The Bible Translator

This issue of The Bible Translator is devoted to the subject of the biblical canon, offering papers presented at UBS Global Bible Translation meetings. The introduction to the issue highlights the following points: the purpose of the papers, church perspectives on biblical canons, the contents of the papers, and the findings and suggestions drawn from the authors’ conclusions.

There is no evidence for a closed OT canon before A.D. 70. Our various sources indicate a high degree of fluidity and gradual accretion, closely related to politico-historical developments and the exigencies of new religious communities. The text collection of one such community, near Qumran, can be investigated for the comparative rating of biblical books, including those in the Tanakh as we know it, others which may have had ambiguous status, and a number of different types of Scripture-based works. This picture may serve to relativize modern Christian conceptions of canon where they have been based on accidents of history such as the language in which texts have been available or the media in which they have been transmitted. As a result, the Bible Societies may need to engage with a wider range of concepts of canon.

The term “Septuagint” refers to a lengthy process by which individual books of the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek, together with the inclusion of a few books originally composed in Greek. It only took on the form of a more or less fixed corpus much later. In the same way, this collection of books in Greek acquired authoritative status for its users over a period of time; notions of formal or institutional canonicity came only at a considerably later date, and in a Christian rather than a Jewish context. This article summarizes the processes by which the Greek translation was made and traces the way in which this corpus gradually acquired authoritative and then canonical status. Some practical implications for Bible Societies’ translation policies are also presented.

This article discusses the process that gave canonical status to the Masoretic Text. The discussion will start from the present reality and continue backwards. Because the Masoretic Text is a creation of rabbinic Judaism and because the rabbis did discuss the status of various books within the Masoretic Text, this article will argue for a late dating both of the text as a collection and of its canonization. However, within Christian canons, the Masoretic Text acts as a canonical text in a limited way, in the sense that it is only a part of those canons. Besides, there is no moment in history where any authority declared the Masoretic Text canonical. Therefore, it is nowadays widely accepted as a canonical text, but without authorization.

This paper focuses on the development of the Vulgate translation of the Bible and the correlative discussion about the canon, particularly the Old Testament canon, since there were no major disputes over the New Testament books in the days of the Reformation. The New Testament canon was fixed, for the most part, during the fourth to fifth centuries. Special attention will be given to the fourth session of the Council of Trent, where the two decrees regarding the Vulgate were issued.

This paper argues that the well-intended attention of humanist and Reformation scholars to the original languages of the Bible also had its downside, especially for study of the New Testament. Although the revival of Greek and Hebrew studies in itself was a positive development, together with the promotion of a Hebrew canon and the notion of sola scriptura, the hermeneutical horizon of the New Testament was limited to a Hebrew canon and a Semitic context. The New Testament was separated from its original Hellenistic-Jewish Greek environment, and was explained from a background to which it never really belonged.

Traditionally, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC) holds that its canon of the Scriptures comprises eighty-one books of the Old and New Testaments. However, which books comprise this list remains obscure and the very little research executed so far on the topic is both insufficient and misleading. This paper critically investigates if there has ever been a closed canon in the EOTC. It further critically engages with the notion and concept of the term “canon” and/or the Scripture(s). The theoretical framework applicable to this study is a history of reception approach as the study focuses on the history of reception, collection, translation, and transmission of the Scriptures in the Ethiopian Church. Methodologically, this study applies both library readings and fieldwork and the main tool employed in collecting data is qualitative interviews. In addition, insights from Ethiopian literature that have been neglected or that were earlier inaccessible are used. Finally, the study tries to prove that not only the canon of the EOTC, but also its concept in this church is very loose; it is possible to conclude that the canon of the EOTC is neither open nor closed.

In order to gain a better understanding of the situation in Russia with regard to biblical canon and biblical text, particularly in the Russian Orthodox Church, this article reflects on the notion of non-canonical books, the role of tradition and its roots in the development of the canon in early Eastern Christianity, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church’s acceptance of multiple authoritative versions of biblical books. This is followed by a brief discussion of the Slavonic Bible and the Russian Synodal Translation, particularly their sometimes hybrid textual base. The article closes with some thoughts on what this complex situation might mean for Bible translation projects in Orthodox contexts in Russia.

The aim of this paper is to discuss NT canons, using an intercultural method in dialogue with historical and canonical approaches. While focusing on NT canons, this study presumes that a Christian Bible is made of two sub-collections, the Old or First Testament and the New or Second Testament. It also assumes that each of the two sections may have canonical and non-canonical books, but not deuterocanonical books, suggesting that the term “deuterocanonical” is inappropriate for designating books that faith communities regard as either canonical or non-canonical.