Eastern/Western Versions of the Bible
Lecture 22  -  

 Early Eastern Versions
•	Translated the Bible from the Greek Text into other languages
•	we will concentrate on those that were made of the NT
The ____________Version
•	To understand how the Syrian version was produced, we need to trace the history of the church going into the Eastern regions
•	the Gospel may have gone East after the Day of Pentecost because there were Parthians, ___________, Elamites, and others from _____________who may have preached the gospel
•	several million ____________lived in the area too.
Legend and Fact
•	legend says that apostolic missionaries took the Gospel into the area, but the facts point to the notion that the gospel reached Arbela, east of the __________and Edessa east of the _______________by the end of the first century.  The Gospel may have been taken East just like ____________records Paul’s journey’s with the Gospel.
The Syrian Church
•	once it was establish took the gospel to the end of its world:__________, __________and even a church was established on the island of Malabar.
•	Eusebius reports that Pantaenus went to India and found a Gospel of Matthew that___________________, a disciple of Jesus, had left there.  Some credit __________________with other churches
What is meant by Syriac Christianity?
•	This is not the Christianity of ________________of Syria.  It is the area between the Two Rivers where _______________was largely spoken, but a large and dynamic church grew that spoke Syraic. ____________may be defined as Christian Aramaic, but its ________is distinct from Aramaic.
The First Syriac Effort: _____________
•	converted about ________and was student of Justin Martyr’s and charged with heresy because of ascetic views around 170 he produced the Syriac-speaking Christians with a Gospel Harmony called ____________________(literally, “through the four”)
•	in the East this is known as the “______________” gospel into one account with 55 chapters
The Diatesseron’s History
•	it was so popular that it was translated into other languages
•	some scholars think it was done in _________________first and then translated into Syriac
•	a copy was found in Dura-Europos in the Upper Euphrates in AD ________
A Second Syriac Version - The Old Syriac Version
•	prior to 1842 few Syriac versions of the NT were known
•	but then many began to show up in the British Museum from a monastery in __________
•	in 1892 Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis and Mrs. Margaret Dunlop Gibson visited the monastary of St. _______________on Mt. Sinai and came away with photographs of a ______________-mss and the 4 Gospels in Syriac
The copies
•	are called: the palimpset is called the _____________Syriac and the later the Sinaitic Syriac
•	All we have are the Gospels as no copy of __________or _____________exists in mss form
•	In time this Old Syriac fell under the domination of the___________________.
The Peshitta
•	______________means “that which is simple and clear” and is used much like the word “_______________________” in that it is common language
•	is the great standard version of the ancient Syriac church and used from the 5th century onwards
•	it is believed that Bishop_________________, of Edessa from AD 411 to 435, prepared it.
The Peshitta
•	In the official form, it includes only ________of our 27 books
•	 2____________, 2 and 3_________, and __________as well as ___________are omitted
•	more than ____________Peshitta versions are in existence for scholars
•	these are such a smooth and scholarly version that very few variants are found
Other Syriac versions
•	the Philoxenian Syriac - done by a __________________from the Greek
•	____________________Syriac - 616 revision by Thomas Harkel
•	_______________________Syriac - about the 5th century and is really done in the Syriac script but uses the Aramaic dialect
•	the Syriac version has the honor of being the _____________translation of the Greek NT
Coptic Versions from ______________
•	when was Chrisitanity introduced into Egypt? Acts 2:10 suggests after ________________
•	It seems that the Gospel reached _______________________by the mid-first century
•	but, the residents of Alexandria were Greek-speaking, why translate it into another language?
•	Christianity spread into the ______________________where Coptic was spoken
The _________________Version
•	this is a coptic dialect of the NT
•	this was not known until the end of the 18th century
•	enough mss evidence is available and goes back to the _________century
•	it has some variant readings in places
The ___________________Version
•	this is a second _______________dialect of the NT
•	it is used even today in the Coptic church
•	this has become the _________________Coptic Version
•	this is the result of Chrisitan ___________________reaching into these areas with the Gospel
The __________________Versions
•	the Armenians lived north of the Syriac speaking church
•	This church reached this Armenians with the Gospel in a territory laying between the ________________and ___________________Empires, north of Mesopotamia
•	Christianity arrived in the ___________century and in time the entire region became Christian
The Armenian Versions
•	the Armenian alphabet was invented in the __________century and Mesrop, the inventor, began to translate the NT into Armenian
•	No version of the NT, other than the Latin________________, is available in so many mss than this one and therefore, it is called the “_________________of the Versions”
Its mark of distinction 
•	is that it includes a Letter of the Corinthians to Paul and 
•	a ____________Letter of Paul to the Corinthians
•	This version is probably based on the Old Syriac ans is a _________________translation
The __________________Version
•	this area is north of_________________, between the Black and Caspian Seas
•	the gospel came here in the middle of the ___________century and 
•	before the gospel could be written here, the alphabet had to be _____________and evidence suggests that the Gospels were written in Georgian language by the ___________century
The Georgian Version
•	may have been translated from the Old Syriac
•	or the Armenian  (_______________translation) or
•	the Greek
•	like the Armenian Version,this one is a missionary version and was part of the early churches ______________of putting the bible into peoples hands and languages
The Ethiopiac Versions
•	the origin of Christianity is mysterious and some suggest that the official baptized by ________________brought it to Ethiopia
•	other traditions suggest one of the 12 apostles brought the message
•	at least by the __________to 6th century the translation of parts of the Bible were made
Early Western Versions 
•	This story begins with the Book of Acts which tells how the gospel spread from Jerusalem westward until it reached the heart of the empire, Rome.
•	No great language barrier exited until the ________as a spoken language in Rome when _____________began to be spoken.
•	Greek remained the language of theologians until the beginning of _________century
The Latin Need
•	this slow change eventually forced the church to change the language of its Bible.
•	As usual the church was among the last __________________to change
•	The early versions which preceded _______________are called __________________
Old Latin Versions
•	The Origin of the Old Latin Versions
•	it seems the need began in the Roman province of ______________because some of the most flourishing churches exited here, before Islam overran the area in the 7th century
•	______________, Cyprian and ___________________were from this area. Where the areas had early translations the Islam religion couldn’t wipe Christianity out.
Carthage
•	was the center of a large Christian community and the need arose here for a Latin Bible
•	In AD __________a record of the trails of Christians in the town of Scillium reports that a certain Speratus was asked what he carried in his box. He replied “Books and letters of a just man, one___________.” This seems to point to a Paul’s letters in Greek and so it is guessed that _________________exited too.
Africa or Italy?
•	Some question remains if the first attempt at translating the Greek text into Latin came in ____________or _______________
•	It appears that the first Latin version is not the product of one man or the work of the church
•	rather individuals in different areas in the empire worked on it.
Augustine
•	in his day complained, 
•	“in the early days of the faith, every man who happened to gain a possession of a Greek mss and who imagined he had any facility in ___________languages however slight that might have been, dared to make a translation.”
•	no single man did all 27 books and many were ____________at first
Early Latin Mss
•	__________________quotes the NT in Latin  (died ca 220)
•	________________ (ca 258) bishop of Carthage, quotes copiously from a Latin version of the OT and NT
Old Latin Mss
•	We have 10,000 mss of Jerome’s________________, but few copies of the Old Latin Versions and usually they are fragmentary
•	_____gospels mss exist and are mutilated mostly
•	all this early attempt to render the bible into Latin ended in chaos, so no two mss agreed. Pope ___________________(366-384) asked Sophronius ________________Hieronymus (Jerome) to produce an accurate version
The Latin Vulgate
•	___________ (born ca 346) raised in fairly well to do Christian family and studied under the famous grammarian_________________.
•	He copied every book by hand that he could find and visited the catacombs on Sundays. He made a formal confession and was baptized and began to study Greek
•	He moved from Rome to _____________and then set out for the east
Jerome
•	had a dream while suffering from a fever which became a turning point in this life
•	He went to _____________and found a Jew who would teach him Hebrew
•	In ___________he became the secretary to the Pope Damascus who asked him to set out to make a _____________translation
•	The Pope died in __________the next Pope didn’t like Jerome and he went to ____________
The Early Vulgate
•	Jerome had already translated the Gospels and Psalms from the Greek and decided that the Psalms needed to come from the ________________
•	His complete translation won over the Old Latin Versions slowly, but finally became the official ________________after his death.
•	This became the bible of the west for ___________years
Revisions of the Vulgate
•	___________________in the 6th century
•	about 800 Charlemagne had _________________carry out a revision
•	____________- the first printed bible by _________________
•	___________________participated in this project and introduced a standardized set of chapter divisions into the Vulgate
Other Latin Revisions of the Vulgate
•	Council of _____________of 1546 decreed the Latin Vulgate as authoritative in lectures, disputations, ________________, and expository discourses
•	they decreed that the vulgate needed to be edited and printed as accurately as possible and a commission was selected to oversee it
•	the official RCC Vulgate was produced by Popes _____________V and _____________XIV is the AV.