The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  The third translation is attributed to a man named Theodotion, of whom we know still less, to the point that we are not sure if he really existed.40 Like Symmachus, Theodotion was a common name, which has led to a jumble of theories about who he may or may not be. The translation attributed to Theodotion may even have been the work of more than one person. We just don’t know.

  All three of these translations were made by Jews for Jews, but that didn’t stop one senior Christian theologian from feeling deeply offended by them. Epiphanius, the fourth-century bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, attacked them with as much ire as he could muster. He was convinced that each of the three translators had wanted to supersede the Septuagint out of nothing more than spite and personal ambition.41 He attacked the character and integrity of the individual translators personally; he may well have known more about them than we do now. Or he may simply have made up his pejoratives.

  Epiphanius described Aquila as a convert to Christianity who was unable to let go of his former idolatrous leanings. Expelled by the Church he became a Jew and wrote his translation with the intention of distorting the words of the Septuagint. As for Symmachus, he had a different, yet equally disruptive agenda. Born and circumcised as a Samaritan, he lusted for power and was enraged by his failure to succeed. He reversed his circumcision (Epiphanius furnishes us with the technical details of how this was done), converted to Judaism, and was re-circumcised. He decided to write his translation in order to pervert the version of the Bible the Samaritans used.42 Theodotion on the other hand had been a follower of Marcion, a heretical quasi-Christian. Theodotion eventually grew angry with Marcion’s heretical views but instead of turning to Christianity, had himself circumcised and became a Jew.

  With the translators’ reputations abased, Epiphanius constructed a slippery argument to play what he imagined to be his trump card. Implying that the three translators were collaborating (an assertion for which he had no evidence), he pointed out that each of them came up with a different translation. How, he asked, can their versions be regarded as accurate, when there were only three of them yet they couldn’t even agree among themselves? Compare this, he demanded, with the seventy-two Septuagint translators, all of whom came up with identical versions. As far as Epiphanius was concerned, the three Jewish translations offered nothing of value when compared to the Septuagint. Their work was nothing more than the consequence of personal vendettas; hardly even worth bothering about.

  Epiphanius lived long after the new Greek translations had been completed. They had been challenging the Septuagint even before he was born. His concern was not whether or not the new translations were accurate; his only interest was to restore the reputation of the Septuagint, to reassert its inerrancy and protect its sanctity. In the eyes of the emerging Church, the Septuagint surpassed the Hebrew original as the truly inspired word of God. Its supremacy over the three Jewish translations was, for Epiphanius, never in doubt. That did not prevent him from considering the alternative translations offensive.

  There was a second factor, nothing at all to do with their theological differences with Christianity, which led the Jews to reject the Septuagint. It is easy for us, living at a time in which the demarcation lines between different religions are more or less clear, to overlook the complexity of a world still struggling to differentiate between the competing claims of different, and not yet fully formed, beliefs. The Jews had a separate complaint against the Septuagint, nothing at all to do with Christianity. It was an internal matter, a difference of outlook between different types of Jews. The argument was a direct consequence of the relationship, or lack of it, between Jewish and Greek society, and consequently, between rabbinic and hellenized Jews.

  Once, Greek thought and culture had been instrumental in shaping the way Jews saw the world. It even influenced parts of the Bible itself. The inclusion in the Bible of the so-called ‘Wisdom’ books, which include Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, is attributed to Hellenistic influences flowing from Alexandria to Jerusalem. But when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the character of Judaism changed. The priests who had run the Sanctuary were now redundant, and it was the rabbis who were laying the foundations of the new, post-Temple Jewish faith. For them the whole purpose of existence was to obey the divine commandments through closely prescribed modes of behaviour. They took a dim view of Hellenistic life, with its emphasis on art and physical beauty. The Talmud rebukes those Jews who reversed their circumcision in order to compete naked in competitions in the gymnasium.43 Such acts represented the antithesis of everything the rabbis stood for. The Alexandrian Septuagint, created by and for such Greek Jews, was an affront, a perpetual reminder of the Hellenism which rabbinic Judaism was desperate to erase. That is another reason why, as far as the rabbis were concerned, the moment of the Septuagint’s composition was a tragedy as great as the day the golden calf was made.

  There is yet a third reason, nothing to do with Hellenism; the alleged falsification of texts or the accuracy of translations, which led the Jewish religious authorities to reject the Septuagint. The rise of the rabbis had been the consequence of the first-century victory of the populist Pharisees over the aristocratic, patrician Sadducees. But although acknowledged by the majority of the Jewish population as their legitimate religious authority, the rabbis feared what might happen should their sacred texts be democratized through translation into other languages. They were concerned at the possibility of the Jews in foreign lands, away from centres of rabbinic teaching, studying the Bible in their own language, not understanding it properly and introducing new, possibly heretical ideas. They worried even more about new, poorly educated translators emerging, who didn’t have the skills or knowledge to make accurate translations. Because they hadn’t yet come to terms with the idea of the Bible being translated into foreign languages, the rabbis were insistent that, if it was to happen, it was only to take place under their control. That’s why there are so few references to the Greek Bible in rabbinic writings. The rabbis’ concern was one which surfaces time and again in the controversies over Bible translation; a fear that seizes all ideologues when they sense a threat to their grip on doctrine. It is equally a paranoia that can easily grip autocrats and unelected leaders.

  As we will see time and again, religious establishments, which tend to be conservative by nature, dread losing control of the educational agenda, fearing that they will not be able to maintain correct forms of belief and practice as the masses gain access to, and understanding of, the sacred texts.

  The First Bible critic

  Epiphanius was not the only one to rise to the Septuagint’s defence. As the Church grew in size and influence, the vulnerability of the ancient Alexandrian translation to its new Greek rivals became a matter of concern. By the fourth century, the works of ‘the Three’; Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion; were subjected to attack by some of the most prominent Christian thinkers of the age.

  John, archbishop of Constantinople, was nicknamed Chrysostom, or Golden Mouth, because of his formidable and outspoken oratory. He was not the only person of his era to be awarded the sobriquet44 but, as the foremost exponent of macrologia or long-winded rhetoric, it is he to whom the name has stuck. John Chrysostom cast scorn upon the ‘Three’, comparing what he considered to be their impure intentions with the integrity of the earlier translators in Alexandria. The Septuagint, he argued, had been written before Christianity; it therefore was, of necessity, free from anti-Christian bias. On the other hand, Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion had all produced their translations after the birth of Christianity, and they had done so as a reaction to the alleged inadequacies of the Septuagint. They had set out, said Chrysostom, to deliberately discredit Christianity.45

  At the other end of the Mediterranean, in the town of Hippo in Algeria, the theologian Augustine was advancing similar views. St Augustine, as he would become, felt that the translators’ isolation from each other in Alexandria was sufficient proof of the Septuagint’s in
fallibility. He asserted that the Jews had falsified their Hebrew original to prevent the truth being known to other nations. However, he claimed, they didn’t get away with it because the spirit which rested on the seventy translators restored the text to its original meaning, to the sense it had been imbued with before the Jews tampered with it.46 This, Augustine asserted, had happened in order to offer salvation to the nations.47

  We have seen that the Jews’ rejection of the Septuagint was not exclusively due to Christian accusations. Similarly, the robustness with which Augustine and Chrysostom defended it was not solely because of the Jews. A debate was hotting up within the Church itself, between those who upheld the inerrancy of the Septuagint and those who were prepared to accept the argument that it had indeed become corrupted over time.

  The argument had started a century earlier, shortly after the year 230. Once again, the seeds were sown in Alexandria where the Roman emperor Severus had launched a wave of persecution against Christians. On hearing that his father had been captured and imprisoned, Origen, a pious, teenage ascetic, decided that his only viable recourse was to consecrate himself as a martyr. We don’t know what heroics he had in mind, we only have the story from the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea. We do know that his plans were thwarted when his mother hid his clothes. The prospect of naked self-sacrifice brought Origen to his senses. But not for long. When he read the verse in Matthew about ‘those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’48 his religious zeal got the better of him. He castrated himself, or at least that is what Eusebius tells us he did.49

  The local bishop, Demetrius, heard about the pious young ascetic and took him under his wing. But as Origen’s reputation and popularity grew, Demetrius, a man of far lesser status, grew ever more jealous. Matters came to a head when Origen was invited to preach in Caesarea, the Roman garrison town in Judea. While he was there the local bishop ordained him into the priesthood. This further piqued Demetrius, who considered that Caesarea had hijacked his own local talent. He rounded on Origen, accused him of heretical preaching and had him condemned by a synod, fatally damaging his career prospects in Alexandria. Fortunately for Origen the condemnation fell on deaf ears everywhere else. He gave up any hope of returning home and continued his career in Caesarea.

  Origen’s great passion was the Bible. He wrote commentaries on much of it and, although most of what he wrote is now lost, we know that he occasionally wrote more than one commentary on certain books. Unusually for his time, he didn’t cocoon himself in his own religious environment; third-century Caesarea was a centre of vibrant Jewish as well as Christian scholarship and Origen was more than willing to engage with rabbinic scholars, even incorporating some of their ideas into his own thinking. He even learned Hebrew, although perhaps not as successfully as he may have wished. He spotted differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text. He also noticed discrepancies between the various Septuagint manuscripts that he had.50 But although he was aware of the new translations by the ‘Three’ he was not prepared to reject the Septuagint in favour of any one of them. Discrepancies or not, he was an orthodox thinker who accepted the Septuagint as the church’s authoritative text. He was also an Alexandrian. Unlike his bishop, he wouldn’t turn his back on the product of his home town. He wasn’t prepared to abandon the Septuagint. He did, however, want to get rid of its errors.

  Origen embarked on a major project of literary analysis. Nowadays, when scholars try to get back to the original version of an ancient text that exists in various recensions, they reproduce the edition they consider the most reliable and at the bottom of the page they note the variations found in other manuscripts. Origen went one better than this. He drew six vertical columns and placed a version of the Old Testament in each. The left-hand column contained the original Hebrew text. The next was the same, written in Greek characters rather than Hebrew. In the adjoining two columns he inscribed the translations of Aquila and Symmachus. The Septuagint was in the fifth column and finally the translation attributed to Theodotion. He devised a series of symbols which he added to the Septuagint column, highlighting where it differed from the Hebrew original. Origen called his whole work the Hexapla.

  The Hexapla’s structure made it easy to use. Its six columns were arranged so that each horizontal line contained only one or two Hebrew words together with their various Greek equivalents. This made cross-referencing very easy. Anyone who wanted to clarify the reading in the Septuagint, or to find the best Greek word to represent the Hebrew, could scan across the columns to compare the different versions.

  The Hexapla was a phenomenal work. It had one serious drawback. The Old Testament is a lengthy document. The Hexapla was six times as long. Origen’s work was so vast that it could only realistically be used as a reference work in a library. The idea of having a personal copy, even for those few people who could both read and afford one, was completely unrealistic. Origen did make a smaller, four-column version containing the versions most likely to be used by Christians. But the complete Hexapla itself was hardly ever copied, indeed it may never even have been copied at all.

  Origen’s original manuscript was stored in the library of Pamphilus in Caesarea. It was destroyed in 638 when the city fell to Saracen invaders. Only a few fragments have survived.51

  Origen was a controversial theologian; he was condemned as a heretic long after his death. Even before then, while his reputation remained relatively intact, Origen’s rigorous scholarship was not universally appreciated. Those who believed that the Septuagint was a divinely inspired text resented his attempts to compare or harmonize it with the Hebrew. Both John Chrysostom and Augustine, each born a century after Origen had carried out his work, continued to defend the Septuagint. Despite its academic value, the Hexapla never seriously challenged the status of the Alexandrian translation as the church’s official text. But the version of the Septuagint which Origen placed in his first column was used as the master copy when the emperor Constantine commissioned his scribes to provide fifty major churches in the Roman Empire with their own copy of the Bible.52

  In the end it wasn’t so much scholarship that did for the Septuagint, rather the vagaries of passing time. Greek’s dominance as an international language was drawing to an end; in the Western Empire Latin had taken over as the new standard. The Septuagint may have been revered, but it was used less and less. By the time Christianity had spread across Europe the Septuagint was, in all but name, effectively redundant. No Christian denied its divine inspiration. Still, they preferred to read the Bible in a language they understood: Latin.

  But the Latin Bible was not yet on the stage. While the Septuagint was declining in popularity, the belief in one God was nevertheless spreading rapidly. Across the East, both Christianity and Judaism were putting down roots in locations where neither Greek, Hebrew nor even Latin were the vernacular. New translations of the Bible were appearing in these places. Unlike the Septuagint they were not the cause of controversy. Yet, when we look at them carefully we can see that they often emerged from communities which were deeply split and traumatized.

  The new levantine translations symbolized the essential differences between East and West. They mark the moment when monotheistic belief began to evolve separately in Europe and Asia along divergent trajectories.

  2

  A Wandering Aramean

  The Old Testament Peshitta

  The Silk Road was the name given to the ancient trade route that linked India and China with the West. Caravans brought gems, spices and of course silk from the Orient, seeking markets in Mediterranean and Byzantine lands. On their return they carried wool, gold and silver. Few traders made the complete journey from the Great Wall of China to Antioch in Syria, and fewer still once the itinerary expanded to Egypt, Greece and eventually Rome itself. Staging posts and entrepôts along the route enabled the merchants to meet, barter and exchange the goods they carried, and to return home sooner with their new wares.

&
nbsp; But although the route had grown up through trade, precious goods and exotic items were merely its visible cargo, the traffic which bore a monetary value. Far more precious, from the point of view of a world still in its infancy, were the free, yet priceless goods which found their way along the Silk Road: the ideas, stories, information and beliefs that circulated among the wayfarers. The Silk Road was a cauldron into which merchants, holy men, soldiers, camel drivers, thespians and bandits poured their skills, science and knowledge, barely conscious of the impact they were making on the rapidly connecting globe, one that was newly encountering and hungrily soaking up a huge and diverse range of cultural influences.

  The city of Edessa, now known as Urfa in Turkey, sits on the Silk Road. It was the last major staging post before Antioch, the first important centre the traveller reached after leaving Nisibis. Fifty miles east of the river Euphrates, the city was located on the border between the vast Parthian Empire, and the eastern fringes of Rome’s territory. Frequent border skirmishes resulted in the city veering from one dominion to the other until finally, in August 116, it fell permanently under Roman control.

  Edessa is said to have been where Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel, had his capital. It also claims to have been the home town of Job and even the birthplace of Abraham (although Genesis places his home town at Haran, 25 miles to the south). Visitors to the city can still see the cave that, local legend has it, was once Abraham’s home. A short distance away lies the site of the furnace into which, according to Jewish and Muslim folklore, Nimrod is said to have cast him.

  More reliably, Edessa is known as the birthplace of Eastern Christianity. This is not disputed even though the events surrounding the city’s conversion to its new faith are unclear. A legend recorded by Eusebius, who gave us information about Origen, tells of an Edessan king writing to Jesus asking him to cure him of a disease with which he was afflicted, and of Jesus sending an emissary to do just that.1 If nothing else this legend indicates that Christianity reached Edessa at a very early period, perhaps even at the very dawn of the faith’s foundation. The city became a hub for the spread of Christianity across the region, and eventually a place of pilgrimage in its own right. Sadly, Urfa today retains little of its former glory. In 1146 a futile attempt by a Crusader force to recapture the city from the Turks led to its destruction and the end of its life as a major Christian centre.