having an alphabet. This was the fourth century after all; most of the human race was still coming to terms with its capacity for learning. Half a century later, in Armenia, it fell to the intriguingly named Mesrop Mashtots to emulate what Little Wolf had earlier done.

  Mesrop was a monk blessed with the gift of language. He spoke Greek, Persian, Syriac and Armenian. Like the meturgeman who translated the Pentateuch into Hebrew in the Jewish synagogues, he was skilled at rendering the Bible on the hoof to Armenian-speaking, Christian congregations. He was, in the Armenian language, a targmanitch43 (we can see that the two job titles derive from the same root). But although he was a skilled translator, Armenian wasn’t his first language and he didn’t always find it easy to declaim the Bible in that language without a written translation to hand.

  Mesrop, and his collaborator Shahak, the patriarch of the Armenian church, knew that it was essentia
l for the Armenian people to have a Bible written in their own language. But they recognized that there was no point in embarking on a translation until people could read it. They determined to devise a nation-wide programme with the aim of teaching literacy to young children. Only then, when they had raised a generation with the skills to read, would Mesrop present them with an Armenian translation of the Bible.

  It didn’t occur to them that the lack of an Armenian alphabet would present a problem; they assumed that they could just as easily teach the children to read using an Aramaic script. They were wrong. When the programme finally got going they discovered that the Aramaic alphabet was not adequate for reproducing Armenian sounds accurately. The kids found it impossible to understand the calligraphy in front of them. After two years, Mesrop and Shahak deemed the experiment a failure.

  Mesrop didn’t give up. He saddled his donkey and travelled the country, listening to the way people spoke and cataloguing the various phonemes they used. He engaged the services of a calligrapher, who took the Greek alphabet as his base and adapted it to represent Mesrop’s phonemes. They ended up with a thirty-six letter, exclusively Armenian, alphabet.

  Once they were satisfied that the alphabet they had devised was fit for the task, Mesrop and Shahak began the most innovative part of their project. They persuaded the country’s rulers to help them create a national network of schools. The plan was to build a literate, cultured population, with a strong enough sense of national identity to resist the pressures of assimilation that were already buffeting them from the neighbouring Persians and Byzantines. Once the schools were up and running, Mesrop and his students were finally able to get on with translating the Bible.

  Mesrop is still remembered in Armenia today. A national holiday in his honour marks the start of the school year and is dedicated to the accomplishments of translators, teachers and writers. His picture can be found on the cover of many school books.44