BIBLE DOCTRINE I
LECTURE 11
SUPPLEMENT
The Greek Received text and the Hebrew Masoretic text were translated into the major languages of the world between the 16th and 19th centuries.
a. The Received Text was translated into the major European languages:
German (1521), English (1524), French (1528), Spanish (1569), Slovenian (1584), French Geneva (1588), Welsh (1588), Hungarian (1590), Dutch (1637), Italian (1641), Finnish (1642), Irish (1685), Romanian (1688), Latvian (1689), Lithuanian (1735), Estonian (1739), Georgian (1743), Portuguese (1751), Gaelic (1801), Serbo-Croatian (1804), Yiddish (1821), Albanian (1827), Slovak (1832), Norwegian (1834), Basque of Spain (1857), Russian (1865), Bulgarian (1864)
b. The Received Text was translated into the major languages of India:
Malay (1734), Persian (1800), Bengali (1809), Oriya (1815), Marathi (1821), Kashmiri (1821), Nepali (1821), Sanskrit (1822), Gujarati (1823), Punjabi (1826), Bihari (1826), Kannada (1831), Assamese (1833), Hindi (1835), Urdu (1843), Telugu (1854), and 35 other languages
c. The Received Text was translated into many other languages around the world:
Syriac (1645), Armenian (1666), Bullom of Sierra Leone (1816), Saraiki of Pakistan (1819), Faroe of the Faroe Islands (1823), Turkish (1827), Sranan of Suriname (1829), Javanese of Indonesia (1829), Aymara of Bolivia (1829), Malay of Indonesia (1835), Manchu of China (1835), Malagasy of Madagascar (1835), Burmese of Burma (1835), Mandinka of Gambia (1837), Hawaiian (1838), Mongolian (1840), Karaite of the Crimea Mountains (1842), Azerbaijani of the U.S.S.R. (1842), Subu of Cameroon (1843), Mon of Burma (1843), Maltese (1847), Garifuna of Belize-Nicaragua (1847), Ossete of Russia (1848), Bube of Equatorial Guinea (1849), Arawak of Guyana (1850), Maori of the Cook Islands (1851), Tontemboan of Indonesia (1852), Somoan (1855), Sesotho of Africa (1855), Setswana of South Africa (1857), Hausa of Nigeria (1857), Nama of Africa (1866), Maori of New Zealand (1858), Dayak of Indonesia (1858), Isixhosa of South Africa (1859), Karan of Burma (1860), Nubian of Egypt (1860), Igbo of Nigeria (1860), Efik and Yoruba of Nigeria (1862), Tibetan (1862), Ga of Ghana (1866), Tongan of Africa (1862), Twi of Ghana (1863), Isizulu of Africa (1865), Niuean of Tonga (1866), Dehu of New Caledonia (1868), Benga of Africa (1871), Ewe of Africa (1877), Batak of Indonesia (1878), Thai (1883). (Some of the previous information on Bible versions is derived from Scriptures of the World, United Bible Societies, 1988 and The Bible in America, 1936.)
d. We would emphasize that this list of translations is only partial. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bible or portions thereof had been produced in almost 900 languages (P. Marion Simms, The Bible in America, p. 177).
e. Though we cannot give the exact particulars of the textual basis for all of these translations, we do know that the vast majority of these were Received Text Scriptures. I know this from correspondence with Bible Society leaders and missionaries, as well as from my own study of various sources, including personal examination of several of the translations referred to above (Slovak, Czech, Carey Nepali, Judson Burmese, German Luther, Russian, and Spanish). Some were translated from the English Authorized Version; some, from the Greek Received Text; others, from important European Received Text versions such as the Spanish and the German.
f. When we say these were Received Text Bibles, we do not mean that they were exactly like the English King James Bible in every detail; we mean that they were textually the same as the KJV. They included the words and verses disputed by the modern texts. They contained “God” in 1 Tim. 3:16, for example. They contained Matthew 17:21 and Mark 9:44, 46 and Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53--8:11 and Acts 8:37--and the hundreds of other verses and portions of verses that are omitted or questioned in the new Bibles.
g. It is important to understand that in many cases the early Received Text versions in these languages have fallen into disuse since the twentieth century and have been replaced with Westcott-Hort type versions. This has been an objective of the national Bible Societies for many decades.
David Cloud
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