The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  Printing, education and the stirrings of religious reform were the main contributors to this change. The translated Bible had long been regarded by Rome as dangerous; it was susceptible to theologically incorrect interpretations and potentially led people to misapprehend their faith.1 But when weighed against the polemics of the reformers, against the argument that orthodox doctrine wilfully misrepresented the Bible, then the carefully managed publication of select translations for the use of Catholic worshippers began to appear to the Church as a sensible policy.

  Although printing allowed texts to be made available more quickly, in greater quantity and with much greater accuracy than manuscript versions, not everyone was endeared of it. Printing was expensive, its cost fell upon the translator; many would-be authors of translated versions could not afford to have their work printed. Even when printed there was a danger of plagiarism; as Tyndale had discovered, the printing presses of Europe were infested by unscrupulous operators churning out and distributing the works of others, in inferior quality and far more cheaply.

  There could also be a stigma attached to printing. Not everybody wanted their works to reach the masses. Some authors intended their literature for a restricted or elite audience. Even as late as the seventeenth century in Venice, the early home of printing, the Jewish polemicist Leon Modena, fearful of a backlash, chose to restrict his fierce, controversial assault on the kabbalah to a manuscript edition.2

  But printing was the new technology, and it walked hand in hand with advances in literacy. In 1504, a canon in Padua justified his writing of a commentary of the Song of Songs in the local dialect on the grounds that printing had brought knowledge of the Bible to uneducated people.3 The masses were ready to receive the Bible in their own language; the translation of Scripture could no longer be dismissed as a Protestant heresy.

  Emser’s 1527 Catholic response to Luther’s German translation had been followed by translations in France, Holland, Bohemia and Poland. English Catholics too were about to get their own version. But it wouldn’t be printed in England; Mary was dead and her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, was on the throne.

  The Catholic Queen Mary had reigned little more than five years, before ’flu carried her off at the age of forty-two. The crown was on Elizabeth’s head and it was once again the turn of the Catholics to be persecuted. Many fled, the leading scholars seeking refuge at a seminary in Douay, northern France. There, for the first time, they began work on an English-language, Catholic Bible, translated from the Vulgate.

  The first copies of the Douay Bible rolled off the presses in 1582. A magistrates’ decree had recently expelled all English residents from Douay and the seminary had temporarily decamped to Rheims. This upheaval, and associated financial problems, had meant that despite the whole Bible being translated, the college could only afford to print the New Testament. It took nearly thirty years for the Old Testament to appear, by which time the college was back at Douay. Conceived and printed in the two centres of Douay and Rheims, the entire work is unsurprisingly known as the Rheims–Douay Bible.

  The Rheims–Douay Bible did not flourish. Its language was heavy and technical, its margin notes and commentaries overlong, its tone unabashedly polemical. It made few friends among Protestants, whom it castigated as heretics or equated with Canaanite idolaters. The first recension of the Rheims–Douay Bible survived for little more than a century before being comprehensively revised.

  Changing Perceptions

  Despite the appearance of Catholic, vernacular Bibles the controversies over translation did not abate. Both Catholics and Protestants used translation as a device for articulating their beliefs; rather than creating common ground between the two denominations, the act of translation drove them further apart. It all came down to the choice of words. The Protestants distanced themselves from the highly structured Roman hierarchy by preferring, for example, to speak of ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’, ‘senior’ instead of ‘priest’. But words alone did not account for the extent of the antipathy between the sects. Nor did disagreements over the order of the biblical canon, nor even the question of whether ultimate authority lay in the Church or the Bible, an issue which had sharply divided More from Tyndale.4 Instead the controversy, as always, lay in the exercise of power, and the Protestant Reformation’s assault on the long-founded hegemony of the Roman establishment.

  It was this struggle over power and authority which led even Catholic translations, or more accurately translations made by Catholics, to be examined for traces of Protestant sympathies. Antonio Brucioli’s Italian translation was one such case. Published in 1530, Brucioli was not the first Italian to try his hand at translation; a rendition from the Vulgate had been published in 1471, in Germany, by Nicolo Malermi. But Brucioli was already a controversial figure, his reputation tarnished long before he took up the art of Bible translation.

  A member of the same circle as the political theorist Machiavelli, Brucioli had been banished from Florence in 1522, in the wake of a failed plot against the future Pope, Giulio de’ Medici. Brucioli spent five years in exile in Lyon where he wrote his Dialogues, a discourse on moral philosophy.5 In 1527, following the Medicis’ fall from power, he returned to Florence where he once again found himself in trouble, this time accused of promoting Lutheranism. On the run for a second time, he now headed for Venice.

  Brucioli in Venice underwent a transition from political philosopher and religious activist to the slightly more sedate profession of bible translator. Even so, he was no priest and probably not much of a scholar. He had a reasonable command of Greek, from which he translated the New Testament. But although he claimed to have translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, his knowledge of that language is suspect. It looks as if he drew heavily on an earlier Italian translation from the Vulgate, though he did not give the translator, Santi Pagnini, any credit for this.6

  Political agitation is one of those traits that people find it difficult to abandon fully. Despite his reinvention as bible translator Brucioli discovered that he couldn’t quite shake off his penchant for making his opinions known. He wrote seven volumes of a commentary to accompany his Bible, in which he allowed his Protestant sympathies to become all too evident. Once again, trouble loomed. The Inquisition summoned him, and sentenced him to the third exile of his life, this time in Ferrara. His troubles didn’t even end there. In 1548 he was arrested again and put on trial for heresy. When, instead of recanting, he stuck to his principles, he was imprisoned. He died, an impoverished and broken man.

  Over the coming years Brucioli’s translation of the Bible began to attract attention. It became increasingly popular, his creation ending up as far more of a success than his own life had turned out to be. Instead of being regarded as a fundamentally Catholic work, albeit heretical, it became accepted as a genuine Reformation text. It was reprinted frequently and ended up as the Bible of choice for Italian Protestants for many years. The Catholic Church responded in their traditional manner. In 1559 they placed it on the first ever Index of Prohibited Books.

  One of the spin-offs from the invention of printing had been the requirement for printers to obtain a licence, known as a privilege, to print their book. Initially this was for their own benefit, to give them copyright over their works and prevent plagiarism. But it didn’t take long for the licensing system to develop into a programme of theological scrutiny; in 1508 the governing body of Venice appointed a censor to examine a book for possible heresy, before agreeing to grant a privilege for its printing.7 The sixteenth century saw the Holy See ban or censor a burgeoning number of books and authors, in an attempt to keep belief within tried and tested boundaries as the Protestant Reformation took hold. Eventually, in an attempt to control and regulate the ever-increasing number of books that even the censors were unable to expurgate, Pope Paul IV introduced the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Although earlier lists of locally banned books had been published, the Index of Prohibited Books was the first compre
hensive catalogue of works to be prohibited throughout the world. First published in 1559 the Index was regularly updated, until it was finally abolished in 1966.

  The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose own works had been scrutinized by the Church’s censors, sympathized with the Vatican’s antipathy to translation. He too doubted the skills of the masses to understand a vernacular Bible properly. In his essay On Prayers he wrote:

  And I do further believe that the liberty every one has taken to disperse the sacred writ into so many idioms carries with it a great deal more of danger than utility. The Jews, Mohammedans, and almost all other peoples, have reverentially espoused the language wherein their mysteries were first conceived, and have expressly, and not without colour of reason, forbidden the alteration of them into any other. Are we assured that in Biscay and in Brittany there are enough competent judges of this affair to establish this translation into their own language?8

  Montaigne’s defence of the old, traditional opposition to Bible translations was indicative of yet another shift in the post-Reformation, intellectual climate. Although the Vatican was now reconciled to the publication of approved, translated Bibles, opposition to the principle of Bible translation had not gone away. As Montaigne illustrates, it had now become a matter of personal opinion rather than an institutional quarrel. Sometimes these personal opinions flared up into out-and-out conflict.

  The Protestant Reformation, in all its various incarnations, had forced theologians of every conviction and persuasion to clarify, articulate and frequently defend their own views. For many orthodox and conservative thinkers, their opposition to the translated Bible had little to do with support for the authority of the Pope. They saw the language of the translated Bible, or the opinions cited in accompanying commentaries, as a challenge to their own personal beliefs. They responded just as personally. Thus, Sebastien Châteillon found himself castigated, not for the erratic quality of his translation, which vacillated between literary amplification and turgid archaism,9 but because he dared to be outspoken. He had nit-picked over discrepancies in biblical readings, such as the number of Jacob’s descendants who went to Egypt, a figure given as seventy in Genesis and seventy-five in Acts.10 Even more daringly, he had called the erotic Song of Songs ‘lascivious and obscene’.11 Châteillon’s opponents didn’t mince their words. They called him an ‘instrument of Satan’.

  An equally personal disagreement had broken out in France, half a century before Montaigne, between the philosopher Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the conservative scholars of the Paris Theology Faculty. At its root lay a virulent, doctrinal dispute over the identity of Mary Magdalene.

  Lefèvre had written a treatise in which he argued that Mary Magdalene, as portrayed in the New Testament, was actually a composite of three different women who had been amalgamated into one by Christian tradition.12 The treatise had aroused the ire of the Paris Theology Faculty and led to a three-year-long controversy which drew in a cast of theologians and humanists from across Europe, including Desiderius Erasmus and John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who would eventually be executed by Henry VIII for refusing to accept the king as the supreme head of the English Church.

  While this controversy was simmering, the French king Francis I, a patron of artists, humanist scholars and reforming churchmen, endorsed a proposal from Lefèvre to create a French translation of the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate. As long as he basked in the king’s favour Lefèvre was safe from the assault of his opponents. But the king fell victim to his own military adventuring and was captured in battle by forces of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Lefèvre found himself shorn of his royal protection, and at the mercy of his enemies in the Theology Faculty.

  Under attack from the Paris theologians, Lefèvre saw no alternative but to flee to Strasbourg. With their enemy gone, his opponents, preferring the correctness of their own opinions in the Mary controversy to any qualms they may have had about scriptural sanctity, publicly burned his bible.13 It would take the ransoming of the king, and his own return to royal favour, before Lefèvre could complete his work; in 1530 his French translation of the complete Bible was published in Antwerp.

  In theory, Lefèvre’s Bible should have had an easy ride in France. Despite his theory about the three Marys, Lefèvre was not a reformer. True, he felt that the time was ripe for an internal reform of the Church and he shared the view that scripture should be made available to the masses, because that was where truth was to be found. But he was a loyal Catholic, he’d had no truck with the Reformation. It was his position on the three Marys which was exploited by way of his translation of the Bible to attack him personally; in 1546 it too was banned.14

  Brucioli and Lefèvre were not the only translators to confront orthodox belief and suffer persecution in return. In Antwerp, the printer Jacob van Liesveldt produced a Dutch Bible, based on Luther’s translation. It was banned and in 1535 van Liesveldt’s entire stock was burned. Unafraid, van Liesveldt continued to reprint his Bible. With each edition he added further notes displaying his Protestant leanings. The final straw came in 1542 with the publication of the sixth edition. By now van Liesveldt’s bible was carrying woodcut illustrations. One showed Satan, in the guise of a bearded monk, with goats’ feet and a rosary. van Liesveldt, who must have known that he wouldn’t get away with it, was charged with heresy. Like so many others struggling for openness and intellectual integrity in Europe’s great age of religious intolerance, van Liesveldt was put to death.

  The story was similar throughout most of Europe. Translators and printers, emboldened by the Protestant Reformation, their own passion for the vernacular Bible, and the possibility of making a quick profit, were risking their lives to produce ever-new editions.

  Brucioli, Lefèvre and van Liesveldt were just some of those who tested the Vatican’s tolerance of the translated Bible. By 1559 the Roman leadership could take no more. Pope Paul IV issued a ban on vernacular versions. No Catholic translations appeared in Italy after that date. Existing translations continued to circulate and eventually the Catholic vernacular Bible did return. But many theological battles would be fought before then and the already sharp instruments of religious repression would be whetted ever more keenly.

  The Spanish Inquisition

  Jews had lived in Spain for the best part of a thousand years. It was a far larger, and better integrated Jewish community than anywhere else in Europe. The Jews knew Hebrew and Spanish. Until their expulsion in 1492, anyone who wanted a Spanish translation of the Old Testament could easily find an interpreter who would work directly from the original Hebrew. They did not need the Vulgate as a crib or intermediary. Unlike the rest of Europe, many of the early Spanish translations were made directly from Hebrew.

  But Spain also conducted a more systematic and thorough Inquisition than the rest of Europe. A particular target of the Spanish Inquisition was the community of conversos, Jews who had been forcibly persuaded to convert to Christianity. During the century leading up to their eviction, more than half the Jews in Spain converted, nearly always at the point of a sword. For many conversos adoption of Christianity was a matter of expediency; they chose to preserve their lives at the expense of their religion. They were Christians in name but Jews at heart.

  Many conversos secretly preserved their old Jewish customs, lighting the Sabbath candles in the recesses of their homes, not eating milk dishes with their meat, acknowledging, even if not fully observing, the Jewish festivals, and in some cases even gathering for clandestine prayer services.

  As they looked into the activities of the conversos, the Inquisitors began to suspect that they were using Spanish copies of the Old Testament to practise their religion. An obvious repressive tactic therefore was to round up and destroy every copy of the Spanish Old Testament that could be found. The enthusiasm with which the Inquisitors went about their task explains why far fewer vernacular Old Testaments have survived in Spain, when compared to Germany, France and England.15
Only one leaf remains of a 1417 translation made by Bonatius Ferrer. It was first printed in 1478, but by 1500 it had been all but fully destroyed. Ferrer was a monk, and his translation was almost certainly made from the Vulgate and intended for Christian use. It may never even have passed through Jewish or converso hands, but the Inquisition would not have bothered about details like that. The sole remaining leaf is preserved at the Hispanic Society in New York.

  One Bible translated from the Hebrew did survive. It was commissioned, together with a commentary, by Don Luis de Guzmán, the Grand Master of the Military Order of Calatrava.16 The putative translator, Moses Arragel, a Castilian rabbi, who probably felt that the request made of him was more of a command than a commission, was highly reluctant to carry out the work. He worried that both Christians and Jews would be offended; a Jewish commentary might scandalize Christian sensibilities while Jewish principles would be breached by Don Luis’s plans for illustrating the edition. He was also concerned that differences between the Hebrew text that he would use and the well-known Latin Vulgate might expose unwanted divisions between the two traditions. But his reluctance to take on the work was to no avail. He came under extreme pressure to change his mind; ultimately, as with so many choices imposed by the medieval ruling classes, he had no alternative but to relent.

  It took Moses Arragel eight years to complete the translation. The illustrations were overseen by two cousins of Don Luis and carried out by a team of monks. The whole work was completed in 1433. It contains 334 illustrations, alongside Arragel’s extensive and erudite commentaries drawn from a variety of sources, and twenty-five pages of his correspondence with Don Luis. It was a remarkable work; all the more so because, shortly after it was completed, it vanished.