Saadia’s Old Testament translation bears all the hallmarks of his personality. There was no obvious need for another Arabic translation of the Bible; several existed already. But Saadia deemed that there was a need, and not just because the style of earlier translations left much to be desired. In his youth he had dreamed of producing a grammatically correct, stylistically attractive Arabic version of the Bible that conformed both to Jewish tradition and to current philosophical thinking.18 But as he grew older, and more disputatious, he perceived a more urgent need. A new translation was essential, Saadia believed, to address the twin challenges that the Bible faced: the Muslim charge that the Jews had falsified its text, and the Karaite rejection of traditional biblical interpretation.
Saadia’s first translation, which he probably commenced while living in Tiberias,19 began as a series of annotations on the Pentateuch. The annotations evolved into a commentary and eventually metamorphosed into a full-blown translation. It covered the whole of the Pentateuch and several other books of the Bible.20
It was important to Saadia that his work became known to Muslims. It would have little polemical value if it simply remained a text used by the Jews. He had been educated in a Muslim environment and spent his life surrounded by Islamic culture; he knew how to make his translation acceptable to the aesthetic refinements of literary Arabic. His purpose may have been to rebut Muslim criticism of the Bible but he deferred to Islamic grammarians and philologists when it came to matters of style.
Islamic writers and intellectuals of the time placed great emphasis on the literary economy of language. They frowned on the use of unnecessary words or phrases and on superfluous repetition. That the Hebrew Bible contained such, apparently unnecessary, material offered ammunition for the Muslim accusation that the Jews had falsified the Bible. The literary critic and philologist ibn-Qutayba had transfigured the classic translation by the non-Muslim Hunayn ibn-Ishāq by converting repeated names into pronouns and deleting phrases that seemed redundant. Saadia’s Tafsir, as his translation came to be known, displays similar stylistic alterations.
The similarities between his amendments and those of ibn-Qutayba, and his echoes of Hunayn’s phraseology, have led Richard Steiner to suggest that Saadia may also have made use of Hunayn Ibn-Ishāq’s translation when composing his own.21 Both men translate the opening words of Genesis as ‘the first of what God created was heaven and earth’. To our minds this is little different from the standard rendering of ‘In the beginning God created’. But as Sidney Griffiths points out, the prevailing view at the time was the Aristotelean notion that time had always existed. ‘In the beginning’ suggests that the world was created within pre-existent time. Saadia is at pains to stress that nothing, not even time, existed before the creation of the world.22
Saadia went to great lengths to eliminate every biblical suggestion that God might have a body or a voice, worrying that the mention of a divine hand, arm, heart or speech might lead uneducated people to believe that God had a physical presence. Nor was this just a matter of education; Saadia’s pugnacity displayed itself in every aspect of his life, even his Bible translation. The Muslim theologian al-Jāḥiẓ had attacked the Hebrew Bible for its portrayal of God as a physical being. He had taken particular exception to the reference in Deuteronomy 4.24 in which the deity is described as a ‘consuming fire’. Saadia had no qualms about meeting such criticisms head on. The consuming fire, according to Saadia, is a metaphor for heavenly punishment.
In his preface to the translation Saadia made it clear that he wanted to produce a work that would not be ‘rebutted by tradition’.23 He meant rabbinic tradition, the very system that the Karaites opposed. Throughout his translation Saadia was at pains to reflect the mainstream rabbinic interpretation; no unnuanced Karaite literalism would grace his endeavour. He’d dreamed, as a young man, of producing a sublime, literarily immaculate Arabic rendition of the Hebrew Bible. By the time he reached middle age he’d become equally concerned to refute and silence his two great intellectual enemies, Islamic and Karaite theologians. The great polemicist never left a battle unfought.
Saadia’s ideological fervour didn’t go down well with everyone. He probably enjoyed some success in deflecting Muslim and Karaite attacks but the Jews themselves, long used to their traditional way of reading the Bible, weren’t well pleased. He was criticized by his own followers for artlessness; for transforming metaphysical ideas like God’s heart in Genesis 6.6 into ‘his prophet’, a substitution which made little sense and did not fit the context. The Jews had long accepted the principle that the Bible speaks in human terms, using language that people understand to express complex theological ideas. Many felt that in his zeal to rebut external criticism, Saadia had gone too far in abandoning this principle.
Saadia did listen to his critics – up to a point. He accepted some of what they said and revised a number of his translated phrases. But he stuck to his guns as far as the bigger picture was concerned; he had set out to write a polemical work, and that is exactly what it was. Saadia wasn’t the sort of person to hand ammunition to his opponents just to appease critics who were not as willing to stick their necks out as was he.
Perhaps this is why, despite all the criticism, Saadia’s translation endured. It may not have been a word-for-word literal rendition, it may have replaced poetic anthropomorphisms with somewhat clumsy alternatives, but it was a readable and ideologically clear text. It became the most well-known and popular of all Arabic Bible translations, widely used by Jews, Copts and Arabic-speaking Christians. In the sixteenth century, when multi-lingual, polyglot Bibles became briefly fashionable in Europe, Saadia’s translation was the most likely Arabic version to be found on the page. It is still in use today.
Sword and Bible in Hand
The first stage in the translated Bible’s history was nearly complete. It could be read in Latin across Western Europe, in Arabic and Aramaic in the east, or in one of several languages in Armenia, the Balkans and the further reaches of Byzantium. It had even been given a home in cosmopolitan Baghdad’s erudite House of Wisdom. But its story was about to take a different turn. As Christianity began to spread across Northern Europe, the translated Bible turned out to be an extremely useful weapon of war.
The first king to appreciate the bellicose potential of the translated Bible was probably Charlemagne, king of the Franks and future Holy Roman Emperor. When he came to power in 771, not only were large tracts of Europe ungoverned and pagan, but even his own Frankish lands were backsliding towards barbarism, undermining the alliance that his father Pepin had made with Rome. Charlemagne (his name is a contraction of Charles Magnus or Charles the Great), aspired to unite Europe into a single, Christian empire. He purposed to achieve this by uniting the Germanic tribes. The translated Bible would form part of his armoury.
Philip Schaff, whose nineteenth-century, eight-volume History of the Christian Church remains a monumental work of reference, compares Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons to that which would be pursued in the future USA towards the Native Americans. ‘Treaties were broken, and shocking cruelties were committed on both sides, by the Saxons from revenge and for independence, by Christians for punishment in the name of religion and civilization. Prominent among these atrocities is the massacre of four thousand, five hundred captives at Verden in one day. As soon as the French army was gone, the Saxons destroyed the churches and murdered the priests, for which they were in turn put to death.’24
Charlemagne’s policy of conversion by conquest had a second dimension; one which transcended sheer brute force. While in Italy, the emperor had met, and been won over by, Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk from York. Struck by the monk’s faith and ability, the king recruited him to devise an educational curriculum for his clergy. He soon found that he had engaged more than just an educator; the man he employed turned out to be a skilled manipulator of the king’s conscience.
Alcuin didn’t like Charlemagne’s forced imposition of Christianity upon
his conquered subjects. Shrewdly playing upon the emperor’s known affection for the German language, he persuaded him to temper his aggression towards his new subjects with a sprinkling of religious education; to encourage them to appreciate the higher aims of Christianity. Top of the agenda, of course, was a translation of the Bible into German. One of the few documents to survive from Charlemagne’s German campaign is a Bavarian rendition of passages from Matthew,25 carried out, or at least supervised, by Alcuin. Alcuin’s enlightened strategy of education as a corollary of conquest stands in marked contrast to the policy favoured by church leaders in subsequent centuries, who, as we will see, resorted to extreme measures to keep the Bible well away from the languages spoken by ordinary people.
Charlemagne’s use of the translated Bible in conquest was relatively benign. Less so in the Slav lands, where, in an example as good as any of medieval double-dealing, deceit and treachery, it was sucked into a power struggle between the Byzantine and Roman Churches. The two hierocracies, representing the Western and Eastern expressions of Christianity, were engaged in a perpetual struggle for authority; particularly in territories where their spheres of influence overlapped.
Some little while after Charlemagne had imposed Roman Christianity on the Saxons, his grandson Louis the German installed an acolyte, Rastislav, as Prince of Moravia. Little is known about Rastislav’s early career; it is thought that he may have been a relative of Moravia’s rebel leader, taken as a hostage by Louis during one of the many wars he fought in the course of his fifty-year reign.26 Conflict, territory and dynastic power were very much the theme of what passed for ninth-century Central European diplomacy.
Whatever the origins of their relationship, Louis obviously thought Rastislav the right candidate to keep the lid on Moravia’s rebellious tendencies; in return for power and protection Louis expected him to keep Moravia subdued. And, in virtue of Louis’ status as Holy Roman Empire, he charged Rastislav with maintaining the Pope’s authority in his lands. But Rastislav turned out to be of a more independent mind than Louis had bargained for.
In the ninth century the Church, reflecting earlier divisions in the Roman Empire, was headquartered in both Constantinople and Rome. The two churches would soon irreversibly split into Eastern and Latin denominations, but in Rastislav’s time the divisions were only just becoming apparent; in theory Constantinople and Rome still formed one united Church. There was, however, already enough tension between the two centres for Rastislav to spot an advantage. He could free himself from Louis’ yoke. He wrote to Michael the Drunkard, the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, asking him to send missionaries to Moravia. It was a shrewd political move; Rastislav was effectively seeking to align himself with the Byzantine Empire, thereby freeing himself from Louis’ Holy Roman dominion.
The Byzantine emperor was happy to oblige. He despatched two Greek brothers, Cyril, a linguist and philosopher, and Methodius, a former governor of a Byzantine principality. The two brothers were born in the Greek city of Thessalonica. They could already speak Slavic, which gave them a considerable advantage over the incumbent German bishops, who had only a limited grasp of the local tongue. Rastislav endowed Cyril and Methodius with the rights to teach in Moravia and the two brothers set about converting the country to the Byzantine rite.
As part of their endeavours the two brothers instituted a programme of translating the Bible into the Slavic language. Like Ulfilas and Mesrop before them, they first had to create an alphabet, one of two which appeared in Moravia at the same time. Cyril’s alphabet was named Glagolitic, but his name survives today in the one he didn’t write: the Cyrillic script that is used across Russia, Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.27
Unsurprisingly, the German bishops fiercely resented the brothers’ success in introducing the Byzantine liturgy. They tried to ban the rite, together with the brothers’ Slavonic Bible. That they failed to impose the ban was due in part to Rastislav’s protection of the two brothers and, just as significantly, because the key player in the inter-denominational dispute, the local bishop Hartwig of Passau, had suffered a stroke and could not speak.
Even so, things did not work out for Rastislav as planned. Louis, angry at his former client’s treachery, gathered his forces. He invaded Moravia and took Rastislav prisoner. The archbishop of Salzburg travelled to the region to reassert the Latin rite, and the use of the Latin Bible. Methodius was thrown into prison.
Seven years later the tables turned. Rastislav’s nephew Svatopluk became ruler of Moravia. He reached an accommodation with the Pope, set Methodius free and appointed him archbishop. Methodius was instructed to work under the Pope’s auspices and remain loyal to the Roman rite and Latin Bible. But like everyone else, Methodius too was his own man. He reinstated the Byzantine rite and brought back his own Slavonic bible.
Svatopluk bided his time. Methodius was an old man. When he died a few years later Svatopluk expelled all his followers, selling many of them into slavery. Those who managed to escape carried Methodius’s bible with them.28 It had been the translated Bible’s first encounter with temporal politics. It would not be the last.
Part Two
The Violence Begins
5
Medieval Conflict
Moses’ Horns
The vernacular Bible made a brief appearance in Britain in the so-called Dark Ages. It didn’t last long, Following William the Conqueror’s Norman invasion of 1066, which brought French to the people and reinvigorated Latin in the English church, the Anglo-Saxon Bible retreated to the shadows. Only one complete manuscript survived; it is, however, quite exceptional.
Known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, and written in the monastery of that name during the seventh century by Bishop Eadfrith, the manuscript ranks among the world’s most important religious artefacts. Its rich colours and elaborate designs, a fusion of knotwork, key patterns and the Celtic decorative style known as La Tène, still have the power to take our breath away today; we can only guess at the impact they had when first created. But the importance of the beautifully illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels to the story of Bible translation has little to do with their aesthetic qualities. It’s more about what we can read between the lines.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were written in the Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate. Towards the end of the tenth century, three hundred years after the manuscript was first emblazoned, by which time it resided in the Minster of Chester-le-Street, Aldred, the Minster’s Provost, added a word-for-word, Anglo-Saxon translation. He composed it in the Northumbrian dialect and inscribed it in the gaps between the lines of the Latin.
Why he did this is a mystery. Maybe it was an act of homage to the majestic splendour of the Lindisfarne manuscript; maybe this was the only copy of the Bible he had available. Fortunately history considers his interpolation to be an enhancement of the original text, not an act of cultural vandalism. Compared to the original calligraphy, Aldred’s handwriting is relatively unobtrusive, if somewhat scratchy.
Aldred’s translation in the Lindisfarne manuscript is the oldest Saxon Bible to have survived.1 Others were made but no longer exist; the Venerable Bede, the most important of all early English theologians, is said to have dictated a translation of the Gospel of John while lying on his eighth-century deathbed. The Psalms too were translated, in Canterbury, at around the same time. But only Lindisfarne has come down through the ages intact. It is now in the British Library.2 There are also early copies of the manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and in Cambridge.3
Illuminated Anglo-Saxon translations were produced during a period of remarkable creativity and originality in English art. They were highly influential, but not always in the manner that the artist or translator had intended. Aelfric, a learned Anglo-Saxon monk, translated the first seven books of the Old Testament, known as the Heptateuch, towards the end of the tenth century. We know very little about Aelfric other than his reputation as one of the most skilful writers and translators of his time. He translated a series
of Latin sermons, the Catholic Homilies, into Old English and composed a biographical treatise, Lives of the Saints. He was spurred on to translate the Old Testament by his patron, Aethelweard, a historian best remembered for his Anglo-Saxon chronicles.
Although considered a translation, Aelfric’s Heptateuch is really little more than a paraphrase. It takes the credit for possibly the most misleading, and culturally significant, of all vernacular Bible mishaps. It wasn’t really Aelfric’s fault, the error was the illustrator’s. Aelfric was simply rendering the Latin Vulgate into Anglo-Saxon. He would surely have been astonished had he foreseen the consequences of his translation.4
In the book of Exodus, when Moses descends from Mount Sinai his face beams with a radiant, spiritual glow; so powerful that he has to put on a veil before anyone can look at him. The Hebrew word used to describe this glow has a number of other possible meanings. In the Exodus narrative it means a beam of light, as in ‘Moses’ face beamed’, but it can also depict a ray, horn or even a corner; the meanings are all connected, they have the underlying sense of something which projects. Although the Septuagint follows the Hebrew in referring to Moses’ glowing face,5 Jerome’s Vulgate, seemingly confused by the various possible meanings of the Hebrew word, chooses to translate ‘beamed’ as cornuta, which literally means ‘horned’.
Jerome’s choice of words doesn’t seem to have caused much of a stir at the time. Horns had been used for centuries on idols and icons to denote power; gods and kings, including Alexander the Great, were frequently depicted as wearing them. They were ubiquitous on helmets. Jerome may have been mistaken in his translation but the thought of Moses wearing horns on his head, if anyone thought of it all, was not particularly striking. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, they didn’t come any more powerful than Moses.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 8