The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (1445-425 BC). Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic, but the rest was Hebrew.
The New Testament was written in the language of common Greek (AD 44-95). Greek, along with Aramaic, was the language everyone spoke at that time, even to the degree that the Old Testament had to be translated into Greek just for people to be able to understand the Old Testament. Jesus spoke Greek, and Paul and Peter and the apostles spoke Greek and wrote in Greek. When quoting the Old Testament, Jesus often quoted it from the Greek translation. He sometimes quoted the Hebrew, but He also quoted the Greek. Why? So people could understand what He was saying! It was during the time of Alexander the Great, and Greek had become the common language. Very few Jews even knew how to read or speak Hebrew.
Before the New Testament was written Greek became the common language of the area, so the Old Testament was translated into Greek. This happened anywhere from 250-100 years before Christ was born. The translation of the Old Testament to the Greek (before the New Testament was written) was called The Septuagint. Jesus often quoted from “The Septuagint”, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This is the Bible that Jesus used often when quoting the Old Testament.
So, this is good news for the misled “messianics" of today who feel that Jesus must only be called “Yeshua”, attempting to yoke such bondage on the rest of us as “Sun-day worshipping pig-loving Christians” as we are called by some of them in the Hebrew Root cultic movement. [Lew White, Fossilized Customs, p. 163, http://www.fossilizedcustoms.com/ ]. For their information, Jesus was never called Yeshua in the original texts of the Old Testament or the New! As I have written in previous posts, His name is precious in any language. Not once in the original Hebrew Old Testament is the name “Yeshua” mentioned! Not once is the name “Yeshua” mentioned in the original texts of the New Testament, because no one spoke Hebrew. Paul wrote and spoke in Greek, and so did Peter and the others.
Then came “The Jewish Targums”. This was a collection of paraphrases of the Old Testament translated into Aramaic. It was a translation, not from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), but rather a translation from the original Hebrew into Aramaic.
Next came the Latin Vulgate (AD 390-405). After Alexander the Great the Roman Empire rose up, and people were reading Latin. This was a translation of the entire Bible into Latin and became the standard Bible for use in the Western church for 1000 years. Jerome translated it into Latin.
John Wycliffe’s translation was the first English translation in AD1380. He translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate to English.
The Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to incorporate chapter and verse divisions, and it was translated in AD 1570.
William Tyndale’s translation in AD 1535 was the first translation from the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into English. He was burned at the stake for this.
The King James Version was translated first in AD 1611. That was the first edition, and it was written in Old English. We would not be able to understand it today. There are many revisions: 1612, 1613, 1616, 1629, 1638, 1660, 1683, 1727, 1762, 1769, and 1873. The 1769 revision is the KJV used today.
With other translations such as the New American Standard, which were translated in the 20th Century, there are textual variants when compared with the KJV, but this is not a problem due to the fact that no doctrine is changed by the variants. No meanings of the verses were changed.
Despite what cultists preach we can still trust the Bible today, and God has guarded His Word!
(For more information hear Pastor Hollie Miller's sermon from Sevier Heights Baptist Church "Which Translation Should I Read?")
