Will the Best Bible Please Stand Up?

Dan McClellan And you can go visit the cave in Bethlehem where he spent 30 years translating his Vulgate. But this was a transla- These

Dan Beecher dudes and their caves,

Dan McClellan man. Caves were a big deal back then. You got to

Dan Beecher get yourself a cave. You want to do some good work, get a cave.

Dan McClellan Very cool in the summer, but they could get pretty drafty in the winter. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is the "Data Over Dogma" podcast, where we try to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion. Other Dan, how are you?

Dan Beecher I'm doing well, man. I'm excited about this episode. It's one of those ones where people have been clamoring for it. Mm-hmm. Hopefully, you'll get some useful information, though you may not get the answer that you're desperately looking for. Yeah. We're talking about Bible translations this week.

Dan McClellan Or translations of the Bible. Whatever your preference, we're going to talk about those. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, this is-

Dan Beecher And not just translations, either. Versions. Versions. We're going to talk about all the things.

Dan McClellan There's going to be some discussion of versional discussion, yeah. We're

Dan Beecher going to sacrifice a virgin on the altar.

Dan McClellan Did you ever see "Monster Squad?" You remember that movie?

Dan Beecher No, I don't think so. I don't think I did.

Dan McClellan Oh, hilarious movie. You got to check out "Monster Squad." Okay. But they've got to find a virgin to read this Latin in order to get this spell to work, to send these monsters back- Oh, sure ... to their realm, and-

Dan Beecher As you do.

Dan McClellan As you do. And they're trying to figure out if they know any virgins, and one of them is a sister. They're like, "Ah." They're trying to figure out a good way to ask this. They don't go about it very well, and then it turns out she was lying. They were like, "I thought you said you were a virgin." She's like, "Well, once with Todd, but that doesn't count. Does it count?" Yeah. And then they get their five-year-old sister to do it instead, and she sends the monsters back. But it's-

Dan Beecher Well, that's for the best.

Dan McClellan Yeah, but if you ever hear somebody say, "Wolfman's got nards," that is from "Monster Squad." So- Okay ... anyway, that is beside the point. We're going to be talking about translations of the Bible. One of the most common questions I get on social media, I don't know about you, Dan, but one of the most common questions I get is: what is the best translation of the Bible? And hopefully, after this episode of the "Data Over Dogma" podcast, you will never want to ask that question again. No. Because you don't want to know- You will be more confused. Yes. You don't want to know the answer.

Dan Beecher You'll leave more confused than you went in, but- Yeah ... edified and educated.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And that's what we're here for.

Dan McClellan Your edu- Edification. What? Oh, gosh. I forgot.

Dan Beecher No, I think you got it. I think you nailed it. Okay. I'm going to move on. All right. So, all right, Dan. Let's just launch into this.

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher Let's talk first about where this all comes from. Mm-hmm. Because what we're getting to, eventually, is English translations of a compiled group of books- Mm-hmm ... that we now call the Bible. But that's not where it started.

Dan McClellan It's not where it started.

Dan Beecher So, take us back all the way to the earliest translations of the Bible to-- And the Bible is multiple things, right? We're talking about the Hebrew Bible. We're talking about the New Testament. These are very different things that happened at very different times.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Guide us through it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the idea that the Bible represents a single book, or even just a single collection of books, is something that has a past, and something that occurred in a rough point in time. And translations of these texts predate the existence of what we might call the Bible. So, we go back to literature that's being produced in and around Jerusalem, the northern kingdom, in the middle of the first millennium BCE. And a lot of this is being produced in and after the exile and in the Persian period, and a bit into the Hellenistic period. So, this is between around 600 BCE and down to around, I think, 164-ish BCE, is the date of the most recent text of the Hebrew Bible that was composed. But with the exile and the return from exile, you have members of Judea, Judeans, who are kind of spreading out in a few different directions. Some are in Babylon. Some go to Egypt. And we know of some communities within Egypt that were made up of Judeans. But once you get a few generations into these places, people are speaking other languages. They're not speaking the Hebrew in which these texts were originally written. And so our earliest translation of any kind, of which we know, of any text that would ultimately make it into the Bible, is into Greek. And this was likely executed in the city of Alexandria, in northern Egypt, so in the Nile Delta, one of the economic and intellectual centers of the ancient world in this time period. Probably somewhere in the third century BCE. So, somewhere between around 300 BCE and 200 BCE, we have translations of the Jewish scriptures. And in this early period- It's starting with what we know as the Torah, the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. And so you have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are translated from ancient Hebrew into Greek. There's a text called "The Letter of Aristeas," also known as Pseudo-Aristeas, that purports to tell the story of how this all happened. But this is a legendary letter. It's very, very convenient. There are some miraculous things going on. The king in Egypt is deferring to the knowledge of these Jewish scholars who are on loan from Jerusalem. So, I think we've talked about it before on this show, but that's one telling of how this happened. In reality, it was probably something that took place a little more organically among the communities in Egypt. And so it was a way to give access to what was considered scripture to people who did not speak the original languages of the scriptures.

Dan Beecher And so- Would you say that Greek was sort of-- I know that there was a lot of Greek in Alexandria. Mm-hmm. But we're talking about a city in Egypt, so the Egyptian people didn't speak Greek, did they?

Dan McClellan So, in this time period, Alexander the Great had come through in the previous century, and- Right ... we refer to this as a-

Dan Beecher He must've been surprised when he got to a place that was called Alexandria. He was like, "We have the same name. That's crazy."

Dan McClellan It's divinely instituted. Yeah. So, a lot of funny stories about Alexander in Egypt and about Alexander in general. So he dies around 333 BCE, and after that, his generals and other leaders are fighting over control of his kingdom, and it kind of gets split up. And the two most relevant groups of people for our purposes are the Seleucids, and they are in Syria-Palestine area, and then the Ptolemies, and they are in Egypt. And so this is a period of Hellenization where Greek is kind of taking over as a lingua franca in the region. So Greek was probably the most widely spoken language by the next century, so by the time of the translation of the earliest texts of the Septuagint into Greek, so within that area. And this was just to facilitate access on the part of those who did not speak the language. There's a theory out there, an interesting theory, that the purpose was actually to provide a bit of an interlinear so that people could get kind of a better grasp on what this Hebrew was saying. So some people think it wasn't necessarily for people who didn't speak Hebrew, but for people who didn't speak it particularly well. So there's this interlinear theory of the Septuagint. I don't think that works with all the data, but we have this translation, and there are some texts of the Pentateuch, at least the translations that have been preserved down to us are very, very literal, overly literal. Like they're rendering the Hebrew into Greek that doesn't sound very Greek, but sounds more Hebrew. And then there are other texts that are more free. But one of the most interesting things about the translation of the Septuagint is it seems to witness to Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that don't always line up with the manuscripts that we have now. The Masoretic Text is the traditional authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible, and this is a text- And

Dan Beecher I think you've mentioned them before- Mm-hmm ... but talk about the Masoretes. Is that who we're talking about?

Dan McClellan Right. So these were Jewish scribes who primarily lived in the Galilee in the medieval period, and they did a handful of things with the text of the Hebrew Bible. They created a system of vocalization. So Hebrew is not written with vowels, and there have been a couple different attempts in the early centuries of the Common Era to create a system of vowels because you had fewer people who were speaking the Hebrew that they used anciently, and it made the text more clear if you could clarify precisely what vowels we understand to be intended here. And so they created this system of vowels, and they created this text with their specific vocalization or the addition of vowels that they liked. And then they also created a couple other parts to the text, what they call the Masora Magna and the Masora Parva, or the Great Masorah and the Small Masorah. And these are notes about how frequently words occur, notes about words that may only occur one time, and just some kind of technical notes about that. And also, you had what they called ketiv and qere readings. So, they marked certain places where you were supposed to read this differently than what is written on the page, and then other places where you were supposed to follow a different vocalization. So- Right ... they did all this and we have the Aleppo Codex, previously understood to be the earliest version of the Masoretic Text, dates to around 900 CE, and that is mostly complete. A lot of the Pentateuch is missing. Some of it probably burned, some of it is just we don't know where it is. And then the Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete edition of the Masoretic Text, and that dates to about 1000, 1010 CE. Wow. And then we just had the sale, the auction within the last month of, I think Codex Sassoon, the Sassoon- Codex, which many scholars think may be a little bit older than the Aleppo Codex. But these three manuscripts are almost exactly identical. They very rarely deviate from each other, and when they do, it is primarily in accentuation marks and things like that. So, they created a very consistent system. And so that tradition, the Masoretic Text, is what is considered most authoritative within Judaism today. However, when you go back to the Septuagint, it seems to be very different in places.

Dan Beecher So, the Book of Jeremiah- Talk about what is the Septuagint? I don't know what that is.

Dan McClellan So, the Septuagint is this ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, and we have some early translations of certain texts that we sometimes refer to as the Old Greek, and then the later Greek translations that became a little more authoritative, that were probably done around the turn of the era, so around the time of Jesus, we generally refer to those as the more traditional Septuagint. And like I said, it started with the first five books of Moses, and then over time, all the other books of the Hebrew Bible, as we understand it now, were translated. But when this was being translated, they did not have what they knew as the Hebrew Bible. There was not a closed canon of texts. And so you have other texts that were also translated into Greek, and you had other texts that were being composed in Hebrew and in Aramaic and in Greek. So, our earliest translation is the Septuagint, which is also a text critically important because it witnesses to source texts that may be earlier than the Masoretic Text, what is most authoritative now. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, over 1,000 different manuscripts, many of them biblical manuscripts, and many of them line up with either the Masoretic Text or the tradition we find in the Septuagint or an unknown tradition. And so, I mentioned the Book of Jeremiah is about one-sixth shorter in the Septuagint, which indicates either that the translator of the Septuagint was just erasing things left and right, or they had a source text that had not yet had all that other stuff added to it. And we discovered some manuscripts of Jeremiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls that agree more with the Septuagint readings than with the Masoretic Text, indicating- Wow ... that, yes, the Septuagint probably was translating Hebrew manuscripts that were shorter, which would indicate Jeremiah, as we have it now, has been the product of some textual expansion that someone- Sure ... has added to it. And there are a handful of other situations that are very similar. The Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings, for instance, can be very different in the Septuagint. So, that's our earliest known translation. And then I mentioned you had Aramaic speakers as well in the East and Babylon, and so we have some Aramaic translations. Now, these are a little more free. These are referred to as the Targumim or the Targums, and these are translations into Aramaic that are a little more expansive. So, they seem to be introducing more changes, and it seems to be more intentional. And so, from a text critical point of view, in other words, if we're trying to reconstruct what their source text looked like, it's a little more difficult and doesn't really seem to give us as clear a view of their source. But there's a theory that the Targumim were actually translated on the fly, that in a service, they would've stood to read in the Hebrew, and they would've had someone next to them who would be translating on the fly into Aramaic.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan That's one theory about how- Sure ... some of the Targumim got to be so different from the source texts as we understand them. And there are other theories about the Targumim, and we have different versions of the Targumim that expand on some things, try to harmonize passages where there are conflicts in the Masoretic Text, or where there's something that's interesting or that we don't have a lot of information, they will expand on that. And so that's the next early translation, is into Aramaic, what we now know as the Targumim, and I think the earliest manuscripts of that come from the second and third centuries CE. Those are the two that predate the development of what we might call a biblical canon, because it's right between the second and fifth centuries CE that we have the crystallization of the boundaries of what could be considered scripture within Judaism and Christianity.

Dan Beecher This may be a weird question. I'm going to make you define something that, it's a phrase that even I've used so far in this, and that is the Hebrew Bible. Mm-hmm. What are we talking about when we say the phrase Hebrew Bible?

Dan McClellan So, I use Hebrew Bible because this is a bit more of an academic standard, but more or less, it's the same as the Old Testament. Okay. The content is the same. However, when I refer to the Hebrew Bible, I refer to it as it is found within the, for instance, the Leningrad Codex. And if a Jewish person were to open up their scriptures today, it's a different order of the books. Primarily, it has to do with the order that the writings and the prophets go in. The Pentateuch, the Books of Moses are the same, but the order of the rest of the books are a bit different. And some of it has to do with the rhetorical goals of this arrangement, this collection of books. So, in the Christian Old Testament, it ends with Malachi, which is this finger-wagging threat about Elijah and the great day of the Lord and everything burning like stubble and all this kind of stuff. And this kind of sets the table for the New Testament because we've got this promise of this something that's coming, Elijah is coming, and then we go, "Hey, look. Somebody was born. Somebody very special was born." And so it's kind of segueing into- Right ... the New Testament. Whereas if you look at the Jewish arrangement of the Hebrew Bible, it ends with 2 Chronicles, which is ending with a description of the return to Israel and the promise of restoration. Mm. And so from a Jewish point of view, the collection ends with looking forward to and hoping for the restoration of this kingdom. So I refer to the Hebrew Bible because I primarily am studying it as it was put together for an ancient Judahite, Judean/Jewish audience, rather than the Christian Old Testament.

Dan Beecher Interesting. Is the word Hebrew in that a linguistic reference or a cultural reference?

Dan McClellan It's a bit of both. The majority of the texts are written in Hebrew, but there is some Aramaic, parts of Ezra, parts of Daniel, a couple of words and verses here and there are in Aramaic. So it's not unilaterally Hebrew, but it is overwhelmingly Hebrew, and so the name is not perfectly accurate. It's not a perfect name, but it has become the academic convention. Sure.

Dan Beecher I don't mean to get hung up on it. I'm just trying

Dan McClellan to- No worries. I'm glad to make that- ... try to

Dan Beecher keep it all straight.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm glad to make that clarification because I do get questions about that from time to time as well.

Dan Beecher Okay. So is there more to get into with the sort of ancient translations or...?

Dan McClellan Well, I think we talked about the ones that come before the

Dan Beecher development of a canon.

Dan McClellan Right. And they kind of go beyond what we understand as the canon of the Bible, whether we're talking about the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and we haven't even talked about the New Testament yet. But we can get into the earliest translations of the Bible after we can talk about canonization, if you like. And that's still ancient- Yeah ... but not as ancient.

Dan Beecher Well, and presumably through this, as we talk about canonization, there were manuscripts, there were books that fell out of favor-

Dan McClellan Absolutely ... or

Dan Beecher that became less popular, and so just sort of didn't make it through- Mm-hmm ... into more, I hesitate to use the word modern because we're not there yet- Mm-hmm ... but into popular usage.

Dan McClellan Yeah, there were a number of them. The Apocrypha that is found in the Catholic deuterocanon and the Orthodox canon, and there are others that we refer to now as pseudepigrapha. Some of them were composed anciently in Hebrew and translated into Greek. Some of them were composed in Greek. And this was one of the criteria that some people use kind of retroactively to explain why the Hebrew Bible ended up the way it did, why things like the First Enoch and Jubilees and these other texts, why they were omitted from the canon. And a lot of people would suggest it's because they were written in Greek along with some of the apocryphal books. The books of Maccabees, for instance, were not included in the Hebrew biblical canon. And then ultimately, they were omitted. Well, they were relegated to deuterocanonical status for the early Christian Church. But we also have what we might call apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Christian texts as well that weren't included, but still get translated by scholars today. In fact, there are a couple different books, if anyone's interested in some of the non-canonical texts that were considered authoritative and were very popular in early Judaism, in early Christianity, there are a couple of different places you can look. For the New Testament, for instance, there is a translation called "The New New Testament," where if you look that up, it's going to give you a lot of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical gospels and other texts.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And then Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše also translated a text that they called "The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament." And this is translations into English of, ooh, let's see, how many texts are there? 39? 39 different- Whoa ... texts that are about Jesus or are secondary gospels. Many of them Gnostic, but some others as well. You can find great English translations of all of those in that text, "The Other Gospels." And then Old Testament or Hebrew Bible Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, there are a couple series right now that are translating these into English. But James, is it Charles? No. Charlesworth. There's a gentleman named Charlesworth who translated or borrowed translations of a lot of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature of the Hebrew Bible that you can find as well. I think one volume was called... Or no, they're both the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. One is Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. One is, I don't remember what volume two is called.

Dan Beecher Can you tell me what, you've said pseudepigrapha.

Dan McClellan Pseudepigrapha,

Dan Beecher yeah. I mean, pseudo, I understand what that means. I know what a pig is, but something tells me I've gotten that wrong.

Dan McClellan So pseudepigrapha means false writings. Okay. And the idea is that these are texts that were written in the name of some famous or significant figure from ancient Jewish or Christian history, but that was clearly written well after that time period, and so was not written by that historical figure, such as-

Dan Beecher But for some reason, we're not applying that word to Matthew, Mark, Luke,

Dan McClellan and John. Yeah. Well, that's the tyranny of tradition. Yeah. Because those things get into the canon, and they're kind of the beating heart of the Christian canon. And so pseudepigrapha is a name that came along much later as scholars were looking at other non-canonical stuff. So- Right ... you have that tyranny of tradition, but many scholars today think maybe words like canonical and non-canonical are problematic in and of themselves. They give these texts pride of place in many discussions about periods that predated their canonization, and so that can be problematic as well.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan So if we move then into the period following the canonization of the Bible, so in the fourth and fifth centuries, we already have other translations that are taking place. Within early Christianity, we have the translation of the Bible into Latin, and this takes place first, I believe, around the third century. There's an early Latin translation. Is this the Vulgate? So the Vulgate is the secondary translation. Oh, okay. There are manuscripts of Latin translations that were in circulation for a century before we get to the Vulgate. But the Vulgate was- Wow ... translated at the very end, up to around 400 CE, by a man named Jerome. And you can go visit the cave in Bethlehem where he spent 30 years translating his Vulgate. But this was a transla- These

Dan Beecher dudes and their caves, man. Caves were a

Dan McClellan big deal back then. That was- You've got to

Dan Beecher get yourself a cave. You want to do some good work, get a cave.

Dan McClellan Very cool in the summer, but they could get pretty drafty in the winter. And so we have the translation into Latin. We have an early Latin, and then we have the Vulgate around 400 CE. And this is being done primarily from the Septuagint, and this is an interesting thing. Early Christians overwhelmingly used the Septuagint. They didn't use the Hebrew manuscripts. And so when we look in the New Testament, most of the quotations from the Hebrew Bible are quotations of the Greek translation, which is why they frequently differ. If- That--

Dan Beecher Yeah, that's really interesting.

Dan McClellan It is, and if Christians compare the quotes in the New Testament to their Old Testament, which is going to be a translation from the Masoretic Text, not the Septuagint, in most instances. If we're talking about Greek Orthodox Church or other Eastern traditions, they still use the Septuagint. But you're going to see differences, and those differences are sometimes very, very meaningful. Sometimes they're not as big a deal, but sometimes they're very meaningful. And they were so convinced that the Septuagint was the true version of the scriptures that you have a lot of accusations that the Jewish folks have altered the text of the Bible- Oh ... to make it less messianic, to make it not point to Jesus.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And in reality, what was going on is they were using a Greek translation that had been executed in a period when there was a lot more fervent Messianism. Right. And so the Septuagint feels more messianic because it was translated in a time when they were interpreting a lot of these texts messianically. And-

Dan Beecher They were trying to point to Jesus.

Dan McClellan Well, to a Messiah. Okay. And then the Jesus tradition developed in light of what was being expected in that text. And so the early Christians would look at the Septuagint and say, "Yeah, this is about Jesus. Why are they using these Hebrew texts that aren't about Jesus?" And so they accused them of altering the text, which was the opposite of- The opposite, right. Yeah ... of what the case was. And you have Origen of Alexandria creates what's called the Hexapla, which is a bunch of different versions of the Hebrew Bible side by side in columns, including a transliteration of the Hebrew and a translation into Greek. And then we have these different what we call recensions of the Greek, which are basically someone took the Greek and redacted it, edited it a little bit to kind of bring it into alignment with the developing understanding of a standardized Hebrew Bible text. So there was a trajectory from more variation towards what would ultimately become the standardized Masoretic Text.

Dan Beecher And so- I will say, in sort of trying to do research for this episode, I was reading just on Wikipedia about that, about the... What did you just call it?

Dan McClellan The recensions? Yes.

Dan Beecher I'm sorry. The name of the guy who did that.

Dan McClellan There were three main ones. Symmachus is one. Is that who you're thinking of?

Dan Beecher No. You had just talked about him. Gosh dang it. I'm trying to find him on the

Dan McClellan thing. Oh, Origen?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes.

Dan Beecher We're talking about origin stories here. And I read this sentence and was like, "I don't know what I'm doing here." You'd think that on Wikipedia, I'd at least be able to understand what I'm reading. But when I read the sentence, "His eclectic recension of the Septuagint had a significant influence on the Old Testament text in several important manuscripts." I was like, "I don't know-" I know. Here's the thing. I know the word eclectic, but I don't think I know it in how it's being used here.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Recension is something. Septuagint is something. Yeah. So I'm glad that we're doing this. Because eclectic isn't like he just had a wild way of doing it. Right. That's not what we're talking about.

Dan McClellan Eclectic means drawing from different sources.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the Hexapla is taking these columns of the text from different sources. Some of it's coming from a straightforward translation, a transliteration, one of these recensions. So Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are the three men in the second century CE who create these recensions of the Septuagint. And so the text is being altered and developed and negotiated as we're going, both in Hebrew as well as in translation. And so Jerome was actually one of the ones who wanted to return to what he called the Hebraica Veritas, or the truth of the Hebrew. He advocated for the primacy, the priority of the Hebrew manuscripts over and against the Septuagint. He still used the Septuagint in creating the Vulgate, but that was kind of the turning point where Christianity went from the Greek is right, the Hebrew is wrong, to kind of going back saying, "Okay, fine, the Hebrew is right." But the Vulgate would become the master document, the database basically for the scriptures for the next thousand plus years. That would-

Dan Beecher And so this is in Latin.

Dan McClellan This is in Latin. The Vulgate. Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So now we're talking about the Catholic Church has really taken hold as the sort of dominant, as the only Christian organization in at least Eastern Europe or Western Europe,

Dan McClellan I mean, right? Western Europe. Yeah. The Catholic Church was the main institution of Christianity in Western Europe. And in the Eastern Church, they were still using the Septuagint. Right. But we also have another tradition. In the early fourth century, around the time of Nicaea and the development of our canon, we had some missionaries who went south to a place called Axum, which is the kingdom that is now known as Ethiopia, and they took the manuscripts of the Septuagint with them. Now, this is before they had whittled it down to what we now know as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and even the Apocrypha. So what they took down to what we now know as Ethiopia was a much larger set of texts, and Christianity took hold in the kingdom of Axum independent of what was going on up north with the Western Church and the Eastern Church, and they're doing their thing, and they're fighting, and they're arguing, and they're having schisms. And down south, they're just carrying on. And so their canon is the largest canon in the world. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has all the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as the Apocrypha, as well as other texts. So they still have versions of 1 Enoch, and different books of the Maccabees, and even some other texts that don't have a counterpart in our Hebrew and Greek canons and deuterocanons. And so one of the other early translations was into a language we call Ge'ez or Ethiopic. And in fact, our earliest manuscripts of the Book of Enoch are in Ethiopic, at least our earliest full manuscripts. And then we found some fragmentary manuscripts of 1 Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so we're kind of able to look at the development of the text between the Hebrew of some of the fragmentary Hebrew manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then our Ethiopic manuscripts, which are primarily from the 11th, 12th, 13th century CE. Wow. So while all this is going on up north with Greek and Latin, we also have the Ethiopic, the Ge'ez translations going on in Africa. And then there's also some translations into Gothic. As missionaries are trying to branch out further into Europe, there are very early translations in the West into Gothic languages, and then in the East into Slavic languages, like Old Church Slavonic and things like that going on in the fifth and the sixth century CE. And so these translations, these ancient manuscripts, are also very important for text critical purposes, for trying to understand the development of the text. And I think I left out Syriac. So I guess that is another, it's a type of Aramaic, but early Syriac Christianity in what is now Iraq, some of our earliest translations of the New Testament, as well as translations of the Hebrew Bible are into Syriac. And they were in use among Christian communities in Iraq, and some of those communities still exist down to this day. Wow. And that's one of the reasons that Aramaic still exists. It's largely known as Neo-Assyrian today, but these are pockets of Christian communities that have existed in Iraq since the second and third century CE. So there are translations that are taking place in all of the places where Christianity is getting a toehold, whether it's Africa or Italy, or deeper into Germanic Europe or into Eastern Europe, around Russia, or among the Syriac/Aramaic Christians in ... in Iraq. So lots of different translations going on very quickly once the canon develops.

Dan Beecher Interesting that the Goths would get their own translation, but everybody in Western Europe so far, they have to hear it in the Latin.

Dan McClellan And that's primarily because of the institutional concerns. The institution wants to unify and wants to be able to oversee what's going on, and so they want things to be carried on in the ecclesiastical Latin, and that's going to be the thorn in the side of early English translators of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Right. And I propose that we take a break right now.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And we will come back and get to English translations.

Dan McClellan Excellent. Hey, everybody. Have you ever wondered how you can support the "Data Over Dogma" podcast?

Dan Beecher Why wouldn't you wonder such a thing? Well, you can become a patron of our show, and that is a fairly easy thing to do. Go over to patreon.com, that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N, I'll get it eventually. Good. .com/dataoverdogma. You can choose how much you want to give. It's a monthly thing, and your contribution helps foot the bill for everything that we have to do here, helps make the show go, and we sure would appreciate it if you'd consider becoming a patron. Thanks.

Dan McClellan Thank you.

Dan Beecher All right, and we're back, and when we last left this humble little book, it had been stuck in the Latin and the Gothic and the Slavic and the Gaets. But the poor French and English had nothing. The Spanish, forget about it. So we've got to get it into our language. Yeah. How does that happen?

Dan McClellan Well, that actually starts off pretty soon after all these other translations are being rendered. Our earliest translations into English are glosses and interlinear translations, basically attempts by people to take the Latin translation and render it in a way that's going to be more accessible to the common folk who may not know Latin as well. And these were, we might call them rogue translations. They're not endorsed by anybody, they're not official, but influential Christians in the church started rendering glosses primarily of the Gospels and the Book of Psalms. And so the Venerable Bede, who was most active in the early 8th century CE, is said to have translated the Gospel of John into English shortly before his death.

Dan Beecher We met him talking about Easter.

Dan McClellan Talking about Easter, right. He wrote this long text on the reckoning of time and gave us a lot of great information about their calendar. Calendars anciently were so much more important and significant than they tend to be today. But we have a handful of other folks who are either writing translations of the English in the margins of manuscripts of the Vulgate.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan Okay. And those are some of our earliest translations into English in between around 600 and 1000 CE. And this is old English, so not the kind of thing someone today is going to be able to easily recognize or read. Right. And then we have some Anglo-Saxon translations after the year 1000 that are very much in a similar vein, only they're branching out beyond the Gospels and the Book of Psalms to Genesis and Exodus and things like that. Our first-

Dan Beecher So these aren't important translations, they're just sort of jotted down-

Dan McClellan Yeah ... way- Not phenomenally influential translations. They were no doubt used in their time and in their place and were probably very helpful for folks who otherwise couldn't have accessed the text or gained much purchase on understanding the text. But yeah, they're not incredibly influential. Now the first full translation of the Bible into English that we get is known as the Wycliffe Bible after John Wycliffe, or Wycliffe if you're nasty. And scholars are pretty sure that he is not responsible for translating the whole thing, though. It was probably him and his followers who were responsible for translating that Bible. But it was based on the Latin Vulgate. So it was an English translation of the Latin Vulgate rather than something that went back to the source text. And the same is true, I probably should have mentioned it, but the same is true of these other translations, these glosses of Psalms and the Gospels and everything. They're translating the Latin. Right. They're not translating the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek. And that was published around 1382. And this is before the printing press, so this is hand-copied manuscripts that we have. So they were not widely disseminated. The-

Dan Beecher Was Wycliffe, was he a monk? Was he a holy man of some sort?

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't remember exactly what position he held, but I can pull it up real quick. An English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford.

Dan Beecher Okay. So- And all of those things tended to overlap with each other. To some degree,

Dan McClellan yeah. Scholarship was almost exclusively done by ... priests and that sort of thing. Yeah, priests or people who held university posts, and they were frequently given to priests- Right ... and things like that. So Wycliffe marks the transition into what we might refer to as the Reformation. And then we get Martin Luther, who is translating into German. And one of the first things that Martin Luther does is translates the New Testament, and then the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, into German. But rather than going from the Latin, Martin Luther is going to go directly from the Greek and from the Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan Now, the problem was, up until this point, you couldn't easily access a critical text of the Greek New Testament. You had manuscripts of certain books of the Greek New Testament available at a variety of libraries, but you couldn't go to the store and get a Greek New Testament. Right. Latin was the easiest to do. And there was this Dutch scholar named Desiderius Erasmus, who was working at the end of the 15th, beginning of the 16th century CE, who wanted to put together an edition of the Latin, the Vulgate New Testament, kind of a new translation. But one of the things he came up with in an effort to outshine the other editions that were going to be out there was he wanted to provide the Greek source text so that he could show his work. And so what- Yeah ... he ended up doing was created a dual-column Latin translation of the New Testament and the Greek. And he went to his library in Basel, Switzerland, and he said, "Give me all the Greek New Testament manuscripts you've got." And that numbered six. There were two main ones that covered the majority of the New Testament, and then there were four others that he used to fill in some gaps. And there were places where he was like, "I think that probably was more original than this one from my main manuscript." And so he cobbled together from these six manuscripts a Greek New Testament. Now, he didn't have a manuscript that covered the last few verses of Revelation in Greek, so he took the Latin and back-translated into Greek. And so the way he showed his work was not by showing the Greek source for his Latin, but translating the Latin back into Greek.

Dan Beecher Oh my gosh, that's so funny.

Dan McClellan But this-

Dan Beecher Do you remember there was a "Saturday Night Live" sketch where they translated a song... I don't know. The whole setup was that this was French singers who a song had been translated into French, and they had translated it back into English for the people.

Dan McClellan Anyway. Yeah. I don't think I remember that one. Was that in the early days?

Dan Beecher Yeah, I think that was in the early days. Anyway,

Dan McClellan yes.

Dan Beecher It is a bit of a blunder. Yeah. It's a game of Operation or a game of Operator at that point,

Dan McClellan yeah. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Or Telephone or whatever.

Dan McClellan But what was so special about what Erasmus produced was this was the first time that anyone had produced what we now would refer to as a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. And so now people could access the Greek New Testament, and so Martin Luther used that as the source text for his translation of the New Testament directly from the Greek. And another dude by the name of William Tyndale, or Tyndale if you're nasty, decided he would do the same. Inspired by Martin Luther, he was going to translate the New Testament, only this time into English. And he had to go into hiding in order to do this because the church had outlawed what we call vernacular translations or translations into local languages and dialects, and English was considered one of those. It was-

Dan Beecher And these were direct acts of rebellion against the church.

Dan McClellan Absolutely. And while he was doing this, he was also publishing treatises and things like that attacking the church. But one of the things that Tyndale did was he changed some of the words that were used. He didn't like the fact that the New Testament in Latin referred to a church as an organization, an institution. He thought, "This is just a gathering of Christians in the New Testament." So he changed it to, I think he used assembly or congregation, I think he used. And then for the priests, he went back to elder and changed a handful of words that were used to support the institution of the church, but that Tyndale thought, "Nah, we're not going to do that. We're going to try to understand the text as it was understood anciently." And Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, which was first published in 1525/26, we're not exactly sure which year it was published in, has become the single most influential translation of the Bible that we know. This inspired Shakespeare. A lot of Shakespeare is taken from Tyndale. There are all kinds of turns of phrase and words that we use in

Dan Beecher English. In part because Shakespeare was writing just a little before another very famous

Dan McClellan edition came out. Edition of the Bible, yeah. So Tyndale puts the New Testament out there, and then he starts to translate the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. He gets through the Pentateuch and gets through Samuel and Kings, and I think he does Jonah as well. But he's able to publish that before he's ultimately burnt at the stake and famously cries out before his death, "O Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Yeah, there are a bunch of very fascinating biographies of Tyndale, but that set the stage for the English translations that would come after. So we have this other guy named Coverdale Who comes in and he wants to complete Tyndale's translation of the Old Testament, but he doesn't know Hebrew. And so he actually takes-

Dan Beecher That is a bit of a stumbling block.

Dan McClellan He found a way to get around it. But he took Tyndale's Old Testament, what he had translated, and then he took the Vulgate, and he took the German, and he took other translations of languages that he spoke, Latin and German, for instance, and he translated from those languages into English. And so in 1535, we have the first printed full Bible that was published by Miles Coverdale, and it is the work of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale together. So the Coverdale Bible is the first full printed English Bible translated directly from Hebrew manuscripts and Greek and Aramaic manuscripts. And then this gets revised and published by others. You have the Matthews Bible, you have the Geneva Bible, you have the Great Bible, you have the Bishop's Bible, which was first published in 1568. And then we have this Hampton Court Conference in 1604, where a gentleman by the name of Reynolds stands up and this conference is basically between Puritans and the Church of England trying to haggle over how to get along better. And this guy named Reynolds stands up and says, "We need a new translation of the Bible that we can all unify around." And this guy, this new king, and King James decides he likes this idea and so commissions a new translation of the Bible. And he's hoping that it will replace the Geneva Bible, which at the time was the most popular English Bible translation, but was also very anti-monarchical.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They weren't happy about the king, and in fact, the Puritans who make it to the Americas are primarily trying to escape from under the thumb of monarchy, and the Geneva Bible is what they took with them. And there were a lot of marginal notes, explanatory notes about how in support of this idea that you find in a few places in the Bible where our king should be the Lord, shouldn't have any human king.