From the Septuagint to the KJV — the story of Bible translation

The history of Bible translation is driven by one conviction, held so strongly that people repeatedly died for it: that God's word should be available to every person in the language they actually speak.

The pattern is set at Pentecost. The Spirit falls, and the crowd — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete and Arabia — hears "in our own tongues the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:11).

Not one sacred language. Everyone's own.

The Septuagint (3rd–2nd centuries BC)

By the third century BC, the large Jewish community in Alexandria had largely stopped speaking Hebrew. Greek was their daily language, and their children could not read the Scriptures.

So the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek — the first major translation of Scripture in history. The traditional account speaks of seventy-two translators, which gives the work its name and its abbreviation: the Septuagint, LXX.

Its importance is hard to overstate. It was the Bible of the early church. When the New Testament quotes the Old — around 300 times — the majority follow the Septuagint's wording rather than the Hebrew.

This has a striking implication: the apostles were quoting a translation as Scripture. The idea that only the original language is authoritative is not the New Testament's own practice.

It also carried theological weight. The Septuagint renders the Hebrew almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos — specifically "virgin" — which Matthew then quotes (Matthew 1:23). And it made the Hebrew Scriptures readable across the Greek-speaking world, preparing ground the gospel would later cover.

The early versions

As the church spread, translation followed almost immediately.

Syriac — the Peshitta, still used by Syriac churches today, reaching the Christians of Mesopotamia and, eventually, India and China.

Coptic — for Egyptian Christians, in several dialects.

Old Latin — a proliferation of unofficial Latin versions of varying quality, which eventually became the problem Jerome was hired to solve.

Gothic — around AD 350, Bishop Wulfila translated for the Goths and had to invent an alphabet to do it. He reportedly omitted the books of Kings, on the grounds that the Goths were quite warlike enough already.

Armenian (5th c.), Georgian, Ethiopic (Ge'ez) — each requiring, in several cases, the creation of a written script.

Translation into new languages, including inventing alphabets, is one of the church's most consistent activities across two thousand years.

Jerome and the Vulgate (AD 382–405)

By the late fourth century the Latin versions were a mess — competing texts, uneven quality, accumulated errors. Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome, the finest biblical linguist of the age, to produce a reliable Latin Bible.

Jerome made a decision that was controversial then and vindicated since: for the Old Testament he went back to the Hebrew, not to the Greek Septuagint that the church had been using.

He called this the Hebraica veritas — the Hebrew truth. Augustine wrote to him worried that changing familiar readings would unsettle congregations, and reported that a North African bishop had caused a riot by reading Jerome's rendering of the plant in Jonah 4:6.

Jerome went back to the Hebrew anyway. He learned it from Jewish teachers and spent decades in Bethlehem on the work.

The result — the Vulgate, from vulgata, common — was the Bible of the Western church for over a thousand years and shaped Latin theological vocabulary permanently.

There is an irony worth noting. The Vulgate was made precisely so ordinary people could read Scripture in the common tongue. Centuries later, when Latin was no longer the common tongue, that same translation became the barrier that new translators had to fight past.

Wycliffe (1382)

John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian, argued that Scripture is the supreme authority and that every Christian should have access to it.

He and his associates produced the first complete English Bible, translated from the Vulgate. Copies were hand-written — this is before printing in Europe — and each took months.

The reaction was severe. His followers, the Lollards, were persecuted; the Constitutions of Oxford in 1408 made unauthorised English translation punishable. Wycliffe himself died of a stroke in 1384, and in 1428, on the order of the Council of Constance, his body was exhumed, burned, and the ashes thrown into the River Swift.

Tyndale (1526–1536)

William Tyndale is the central figure in the English Bible, and he is not nearly well enough known.

Told by a learned churchman that England would be better off without God's law than without the Pope's, Tyndale gave the reply that defines him:

If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.

He was the first to translate into English directly from the Hebrew and Greek, and the first to print an English Bible.

Refused permission in England, he fled to the continent. His New Testament was printed at Worms in 1526 and smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. The Bishop of London bought up copies to burn them — and inadvertently funded the next printing.

He worked on. He translated the Pentateuch and Jonah, and was betrayed by an Englishman he had befriended named Henry Phillips.

He was imprisoned for sixteen months in a cold castle at Vilvoorde near Brussels. A surviving letter from that imprisonment asks for a warmer cap, a candle, and — above all — his Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary, so that he could continue working.

In October 1536 he was strangled and burned. His last recorded words: Lord, open the King of England's eyes.

Three years later, by royal command, an English Bible resting substantially on his work was chained in every parish church in England.

David Daniell's scholarship established the extent of his legacy: roughly 83% of the King James New Testament is Tyndale's wording, and around 76% of the Old Testament sections he completed.

These are his sentences: Let there be light. Am I my brother's keeper? The salt of the earth. The powers that be. Fight the good fight. A law unto themselves. The signs of the times. Eat, drink and be merry. Blessed are the peacemakers.

He also coined words English did not have: Passover, scapegoat, atonement, mercy seat.

Tyndale did more to shape written English than any writer except Shakespeare, and unlike Shakespeare he was killed for it.

Luther's German Bible (1522–1534)

Hidden at the Wartburg after Worms, Luther translated the New Testament from Erasmus' Greek text in eleven weeks.

His method was deliberate: he wanted German that sounded like German, not translated Latin. He wrote that one must ask the mother in the home, the children in the street, the common man in the marketplace, and translate accordingly.

Like Tyndale's for English, Luther's Bible shaped its language permanently — it did much to standardise written German across a patchwork of dialects.

The King James Version (1611)

Commissioned by James I at the Hampton Court Conference, partly to replace the Geneva Bible, whose marginal notes he found politically objectionable.

The scale was remarkable: fifty-four scholars in six committees at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, working for seven years. Each section was reviewed by every company; the whole was read aloud, because it was made to be heard.

They did not begin from scratch. Their own preface says they never intended to make a new translation but to make a good one better, and they drew heavily on Tyndale, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops' Bible.

Its influence on English is unmatched by any book. And its translators would have been surprised by later claims made on its behalf: their preface welcomed future revision, and they printed alternative readings in the margins because they knew some passages were genuinely uncertain.

What has happened since

Discovery drove revision. The Codex Sinaiticus (1844) and Codex Vaticanus, both fourth century, are far older than anything available in 1611. Thousands of papyri emerged from Egypt. The Dead Sea Scrolls (1947) pushed the Hebrew evidence back a thousand years.

Modern translations — RSV, NASB, NIV, ESV, NLT, CSB, NRSV — work from these earlier manuscripts and from a much better understanding of Hebrew and Greek.

And the work continues. Wycliffe Bible Translators and partner organisations report that the full Bible now exists in over 750 languages and the New Testament in over 1,600, with translation active in around 3,000 more. Roughly 1,200 languages still have no Scripture at all.

Why any of this matters

Because the pattern from Pentecost onward is unbroken: God speaks in the languages people actually use.

Not one sacred tongue. Not a priestly monopoly. Every language, every ploughboy, every mother in every home.

That conviction has cost a great many lives, and every English Bible on every shelf is downstream of a man asking for a candle and his Hebrew dictionary in a cold cell, so that he could keep working.