Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [19]
The next major step in the process that led to the Bible as it is known today came when Latin, the language of the Roman empire, replaced Greek as the Western world’s common language. By the time Christianity moved from outlaw religion to accepted faith after Emperor Constantine began to tolerate Christians in 313 CE, Greek was a dying language. Although Latin translations of parts of the Scriptures began to appear, there was no formal, official Latin version of the Bible. Beginning in 382 CE, a priest named Jerome began the process of bringing both Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament into Latin.
Working for twenty years in Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, Jerome went back to the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, instead of simply translating the Septuagint Greek into Latin. Jerome supervised the translation of a Latin Bible that was completed by 405 CE. His work resulted in the versio vulgata, or “common translation,” better known as the Vulgate Bible. To Jerome, vulgata meant “vulgar” in the sense of “commonly used,” rather than the widespread modern meaning of vulgar as “dirty.” But this is a perfect example of how words change meaning, a significant factor in understanding the Bible. Many words simply do not mean in the modern world what they meant in the Jerome’s Latin fifteen hundred years ago, or King James’s English of the 1600s. Among Jerome’s decisions was to retain the use of the name “Jesus,” which was how the first-century Greek writers of the New Testament had translated the Hebrew name Joshua.
At about the same time that Christians were transforming Greek into the Latin Vulgate, another crucial set of old Jewish scriptures was being maintained in its “official” Hebrew form by the Masoretes, a school of medieval Jewish scholars who worked between 500 CE and 1000 CE. They produced the original “Masoretic” text. The Masoretes made a crucial addition to the ancient Hebrew consonants-only writings—they included vowel signs, accent markings, and marginal notes, a kind of “Cliffs Notes” for the Hebrew Bible. These marginal notes provide a much clearer understanding of the ancient Hebrew texts, and the Masoretic texts have since become the standard used in studying ancient Hebrew scriptures. Yet even the oldest complete Masoretic texts—the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex—date only to about the year 1000 CE, practically a blink of the eye in the scheme of the Bible’s composition. (“Codex,” by the way, is a word for the earliest collections of bound pages; in other words, the first books were actually an innovation of the early Christians.)
When the Roman Catholic church became the predominant force in western Europe during the medieval era, the Latin Vulgate remained the standard by which European Christians knew the Bible. Of course, only priests and a few wealthy educated individuals could read the “Word of God.” During this era, the Scriptures were still copied by hand in the famed illuminated manuscripts of the so-called “Dark Ages.” Of course, few people could afford to own such a book and few ever saw one. Fewer still could read it. The Latin Mass, formalized and made into an elaborate ritual under Pope Damasus I (366-384), became the predominant form of worship in Europe. But most people had no idea what was being said in church. The advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1450 meant the Bible could be mechanically produced, but even then, only about two hundred copies of the Gutenberg Bible were produced. And it was still in Latin.
But in the early years of the movement that came to be called the Protestant Reformation, begun in Germany in 1517 by Martin Luther, a few daring souls attempted to translate Holy Scripture from the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into commonly used German and English. Like the mythical Prometheus, punished for bringing fire to mankind, some