Español / Spanish Bible History (2)

**List: Spanish Ministry the Holy Bible ( la Santa Biblia ) Spanish... "THE SPANISH VERSIONS    George Borrow’s narrative entitled "The Bible in Spain," which has become a classic of nineteenth century prose, has ac- customed the English-speaking world, at least, to the colloca- tion of those two words, Spain, and the Bible.   Yet it was precisely the lack of Bibles in Spain that accounts for that book, and for the remarkable episode in Borrow’s life which it records."--1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only: G. Borrow?]    "Unlike France and Italy, Spain’s Latin and Roman Catholic sister-lands, there were no vernacular Bibles or Testaments pro- duced in Spain by Catholic scholars with ecclesiastical approba- tion, contemporary with versions called forth by the Reforma- tion.   It was not until 1793, when the French Revolution was passing into the Terror, that the first [b]ible in Spanish was issued on Spanish soil.   It was a ten-volume affair, with a parallel Latin Vulgate text, from which alone it was translated.   The Bishop of Segovia, its author, published a revision of it four years later, and by this time it numbered nineteen volumes, without the Vulgate text that was in the first issue.   Obviously, the com- mon people of Spain, even the literate fraction of them, were unable to become Bible-readers as long as such bulky editions prevailed."--1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only: incorrect Latin text.]    "But from the middle of the sixteenth century the Word of God in Castilian dress had seen the light in foreign lands.   Men of Spanish birth, studying abroad, or compelled to live abroad because of their adherence to faiths denounced by the Inquisi- tion, longed to see their own people enjoy the same feast as had long since been spread before believers of other races.   To this end they labored and suffered to give Spain the Scriptures in the vernacular.   Other men risked, and some of them lost, their lives in smuggling into Spain the forbidden Bibles thus published abroad.   One such character, defiant of the laws of man that he might serve the Law of God, is mentioned in the Historical Catalogue of Printed Scriptures, a certain "Julian Hernandez (named Julianillo), who in 1557 succeeded in conveying across the Netherlands and landing safely at Seville two great barrels filled with copies of J. Perez’ translations of the New Testament and the Psalter.   Ultimately he paid the penalty with his life." (Vol. IV., p. 1429).    The Tyndale of the Spanish Bible was a young Spaniard who, in the fashion of the time, translated his native name, de Enzinas ("oak trees"), into Greek as "Dryander."   He was known as Dryander in England, where for a short time he held a professorship in Greek at Cambridge.   It was while he was still a student at Wittemberg, living in the home of Melanchthon, his teacher, that he made what was the first translation of the New Testament into the Spanish tongue.   The book was printed in 1543 at Antwerp, but had a strange fate.   The Emperor, Charles V, was then master of the Low Countries, as well as of most of the rest of Western Europe, including of course his native Spain.   Desirous of having such distinguished patronage, En- zinas dedicated the work to the Emperor, and removed from it whatever he thought might offend.   Unfortunately he failed to alter certain sentences which he had had printed in capital letters because of their importance to true Christian doctrine, as the translator had learned from Wittemberg to construe it.   Though received by the Emperor at Brussels in a friendly way to receive a copy of the new work, Enzinas was shortly after seized and cast into prison, after the Emperor’s confessor had examined it and denounced it as heretical.   More fortunate than Tyndale, Enzinas escaped to Antwerp, and spent the rest of his short life of thirty-two years in Germany and England.   As the Testament was suppressed by imperial order, few copies of it have survived. Thus the Perez New Testament, published thirteen years later at Geneva, and the de Reina Bible of 1569 (the first complete Spanish Bible), serve as the basis of later revisions of the Spanish Version.    Such is the very influential de Valera Version of 1602, which is still largely used and by some preferred to all later texts. England was the usual refuge for the eminent Spanish Reformers who had to flee their own land.   De Valera was educated at Cambridge, taught at Oxford, and spent most of his life in Lon- don, where his New Testament was printed in 1596, six years before his entire Bible appeared at Amsterdam.    The violent persecutions that drove out of Spain great numbers of her most learned and prosperous citizens, the Jews, are re- sponsible for the appearance of Spanish Scriptures made by or for these Jews in Italy and Holland.   In fact, the earliest Old Testament ever printed in the Spanish language (1553) is that known as the "Ferrara Bible," from the fact that it was printed by Jews there, under the patronage of the Duke of Ferrara.   As these "Sephardim" or Spanish-speaking Jews preferred generally (and still prefer today) to read their Scriptures in Rabbinic letters, there is a whole series of Spanish publications to be listed under the head of "Judaeo-Spanish."   This version, in a dialect somewhat differing from the Spanish spoken in Spain and the colonies today, still meets the needs of the descendants of those who fled from the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella more than four centuries ago.    The widespread diffusion of the Spanish language, chiefly through the colonization and conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in both the East and the West Indies, has brought about a language situation that baffles all attempts to please the whole Spanish-speaking world of today by any one version.   There is [RVG 2010] Spanish Bible that holds the unique place that the King James Bible holds in English.   Various revisions and additional translations have been made.   The older versions in revised form are still the most widely circulated.   The "Hispano- Americana" New Testament (1916), like the Brasileira Bible in Portuguese, represents the effort to share with the Latin Ameri- can world the [so-called] advances in knowledge of text and language ex- pressed in the English Revised Versions."-- 1000 Tongues, 1939   [Info only: radical ERV.]

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