This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
22 July 2022 - 11 September 2022
Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, and after that of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, by the middle ages Western Christianity related to a Bible entirely in Latin, and for the most part did not consult the original languages until the Protestant Reformation. The religious controversies which broke out after 1517 provided a serious impetus towards study of the original languages, by both Catholics and Protestants.
Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, stuck to Greek as its standard language, using the Byzantine Text of the New Testament and the Septuagint for its Old Testament.
Today, however, as a result of Hebrew study in which Christians learned from Jews in the wake of the Reformation, translation of the Old Testament books found in the Hebrew Bible now relies almost exclusively on the Masoretic Text.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.