Study of the King James Bible | Page 4

language used is not the
great thing, that there is something in it which gives it power and value
in any tongue. No book was ever translated so often. Men who have
known it in its earliest tongues have realized that their fellows would
not learn these earliest tongues, and they have set out to make it speak
the tongue their fellows did know. Some have protested that there is
impiety in making it speak the current tongue, and have insisted that
men should learn the earliest speech, or at least accept their knowledge
of the Book from those who did know it. But they have never stopped
the movement. They have only delayed it.
The first movement to make the Scripture speak the current tongue
appeared nearly three centuries before Christ. Most of the Old
Testament then existed in Hebrew. But the Jews had scattered widely.
Many had gathered in Egypt where Alexander the Great had founded

the city that bears his name. At one time a third of the population of the
city was Jewish. Many of the people were passionately loyal to their
old religion and its Sacred Book. But the current tongue there and
through most of the civilized world was Greek, and not Hebrew. As
always, there were some who felt that the Book and its original
language were inseparable. Others revealed the disposition of which we
spoke a moment ago, and set out to make the Book speak the current
tongue. For one hundred and fifty years the work went on, and what we
call the Septuagint was completed. There is a pretty little story which
tells how the version got its name, which means the Seventy--that King
Ptolemy Philadelphus, interested in collecting all sacred books,
gathered seventy Hebrew scholars, sent them to the island of Pharos,
shut them up in seventy rooms for seventy days, each making a
translation from the Hebrew into the Greek. When they came out,
behold, their translations were all exactly alike! Several difficulties
appear in that story, one of which is that seventy men should have
made the same mistakes without depending on each other. In addition,
it is not historically supported, and the fact seems to be that the
Septuagint was a long and slow growth, issuing from the impulse to
make the Sacred Book speak the familiar tongue. And, though it was a
Greek translation, it virtually displaced the original, as the English
Bible has virtually displaced the Hebrew and Greek to-day. The
Septuagint was the Old Testament which Paul used. Of one hundred
and sixty-eight direct quotations from the Old Testament in the New
nearly all are from the Greek version--from the translation, and not
from the original.
We owe still more to translation. While there is accumulating evidence
that there was spoken in Palestine at that time a colloquial Greek, with
which most people would be familiar, it is yet probable that our Lord
spoke neither Greek nor Hebrew currently, but Aramaic. He knew the
Hebrew Scriptures, of course, as any well- trained lad did; but most of
His words have come down to us in translation. His name, for example,
to His Hebrew mother, was not Jesus, but Joshua; and Jesus is the
translation of the Hebrew Joshua into Greek. We have His words as
they were translated by His disciples into the Greek, in which the New
Testament was originally written.
By the time the writing of the New Testament was completed, say one

hundred years after Christ, while Greek was still current speech, the
Roman Empire was so dominant that the common people were talking
Latin almost as much as Greek, and gradually, because political power
was behind it, the Latin gained on the Greek, and became virtually the
speech of the common people. The movement to make the Bible talk
the language of the time appeared again. It is impossible to say now
when the first translations into Latin were made. Certainly there were
some within two centuries after Christ, and by 250 A.D. a whole Bible
in Latin was in circulation in the Roman Empire. The translation of the
New Testament was from the Greek, of course, but so was that of the
Old Testament, and the Latin versions of the Old Testament were,
therefore, translations of a translation.
There were so many of these versions, and they were so unequal in
value, that there was natural demand for a Latin translation that should
be authoritative. So came into being what we call the Vulgate, whose
very name indicates the desire to get the Bible into the vulgar or
common tongue. Jerome began by revising the earlier Latin translations,
but ended by going back of all translations to the original Greek, and
back of the Septuagint to the original Hebrew wherever