The People of the Book (in translation no less)

Last updated on: March 13, 2026 at 1:08 am by Ben Witherington

The People of the Book (in translation no less) 2026-03-07T11:31:50-05:00 Ben Witherington

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Ancient peoples did not really have sacred texts in the same way ancient Israelites did. This was not because other ANE cultures didn’t believe in the concept of revelation or inspiration and so of prophecy. Clearly they did. But these were all predominantly oral cultures, whereas starting with Moses, the Hebrews were told to write things down, indeed in the first instance ‘in stone’– the ten Words is what they called them, or later the ten commandments. It was the Israelites that continued in this tradition to write down what God had revealed to them, both while they were in the Holy Land and later when they were in exile and scattered to various ANE countries, including Egypt. It is a mistake to assume that once many Jews left Egypt with Moses, that involved all the Jews there, or that that involved them not moving back to Egypt later, especially during periods of famine. Even before the beginning of the NT era, there were thousands upon thousands of Jews living in Egypt, with a particularly large group in Alexandria. It is probably here where the books of the OT were first translated into Greek, because many Jews only spoke Greek, and knew little Hebrew or Aramaic, and yet they wanted and needed God’s Word to guide them. Listen to what John Barclay has to say about the remarkable production of the LXX or Septuagint.

“Never before in the history of religion had a translation been the focus of such religious celebration. It was only among Jews that written documents were accorded such direct revelatory significance, and only among Diaspora Jews, unable to read their original script, that their Greek version could be the object of such respect”; John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 424.

Not only so, but when Constantine in 325 A.D. commissioned Eusebius of Caesarea (later to be called the father of church history due to his early church chronicles), he commissioned Bible composed entirely in Greek– a Greek OT and a Greek NT! This was indeed the first complete Christian Bible, and it involved neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. Of the original copies made, Codex Vaticanus maybe be a remaining original of this compilation.

Codex Vaticanus (Illustration) - World History Encyclopedia

This however left western Christians who only knew Latin, without a Bible, hence Jerome’s attempt to produce a standard Latin translation of the Bible, but interestingly, he drew on the Hebrew OT as well as the Greek Bible. Here is a helpful online summary of what he did.

“Jerome’s****Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, is a significant work that shaped Christian theology, liturgy, and scholarship. Jerome’s translation was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 AD to provide a standardized Latin version of the Bible. His work involved revising existing Latin translations of the Gospels and translating the Old Testament from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. By the mid 6th century, Jerome’s complete Bible was commonly used, and by the 16th century, the Council of Trent had declared the Vulgate as the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome’s translation philosophy emphasized “sense for sense, not word for word,” and his engagement with Jewish sources set him apart in the Western church.“

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