Question
Why is it that all of the English translations of the bible have extra words added or changed from the Latin Vulgate Version from which they claim they are translated.
Answer
The questioner provided this example. Example: 2-Peter 1:1 The Latin word Iusticia meaning Justice is replaced in every English version with the word Righteous which is actually Probus in Latin.
2-Peter 1:2 Jesus Christ is added to the end of this verse and does not
appear at all in the Latin Vulgate.
Jerome’s Latin version (Vulgate) of the Scriptures was begun around the end of the 4th Century. It was translated into Latin from a revised European text and from comparing with older Greek texts. Since all the New Testament was written in Greek, when King James commissioned the Authorized Version (popularly known as the King James Version, abbreviated KJV), its translators relied only upon Greek texts, not Latin. In this way, their translation is not a “translation of a translation.” The advantages of this is obvious. In the Greek, the word righteousness is the word dikaiosune from dikaios meaning equitable. It is variously translated by the English word “righteous” or “just” (and as you have noted, by different Latin words as well), but in the Greek the word is the same. The same is true of the English words “faith” and “belief.” In the Greek, there is no difference: both are from one Greek word, pistis, which the Greeks used as a noun or a verb. In English, we would find it awkward to say “Abraham faithed God,” so we translate pistis as “believe” (from its Greek verb form, pisteuo).
Since the translation KJV was first translated, in 1611, several important discoveries occurred. The first was the discovery of older Greek texts, most significantly, the Sinaiticus, which dates from the mid-fourth century. It was discovered by Constantin Tischendorf in 1844. Hence, one of the reasons for the addition or deletion of some phrases. The second discovery was the recent discovery in our century of the koine Greek language (“common” Greek). It was known that the New Testament’s Greek was a little different from the Classical Greek, but no one knew why. As we now know, the koine Greek was the language of trade, the language spoken by the “man-on-the-street” so to speak. We learned this from the discovery of ordinary letters and trade documents. These discoveries have shed light on how better to translate certain words and phrases, especially idioms. Even so, the differences between the older and newer translations are not doctrinally significant. However, they allow for a keener insight into the meaning of many words and phrases.
By Doug Focht
