The Pointer June 2021
Rector The Rt Rev Darren McCartney 028 4175 3497 suffragan1@gmail.com
The Magazine of the Church of Ireland Parishes of Clonallon & Warrenpoint with Kilbroney in the Diocese of Down and Dromore “He opened wide his arms upon the cross and, with love stronger than death, he made the perfect sacrifice for sin”. Holy Communion 3 BCP 2004. Someone recently asked if they could read a particular reading from the King James version in church and I was very happy to hear the question and oblige. I was encouraged to hear that in 2011, the year that we celebrated the 400 year anniversary of the completed translation of the King James Bible, the translation was read within church. Bible translation is a story of passion and love, a story of hard work and determination, a story of suffering and death that affords you and I the privilege of reading God’s Word in our own language. There are still quite a number of people around the world who do not have a completed translation in their first language. The Inuit, in the Arctic, did not have the completed Bible in their language until 2012 and it has been recently revised. I have had the privilege of working alongside Inuit leaders in the church in the Arctic, whom I have buried, who would have loved to have read the whole Bible in their own language but never had the chance. The photo at the top of the next column is of my friend Revd Dr Jonas Allooloo – Lead Inuktitut Bible Translator for Canadian Bible Society, working on the translation for a Children’s Bible.
had been translated by Jerome, way back in 405, and puts it into English. It is believed that he translated the New Testament whilst his associates translated the Old Testament. There being no printing press at this time, meant that any copy had to be written by hand. The first Bible to be printed didn’t come until AD 1455 and it was a Latin copy. Wycliffe suffered much persecution in the cause of seeking to make the teaching of Christ available to the people of his day.
I love history and I looked forward to reminding myself of just how we came to have the Bible in English. I was encouraged by the story. A story that goes back to Jerome in AD 405 whenever he translated the Bible into Greek from the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. This was the Bible that remained in official use for almost 1000 years in all churches throughout Europe.
Another name worth mentioning is Erasmus. He was a brilliant Dutch Roman Catholic scholar who became famous for his writings. Erasmus gathered all the Greek MSS he could find in Basle and England, and came up with five, none of which contained the entire NT (all were dated 12th century or later and from the Byzantine family). Erasmus publishes the first edition of his Greek NT in 1516 and has it dedicated to Pope Leo X.
England AD 1382 and we come across the first efforts to put the Bible into the hands of “common folk”. A man that has been described as the ‘Morning Star’ of the reformation in England. The man’s name is John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe takes the Latin Vulgate that
Why do I mention him, well, all subsequent translators of the Bible into English used his Greek New Testament as the text from which they translated? The first of these translations came from a man called William Tyndale. William Tyndale was an