Many attempts have been made to translate the Bible from the ancient languages of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The history of the German language since the Middle Ages has closely been associated with the translation of the Bible. Although the Luther’s German Translator edition of the Bible is not the first translation of the bible into German, it is maybe the most important and of greatest influence on the development of the literary German language. His version was followed by Protestant versions in other languages, especially the French, Dutch, and English. The Bible ceased to be a foreign book in a foreign tongue, and became naturalized, and hence far more clear and dear to the common people. Luther’s German Translation of the Bible has been hailed as the first German classic, the impact on the German language of which is comparable to the King James version of the Bible which became the first English classic. The Darby translation of the Bible is one of many translations that has been published ever since the Bible was written.
Having finished Trinity College in Dublin with medal, John Nelson Darby was appointed as a priest in the Irish church in 1825, and attended to the needs of people in remote places. In 1827 he started to believe that the church he belonged to was corrupt and the clergy unconcerned and joined the movement of the “brethren” in Dublin and by 1830 he became its dominant leader and shaped its history. Together with French and German followers of his he produced versions of the Bible in French and German for the purpose “not to offer to the man of letters a learned work, but rather to provide the simple and unlearned reader with as exact a translation as possible.” A French Translator edition of the Bible, often referred to as the Pau Bible was published in 1885, while the Darby Bible in German is known as the “Elberfelder Bible”. The ‘Elberfelder Bibel’ has been considered one of the most accurate and literary German Bible translations. While Luther used both interpretive and word-for-word approaches, Darby kept to the principles of word-for-word translation, accounting for the grammar peculiarities of the underlying Greek verbs.
Darby thought that it is not necessary to make a new English version of the Bible because he considered King James Version quite good and advised his associates to use it. However, he deemed it necessary to make a more word-for-word translation of the New Testament for the ones who wished to study it. The version, published in 1867 and revised twice - in 1872 and 1884, was exceedingly literal, based upon modern critical editions of the Greek text, and abundantly supplied with text-critical and philological annotations.
Malermi Bible (the Italian Translation edition of the Vulgate) was first printed in Venice by Wendelin da Spira in 1471. One of the main and of the most popular 20th century Italian Translation of the Bible is the Nuova Riveduta, which means “Newly Revised”. Since 1971 the Italian Catholic Church has its official version - the Bible of CEI, a totally new version of which was published in 2008 after a revision of both the Testaments started in 1997, considering newly discovered documents for the New Testament.
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