The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  Julia Smith’s Bible does not stand out as one of the great translations, nor indeed as one of the most popular. It was never intended to be; only one thousand copies were printed, many of which were given away. But it is remarkable for at least two reasons. One, because of the role it played in the struggle for women’s rights and representation. The other because, of all the Bible translations ever made, controversy was the stimulus for its publication, not the consequence.

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  The Quest for Meaning

  The Push for Revision

  Julia Smith and Noah Webster were just two of several lone, idiosyncratic translators, each trying to produce a Bible more relevant than the now archaic King James version. During the nineteenth century pressure for a new revision of the translation continued to grow, fuelled by a desire for greater readability, a scholarly wish to crystallize the definitive biblical text and new discoveries of ancient manuscripts.

  It had become clear that, despite the work of Erasmus, and of Theodore Beza, a sixteenth-century Calvinist who followed in his footsteps with an even more definitive edition of the Greek New Testament, the classical base text used for the King James Bible was far from accurate. Indeed the King James version had only been in existence for sixteen years when a previously unknown manuscript, the Codex Alexandrinus, was sent to James by the patriarch of Constantinople. It only differed in minor details from the texts known up until that point, but far from advancing the quest for an original, authentic, definitive text of the Bible, it supported the growing awareness that such a thing probably never even existed. The Bible is composed of many books, all written by different people, in different times and at different places. The Old and New Testaments, as we know them today, were originally nothing more than compilations of these different books, and who is to say that every compiler had identical texts in front of them when they integrated them into a single codex?

  When, in 1844, the German scholar and explorer Constantine von Tischendorf was winched in a basket over the impregnable walls of St Catherine’s Convent in the Sinai desert, he little knew that he was about to become the latest antiquity hunter to rewrite bible history. Inside the monastery’s warm, dry library, perfect conditions for preserving ancient manuscripts, Tischendorf found a fourth-century codex, so heavy that one person could not lift it. The Codex Sinaiticus contained all the books of the Bible. It was the oldest and most complete Bible manuscript ever found. In an age captivated by archaeological exploration, Tischendorf’s discovery seized the popular imagination. His account of his adventure, suitably embellished for public appeal, ran to eight editions. More recently, however, his report has been challenged. As has his ‘borrowing’ of the codex, to have it copied in St Petersburg before returning it undamaged. The codex has never been returned to the monastery from whence it came.1

  Tischendorf’s discovery lit the fuse for a flurry of research into the reconstruction of the elusive, original biblical text. It reached a crescendo in 1881 when the English scholars Westcott and Hort published the definitive New Testament in the Original Greek. It has been estimated that between Tischendorf’s initial visit to St Catherine’s in 1844 and Westcott and Hort’s 1881 publication the number of known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament increased from 1,000 to 3,000. Rather than getting closer to the primordial prototype, any hope of recovering an original, definitive version of the Bible was slipping further and further away.

  As awareness of the Bible’s textual history increased, the emphasis shifted from reconstruction of the past to making the present intelligible. Pressure for a revised, modernized version grew. In 1832 the professor of Greek at Cambridge University, James Scholefield, published Hints for an Improved Translation of the New Testament. Dedicated to the Priests, Bishops, and Deacons, Scholefield acknowledged that to ‘call the public attention to the consideration of any supposed improvements in the authorised versions of our Bibles is needlessly to unsettle men’s minds’, but if difficulties in understanding the Bible come from a defective translation, then it is ‘an act of charity and duty to clear away that duty as much as possible’.2 To achieve that aim, Scholefield worked his way, verse by verse, through the Greek text of the New Testament, suggesting amendments to the King James Version and inserting often lengthy notes to justify his choices.

  In 1856 Canon William Selwyn published his Notes on the Proposed Amendment of the Authorised Version. He stressed that the spread of the English language throughout the world, and the role of the Authorized Version as the basis for missionary translations, had enhanced the importance of Scholefield’s work one hundredfold. He urged the establishment of a committee of translators, working to the same principles as had guided the redactors of the King James version to amend and update the language of the seventeenth-century masterpiece.3

  But it wasn’t until 1870, in the Convocation of Canterbury, a venerable assembly of English churchmen, that a formal initiative was instigated to revise the King James version. A committee was appointed, mainly consisting of Anglicans but including Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians and a Polish-born, Jewish convert to Christianity. Two years later, the committee’s work was extended to the USA, with the establishment of a parallel commission. The result was the publication, in England in 1885, of the Revised Version of the Old and New Testaments. It included an appendix listing the recommendations of the American committee. But voices in America were not satisfied with having their recommendations tucked away in an appendix. Illegal, pirated translations incorporating some of the proposed amendments began circulating in the United States. Even the staid, uncontroversial Oxford and Cambridge University presses got in on the act, publishing the American Revised Bible.4 In response, the American committee, sensing that they were losing control of their own work, decided to issue their authenticated, proprietary translation. Choosing a title was a problem, the number of available options for the publication was shrinking, and every variation on ‘revised’ and ‘revision’ had already been appropriated. They named their volume the American Standard Version. It was published in 1901.

  Religion and Politics in Russia

  For the best part of a thousand years, the Slavonic Bible, originally translated in Moravia by Cyril and Methodius, had tenaciously clung to its status as the official scripture of the Orthodox Russian Church. But as the nineteenth century dawned, its dominance seemed less assured. Old Slavonic was an archaic language that few could comprehend. A modern Russian translation, which ordinary people could use and understand, seemed to be a self-evident imperative. Every other country in Europe had one, and Russian society was increasingly opening up to cultural trends blowing in from the West.

  In 1812, the recently formed British and Foreign Bible Society helped to establish a branch in St Petersburg. The British and Foreign Bible Society had been founded in 1804. Its founding impetus had come from a Welsh clergyman, Thomas Charles, who approached the Religious Tract Society complaining of a shortage of Welsh-language Bibles in the Principality. He asked the Religious Tract Society, who published Christian literature, to help cater for the need. As the Society set about considering his request it became clear that the Welsh issue was merely part of a much wider problem. If Wales, a part of Great Britain itself, was short of Bibles, then how much more likely were other countries in the British Empire to be in a similar position? Indeed, they mooted, it was more than possible that some of the more remote colonies and outposts had no Bible available in their native tongue at all. What was obviously needed was a means of translating the Bible into each and every patois which needed it, and then, once translated, the wherewithal to distribute copies widely, and cost-effectively.

  And so it was decided to form ‘A Society for Promoting a more extensive Circulation of the Holy Scriptures, both at Home and Abroad’,5 a name which soon became shortened to the more elegant British and Foreign Bible Society. Among its most prominent backers was William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner and member of parliamen
t.

  The new Society rapidly got to work. It despatched envoys across the world, to encourage and facilitate the establishment of local branches, formed in its own image. They sent a Scot named John Paterson to represent them in Russia and Scandinavia; it was he who initiated the foundation of the St Petersburg Bible Society.

  Although the British played a seminal and evangelical role in its establishment, given the political complexities of nineteenth-century Russia, the new St Petersburg Bible Society is unlikely to have succeeded had it not been for the active patronage of the emperor, Alexander I.

  The St Petersburg Bible Society’s early vison was ambitious; it aimed to provide translations of the Bible for those people of the Russian Empire who did not speak the Imperial language, and to further the use of the Slavonic Bible within Russia itself. But it was Alexander I who harnessed its ambition, broadened its remit and turned it from a local society into a politically vulnerable, religiously controversial, state-backed institution.

  Stephen Batalden, in his book Russian Bible Wars,6 suggests that one reason for Alexander’s support of the Society was his own personal, existential crisis in the wake of St Petersburg’s fall to Napoleon’s forces in 1812. In a state of despair, Alexander I turned to his adviser and friend, Prince Alexander Golitsyn. Golitsyn recommended that the emperor seek solace in Scripture. The emperor took the advice to heart, undergoing an intense religious awakening which eventually manifested itself in his promotion of the Holy Alliance, a coalition of European rulers set up after the defeat of Napoleon, ostensibly to encourage the use of Christian principles in international diplomacy.

  Alexander’s new piety also found an outlet at home when, in 1816, he issued a decree empowering the former St Petersburg, now the Russian, Bible Society, to translate and publish Scripture in modern Russian. The need for an imperial decree to permit a translation of the Bible might sound like overkill, an echo of the patronage of King James. But it was an essential tactic; there was no other way to override the antagonism of the Orthodox Church. For, just as countless religious establishments had done before them, the Russian Church opposed any new translation of the Bible. The Old Slavonic text had served them perfectly well for a millennium; they saw no reason to change. The only power in the Empire which could override their objections was the throne; in Imperial Russia the emperor’s fiat held sway even over the wishes of the Church. In his decree the emperor noted that the Greek Orthodox Church had recently approved the translation of the Bible into Modern Greek; this, he determined, was adequate precedent for a similar move in Russia.

  The emperor issued his decree and a fresh controversy broke out. Even if momentum towards a Russian-language translation now appeared unstoppable, one fractious issue remained unresolved. The Old Slavonic Bible had been translated from the Greek Septuagint. But contemporary Russian bible scholars argued that the new translation should be based on the accepted Hebrew text. As had happened so many times in history, the dispute pitted conservative churchmen against scholarly modernizers. Gerasim Pavskii, the best known of the translators and a man who would become the focus of a later controversy, thought he had disposed of the argument when he produced a compromise translation of the Old Testament’s book of Psalms. He translated from the Hebrew but used the Septuagint’s numbering, which differed from the Hebrew, and he included an additional psalm which only appears in the ancient Greek version. But Pavskii’s ingenuous fait accompli only made things worse.

  One of the stimuli behind John Paterson’s creation of a Bible Society in St Petersburg had been the popularity of a spiritual system of freemasonry, which regarded the Bible as the key to understanding the supernatural world. While this system remained in vogue, conditions were ideal for a popular Bible, and for a Society to promote it. But Russian freemasonry was highly politicized; several of the Masonic lodges were suspected of revolutionary leanings. By the time that Pavskii’s translation of the Octateuch, the first eight books of the Old Testament, was underway a counter-revolutionary mood was infiltrating Russia, one which saw freemasonry, fringe spiritual movements and reformist factions as threats to social stability. In 1822 Alexander I closed all Russia’s Masonic lodges. The Bible Society, which had a number of mystically inclined masons among its members, began to come under scrutiny. It was certainly not the time for them to print or publish a translation of the Octateuch, particularly one made by Gerasim Pavskii, whose translation of Psalms had antagonized the conservatives.

  Over the next couple of years the fortunes of the Bible Society deteriorated. The next crisis came when two charismatic Roman Catholic priests from Germany, Ignaz Lindl and Johannes Gossner, began preaching to large crowds and attracting substantial followings. The two preachers were not shy about their evangelical leanings and reformist sympathies, attributes guaranteed to attract the opprobrium of the Church. The Bible Society, for its part, appeared to be inextricably linked to the two German preachers. The secretary of the Society had assisted in revising the Russian translation of Gossner’s New Testament commentary, a friend of Paterson had circulated it and Prince Golitsyn, the President of the Society and the emperor’s former adviser, had personally given it his patronage. Matters became even stickier when Lindl abandoned his priestly celibacy and secretly slipped away to get married. When the translator of Gossner’s commentary mysteriously died, prompting suspicions of supernatural intervention, the writing was on the wall for the Society.

  Pressure from the Orthodox Church continued. The Society was accused of being too closely involved with sectarians and reformist ideas. Its opponents argued that it had outlived its purpose. The Society was no longer needed; there was sufficient stock of translated Bibles to last for many years. Church leaders agitated for it to be closed.

  The emperor tried to find a middle way. He removed Alexander Golitsyn, the friend who had advised him to seek comfort in the Bible, from his post as President of the Society. In his place he appointed Serafim, the Metropolitan, or senior archbishop, of St Petersburg. Serafim, who had sat on the governing body of the Society for ten years, was one of the two churchmen who had led the campaign of opposition to it. The last thing he wanted was the job of President. He suggested instead that the Society be closed. The emperor did not agree, an impasse was reached, and the Society fell into a state of decline. But Alexander was nearing the end of his life. A year after his death in 1825, the new emperor Nicholas I issued an order closing the Society and restoring the status quo prior to its establishment. Henceforth, Bibles were only to be published in Slavonic. The Russian Octateuch, which by now had been printed, was never bound or distributed. It remained in storage. Meanwhile Bible translation in Russia went underground.7

  Gerasim Pavskii, who had translated the Book of Psalms and overseen the translation of the Octateuch for the Bible Society, was considered to be the most gifted Russian Hebraist of his era.8 He was also seen as a high flyer in the church hierarchy. Since leaving his post as a director of the Bible Society he had taught at the St Petersburg Academy, been appointed as archpriest in the Kazan Cathedral and served as religious tutor to the Grand Prince and Princess. But in 1835 he fell out with his superior over his proposed educational programme for the Grand Prince. His exalted status began to unravel. It was merely a foreshadowing of what was to come.

  The closure of the Bible Society had not curtailed Pavskii’s translation work. By the time he took up his post as professor of Hebrew at the St Petersburg Academy, he had rendered most of the Hebrew Old Testament into Russian. He made his translations available to his students as part of his lecture notes. His students, knowing that no other Russian edition of the Old Testament existed, spotted an opportunity. In 1838, after Pavskii had left the Academy, his former students cashed in. Pavskii’s lecture notes, which were in essence his translations of the Old Testament, were lithographed and secretly circulated.

  The notes quickly became popular, and copies were soon to be found in theological colleges throughout the empire. Between 1838 and
1841, three separate editions of Pavskii’s Russian Old Testament were clandestinely published. The church was outraged. A double offence had been committed; not only had the Old Testament been rendered into modern Russian instead of Slavonic but the translation was based on the Hebrew text, rather than the Septuagint.

  The underground availability of a modern, Russian Old Testament was made even more exciting by its ecclesiastical illegitimacy. It was sought after, even by those from whom the Church expected better things. A contemporary writer recalled that, when it was first published, not only did he order a copy of the illegal translation, but so too did the Archimandrite, or rector, of his seminary. Indeed, so he said, even the bishop of Tobol’sk had more than once borrowed his copy.9

  Sadly, the church authorities were not so enthusiastic. An instructor at the Moscow Academy reported the distribution of the prohibited version of the Old Testament to the Academy inspector, who in turn informed the Metropolitans of Moscow, St Petersburg and Kiev, as well as the synodal chancery. The matter was placed before the Holy Synod. They swung into action.

  A commission of investigation was established and a feverish hunt took place for copies of the lithographed translation. Instructions were sent to all diocesan bishops to recover all printed or hand-written copies of the translations, and to examine whether any seminary teachers caught in possession of a copy held unorthodox beliefs. Everyone who was found to be in possession of a copy was interrogated. Pavskii himself was summoned by the inquisitors in 1842 and again in 1844. He was cleared of participating in the distribution of the translation. But that didn’t stop them from burning his Bible; in nineteenth-century Russia the thirteenth-century tradition of burning illegitimate Bibles underwent something of a revival.