Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible by Mark Ward L. Jr

Author:Mark, Ward L., Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bible. English--Versions--Authorized.
Publisher: Bellingham, WA
Published: 2017-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

THE REFORMATION AND VERNACULAR TRANSLATION

The idea that the word of God should be permitted to calcify slowly into a language normal people can’t read is one of the reasons we had a Protestant Reformation, a movement launched by a monk whose first act after defying a church council with, “My conscience is captive to the word of God” was to hole himself up in Wartburg castle and translate the Bible into German. There he sat; he could do no other.

Richard Muller dedicates a whole section to “Vernacular Translation” in his magisterial summary of the theology of the Reformation. He summarizes the views of one German reformer, born in 1584, Marcus Friedrich Wendelin:

The prophets and apostles themselves spoke and wrote in the vernacular in order that their hearers might understand: translation thus enables the Scriptures to be read by all, as the prophets and apostles themselves intended.… All believers are commanded to read and study the Scriptures (John 5:39; Deut. 31:11) as, indeed, the apostle praised the Bereans (Acts 17:11). Beyond this, the command to preach to all nations implies the need to translate Scripture, as does the great effort of the early church to produce translations in all of the languages of believers.23

The Bible had been translated previously into languages people actually spoke, notably into Syriac (a version of Aramaic) in the second century after Christ and into Latin, Gothic, Coptic, and Ethiopic around the fourth century. But for various religious and cultural reasons (reasons that were not distinguished that way at the time), it was many centuries before any large groups of people got the Bible in their own languages. There were pre-Reformation vernacular Bibles,24 but it took the Reformation to give us the profusion that we have since enjoyed, a blessed florescence (!) that has not ceased to this day—and must not, if we are to teach the nations to observe everything God commanded.

The churches of the Protestant Reformation gave us not only the German Luther Bible (1522), but also the Polish Brest Bible (1563), the Spanish “Biblia del Oso” (1569), the Czech Melantrich Bible (1549), the French d’Étaples translation (1530), Dalmatin’s Slovene translation (1578), Chyliński’s Lithuanian Bible (1659), and of course Tyndale’s English New Testament (1526) and Pentateuch (1530). Ethnologue.com, the work of Christian Bible translators, lists all 7,099 human languages along with an indication of whether they have the Bible or not. I have multiple friends who have given their lives to this kind of work—as William Tyndale quite literally gave his—and have come up with innovative ways to get it done faster and more accurately. They are motivated by the grand mission of giving people the Bible in their own language.

Ideas have consequences. Theology matters. Just as the Mormon idea of “baptism for the dead” has led that religion to build a massive genealogical database, and just as Muslim practice has given work to those who manufacture prayer mats, so “Bible translation as we know it today is fueled to a considerable extent by evangelical

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