page_title: Bible translations in Norway
section_title: Bokmål
hierarchical_section_title: Bible translations in Norway / Norwegian editions 1873-2011 / Bokmål
caption_attribution_description: English: Page from the Norwegian Bible translation of 1891. Jeremias Norsk bokmål: Side fra den norske bibeloversettelsen fra 1891. Jeremia
context_page_description: Since the first spread of Christianity in Norway, numerous translations of the Bible have been published. Translations have appeared in several of the official languages that Norway has had throughout its history, including editions in Old Norse, Danish, and both current standard forms Nynorsk and Bokmål.
context_section_description: In 1891 the first full translation of the Old Testament to Bokmål was made directly from the basic languages. This included translation of the Apocrypha, which once published with the Old Testament formed the Bible Society's first official version of these texts. The work of translation was done by Wilhelm Andreas Wexels and Jens Matthias Pram Kaurin. Wexels had previously been behind a British-organized revision published in 1834. These two translators initially estimated that the work would take five years; the project ended up lasting for around fifty. They delivered a draft of the individual books to an audit committee, which then in turn considered the translation. The committee consisted mostly of teachers from the Faculty of Theology, led by Carl Paul Caspari. He contributed to the chapter summaries before each chapter. As the different parts were approved, they came out in the booklets. In 1869 the Old Testament was published as a sample translation. The final version came in 1891, with "the issue" in 1888.
  The translation was met with skepticism, both from those who felt that it was bad language in the translation, such as Bishop Anton Christian Bang, and from the Faculty of Theology, which were critical of the choice of base texts for the translation.
  A second translation of The New Testament was worked on in parallel with this work. This was already in 1870 given to a professor of New Testament studies, Jacob Frederick Dietrichson, who died in 1879. He submitted a proposal, and his successor, Frederick William Bugge, was in 1886 given the task of completing this translation. Bugge, a champion of the Norwegian language, had to both look over the work of Dietrichson and translate the rest. While Dietrichson had kept strictly to the Textus Receptus, Bugge selected older and better text testifying to his skill as a translator. When Bugge was made bishop of Oslo in 1893, his translation work was then handed over to Sigurd Odland, who like Dietrichson remained closer to the Textus Receptus. The last ten years of work was carried out by an audit committee consisting of the theological professors Anton Christian Bang, Sigurd Odland, and Elias Blix, as well as linguist Johan Storm.
  Thus 1904 saw the publishing of the first official New Testament to have been translated into Bokmål from the basic text. The translation is close to Textus Receptus and there are attempts to render a word in the basic text with the same Norwegian word every time it occurs. In spite of this somewhat strange translation principle, the translation comes across as relatively fluent in the Norwegian language.
  The Bible Society's 1930-translation (NO30) was a copy of the full Bible, revising the New Testament translation from 1904 and revising even more strongly the Old Testament translation from 1891. In this edition, the language was further Norwegianized, giving the two Testaments a more unified Norwegian expression. The audit process was led by Bang and Odland, with help from Alexander Seippel, who had worked hard to translate the Bible into Norwegian. The translation follows the orthographic norms of 1917, and stood as the common standard for over 40 years. Despite this opinion by 1939 Eivind Berggrav, bishop of the Diocese of Oslo, felt that the language was not good enough and that it should work with a new translation.
  There have also been translations of the Bible in Bokmål published by people other than the Bible Society. The motivation for, and the results of, these versions have varied; several important ones include:
  The "GTMMM", or S. Michl, Sigmund Mowinckel and N. Messel scholarly edition of the Old Testament in five volumes came out from 1929 to 1963. The name "GTMMM" was given by its authors. This is a scholarly edition with text-critical notes and comments, often with textual criticisms not found in the "people issues". This edition follows an idiomatic translation principle, and was important in the work of the 1978 translation.
  John Brown Sounds, Professor of New Testament studies, published The New Testament in a new transla
caption: A page from the Bible Society edition of 1891. The picture shows the start of Jeremiah, with chapter summaries.
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