What I am Reading

Abstract

Over the past few years I have been engaged in a collaborative project, with Matthew McLean of the University of St Andrews, investigating Protestant translations of the Bible into Latin. As early modernists and teachers, we are familiar with the importance of the work of Luther, Tyndale, Zwingli and others who brought scripture into the languages of the people. Indeed, one of the most astonishing experiences I have had recently was to speak about a Tyndale Pentateuch and New Testament recently acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Such emphasis on the vernacular, however, has overlooked the reality that for most sixteenthcentury Protestant churchmen Latin remained a sacred language and the common tongue of the educated. Erasmus’s New Testament of 1516 and his later Latin translation were an inspiration to a generation of humanists who endeavored to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to render the Word of God into Latin, the language of the church and its theology. Our project examines the evolution of Protestant Latin Bible scholarship over the sixteenth century, considering issues of translation, page and text, doctrine, and readership. We focus on four Bibles: Sebastian Munster’s Old Testament of 1534/ 5; the 1543 Biblia Sacrosancta from Zurich; Sebastian Castellio’s Biblia Latina; and the several editions of the Testamenti veteris of Franciscus Junius and Immanuel Tremellius. In addition to these Bibles there were numerous translations of individual books of the Bible. The challenges facing the translators were legion. To begin, knowledge of Hebrew in the early and mid-sixteenth century was limited to a small group of men dependent on their Jewish teachers. There was little agreement on how Hebrew should be turned into Latin. Jerome was regarded as the model to be emulated, but the needs of the sixteenth century were different. Munster intentionally translated the Old Testament into literal, ugly Latin not because he was a poor stylist. His intention was to provide a tool for Christian scholars to learn the ancient language. Ten years later the scholars in Zurich eschewed the literal approach to produce a translation of Hebrew into Latin that was pleasing to the eye. Although they held Munster in high regard they cast his literal renderings into the marginalia. The most radical approach came from Sebastian Castellio, who argued that Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, should be treated as a Greek orator. The Hebrew of the Old Testament was, therefore, to be put into the very best Ciceronian Latin to the extent that the traditional Latin vocabulary for God, angels, and the church was abandoned for more elegant classical words. Finally, the most influential Bible was prepared by reformation, Vol. 20 No. 2, November, 2015, 151–153