including headings The Old Testament in Greek, The Bible in Latin, Ulfilas and his alphabet, A restricted Bible, Erasmus, Luther and Tyndale, ...
Meanwhile the texts are being ceaselessly copied and recopied on papyrus and later on parchment. A few fragments survive from the 2nd century, but the earliest complete New Testament (the Codex Sinaiticus, in Gree...
Ulfilas is the first man known to have undertaken an extraordinarily difficult intellectual task - writing down, from scratch, a language which is as yet purely oral. He even devises a new alphabet to capture accurately...
In 385 Jerome and his virgins go on pilgrimage together to Palestine and to the monasteries of Egypt. In 386 they settle in Bethlehem. Here Paula, a widow leading the group of women, organizes the building of a monastery...
The Jews of Alexandria demonstrate the ability of a Jewish community to flourish in a new context without losing its identity. They integrate so fully with the secular life of the city that their own first language becom...
Jerome acquires a firm commitment to the monastic life during his travels in the Middle East as a young man. These include two years living as a hermit in the desert. Like St Anthony before him, he suffers vivid sexual h...
Cyril and his elder brother Methodius already have a distinguished reputation as theologians and linguists when the Byzantine emperor sends them as missionaries, in 863, to the Slavs of Moravia. The brothers are Greek bu...
The books of the Jewish Bible are believed to have been written over several centuries, beginning in the 10th century BC - by which time the Hebrews are settled in Canaan, or Palestine. But in many parts the scribes are...
The Reformation, with its emphasis on receiving the word of God in one's own language, brings great benefit to Wales. In the mid-16th there are fewer than 250,000 inhabitants of the principality, yet the Protestant gover...
Luther's interest in translating the New Testament from the original Greek into German has been stimulated, in 1518, by the arrival in Wittenberg of a new young professor, Philip Melanchthon. His lectures on Homer inspir...
