PLAYER57832 wrote:The oldest complete, full Bible is generally said to be the Greek one. As I and tzor both said (even though some apparently thought we were disagreeing), the Greek church did not believe that any translation could be fully accurate. The latin or western church did, and used Latin, which was then the common tongue. It is a big ironic then that later the Roman Catholic (or latin or western) church then decided only the Latin version was "OK".
Sorry, I have a bad habit of not completing a thought. The original point of my disagreement involved not the modern Greek but the anchient Greek. The
Septuagint named for the number of translators involved was a Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament in the 3rd to 2nd century BC. (Or BCE if you are so inclined.)
Note that most of the "quotes" in the New Testament often come from the Septuagint.
We then come to the Western Church, typically centered around Rome (because, gosh darn it, the only western "Patriarch" as established under the original ecumencial councils was from Rome) who translated the "Greek" scriptures into the common tongue. Then they got stuck on that common tongue while it no longer became common. (They are not the only ones, the Church of England, as well as the Anglican Church continued to use Old Engligh in their liturgies into well into the 1970's ... I used to tease my Uncle about that all the time, especially after the Roman Catholic Church permitted English, which meant the more modern usage.) In fact most of the liturgical stubbornness came after the reformation, as a result of the counter reformation. It was also during this time a number of very sloppy translations were made, the worst involved a case of "suffer the little children" as "kill the children." I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for the next sentence, but even the King James Bible was not immune to political sloppiness; the classic hebew prohibition against people who used poisons "thou shall not permit a poisoner to live" was adjusted to "witch" to justify the various witch trials across most of Europe, both in Protestant and Catholic locations.
Biblical translations to common languages was common in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. In general all churches tend to go to the most reliable translation available. Note that most of the oldest texts we have today were only discovered in the past century. So you have to go with the best you got.
And I did take a semester of Biblical Interpretations, so I do have some basic knowledge in the subject.
