Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Handwritten Latin Bible displayed in Malmesbury Abbey

PD Photo: a handwritten Latin Bible on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England

The Latin handwritten Bible (seen above) was transcribed in Belgium in 1407 for reading aloud in a monastery. The original texts of the Tanakh were mostly in Hebrew and some portions were in Aramaic. There are several different ancient versions of the Tanakh in Hebrew, and the traditional Jewish version is based on the version known as Aleppo Codex.

The primary biblical text for early Christians was the Septuagint (LXX), and subsequently translations of the Hebrew Bible were made into several other languages, including Latin. The Latin translations were the most important for the Church in the West, while the Greek-speaking East continued to use the Septuagint translations of the Old Testament and had no need to translate the New Testament.

In AD 382, Pope Damasus I assembled the first list of books of the Bible at the Council of Rome, and commissioned Saint Jerome to produce a reliable text by translating the original Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin, which became known as the Latin Vulgate Bible, which was declared by the Church, in 1546 at the Council of Trent, as the only authentic and official Bible in the Latin Rite.

Since the Protestant Reformation, the Bible has been translated in to many more languages, and the Bible has a large number of English language translations.

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