How Did People Translate the Bible into English?

Arianna asked,

How did people translate the Bible into English if it was normally in Greek and/or Latin?

Thanks for your question!

God originally inspired the Old Testament in Hebrew (and a little bit of Aramaic) and the New Testament in Greek. These were the common languages spoken by God’s people at the time they were written.

Old Testament

In 586 BC, many Jews went into exile (meaning they were banished from Israel, their home, for a time). Though some Jews returned to Israel, others remained scattered and eventually didn’t speak Hebrew at all. They would need a translation of the Hebrew Scripture!

In the third century BC, one large group of Jews in Greece produced the first major translation of the first five books of the Bible into Greek. Over the next couple hundred years, the rest of the Old Testament was translated into Greek. By the time of Jesus, this book, called the Septuagint, had spread and was considered God’s Word by Jews who didn’t speak Hebrew.

New Testament

After Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of the New Testament to write in their language, which was Greek. Christians copied these Greek documents and took them all over the known world.

As the gospel spread, it quickly reached people who did not speak Greek, so Christians translated the New Testament into several other languages.

All Together

Nearly 400 years after Jesus’ ascension, an Italian scholar named Jerome translated the Greek testaments into Latin. His translation is called the Latin Vulgate. Vulgate comes from the same Latin root word as vulgar, as in “common.” At the time, Latin was a common language that many people understood.

The Latin Vulgate was the standard translation of the Western Church for about 1,000 years, until the Reformation in 1517. By the Reformation, Latin was no longer a spoken or widely studied language. Some were using the Latin Vulgate to keep God’s Word from the many people who didn’t read Latin. So godly men like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale began translating the Bible into English, and others translated the Bible into their own languages.

For more information about how we got the Bible, check out “Hunting Down the History of God’s Word” from the July–September 2023 issue of Kids Answers magazine. You can read it here.

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