Expert: Brenda Martin - 8/26/2005

Question
When was the earliest translation of the english bible, who translated it?
What was it translated from?
How can i be sure through facts, that it was an acurate translation?

Answer
Hi Andrew, Here are my findings--

The record of Christendom's religions includes bitter opposition to the distribution of the Bible and its “good news.” And no wonder!—for it exposes her bloodguilt. During the infamous Dark Ages, when for more than a thousand years Christendom was dominated by the popes of Rome, no effort was made to circulate the Bible among the common people. The few copies available were in Latin, a language that in time came to be known only to the priests.

When at last courageous men attempted to translate the Bible into the language of the common people, so that these could read and understand it, they were persecuted, often to the death. **In the fourteenth century C.E., John Wycliffe first translated the Bible from Latin into English. But the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, England, described him as “that pestilent wretch . . . the son of the old Serpent,” and some years after his death, opponents of the Bible dug up his remains, burned them and threw his ashes into the river Swift.

In the sixteenth century, William Tyndale set out to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English, declaring, “If God spare my life, I will, before many years have passed, cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than the priests do.”

But he had to flee from England to the European continent in order to translate and print his Bible. Copies were then smuggled into England and began to circulate in great numbers, despite the clergy's publicly burning all the Bibles that they could find.

A hypocritical person betrayed Tyndale, and he was executed by being strangled at the stake, after which his body was burned. But his Bible translation lived on, so that ordinary people like a plowboy could read its “good news.” Later it was extensively consulted in the preparation of the well-known English King James version of the Bible.

Wycliffe's translation of the Bible created an appetite for the Scriptures that needed to be satisfied. At the same time, the use of this version in preaching revealed that often its renderings were hard to understand. A revision was needed to put the Bible's message into the language of the ordinary people. In this work, a number of Wycliffe's followers assisted, and his closest companion, John Purvey, seems to have taken the lead.

A preface or prologue to the second Wycliffe version describes some of the principles used in the translation. The Latin text was not simply accepted as it stood, for the translators realized that errors and corruptions had crept in through the centuries. As many old editions as possible were collected and compared “to make one Latin Bible some deal true; and then to study it anew, the text with the gloss”—a method almost unheard of in those days.

In arriving at a purer Latin text, the translators also endeavored to find the most correct and accurate meaning of difficult words and phrases, and to understand something of the grammar used. Finally, the translator would stick “as clearly as he could to the sentence” and would then have the work checked and corrected.—The English Hexapla, p. 29.

The result was an English translation in which an effort was made to keep the sense of the Latin while using the English idiom. Indicative of the popularity of the revision may be the fact that today five times as many copies of the later version exist as of the earlier one. Many of the words and phrases were carried over into Tyndale's version, and thus into the Authorized Version.

all the best
Brenda