Artifacts That Affirm the Wordනියැදිය

Erasmus’s New Testament and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible

Bible translation is a challenging task. Today, Bible translators have a wide variety of technological tools, from simple digital concordances to AI-powered quality assessment software, that make the translation process more efficient and accurate. Before these existed, Bible translation was far more challenging.

In the early 1500s, Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus completed a Greek edition of the New Testament, which became the first published Greek New Testament, known as the Novum Instrumentum Omne. It included the Greek text and Latin translation side-by-side, allowing for easy comparison between the two. Erasmus published many subsequent editions of his Greek New Testament that corrected errors and improved the quality of his text. His work became the basis for translations into vernacular languages, such as Martin Luther’s German translation, William Tyndale’s English translation, and many others.

Around the same time, other scholars were working on both Greek editions of the New Testament and Hebrew editions of the Old Testament. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, published soon after Erasmus’s New Testament, contains Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin editions and translations of the biblical text. It was overseen by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who gathered Hebrew, Greek, and Latin scholars to work on this project. With the inclusion of several different languages, this Bible presented the ability to cross-reference different textual traditions; comparing different versions could give a more nuanced and richer understanding of the text. The text of the Latin Vulgate, an influential fourth-century translation by St. Jerome that continued to be used during this time by the Catholic Church, was also included in this Bible, allowing for comparison between this version to Scripture in the original languages.

Both of these Bibles became sources scholars used to study and compare different translations in one place, making them important sources for biblical scholarship and future translations. With these examples, we can also see how access to the Bible in different languages, especially in the original languages, can enrich and enhance the reading and understanding of Scripture.

In this plan, we’ve examined a few manuscripts that help us see the transmission, translation, and dissemination of the biblical texts throughout the years. Of course, these are simply snippets of a much larger story, and we encourage you to dig deeper to learn more about the rich and unique history of the Bible.