Some of the sad (bad) history of English Bible translations

English Bible translation has a lot of wonderful history, especially when we look at the early translators (e.g., John Wycliffe and William Tyndale) who risked their lives to defy church leaders who were against the Bible being translated into the 'common'/'vulgar' English language (when a 'superior' Latin translation had already been available for around a thousand years).

However those brave actions aren’t the topic of this blog entry, but rather we’ll focus here on some of the unfortunate circumstances and unfortunate decisions that led to the somewhat sad state of our current English translations.

But before we get to that, we first need to go all the way back to Roman times. Although the earliest New Testament manuscripts that we have are all Koine Greek and the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) had already been translated into Greek (see the Septuagint), Latin was a major language of the Roman empire, and a Latin translation was commissioned by the Pope in the late 300s that later came to be called the Latin 'Vulgate' (meaning 'common'/'ordinary'). This translation was a great asset to the church, but the problem was that over a period of roughly one thousand years, this Latin translation remained highly revered by the church even when the average person in England could no longer understand Latin. (This led to a period of terrible corruption in the church once the ordinary people no longer had access to the scriptures in their own language and so had to rely purely on what they were taught from the pulpit.)

In the mid 1300s, John Wycliffe started to translate the Bible into the language of the people (that we now call 'middle-English'), but unfortunately, this early English translation was done from the Latin not the Koine Greek and Hebrew. Of course, this extra level of indirectness led to a number of deficiencies in the Wycliffe translation, and particularly to the invention of the name 'James' (which was probably pronounced as two syllables at the time: 'Yames') for the Greek name 'Ἰάκωβος' (Yakōbos), although in passages where Wycliffe realised that it was talking about the Old Testament character, he corrected it to 'Jacob' (pronounced 'Yakob'). This is discussed more here and here. The saddest part of the 'Yames' error is that it wasn’t corrected by the succeeding English translations and 'James' now has even become a common English boy’s name (even though no Biblical character had a name even slightly resembling that).

William Tyndale (in the 1500s now) changed Wycliffe’s spelling for names with many of them now starting with the letter 'I’, hence the beginning of Jude 1:1: 'Iudas the servaunt of Iesus Christ the brother of Iames.' That spelling went all the way through to the original 1611 King James Bible, but by the 1769 printing (along with hundreds of corrections, and dropping the 'apocrypha'), all those 'I’s at the beginning of names were changed back to 'J’s.

The next sad event is simply an accident of history. Language change, although it was slowed down after the invention of the printing press and the resultant stabilisation of spelling, is continuous (and ongoing even now). English is a West Germanic Language, but also heavily influenced by Latin and French. As the (originally Germanic) 'J' (pronounced like English 'Y') changed its pronunciation, English words like 'Iesus' ended up as 'Jesus' even though both the Hebrew and the Greek names began with the 'Y' sound.

In terms of spelling, the first letter of a word is quite vital. You can often get your spell-checker to complete a word for you if you know how it begins. So sadly, we now have a situation in English Bibles, where the first letter of many, many names (starting with 'J') is wrong. If you visit Israel, you’ll notice that all Hebrew speakers will start the names of those places with a 'Y' sound (as do most Europeans).

What’s more, a number of Hebrew names (like 'Ishmael’, 'Isaac’, ‘Israel’, and 'Isaiah') have a 'Y' (that ended up being dropped completely) preceding the 'I'/'i’, so English speakers sadly get those names quite wrong as well.

Then names like 'Isaiah' (and 'Jeremiah’, ‘Uzziah’, and many others) have an 'i' in the middle that should be a 'y'. The transliterated Hebrew is more like 'Yeshayahu’, and then 'Yah' (the shortened form of God’s name) can more easily be recognised inside the name. (The situation in Spanish and many other languages is even worse, where the 'h' gets changed to 's' so it becomes even harder to recognise a 'Yah' on the end of 'Isaías'. Not all languages have an 'h’, so sometimes changes like that are unavoidable—other times they're because of a prestigious intermediary language.)

The sad result of this cacophony of mistakes, differences between languages, and change with the passage of time, means that sadly the proper names in our English Bibles are often woefully distant from those peoples' actual names. This can lead to some unfortunate results:

1. A disconnection from the Jewishness of the Bible. Did you know that Matthew’s Jewish name 'Matityahu' has a 'Yah' in it (and means 'gift of Yahweh')? (Our name 'Matthew' comes from his Greek name via his Latin name.) Did you know that former Israeli prime-minister 'Yitzhak Rabin' was named after 'Isaac'? Even the name 'Jesus' doesn’t sound very Jewish because it’s not. Try 'Yeshua' instead (and it’s exactly the same name as 'Joshua' in the Bible).
2. It’s not as easy as it could be to recognise 'Yah' in the middle of a number of Bible names. (The OET Literal Version tries to superscript them to help the reader notice them, e.g., see Matthew 1.)

Robert Hunt, November 2024.
Street and door-to-door evangelist, public school chaplain, prison Bible-study leader, Bible teacher/preacher, and professional Bible translator.