William Tyndale is perhaps the most famous Bible translator in the English-speaking world, but the francosphere (encompassing France, Belgium, Switzerland, and much of Africa) has its own pioneer translator. Pierre Robert Olivétan brought the Hebrew Masoretic Old Testament and Erasmus’ Greek New Testament to French—the first from the original languages. La Bible d’Olivétan shaped French-speaking Protestant identity and laid the groundwork for the Reformation’s spread in France and beyond.

Before Olivétan, the Holy Scriptures were restricted to the clergy and academia. In the Occitan-speaking south of France, the Waldensian barbes (itinerant pastors) had been preaching from their Occitan translation for over three hundred years, but in the langue d’oïl north, hearing the Bible in the people’s tongue was nearly impossible. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (alias Jacob Faber) was the first to produce a French Bible, but it was not accepted by the early Reformers due to its source text being Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.

1 John 5:7 is probably the most controversial inclusion in the King James translation of the Bible. Often referred to as the Johannine Comma (Latin: Comma Johanneum), entire books have been written about this one verse, either for or against its place in the Biblical text. It is arguably the most concise Trinitarian declaration in the New Testament:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

Every so often in history, it seems everything happened at once. A recent example future historians may evaluate is the rapid downfall of colonial empires from the end of World War II until the 1960’s. Further back was the period of national revolutions beginning with the American Revolutionary War and ending with the Napoleonic Wars.

Build Up

The most interesting to me, however, is the “explosion” of Bibles in the early modern period. Before the sixteenth century, the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—were inaccessible to most people. The Latin Vulgate was the most extant version, but few except for the Roman Catholic clergy could read it. Translations existed in English, French, German, etc., but they were not published or distributed to commoners, and thus are mostly lost to history. Everything changed, though, with a series of events starting in 1452.