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IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
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Bible Translations I (History)
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Bible Translations I (History)
The Bible is the most frequently translated book in the world. As of January 2024, the New Testament has been translated into 1,682 languages. The full text of the Holy Scriptures is available in 743 languages. This means that approximately 80 per cent of the world’s population can read a complete Bible in their own native language.
A long history of biblical translation has brought us to this point. In addition to the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bibles in Latin also became increasingly common as Christianity became more important in the Roman Empire. There were many differences between these Latin manuscripts, however. To change this, Pope Damasus I commissioned the scholar Jerome to produce a new Latin edition in the fourth century CE. This became known as the “Vulgate,” which means “the commonly used.”
At the same time as Jerome, the Gothic theologian Ulfila produced the first Bible in a Germanic language, translated from the Greek source texts. Since there was no written version of the Gothic language yet, Ulfila invented one especially for his Bible!
From the eighth century on, we know of more and more German-language translations of the Bible. Most of these were translated from the Vulgate. This development continued into the fifteenth century, but there was no uniform tradition of translation.