What is the history of Bible translation?
The history of Bible translation began with a necessity: people should be able to read the Bible in their own languages as the gospel went into new lands. As familiarity with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek declined, biblical translation into new languages occurred. The History of Bible Translation – Early Translations – It was not until the fourteenth century that the Bible was translated into English. Latin was dominant in the western church. The principal Bible used in the church was Jerome’s Vulgate (completed in 405). Sporadic attempts to translate parts of the Bible into Old English (before 1100) gave limited access to the Bible for those who did not know Latin well. The Venerable Bede, a historian and scholar of the Early Middle Ages, had a great concern that the less-educated clergy be equipped for service through translation of parts of the Bible. He worked on a translation of the Gospel of John, but death intervened in 735. No copies survived. We have some “glossed” (written
