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Bible

Several major changes during the Renaissance affected the way Europeans read and interpreted the Bible. The first development was a renewed interest in Greek and Hebrew, the original languages of the New and Old Testaments. The second was the production of Bibles in the vernacular—the languages common people used in their daily lives—rather than in Latin. And finally, the invention of printing made widespread distribution of the Bible possible for the first time.

TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION

At the beginning of the Renaissance, the accepted version of the Bible was a Latin translation known as the Vulgate. Many scholars believed it to be the work of St. Jerome, a church father who lived in the late 300s and early 400s. During the Renaissance, humanist* biblical scholars analyzed the Vulgate and wrote new translations from the original Greek and Hebrew texts.

Recovering the Greek Text. During the Middle Ages, scholars had little knowledge of ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament. Around 1400 a revival of Greek scholarship began. Many teachers entered Italy from Greece, and many western Europeans traveled to Greece to learn. When the Ottoman Empire conquered CONSTANTINOPLE in 1453, even more Christian scholars with a knowledge of ancient Greek came to the West.

Armed with new knowledge of ancient Greek, several scholars set out to improve their understanding of the New Testament. Lorenzo VALLA undertook one of the earliest and most influential efforts in 1444 with his Collatio Novi Testamenti. In this work he made a comparison (collatio) between the Vulgate's New Testament and a Greek text. Valla noted differences between the two versions, but he did not favor one text over the other. However, his work opened the door for later biblical criticism.

Interpretation and Criticism. Scholars who followed Valla not only translated the Bible, but also offered their own commentaries on the text. In 1509 Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples published an edition of the Book of Psalms that presented five different versions of each psalm. Each page showed four traditional versions and Lefèvre's personal interpretation. His was the first work to use this technique, which many other translators and commentators later adopted. Lefèvre carefully explained each word and verse of the text in every psalm. Despite its importance, Lefèvre's work suffered from his limited knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.

The great humanist scholar Desiderius ERASMUS published his own Greek version of the New Testament in 1516 and revised it in 1519. The second edition upset many religious scholars because it contained corrections and changes that affected the meaning of the text. In 1517 he published the first of his Paraphrases on the New Testament, a series that rewrote Biblical passages in simpler terms. Between 1516 and 1536, Erasmus also published several volumes of Annotations on the New Testament. In these works he commented on questions of language and theology* that interested him or that were subjects of debate.

Polyglot Bibles. Some scholars prepared polyglot editions of the Bible, which presented the text in several different languages. The first and most familiar is the Complutensian Polyglot. Cardinal Francisco Jiménes de Cisneros, the founder of a Spanish university, began work on the text in 1502. Each page of the Old Testament showed a single passage in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. It provided both the text of the Vulgate edition and a new Latin translation. The book also included the Targum of Onkelos, a paraphrase of the first five books of the Old Testament in the ancient language of Aramaic. The Targum appeared with its own Latin translation. The New Testament included both the original Greek and the Vulgate.

The Complutensian Polyglot was completed in 1517, but a wait for permission from the pope delayed its distribution until 1522. Over the next 135 years, scholars in Antwerp, Paris, and London produced three more polyglot Bibles. Scholars consider the London Polyglot (1655–1657) the most accurate of the four.

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE VERNACULAR BIBLE

The year 1517 marked the beginning of the PROTESTANT REFORMATION, a religious movement that divided Christians into Catholics and Protestants. Protestant leader Martin LUTHER argued that the true source of salvation was the Bible, rather than the traditions and practices of the church. Catholic religious scholars of the 1500s and 1600s spoke out against Luther's view. They held that the Bible was not clear and that the Catholic Church had the final say in determining its meaning.

The Reformation strongly influenced later versions of the Bible in two ways. First, it encouraged the production of vernacular Bibles, which people could read without knowing Latin. Protestants strongly supported vernacular Bibles, but the Catholic Church continued to rely on the Vulgate. It approved some vernacular Bibles prepared by Catholics but banned others. The Reformation also affected the focus of new versions of the Bible. The way translators interpreted specific passages often reflected their religious views.

German Versions. The first printed vernacular Bible, a German translation of the Vulgate, appeared in 1466. Seventeen more German Bibles based on the Vulgate followed. In September of 1522 Luther published a translation of the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek Bible. Over the next 12 years, he gradually translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into German. Luther worked with Greek and Hebrew scholars to create a Bible that would be clear and easy to read. He was careful to use language that was familiar to the common people.

By the time Luther died in 1546, his Wittenberg Bible had sold over 500,000 partial or complete copies throughout Europe. It was the most widely printed book in the German language. The Wittenberg Bible drew criticism from Catholics, who offered their own German translations as alternatives. However, they based most of these Catholic versions on Luther's translation. Soon, Germany was flooded with Bibles.

English Versions. The first complete English Bible was translated in the 1300s by John Wycliffe, an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church. After church officials accused Wycliffe of heresy* and banned his books, creating an English Bible became a crime. However, in the 1520s humanist William Tyndale believed that the English people were hungry for a vernacular Bible. To get around the law, Tyndale traveled to Germany to prepare an English version of the New Testament.

Authorities in the city of Cologne stopped Tyndale's first attempt in 1525. The following year, he published some 3,000 copies of a full New Testament in the city of Worms and sent them to England. Tyndale then moved to Antwerp, where authorities arrested him in 1535. A year later he was executed for heresy. Only two complete copies of his Bible survive, yet it formed the basis for all later English versions.

Meanwhile another translator, Miles Coverdale, had obtained permission from HENRY VIII to create an English Bible. He produced his first translation in 1535. Four years later he used Tyndale's work to create a new version, the Great Bible. The Church of England authorized this version and planned to set up a copy in every church. However, the most influential English Bible was the King James Version, published in 1611. Unlike many other Bibles of the day, it included no commentaries or notes on the text. Disliked at first, it became very popular in the late 1700s. The King James is still the most widely published edition of the Bible in English.

French Versions. In 1530, Jacques Lefèvre published the first complete French Bible, using the Vulgate as its basis. The first French translation from original languages appeared in Geneva five years later. The famous Protestant leader John CALVIN contributed an introduction to this book, called the French Geneva Bible. It became one of the most popular versions of Scripture in any language. New versions added notes and commentaries, many of which took strong Protestant stands on questions of theology.

The first Catholic edition of the Bible in French appeared in 1566. However, it relied on the Protestant French Geneva Bible, so Catholic scholars condemned it. In 1578 Christophe Plantin published a revision of the earlier Catholic edition. This version is called the Louvain Bible because it received the approval of theologians at the Catholic university in Louvain.

PRINTING AND THE BIBLE

The development of printing spread the text of the Bible throughout Europe on a scale never known before. It also helped promote new biblical scholarship.

Early Printed Bibles. Johann GUTENBERG's revolutionary invention, movable type, made widespread distribution of books possible. The first book he printed with movable type, around 1455, was a Bible. Gutenberg's Bible had less visual detail than manuscript Bibles of his day, but it used the same layout—two columns of text on each page. Gutenberg used a style of type that was similar to handwriting, and he left space so that scribes* could insert decorative initial letters by hand. Most Bibles used this approach until printers developed new methods of printing initial letters.

German and Italian Bibles of the 1400s often featured woodcut* illustrations, with some editions having hundreds. The Italian Malermi Bible of 1490 included 387 woodcuts. Printed Vulgate Bibles, by contrast, did not have illustrations before about 1500. In 1498 the great German artist Albrecht DÜRER published an illustrated copy of the Book of Revelation in both Latin and German. His work greatly influenced the illustrations of later Bibles.

Technical Improvements. Two important technical advances in Bible printing during the 1400s were the creation of smaller type and the ability to print Hebrew text accurately. Early Bibles were printed on large pages called folios. They were so large that the Bibles often consisted of more than one volume. As smaller type became available, Bibles shrank. The first quarto edition Bible (half the size of a folio) appeared in 1475, followed by an even smaller octavo Bible (half the size of a quarto) in 1491.

In 1477 printers in Bologna made the first attempt to produce a book of the Bible in Hebrew. The Hebrew letters in their Book of Psalms did not align with their vowel points, the small markings that indicate vowel sounds. Five years later Abraham ben Hayyim overcame this problem. His edition of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) also included the Targums. Ben Hayyim later joined the Soncino press in Italy, which printed the first complete Hebrew Bible in 1488.

(See also Books and Manuscripts; Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation; Censorship; Christianity; Humanism; Illumination; Jewish Languages and Literature; Ottoman Empire; Printing and Publishing; Translation.)

* humanist

referring to a Renaissance cultural movement promoting the study of the humanities (the languages, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome) as a guide to living

* Ottoman Empire

Islamic empire founded by Ottoman Turks in the 1300s that reached the height of its power in the 1500s; it eventually included large areas of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa

* theology

study of the nature of God and of religion

* heresy

belief that is contrary to the doctrine of an established church

"Perfection in This World"

Jewish scholars during the Middle Ages and Renaissance developed a rich tradition of biblical study and interpretation. Jewish thinkers saw the Torah—the most holy text in the Jewish religion, containing the first five books of the Bible—as vastly complex, requiring intense study and questioning. Preachers and teachers connected passages from Scripture to subjects as diverse as physics, politics, and psychology. One scholar claimed that the Torah "provides us with perfection in this world, as well as in the world to come … contained within it are all the sciences."

* scribe

person who copies manuscripts

* woodcut

print made from a block of wood with an image carved into it