The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  The investigating commission determined that 490 lithographed copies of Pavskii’s translation had been made, in addition to an unknown quantity of manuscripts. The inquisitors recovered 308 copies and burned them all, bar three. We know this because the Holy Synod archive contains 4,000 pages of once-secret documents pertaining to the investigation.10

  For decades, the fallout from the Pavskii affair inhibited further progress towards a popularly available Russian-language bible. One of the bishops, devastated by the clumsy and aggressive manner in which the investigation had been conducted, lamented that ‘they only take things away from us – what do they ever give us in their stead?’11

  Of course, as was always the case, the popular Bible eventually prevailed. In May 1858 the Holy Synod, no less, petitioned Emperor Alexander to approve the resumption of Old Testament translation. Even drawing up the petition had been troublesome; those who opposed it feared it would undermine the authority of the Slavonic version, and damage the Russian Church’s relations with its Slavic and Near Eastern Orthodox neighbours. Even as Russia modernized, the issue of Bible translation remained as bound up as ever in questions of politics and authority.

  Still, the translation went ahead. The Synodal Bible, the first to be approved in the Russian language, was finally published in 1876. It was a triumph for those who believed in making the Bible popularly accessible, but it didn’t mark the end of the Russian state’s influence on the politics of scriptural translations. During the Soviet era, as part of its policy of containment of religious practice, the state controlled the publication and distribution of the Russian Bible. No new translations were undertaken for more than a century. The next popular version didn’t appear until 2011, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  The Return of Bible Burning

  Back in the English-speaking world, the Revised Version was enduring a rocky ride. It had been received enthusiastically when first published in 1881; two million copies were sold in London in the first four days, half of the orders coming from America. The Chicago Tribune printed the entire New Testament in its regular Sunday edition. The entrepreneurial bandwagon quickly got into gear, and within a few short weeks it was possible to buy cheap pirated copies. More critical readers could obtain an edition listing all the differences between the new translation and the King James version, while Bible specialists could buy a volume which set the Revised Version alongside Westcott and Hort’s recently published New Testament in the Original Greek.12

  But the excitement quickly dimmed. In the nineteenth-century age of exploration and progress, Bible translators were no longer murdered or persecuted. But living in a more tolerant world did not lessen the emotional attachment of ordinary people to the particular edition of the translated Bible with which they were most familiar. Religion is at least as much of the heart as of the mind, and for many people the words of the Bible they had grown up with were comforting and reassuring; changing its language to make it less archaic, or to conform more accurately to the original, may have been a rational thing to do, but it could prove very unsettling.

  Not that the Revised Version’s critics necessarily presented their unease as an emotional phenomenon; ‘I don’t like it’ is not a persuasive argument. It was far more effective for an opponent of the new version to identify faults, general or specific, with the actual translation itself. And so Charles Haddon Spurgeon, perhaps the best known and most popular British preacher of his age, called the Revised Version ‘Strong in Greek but weak in English’.13 Even so, despite his dislike of its language, Spurgeon did appreciate the scholarship in the new version, particularly where it corrected some of the errors overlooked by the King James translators.14

  The lukewarm reception given to the Revised Version naturally distressed those who had been involved in its production. In a series of addresses arguing for greater adoption of the Revised Version by churches, Charles Ellicott, bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and a founding member of the committee, lamented that the translators had collectively spent a total of twenty-four years on their efforts, only to find that ‘partly from indifference, partly from a vague fear of disquieting a congregation . . . the old Version is still read’. He considered loyalty to the three-hundred-year-old King James Version inexplicable in the light of ‘a current Version from which errors are removed, and in which obscurities are dissipated’.15

  A slightly more optimistic reaction came from the western side of the Atlantic. Although Philip Schaff, a church historian and member of the American translation committee, was disappointed that of all the American denominations, only the Baptists had formally adopted the Revised Version, he remained confident that ‘English readers will not be contented with King James’ Version. They know that something better can be made . . . the Revised Version is not free from defects, I would have had some things different if I had been the only one to be consulted. But on the whole, the Revision is a vast improvement upon the Version of 1611.’16

  Vast improvement it may have been, but the Revised Version hardly had time to become established in the USA before it was superseded in 1901 by its twin, the American Standard Version. The two editions barely differed; the Standard version merely contained those amendments recommended by the American translation committee of the Revised Version, which their British counterparts had rejected. But even the Standard Version did not prevail for long. By the 1930s calls were going out for a further revision; one which was a little braver than the Standard and Revised Versions in rejecting archaisms, and which took account of even more early Greek manuscripts which had come to light since the Revised Version had been compiled.

  And so it was that in 1937 a coalition of white, Protestant professors, drawn from across the denominations, assembled to begin work on the Revised Standard Version (the proliferation of similarly named Bible translations was becoming dizzying). There were no Catholics on the Committee; the fundamental theological difference as to whether authority was vested in the Bible or the Ecclesia meant that Catholics would not necessarily grant every newly discovered manuscript greater authenticity than the Vulgate, the sanctity of which was rooted in the earliest days of the Church. But there was a Jew; Harry Orlinsky of the Hebrew Union College was invited to join in 1941. Some opponents of the translation castigated the committee for co-opting a non-Christian, and none rejoiced more in the opportunity to condemn the committee than Gerald Winrod, a Kansas preacher not long previously indicted for Nazi sympathies, who described their project as the ‘bastard offspring of Talmudism’.

  The Revised Standard Version was not solely attacked for having a Jew on its committee. The most dramatic opposition came shortly after its publication in 1952 from North Carolina. Luther Hux, a conservatively inclined Baptist pastor, was horrified to discover that in the new version Isaiah was no longer prophesying that a virgin would give birth; instead the mother of the child who would be named Immanuel was described merely as ‘a young woman’.17 This was the revival of an ancient controversy; its origins went back to the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew word almah as virgin, although elsewhere rendering the same word as ‘maiden’.18 Hux, who no doubt knew what he was looking for when he turned to Isaiah, was well aware of the textual implications. Replacing the virgin with a young woman went to the heart of a major interpretative dispute between Christianity and Judaism: was Isaiah foretelling the birth of Jesus, or not?

  Hux was not a man to stand idly by when what he believed to be the integrity of the Bible was challenged. In the spirit of the medieval inquisitors, he announced that he would burn the new Bible. On a Sunday evening at the end of 1952, Hux delivered a two-hour sermon before leading his congregation out into the cold November air. He gave each one an American flag, held aloft a copy of the Revised Standard Version, ripped out the page containing the offending translation and burned it. Sensing that act was somewhat less dramatic than the promise, he had only burned a single page, he yelled, ‘I never said I would burn the Bible. I said I woul
d burn a fraud.’19 An anonymous Bible burner was more courageous. A few weeks after Hux’s histrionics the chairman of the Standard Bible Committee received a box full of ashes. Its accompanying note proclaimed that it was the remains of a copy of the Revised Standard Version.

  Controversy over the Revised Standard Version continued throughout the 1950s. It was not just its theology which came under attack. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the translators for Communist sympathies. In 1960 the US Air Force Reserve published a training manual which warned recruits to avoid the RSV Bible which, so they claimed, had included among its translators thirty people ‘affiliated with “Communist fronts”’.20 When the matter became public, the manual was speedily withdrawn and the Defence Secretary apologized.

  Arguments even raged over the non-appearance of italics. The Bible’s predecessor, the American Standard Version, had followed the King James in italicizing all words which did not appear in the original Hebrew or Greek, but which had been interpolated into the text for clarity. This allowed readers to distinguish between the ‘real’ Bible and editorial adjustments. The Revised Standard Version, however, in the interests of readability, left the italics out. The Version’s many opponents complained that it could not be trusted as a literal translation. And notwithstanding a few minor amendments, designed to soothe ruffled conservative feelings, appearing in subsequent editions, the controversy did not abate. Instead it led to yet another similarly named translation appearing a few years later; this one was the New American Standard Bible, distinguished by its literal translation, and use of italics. The New Testament appeared in 1963 and the complete Bible in 1971. The Bible bandwagon just kept on rolling.

  A similar process had taken place in England, beginning in 1946. A coalition of scholars drawn from British universities and representing all the main Protestant denominations began working on a Bible ‘to be made in the language of the present day’.21 The New Testament was published in 1961 with the Old Testament and Apocrypha following nine years later.

  The New English Bible’s desire to reflect present-day language immediately placed it under fire. Among its many critics, the poet T. S. Eliot wrote ‘We are . . . entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: “What is happening to the English language?”’22

  The New English Bible, despite some initial interest, never really took off. Finding that elusive balance between a modern literary style and dignified, religious gravitas had, for its translators, proved just too difficult.

  Jewish Bibles

  By now, Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation no longer stood unchallenged as the only modern Jewish version. Those factors which had persuaded Mendelssohn to translate the Hebrew Bible into German, particularly the desire for Jewish emancipation and social integration, were now tempered by the less welcome reality of assimilation and loss of religious identity.

  Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of German Jewish orthodoxy, was troubled by conflicting pressures, all of which, he believed, posed a direct threat to the beliefs and practices of the Jewish religion. Apart from the corrosive impact of assimilation, his orthodoxy was burdened by the rise of a new, modernizing movement, with a reformist agenda that uncomfortably challenged the religious status quo. There was also the new academic discipline of Higher Bible Criticism, flying in the face of the traditional Jewish belief that the Pentateuch, or Torah, had been revealed in its entirety to Moses; hypothesizing that it was in fact a composite work constructed from several different, very human, documents.

  Hirsch, who notwithstanding his orthodoxy was no dyed-in-the-wool conservative, set out to address these challenges, not by refuting them, but by presenting an alternative worldview. His translation, which was published in stages together with a voluminous commentary between 1867 and 1878, offered an interpretation which reinforced the traditional Jewish understanding of Bible authorship, and promoted his own vision of the positive interaction between traditional religion, contemporary thought and scientific progress. It was a monumental, if intellectual, religious response to modernity.

  His work was translated into English in 1956; a rare example of a translation being translated into yet another language; somewhat reminiscent of Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century rendering of the Vulgate into English. The difference is that the Vulgate was regarded as a canonical text, whereas Hirsch’s work was the product of a scholar whose commentary was as essential for understanding his ideas as was his translation.

  Germany was not the only place where Jewish translations were produced. During the course of the nineteenth century, French, Dutch, Russian, Hungarian, Italian and English versions of the Old Testament appeared. But unlike the vast majority of Christian translations of the period, these translations nearly always appeared alongside the original Hebrew text. For the Jews, the sanctity of the Bible lay in its language; the translations were merely an aid to understanding for those who were not fluent in Hebrew.

  Among the Jewish Bibles, most nineteenth-century English versions were based on the Authorized or Revised Versions, with a nod to the Hebrew scholarship of German translators like Mendelssohn and Hirsch. It wasn’t until 1892 that the recently formed Jewish Publication Society of America decided that the time had come to start afresh. As was now traditional in Bible translation projects, a committee was established, each member being charged with translating a particular book. The first volumes began to appear in 1903 and the full translation fourteen years later. For most of the twentieth century, it was the pre-eminent English translation of the Bible for Jews. Its supremacy was only seriously challenged when the English language had evolved so far that the translation’s conscious aping of the elegant but archaic style of the King James version, with its thees and thous, hithers and thithers, began to feel just too antiquated for a religion which, like all twentieth-century faiths, was more anxious than ever to speak to people who lived in the present not the past.

  Many, more modern Jewish translations followed, not all of them elegant. In the introduction to his particular contribution to the field, the American scholar Robert Alter noted that in the King James version the problem had been a ‘shaky sense of Hebrew’ whereas now, in the modern versions, the problem is ‘a shaky sense of English’.23

  Alter’s comment throws a spotlight on the tension inherent in any translation, but particularly of a work as old, well known and venerable as the Bible. On the one hand the translator wants to convey the style, rhythm and poetic sense of the original; on the other hand the imperative is to communicate its meaning with clarity and accuracy. It is often a circle that cannot be squared.

  The dilemma can be seen clearly in the revised translation that the Jewish Publication Society issued in 1985, which has formed the basis of many more recent editions. When Reuben returns to find his brothers have sold Joseph into slavery he is distraught and declares, in dramatic, alliterative Hebrew, va’ani ana ani-va. A literal translation is ‘The boy is not and I, where have I come?’ which makes sense in classical Hebrew but not in modern English. Understandably the 1985 translators tried to find a more evocative solution. They decided upon ‘The boy is gone, now what am I to do?’ It’s the sort of thing one might say when discovering one’s train ticket has disappeared. It scarcely conveys Reuben’s despair and it completely misses the poetry and the alliteration.

  When it comes down to it, translation is always a matter of choice. One reason why the twentieth century saw so many alternative English versions is the near impossibility of producing an ‘ideal’ translation.

  The Jerusalem Bible

  By the middle of the twentieth century, innumerable Protestant editions of the Bible had been published, for an untold number of reasons. Some took account of new manus
cript discoveries, others sought to modernize archaic language, to correct perceived inaccuracies or to standardize competing versions. But up to now, this multiplicity of Bible versions had been a Protestant phenomenon. It was not replicated in the Catholic Church, nor to any significant degree within Judaism.

  The centralized structure of Catholicism, with ecclesiastical authority vested firmly in the Vatican, meant that any published Bible which did not carry the papal imprimatur could not, by definition, be considered a Catholic version. Significantly, the powers of the Catholic Church to censor works which were doctrinally incorrect, or to prohibit them altogether, proved a powerful disincentive to the production of new Catholic translations.

  Since 1582, English-speaking Catholics had used the version originally prepared in Douay in northern France, by refugees fleeing persecution during the reign of Elizabeth I. The version had undergone a substantial revision in 1750 when the Catholic bishop Richard Challoner modernized its unwieldy language, and the language of the New Testament had again been updated in 1941. But from the publication of the Rheims–Douay version onwards, every revision had been based on the Latin Vulgate. This was to change in 1943 when the Pope issued an encyclical letter permitting translation from the Hebrew and Greek.

  A group of French Dominicans in Jerusalem were first off the mark, with their 1956 publication of La Bible de Jérusalem, an annotated Bible. Like all Catholic Bibles, it included the Apocrypha, books which did not make it into the Jewish scriptures and which were subsequently excluded by Protestants when Luther’s emphasis on sola scriptura, ‘only by scripture’,24 necessitated a return to the Hebrew Old Testament.

  La Bible de Jérusalem was seized upon by English-speaking Catholics anxious for a modern version in their own language. It was soon to be; The Jerusalem Bible appeared in 1966, acknowledging its debt to the French version. Cardinal Heenan, the leader of Britain’s Catholics, called it ‘a genuinely contemporary version of Holy Scripture . . . a landmark in the evolution of Catholic culture’.25 The editor, in his foreword, explained that the dual purpose of the new translation was to keep abreast of the times, by recasting the Bible in contemporary language, and to deepen theological thought through annotations and explanations. The notes, he explained, were a direct translation from the French. The English translation was made from the Hebrew and Greek, but cross-referenced against the French version when questions arose. And although the editor acknowledged that it was not his job to impose his own style on the translation, nevertheless literary quality was important. Among those whom he consulted on style was Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien.