Unit 17 · Paul, Interpretation and the Making of the Canon

Paul is the author of more books of the New Testament than anyone else. He was born a Jew in Tarsus, a city in what is now southern Turkey, according to the book of Acts (Acts 22:3). In his own words he was a Pharisee, a member of a Jewish movement devoted to careful keeping of the Torah (Philippians 3:5). Acts also says he was a Roman citizen and a tentmaker by trade (Acts 22:25–28; 18:3). He wrote in Greek, the shared language of the eastern Roman Empire.

Paul first appears as an opponent of the followers of Jesus. He says himself that he persecuted the church (Galatians 1:13). Then, on his own account, God revealed his Son to him and called him to preach to the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations (Galatians 1:15–16). Acts tells this as a dramatic scene on the road to Damascus, with a light and a voice (Acts 9). Christians call this Paul’s conversion; many scholars prefer the word call, since Paul never stopped seeing himself as a Jew.

Historians work from two kinds of sources. The letters are primary: Paul wrote them himself, in the middle of events. Acts, written later by the author of Luke’s gospel, tells a connected story of Paul’s journeys and arrest. Where the two disagree, most historians give more weight to the letters. Tradition holds that Paul was executed in Rome under the emperor Nero, c. 64–67 CE. The New Testament does not describe his death.

Thirteen letters in the New Testament open with Paul’s name. In the printed Bible they are arranged roughly by length, longest first, with letters to churches before letters to individuals. Romans comes first because it is the longest, not because it was written first. The earliest letter is probably 1 Thessalonians, from c. 50 CE. That makes it the oldest surviving Christian document, older than any of the four gospels.

Scholars sort the letters into groups. Seven are called undisputed: nearly everyone agrees Paul wrote them. They are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Three are debated: Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. Three more, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are called the Pastoral letters, and most scholars think they were written after Paul’s death by followers writing in his name. Hebrews does not name an author at all.

Writing in a respected teacher’s name was a known practice in the ancient world, and scholars call such a work pseudonymous. Christian traditions differ on this question. Many Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical readers hold that all thirteen come from Paul or his circle. The differences in vocabulary, style and church organization are what drive the debate. Either way, all thirteen are in every Christian canon, so the question is about authorship, not about which books belong.

A letter is not an essay. It is one side of a conversation. Paul’s letters follow the standard shape of a Greek letter: the sender’s name, the recipients, a greeting, then thanks, the body, and final greetings. Paul stretched the form. His greeting became grace and peace, and his thanksgiving often previews the letter’s themes. Galatians has no thanksgiving at all; Paul goes straight to I marvel that ye are so soon removed (Galatians 1:6). Readers have long taken that silence as a sign of anger.

Scholars call the situation that prompted a letter its occasion. For Galatians, the occasion is a dispute about whether Gentile believers must be circumcised. For 1 Corinthians, it is a list of problems reported from Corinth. For Romans, the occasion is harder to find, and that is one reason readers have argued over it. Was Paul writing a summary of his message to introduce himself? Was he addressing tension between Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome? Many scholars now say both.

One practical rule follows. A sentence pulled out of a letter can mean something different from what it means in place. When Paul writes the letter killeth (2 Corinthians 3:6), he is contrasting two kinds of ministry, not attacking reading. So the discipline is to read the whole letter first, find its occasion, and then ask what a passage is doing in that argument. The rest of this chapter practices that discipline on two letters.

One more caution. We only hear Paul’s side. His opponents in Galatia left no letters, so we know their views only through his description of them. Historians call this reading through a mirror. It reminds readers to describe what Paul says his opponents believed, rather than to state as fact what they believed.

Galatia was a region in central Anatolia, now Turkey. Paul had founded churches there made up mostly of Gentiles. After he left, other teachers arrived. According to Paul, they taught that Gentile men who trusted in Jesus also had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses (Galatians 5:2–3; 6:12). Circumcision was, and is, the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham’s descendants (Genesis 17). The question was therefore about belonging: who counts as part of the people of God?

Paul answers in the first two chapters by telling his own story. He insists his gospel came by revelation, not from any human teacher (Galatians 1:11–12). He describes a meeting in Jerusalem with James, Cephas (Peter) and John, who agreed that he would go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised (Galatians 2:7–9). Then he tells of a public clash in Antioch. Cephas had been eating with Gentile believers, then drew back when visitors came from James. Paul says he confronted him to his face (Galatians 2:11–14).

Why did table fellowship matter so much? Jewish food laws in the Torah set Israel apart, and sharing a table was a sign of belonging. If Jewish and Gentile believers could not eat together, the church would be two peoples, not one. Paul’s phrase for what was at stake is the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:14). Jewish readers note that Paul never says Jews should stop keeping the Torah; the argument is about Gentiles. That distinction matters for everything that follows.

In chapter 3 Paul turns to scripture. His key text is Genesis 15:6: Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Paul notes that this happened before Abraham was circumcised (Genesis 17 comes later), and long before the law was given at Sinai. So, he argues, those who have faith are Abraham’s children (Galatians 3:6–7). The promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed in him (Genesis 12:3) is, for Paul, a promise about Gentiles coming in by faith.

Paul then makes a hard claim about the law, the Torah. He says the law came 430 years after the promise and cannot cancel it (Galatians 3:17). He compares the law to a guardian who watches a child until the child comes of age (Galatians 3:24–25). The Greek word is paidagogos, the enslaved attendant who walked a boy to school. Readers dispute the tone. Is the guardian a harsh jailer or a needed protector? Both readings have long histories.

The argument ends with one of Paul’s most quoted lines: there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Christians have read this as a charter of equality; some historians think Paul is quoting a baptism formula already in use. Jewish scholars point out that Paul argues entirely from the Torah and the prophets, as a Jew arguing with other Jews. He is not rejecting scripture but reading it in a new way, much as later rabbis would read it in theirs.

One term needs care. Justified translates a Greek word that means to be declared or made righteous, to be in the right. Whether it means declared or made became a major dispute between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century. Paul’s own phrase is that a person is justified by faith and not by works of the law (Galatians 2:16). What he meant by works of the law is the subject of the last lesson of this chapter.

Galatians 5 opens with a call: stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free (Galatians 5:1). Then Paul faces an obvious objection. If Gentiles do not keep the law, what keeps them from doing whatever they want? His answer is that freedom is for serving one another in love, and that the whole law is fulfilled in one word: thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Galatians 5:13–14). That command is Leviticus 19:18, from the Torah. Freedom from the law, in Paul’s telling, ends up quoting the law.

Paul then sets two lists side by side. The works of the flesh include strife, envy and drunkenness. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:19–23). The word fruit matters: it is singular, and fruit grows rather than being manufactured. Christians have used the list for centuries in teaching about character. Note that Paul lists no rituals on either side. The test of belonging is a way of living.

Chapter 6 closes with practical rules: restore a person who has stumbled gently, bear one another’s burdens, do good to all (Galatians 6:1–10). Then Paul takes the pen himself: ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand (Galatians 6:11). A dictated letter usually ended with a line in the sender’s own writing as a signature. The final word returns to the crisis: circumcision or uncircumcision is nothing; what matters is a new creation (Galatians 6:15).

Romans is Paul’s longest and most carefully built letter. Its theme sentence comes early: the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, for the just shall live by faith (Romans 1:16–17). That last line quotes Habakkuk 2:4. The pairing of Jew and Greek runs through the whole letter. Paul is writing to a community where the two groups had to learn to live together.

The first main section, Romans 1:18 to 3:20, builds a case. Paul first describes the Gentile world turning from God to idols and into vice (1:18–32). A Jewish reader of his day might nod along; this was a standard critique of pagan life. Then Paul turns: therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest (2:1). Having the law is no shield if one does not keep it. He ends with a chain of quotations from the Psalms and Isaiah: there is none righteous, no, not one (3:10).

The conclusion is Romans 3:23: all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Readers have taken this in different directions. Augustine drew from Romans the doctrine of original sin, that all humanity shares in Adam’s fall (see Romans 5:12). Eastern Orthodox and Jewish readers have generally not read the text that way; Jewish tradition speaks of an inclination to evil and an inclination to good in each person, with the power to choose. The text is shared; the readings are not.

Romans 1:26–27, part of the description of Gentile vice, has become one of the most argued passages in the letter in modern times, because it concerns same-sex relations. Readers disagree about what practices Paul had in view and how the passage applies today. In a public-school setting, the task is to describe the passage, its place in Paul’s argument, and the range of readings, not to settle the question.

After the case against everyone, Paul announces the answer: the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, by faith of Jesus Christ unto all that believe (Romans 3:21–22). The key word is grace, a free gift. Paul says people are justified freely by his grace (3:24). Then comes the line Luther built a movement on: we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law (3:28). As in Galatians, Paul turns at once to Abraham, who believed and was counted righteous before he was circumcised (Romans 4).

Romans 5 draws the consequences. Being justified by faith, we have peace with God (5:1). Paul then sets Adam and Christ side by side: as by one man sin entered the world, so by one act of righteousness life comes to many (5:12–19). This Adam-Christ comparison is one of the sources of Christian teaching about the fall and about Jesus as a second Adam. Romans 6–8 then addresses the objection that grace makes sin harmless, and ends with the famous assurance that nothing can separate believers from the love of God (8:38–39).

Christians have disagreed sharply over these chapters. Sixteenth-century Protestants read justification as God declaring a sinner righteous on account of faith alone. The Catholic Council of Trent (1547) taught that justification also makes a person righteous inwardly, with faith working through love. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration saying their remaining differences no longer warranted the old condemnations. The argument is old, and it is still alive.

A translation dispute sits inside the text. The Greek phrase in Romans 3:22 can be read as faith in Jesus Christ or as the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. The King James Version has faith of Jesus Christ; most modern versions have faith in. Scholars still argue. This is one reason the chapter on translation comes next: a whole theology can turn on how one small Greek phrase is rendered.

Romans 9 begins with grief. Paul says he has great heaviness and continual sorrow for his kinsmen according to the flesh, the Israelites, to whom belong the covenants, the law and the promises (Romans 9:1–5). The problem he faces is this: if the gospel is for Jew first, why have most of his fellow Jews not accepted it? Three chapters follow, the most debated in the letter. Paul argues from Genesis, Exodus, Hosea and Isaiah, quoting more scripture here than anywhere else.

In chapter 11 Paul uses an image from farming. Israel is an olive tree; some branches were broken off, and wild branches, the Gentiles, were grafted in. He warns Gentile believers: boast not against the branches; thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18). Then comes his conclusion: all Israel shall be saved (11:26), and the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, that is, cannot be taken back (11:29). He ends in praise of the depth of God’s wisdom.

How these chapters have been read matters enormously. For centuries many Christians taught that the church had replaced Israel, a view now called supersessionism. Others read Romans 11 as saying the opposite: Israel’s covenant stands. After the Holocaust, many churches revisited the question. The Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) cited Romans 11 in affirming that God does not repent of the gifts he makes. Jewish scholars such as Daniel Boyarin and Pamela Eisenbaum have read Paul as a Jew who never left Judaism. The text is the same; the history of its reading is not.

Romans 12 begins with therefore. Having argued for eleven chapters, Paul now asks what follows for daily life. Present your bodies a living sacrifice, he writes, and be not conformed to this world (12:1–2). He pictures the community as one body with many members and gifts (12:4–8). Then a run of short commands: let love be without dissimulation, that is, without pretending; rejoice with them that do rejoice; recompense to no man evil for evil; if thine enemy hunger, feed him (12:9–21).

Romans 13:1–7 is a short passage with a long shadow. Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, Paul writes, for the powers that be are ordained of God. Rulers, he says, bear the sword to punish wrongdoing, so pay taxes and give honor where due. Rulers have quoted this to demand obedience. Readers who resisted them, from the American Revolution to Martin Luther King Jr., replied that the text describes rulers who reward good and punish evil, and asked what follows when they do the opposite. Paul, writing under Nero, did not say.

Romans 14–15 addresses a concrete quarrel. Some in Rome ate only vegetables and kept certain days; others ate anything and treated every day alike. Paul calls the first group weak in faith and the second strong, but he refuses to let either judge the other (14:1–6). The strong should bear the failings of the weak (15:1). Most scholars think the dispute involved Jewish food laws and holy days, which suggests a mixed community learning to share a table, the same issue as in Antioch.

The letter ends with travel plans and greetings. Paul is taking a collection from Gentile churches to the poor in Jerusalem (15:25–27). Chapter 16 names some twenty-six people, including Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, Prisca and Aquila, and Junia, whom Paul calls of note among the apostles (16:7). Whether Junia was a woman and whether she was counted an apostle has been debated by translators for centuries; most scholars now read the name as a woman’s.

Paul’s letters have been cited on both sides of the largest arguments in Western history. On women, readers point to Galatians 3:28, neither male nor female, and to Romans 16, where Phoebe, Prisca and Junia lead. Others point to 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, let your women keep silence in the churches, and 1 Timothy 2:12, which forbids a woman to teach. Some scholars think the Corinthians verses were added by a later copyist; 1 Timothy is among the letters whose authorship is debated. Churches that ordain women and churches that do not both claim to follow Paul.

On slavery, the record is painful. Paul never calls for abolition; slavery was everywhere in his world. In Philemon he sends the enslaved Onesimus back to his owner, asking that he be received not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved (Philemon 16). In 1 Corinthians 7:21 he tells enslaved believers not to be troubled by their state. Letters of debated authorship tell servants to obey their masters (Colossians 3:22; Ephesians 6:5). In the United States before 1865, defenders of slavery quoted those verses, and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass answered with Galatians 3:28 and with Philemon read as a plea for freedom.

On the state, Romans 13 has served rulers and resisters, as the last lesson showed. Whatever one concludes, a fair reading follows some rules. Read the whole letter and its occasion. Note which letters are undisputed. Distinguish what Paul commands from what he accepts as his world’s fact. And say plainly which passages weigh more in your reading and why, since every reader is choosing. That is what it means to argue from the text rather than from a verse.

Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg. Lecturing on Romans in 1515–1516, he came to read justification by faith as the heart of the gospel: God counts sinners righteous because of faith alone, not because of anything they do. In his German New Testament of 1522 he rendered Romans 3:28 as justified by faith alone, adding the word alone, and defended the choice as good German. For Luther, the Jews of Paul’s day stood for anyone who tries to earn God’s favor, and the law stood for that effort. This reading shaped Protestant Christianity for four centuries.

In 1977 the scholar E. P. Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Reading Jewish texts of Paul’s era, he argued that Judaism was not a religion of earning salvation by works. Jews kept the law because they were already in the covenant by God’s grace; he called this covenantal nomism. If so, Luther’s picture of Paul’s opponents was wrong. In 1982 James D. G. Dunn named the resulting approach the New Perspective on Paul. On this reading, works of the law in Galatians and Romans means mainly the practices that marked Jews off from Gentiles, such as circumcision and food laws. Paul’s question was who belongs, not how to quiet a guilty conscience.

The debate continues. Some scholars, such as N. T. Wright, adopted much of the New Perspective; others defended the older reading; still others, in what is sometimes called the Paul within Judaism approach, argue that Paul’s message was for Gentiles only and that he expected Jews to keep the Torah. Readers of this course do not need to choose. What they need is to see that a text written c. 57 CE has been read through the concerns of 386, 1517 and 1977, and to be able to say which reading a given claim comes from.

The word canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring rod. In the study of the Bible it means the list of books a community counts as scripture. Jewish tradition calls its Bible the Tanakh, from the initials of its three parts: Torah (teaching, the five books of Moses), Nevi’im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings). Counted the Jewish way, it holds twenty-four books; the same texts counted the Protestant way make thirty-nine, because Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and the twelve minor prophets are split.

The three parts seem to have gained authority in stages. The Torah was read publicly by the time of Ezra, in the fifth century BCE (Nehemiah 8). The prologue to the book of Sirach, written c. 132 BCE, already speaks of the law, the prophets and the other books. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing c. 95 CE, said his people had twenty-two books they held sacred (Against Apion 1.8). The edges of the Writings, books such as Esther, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, were still discussed by rabbis in the second century CE (Mishnah, Yadayim 3:5).

Older textbooks said the Jewish canon was fixed at a council in Yavneh, or Jamnia, c. 90 CE. Most scholars now doubt that any such formal council took place; the rabbis at Yavneh discussed some books, but the canon grew by use over time. That is a good example of how a tidy story gets corrected. It also shows that a canon is not usually made by a single vote. Communities read certain books, copied them, taught from them, and over generations the list hardened.

In the third century BCE the Jews of Alexandria, in Egypt, spoke Greek. Tradition told in the Letter of Aristeas says that seventy-two scholars translated the Torah into Greek for the king’s library, and the translation was named the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy. Historians accept that the Torah was translated in Alexandria c. 250 BCE and the rest over the following two centuries; the story of the seventy-two is a legend that grew. The Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and then of the early church. Most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow its wording.

Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint carried books and passages that the Hebrew canon does not: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel. Protestants call these the Apocrypha, hidden things; Catholics call them deuterocanonical, a second canon, and count them as scripture. Orthodox churches include those and a few more. Jewish tradition does not include them, though Hanukkah recalls events told in 1 Maccabees. Jerome doubted their standing; the Council of Trent (1546) affirmed it for Catholics.

The result is that the number of books in a Bible depends on whose Bible it is. Protestant Bibles have 66; Catholic Bibles 73; Greek Orthodox Bibles a few more; the Ethiopian Orthodox canon is larger still. The King James Bible of 1611 printed the Apocrypha between the Testaments, and most editions dropped it in the nineteenth century. When a public-school class reads the Bible, then, the first question is which one, and a fair answer names all of them.

The first known person to propose a fixed Christian scripture was Marcion, a wealthy shipowner who taught in Rome c. 144 CE. He held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a different, lesser being from the Father of Jesus. So his scripture had no Old Testament at all: only an edited gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul. The church in Rome expelled him. Many historians think Marcion’s list pushed other Christians to say more clearly which books they did accept, though the extent of his influence is debated.

The Muratorian fragment is a damaged Latin list discovered in a Milan library and published by Ludovico Muratori in 1740. Most scholars date the original to the late second century, though some argue for the fourth. It names four gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, the Wisdom of Solomon and Revelation, and it admits the Apocalypse of Peter with some hesitation. It leaves out Hebrews, James and the letters of Peter. The list shows a canon largely, but not fully, agreed by then.

The earliest surviving list that names exactly the twenty-seven books of today’s New Testament, and no others, is the Easter letter of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in 367 CE. He called them the springs of salvation and said no one should add to them or take from them. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed similar lists in the West. No emperor decided the matter, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 did not discuss the canon, despite a popular modern legend. The list emerged from use, argument and, at last, agreement.

Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript was the Leningrad Codex, copied in 1008 CE, and the slightly older Aleppo Codex, c. 930 CE, now missing parts. These were the work of the Masoretes, Jewish scribes who added vowel marks and notes to fix the text between roughly 600 and 1000 CE. Their text, the Masoretic Text, is the Hebrew Bible behind almost every Jewish and Christian translation. But a thousand years separated it from the last books of the Bible, and no one knew how much had changed.

In 1947 Bedouin shepherds found jars holding scrolls in a cave near Qumran, by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade eleven caves yielded some nine hundred manuscripts, most in fragments, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and dated by script and by radiocarbon to c. 250 BCE to 68 CE. The Dead Sea Scrolls include copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, along with community rules, hymns and commentaries. Many scholars connect them to a Jewish group living at Qumran, often identified with the Essenes; that identification is debated.

The star find is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of Isaiah about 24 feet long, dated c. 125 BCE. Compared with the Leningrad Codex, copied more than eleven centuries later, its text is remarkably close, with mostly small differences in spelling and wording. Other scrolls, however, show that more than one form of some books circulated: a shorter Jeremiah like the Septuagint’s, a Samuel with readings the Greek shares. The scrolls proved both how carefully scribes copied and that the text was not yet fixed to a single form.

No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What survives are copies, and for the New Testament there are a great many: about 5,800 Greek manuscripts, from scraps to complete Bibles, plus thousands in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other languages. The earliest are written on papyrus, a paper made from a Nile reed. The oldest generally accepted piece is P52, a fragment of John 18 the size of a credit card, kept in Manchester, England, and usually dated c. 125–175 CE. P46, a codex of Paul’s letters, dates from c. 200.

The great fourth-century codices are written on parchment, prepared animal skin, in capital letters with no spaces between words, a style called uncial. Codex Vaticanus, in the Vatican Library since at least 1475, and Codex Sinaiticus, the manuscript from the opening story, both date to c. 325–360 CE. Codex Alexandrinus, in the British Library, is from the fifth century. These three, with the papyri, are the main witnesses scholars use to reconstruct the earliest recoverable text of the New Testament.

The shift from scroll to codex mattered. A scroll holds one long book; a codex can hold a whole library between two covers. Christians adopted the codex early and almost completely, while Jewish communities kept the scroll for synagogue reading, as they do today. Some historians think the codex made it possible to think of the many books as one Bible. A canon list and a bound book reinforce each other: once all the books sit inside a single cover, the question of which books belong has a physical answer.

Copyists made mistakes: skipped lines, doubled words, misheard dictation. Sometimes they also made changes on purpose, smoothing grammar or adding a familiar phrase from another gospel. So manuscripts differ, and a place where they differ is called a variant. Scholars count hundreds of thousands of variants across the Greek New Testament manuscripts, most of them spelling and word order that change no meaning. Textual criticism is the discipline of comparing the copies to decide which reading is most likely original.

Its rules are simple to state. Prefer the reading in the oldest and best manuscripts. Prefer the harder reading, since scribes smoothed rather than roughened. Prefer the reading that best explains how the others arose. The most famous case is the ending of Mark. In Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, Mark ends at 16:8 with the women fleeing the tomb, afraid, and telling no one. Most later manuscripts add twelve verses, 16:9–20, with appearances of the risen Jesus, snake handling and a command to preach. A few have a different short ending.

Eusebius in the fourth century and Jerome around 400 both noted that most Greek copies they knew lacked the longer ending. Its vocabulary differs from the rest of Mark. Most scholars conclude that 16:9–20 was added in the second century, perhaps because an ending at afraid seemed unbearable. Modern translations print the verses with a bracket or note. The King James Bible prints them without comment, because the manuscripts its translators used included them. Christians differ on the verses’ authority; nothing central to Christian teaching rests on them alone. Two other well-known variants are the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) and the Trinitarian phrase in 1 John 5:7, which is absent from all early Greek manuscripts.

By the fourth century most Christians in the western Roman Empire spoke Latin, and Latin translations of the Bible had multiplied, of uneven quality. In 382 Pope Damasus asked a scholar named Jerome to revise the Latin gospels against the Greek. Jerome went further. Settling in Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers and translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint, finishing c. 405. He called this the Hebrew truth, and it caused controversy, since the Septuagint had been the church’s Old Testament.

Jerome’s version came to be called the Vulgate, from a Latin word meaning common or widely used. It was not accepted overnight. Augustine worried that congregations would be upset by unfamiliar wording; he told Jerome of a church in North Africa that rioted when the plant in Jonah 4 was read as ivy instead of gourd. Over the following centuries the Vulgate won out. It was the Bible Wycliffe translated from, the first book Gutenberg printed, c. 1455, and the Bible the Council of Trent declared authentic for Catholic use in 1546.

Jerome also gave later translators their hardest questions. He judged that the books found only in Greek, the Apocrypha, should be read for edification but not used to establish doctrine, a view Protestants later took up. And in Isaiah 7:14 he rendered the Hebrew word almah with the Latin virgo, virgin, following the Septuagint’s Greek, a choice that a later lesson returns to. Every translation decides, and the Vulgate’s decisions shaped Western Christianity for a millennium.

The first complete English Bible is linked to John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar who held that scripture, not the church, was the final authority. His followers produced it from the Vulgate c. 1382–1395; Wycliffe himself died in 1384, and how much he translated is unknown. The church condemned the movement, called Lollards. In 1408 English bishops forbade any new translation without approval, and in 1428 Wycliffe’s bones were dug up and burned. About 250 manuscripts of the Wycliffe Bible survive, more than of any other medieval English text.

William Tyndale changed everything by using two new tools: the printing press and the Greek New Testament that Erasmus published in 1516. Refused permission in England, he fled to the continent and printed his English New Testament in Worms in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and burned by the bishop of London. Tyndale went on to translate the Pentateuch and other books from Hebrew. Betrayed in Antwerp, he was strangled and burned near Brussels in 1536. His reported last words were a prayer that the king of England’s eyes be opened.

Tyndale’s English survives on a scale most readers never notice. Phrases such as let there be light, the powers that be, my brother’s keeper and the salt of the earth are his. He coined the words Passover and scapegoat. Scholars estimate that most of the King James New Testament repeats his wording. Within a year of his death, an English Bible with royal license, largely Tyndale’s work, was legally on sale. Miles Coverdale had printed the first complete English Bible in 1535, filling in Tyndale’s unfinished Old Testament from Latin and German.

In 1604 the new king of England, James I, called a conference at Hampton Court to hear the complaints of Puritan clergy. One request was a new translation. James agreed, partly because he disliked the notes in the popular Geneva Bible of 1560, which questioned the rights of kings. About forty-seven scholars in six companies, at Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster, divided the books between them. Their instructions told them to revise the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, keep old church words such as church rather than congregation, and add no doctrinal notes.

The King James Version appeared in 1611. It was not a fresh translation but a careful revision, checked against Hebrew and Greek, and it kept most of Tyndale’s New Testament wording. Its Greek base was the printed text descended from Erasmus, later called the Textus Receptus, which rests on late medieval manuscripts. It printed the Apocrypha between the Testaments. Early printings had errors; a 1631 edition left the word not out of the seventh commandment and was nicknamed the Wicked Bible.

The King James Bible was slow to displace the Geneva Bible, but by the eighteenth century it was the Bible of the English-speaking world, carried to America and read by Lincoln, Douglass and King. Its rhythms shaped English prose. Because it was published before the fourth-century codices were studied and before the papyri were found, its text differs in many places from what scholars now judge oldest. That is not a fault of the translators, who used what they had; it is the reason the next lesson exists.

The Revised Version of 1881–1885 was the first major English Bible to use the fourth-century codices. Its American cousin, the American Standard Version of 1901, rendered God’s name as Jehovah. The Revised Standard Version of 1952 caused a storm by translating Isaiah 7:14 with young woman rather than virgin; a few pastors burned copies. Since then translations have multiplied: the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh (1985), the New International Version (1978), the New Revised Standard Version (1989), the English Standard Version (2001) and many more. Estimates vary, but the full Bible now exists in over 700 languages.

Translators choose a place on a line. At one end is formal equivalence, keeping the words and word order of the original as far as English allows; the King James, ASV and ESV lean this way. At the other is dynamic equivalence, giving the meaning in natural English; the NIV leans this way, and the Good News Bible further. Beyond the line are paraphrases such as The Message (2002), which restate freely. None is simply right. A formal version shows the shape of the Hebrew; a dynamic version reads more easily; a paraphrase may say what the original never did.

Set the first line of Psalm 23 side by side. Wycliffe, c. 1395, from the Latin: The Lord governeth me, and nothing shall fail to me. Coverdale, 1535: The Lord is my shepherd, I can want nothing. King James, 1611: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. American Standard, 1901: Jehovah is my shepherd; I shall not want. World English Bible: Yahweh is my shepherd: I shall lack nothing. The Latin had lost the shepherd, which Coverdale restored from Hebrew; the divine name is handled four ways; and want has drifted in meaning, so newer versions say lack. One line, five decisions, none of them innocent.

Isaiah 7:14 is the clearest case. The Hebrew word is almah, a young woman of marriageable age. The Septuagint translated it with the Greek parthenos, which usually means virgin, and the gospel of Matthew quotes the Greek as fulfilled in the birth of Jesus (Matthew 1:23). Jerome’s Latin followed the Greek. So the King James reads a virgin shall conceive, while the Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation reads the young woman shall conceive. Christians read the verse as prophecy of Jesus; Jewish readers read it as a sign to King Ahaz about a child born in his own day. Both readings rest on a real feature of the text; neither can be settled by a dictionary alone.

Other words carry similar weight. The Hebrew hesed, in the King James mercy or lovingkindness, in newer versions steadfast love or faithfulness. The Greek word Paul uses for justify, which Augustine’s Latin read as make righteous and Luther read as declare righteous. Faith of Christ or faith in Christ in Romans 3:22. In each case the original word is wider than any single English word, and a translator must pick. Some versions print alternatives in a footnote; the American Standard Version put the maiden in the margin at Isaiah 7:14. Footnotes are where translators admit they had to choose.

So who decides? In practice, committees do, and their choices reflect their communities. A translation made for a church will lean toward that church’s readings; a translation made for scholars will note every alternative; a Jewish translation will not read the Prophets through the New Testament. That is not dishonesty. It is what it means to translate a text that several communities hold sacred. The skill this unit has built is to see the choice, name the reasons on each side, and say which tradition each reading belongs to.