Johnstown weekly Democrat. (Johnstown, Cambria County, Pa.) 1889-1916, 1889-11-01
TILE BIBLES HISTORY.
WONDERFUL FACTS AND FIGURES
ABOUT THE DIVINE BOOK.
The Early CompiIers-St. Jerome and His
Work-The Translators and the Many
Bibles They PubIished-When the Divis-
ion Into Verses Took Place.

| ty-four years ago, in the year 2S5 B. c..
| seventy of the wise men of Alexandria
engaged themselves in compiling and
collating the Hebrew Scriptures into
their present united form and further
simplifying the works by translating
them into Greek for the benefit of the
Jews then in Egypt The results of their
labors have since been known collective
ly as the Septuagint, from the fact that
it is the work Of the seventy translaSors
About 900 years later. in the Second
century, y. H., the books of the New
Testament were added and the whole
translated into Latin
The italia, or Latin version soon be-
came the standard of the primitive
| Christians and was used to the exclu.
sion of both the Hebrew and Greek YER
Finus for two centuries, until the st
Jerome revision of i. d. 4O5 After St
jerome had finished his crowning work
great deal OF which he performed in
the village C! Bethlehem, almost in sight
Of the birthplace Of Jesus, the Damatan
and Paunouan monks hid away their
! old versions ul The Bible and would use
no other except the one which had been
given them by their patron, Jerome. him
self
! The jerome revision was Is superior to
the work Of the seventy as their work
was to the old semi-barbaric work which
existed prior to the translation of 2S5
B. G.
ST. JEROME.
The most carefully written copies of
the Bible ohtainable were consulted by
the scholarly saint and compared with
the Arabic Hebrew aud Syriac versions,
in all of which he made cancellations
and corrections which have stood the
test Of all subsequent time. The hercu-
lean task undertaken by St, jerome will
be better understood when the reader
| has been informed that over 200 versions
of the Evangelists, each differing from
the other in many of its essential de-
tails, were presented for the considera-
ton of the sages ut the council of Nice,
in 395 A. ID. For hundreds of wears
copyists had added to and taken from
the Scriptures to such an extent as to
make it extremely difficult for even the
most learned to decide what should re-
main for the ediicationof future gener-
ations or what should be eliminated from
the sacred pages as apocryphal.
The word "bible," meaning book, or
as applied by the early writer's, 1.-The
book, was first used by Chrysostom as
early as the fifth century, where he
speaks of the sacred writings collective
ly as the Biblia, or 1.-The Books. The
| infinite variations which occurred in the
manuscripts written by the early Chris
tian fathers have caused great deal of
contention among churchmen, some ad-
mitting certain books as ascanonical which
are rejected by others as apocryphal.
This you can find illustrated by compar-
ing Douay and King James Bible Of
today; the former admits several books
which the King James translators would
not, as they considered them uncanoni-
cal.
The several books as arranged and ac-
cepted at present are the results of years
of labor and of countless councils and
revision assemblages. For 1900 years
after the Saviour of Men ended his brief
career on the rugged heights of Calvary,
the touching details of which are known
to over 700, 100000 of people and in every
land on the globe, each book of the Bible
was one continued story, undivided into
chapters, paragraphs or verses.
DIVISIONS OF THE BIBLE.
Prior to the time of the Spanish rabbi,
the jew had employed system of divid-
ing the chapters into verses in the Old
Testament, a system which had never
been adopted by the Christians, and
which was discarded for that of the
learned Spaniard by the Jews themselves.
The New Testament was not divided
into verses until after the invention Of
the art of printing, by the Robert Steph-
ems Greek edition in 1851.
OF the early translations of the Bible
the most important, aside from the Sept
uagint and the st. Jerome versions, are
the threefold Egyptian translation of the
fourth century. This remarkable work
of the copyist was in three languages,
and was intended for all parts of Egypt:
the Versio Figurata, collated by Jacob,
Vi EueSottS III btlS SlSo ith SSLlbulJ J OiaV VI
Paul, bishop Of Tela, in 617, and the
eighth, ninth and tenth century transla-
tions, made respectively by Bede, Alfred
and AElfric.
During the dark ages, and on down to
the time Luther gave his masterpiece to
the world, several translations were
made, including that Of Notker-Labeo,
$50 A. D.; that prepared under the super
vision of Petrus Waldus, ITO; the inn
portant work Of Louis the Pious, 1897;
that of Charles the Wise, 1880; the
Guyars version of 1886; the thirteenth
century version in Spanish during the
reign of Alphonso V, and the two excel
lent works of Wickliffe and Huss, the
latter for the Bohemians and the former
for the English speaking people. With
the invention of printing every person
who had ever laid claim to literary
abilities seemed to think that he had
been specially commissioned from on
high to retranslate the Word of God, as
one would naturally infer from the fact
that not less than seventeen German
translations alone were given the public
between the time of Gutenberg and
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