17 September 2024

When St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century, it wasn’t the first Latin translation but what became known as the Vulgate was used in the Western Church for over a thousand years! Interestingly, the word vulgate gives us our word vulgar.

The Vulgate was a translation into ‘common speech’, the Latin tongue. But it wasn’t until the Scottish Reformation of 1560 that the common people got the Bible in our common language, English. Of course, the Latin version  continued to be used in  the Roman Catholic Church until the last century.

In May 1601, the General Assembly met in the newly built  Burntisland Church in the presence of the King and approved a new translation of the Bible into English. In 1611, the Authorised Version was published and read in Scottish Churches for three hundred and fifty years!

When a boy in the Primary School at Bridge of Allan asked the school chaplain, ‘Why can’t be have a Bible that we can read easily?’ the chaplain, GS Hendry, took the question to the Presbytery of Stirling and Dunblane and eventually the General Assembly.

As a result, the New English Bible was produced in 1961, the first version in modern English. This was followed by many others not least the Good News Bible in 1976. It was more of a paraphrase than a precise translation and was effective in communicating the Gospel around the world.

It is of profound significance to note that both the Authorised Version of the Bible and the first version of the Bible to be translated into contemporary English were both instigated by the Church of Scotland. Although we are a small nation and a small church by international standards, we have certainly punched above our weight –a ‘People of the Book’ indeed!

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