Jeff LeJeune opened the door to this subject with his thoughtful essay on St Jerome, so we thought we’d step on through it and expand a bit on the theme of the history of the Bible.

As Jeff said, a correct translation of the Holy Scriptures isn’t an optional extra for Christians.  Heretics have often twisted the meaning of Biblical passages to support their false teachings.  They are still doing this today as it regards things like LGBT identity.

This really does have existential implications for man and his salvation.  It is imperative to have a right translation of the Scriptures.

Jeff presents St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation (4^th century A.D.) as the key moment in the history of Biblical translations, but it actually occurs much earlier and is more miraculous.

That moment takes us back to the 3^rd century before Christ, to Alexandria in Egypt and the writing of the Septuagint:

‘The Septuagint derives its name from a document called the Letter of Aristeas that purports to relate how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. According to Aristeas, King Ptolemy II of Egypt wished to enlarge the famous library of Alexandria with a copy of the Hebrew Scripture, but translated into Greek so that it could be understood. Accordingly, seventy (or in some accounts seventy-two) learned translators were dispatched from Jerusalem to Alexandria circa 280 B.C. Working separately on the island of Pharos, the seventy were later astounded to find that their translations agreed word for word and believed that the Holy Spirit must have inspired them.

‘From then on the translation was known as the Septuagint from the Greek word for the “seventy” (i.e. the seventy-two translators).  Hence, the Roman numeral LXX for seventy is often used as a modern shorthand way of referring to the Septuagint.’

The Holy Elder Simeon who held the Infant Christ in his arms was one of the 72 translators of the Septuagint, miraculously kept alive by the Lord, which would have made him over 200 years old (at the least) at that moment.  This gives extra poignancy to the prayer he offered during that encounter, ‘Now, O Master, let your servant depart in peace’:

‘An interesting tradition exists in the Church that St. Simeon, who embraced the forty-day old Christ Child in the Temple (see Luke 2:25-35), was one of the original translators of the Septuagint. Accordingly, he wished to translate the Isaiah 7:14 passage as “young woman” rather than “virgin,” disagreeing with all the other translators on the grounds that it was illogical for a virgin to be with child. As a result, the Lord told him that he would live to see the event come about, which inspires his famous prayer, “Now, O Master, let your servant depart in peace…” when he holds the infant Messiah. Seeing the prophecy of Isaiah fulfilled, he “departs in peace” at the age of 276.’

The Church Fathers hold that the Septuagint is divinely inspired:

‘The Church extremely reveres the translation of the 70 — the Septuagint. St. Irineus thinks that the holy interpreters were as much inspired by the Holy Spirit, as the prophets and apostles (Irineus 3, chap.11, 4). St. Justin the Philosopher in his “Addressing to the Greeks,” Tertullian, St. Cyprian, blissful Augustine, Clement of Alexandria call the translation of the 70 as God-inspired. St. Basil the Great calls it the most famous in the Church.’

This contrasts with views of the Vulgate, which even its admirers say is not perfect:

‘While again cautioning that no translation is ever perfect, Rico was quick to praise Jerome’s Vulgate for its accuracy and its importance in the history of the Church.’

Such a statement is clarified when one considers the Vulgate’s reliance on Hebrew manuscripts.  That reliance introduces difficulties into the translation and use of the Bible – for instance, with the number of books in the Old Testament:

‘The Septuagint differs from the Hebrew Bible both in respect to the number of books and their arrangement.  Most obviously, the Septuagint has 49 books compared with the Hebrew Bible’s 39.  (Some of the books of the Hebrew Bible are combined, so that the whole is rounded down to 24.)  The Hebrew Bible does not include what the West calls the Deuterocanonical books or Apocrypha.  There are considerable differences between the books and their order as between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, and the actual texts of individual books also vary.  In the case of such books as Jeremiah, Job and Proverbs, the divergences between the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Septuagint are so considerable, even with respect to length, that it is clear that the Hebrew text underlying the translation cannot have been identical with the text we know today.’

Things get even more complicated when one considers how and why the Hebrew manuscripts developed:

‘The Church gives Its preference to the translation of the 70, not only among other translations, but also prefers it to the Jewish original of the Old Testament.

‘The Church does not rely onto the Jewish original of the Old Testament, to be more exact, on its preserved till now form — the Massorite one, for during two thousands of years of the Christian history the Hebrew original was kept in the non-Christian medium, hostile to the Christianity, was re-written by the non-Christian hands. Even if one does not suspect any mal intention then anyway these non-Christian copyists could always make a mistake, not knowing the mysteries of the Christian faith and therefore not understand the complete meaning of those holy books, which they were rewriting; always could make a mistake, and, having made, could not understand that.

‘ . . . The Church admits that the Septuagint is not only an authoritative text, but defines the composition of the Holy Scripture according to the Septuagint. The Septuagint completely preserved the Holy Scripture, and the Massorite tradition partly lost it.’

Even in the early years of Christianity, when Jews were a substantial part of the membership of the Church, the Septuagint was preferred over the Hebrew texts:

‘Now in the West today it is almost universally assumed that the text of the Hebrew Bible as it is today is the canonical text of the Old Testament at the time of Our Lord.  This is not so: most of the New Testament authors actually quoted from the Septuagint.  A mid-nineteenth century study of 275 New Testament passages by D. M. Turpie[2] (‘The Old Testament in the New’, 1868) concluded that the New Testament, the Septuagint and the Hebrew text all agree in only about 20% of the quotations.  ‘Of the 80% where some disagreement occurs, fewer than 5% agree with the Hebrew against the Septuagint’.  More recently two authors have listed 340 places where the New Testament cites from the Septuagint but only 33 places where it cites from the Masoretic Text rather than the Septuagint ⁵(G. Archer and G. C. Chirichigno, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey, 25-32).  These figures show just how heavily the New Testament writers used the Greek version of the Old Testament. They also show how significant the Septuagint was for the emerging Christian Church, because the early Church consistently read the Old Testament in the light of the New: ‘Vetus Testamentum in Novo Receptum’ i.e. ‘The Old Testament taken into the New’.  And when Christianity spread outside the borders of Palestine, it was the Septuagint from which the Apostles, especially St Paul, preached Christ.’

The upshot of all of this is that, if someone is going to pick up a Bible to read, he needs to make sure it is based on the Septuagint version of the Scriptures.  The Latin Vulgate, like the English King James Version or the Welsh Bible, has contributed good things to Christendom.  But the testimony of the Church Fathers tells us to prefer those translations based on the Septuagint, as it is God-inspired and therefore the most accurate.

Jeff is usually up to something good when he writes.  So it is with his essay on St Jerome.  In closing, then, we echo another of the themes he stresses in it – mainly, if we are going to keep ourselves and our families and our communities from straying into harmful errors, we will only do so by following the path revealed to us by God and His saints:

‘In the spiritual world there are many roads and paths, but the direct, correct and truthful way is always the one — the church way. It started with the creation of the world, the repentance of Adam, the exploit of Noah, the calling of Abraham, the history of the Chosen Nation, Christ the Savior, His holy Apostles, holy fathers, the exploit of monks and faithfulness of all the children of the Church of Christ and will continue till the end of ages.’