biblical translation, the art and practice of rendering the Bible into languages other than those in which it was originally written. Both the Old and New Testaments have a long history of translation.
A brief treatment of biblical translation follows. For full treatment, see Biblical Literature and Its Critical Interpretation: Texts and versions.
The Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, was originally written almost entirely in Hebrew, with a few short elements in Aramaic. When the Persian empire controlled the eastern Mediterranean basin, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the area, and for liturgical reasons it became necessary for the Jewish communities of the region to have the Torah, or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), translated into the common language from traditional Hebrew. The resulting Targums (from Aramaic meturgeman, “translator”) survived after original Hebrew scrolls had been lost.
By the mid-3rd century bc Greek was the dominant lingua franca, and Jewish scholars began the task of translating the Hebrew canon into that language, an undertaking that was not completed for more than a century. Because tradition held that each of the 12 tribes of Israel contributed six scholars to the project, the Greek version of the Jewish Bible came to be known later (in Latin) as the Septuagint (septuaginta: “70”).
The Hebrew Scriptures were the only Bible the early Christian church knew, and as the young religion spread out through the Greek-speaking world, Christians adopted the Septuagint. In the meantime, many of the books of the Christian Bible, the New Testament, were first written or recorded in Greek, and others in Aramaic.
The spread of Christianity necessitated further translations of both the Old and New Testaments into Coptic, Ethiopian, Gothic, and, most important, Latin. In 405 St. Jerome finished translating a Latin version that was based in part on the Septuagint, and this version, the Vulgate, despite errors introduced by copyists, became the standard of Western Christianity for a thousand years or more.
Hebrew scholars at Talmudic schools in Palestine and Babylonia about the 6th century ad began trying to retrieve and codify the Hebrew scriptures, restoring them authoritatively and in the Hebrew language. Over centuries they laboured to complete the traditional, or Masoretic, text, which since its completion in the 10th century has come to be universally accepted. The Masoretic version was transmitted by scribes with amazing fidelity down to the time of movable type in the 15th century.
Jerome’s Latin Vulgate served as the basis for translations of both the Old and New Testament into Syriac, Arabic, Spanish, and many other languages, including English. The Vulgate provided the basis for the Douai-Reims Version (New Testament, 1582; Old Testament, 1609–10), which remained the only authorized Bible in English for Roman Catholics until the 20th century.
The new learning in the 15th and 16th centuries revived the study of ancient Greek and led to new translations, among them an important one by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who in 1516 published an edition of the New Testament containing the Greek text and his own translation into Latin. Meanwhile, in Germany, Martin Luther produced the first complete translation from the original Greek and Hebrew into a modern European language. His German-language translation of the New Testament was published in 1522 and that of the complete Bible in 1534; this remained the official Bible for German Protestants and was the basis for Danish, Swedish, and other translations.
The first complete English-language version of the Bible dates from 1382 and was credited to John Wycliffe and his followers. But it was the work of the scholar William Tyndale, who from 1525 to 1535 translated the New Testament and part of the Old Testament, that became the model for a series of subsequent English translations. All previous English translations culminated in the King James Version (1611; known in England as the Authorized Version), which was prepared by 54 scholars appointed by King James I. Avoiding strict literalism in favour of an extensive use of synonym, it was a masterpiece of Jacobean English and the principal Bible used by English-speaking Protestants for 270 years.
About the time of the invention of printing in ad 1450, there were only 33 different translations of the Bible. By about 1800 the number had risen to 71; by the late 20th century the entire Bible had been translated into more than 250 languages, and portions of the Bible had been published in more than 1,300 of the world’s languages.
New translations of the Bible into English proliferated in the 20th century. Among the more recent Protestant Bibles are the Revised Version (1881–85), a revision of the King James Version; the Revised Standard Version (1946–52) and the New Revised Standard Version (1989), which are widely accepted by American Protestants; and The New English Bible (1961–70) and The Revised English Bible (1989). Among the Roman Catholic Bibles are a translation by Ronald Knox (1945–49), The Jerusalem Bible (1966), The New Jerusalem Bible (1985), and The New American Bible (1970).