“An Overview of the New Testament Translations
into Vernacular Greek during the Printing Era”
(«Επισκόπηση των Μεταφράσεων της ΚΔ
σε Καθομιλούμενη Ελληνική την εποχή της Τυπογραφίας»)
in: Biver-Pettinger & Shuali (eds.),
Traduire la Bible : hier et aujourd’hui. 2024, pp. 81–115.
REVIEW (from the post's comments):
This volume succeeds in turning the well-worn question “how should Scripture be translated?” into a comparative inquiry about who controls meaning, for whom, and with what cultural consequences. Organized in two complementary movements—historical trajectories followed by contemporary case studies—and framed by bilingual introductions, the book achieves a rare dialogue between philology, theology, and translation studies. Its geographical and confessional range is impressive: medieval and early-modern French controversies sit alongside Russian and Greek histories, patristic and Qumran-inflected textual work meets Arabic Pauline traditions and a fifteenth-century Hebrew translation of the Gospels from Catalan; later essays move from Lutherbibel revision and English evangelical versions to French liturgical experiments, Modern Hebrew, Sango, and even the tentative emergence of a Luxembourgish evangeliary. The editors’ wager—“past & present” read together—pays off, because the through-line is not method alone but the politics of reception.
Among the contributions, Pavlos D. Vasileiadis’s long study of New Testament translations into vernacular Greek during the printing era provides the volume’s most fully theorized account of how textual decisions are embedded in ecclesial and national history. It is at once a granular catalogue and an argument. By tracing the fortunes of translators from Kartanos and Kallipolitis to Vamvas and beyond, and by setting ecclesiastical prohibitions against recurrent humanist pleas for intelligibility, Vasileiadis reframes “untranslatability” as a historically produced posture of control. His typology—discriminating base texts (Textus Receptus, “Ecclesiastical Text,” modern critical editions), translational stance (from formal correspondence to paraphrase), language register (Katharevousa to Demotic), orthography (polytonic versus monotonic), and confessional alignment—offers a genuinely comparative instrument that other chapters could have adopted more explicitly. The appendices and intra-chapter figures distill complex histories into usable maps; the sample verse comparisons are exemplary for classroom use. At times the rhetoric hardens into polemic against Orthodox gatekeeping, risking an underestimation of liturgical and catechetical rationales for textual conservatism; yet the overall case—that delayed vernacularization in Greece cannot be understood apart from confessional anxieties and the long afterlife of diglossia—is persuasive and meticulously documented.
Other essays mirror this combination of historical embeddedness and methodological clarity. Jan Joosten’s overview of ancient translation practices and Thierry Legrand’s essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls remind readers that “originals” are already interpretive strata, while Luise von Flotow’s gender-attentive meditation on “the letter” unsettles the false binary by which literalism is coded as fidelity and communicative renderings as capitulation. Enora Lessinger’s comparison of ESV and NIV brings Anglophone debates about formal versus dynamic equivalence into conversation with reception theory, showing how “communicative strategies” produce distinct implied readers. Christoph Kähler’s remarks on the Urtext and the Lutherbibel revisions soberly stage the Protestant analogue to Greek debates over an “authorized” line of descent. On the Francophone side, Valérie Duval-Poujol’s history of the Bible en français courant and Henri Delhougne’s account of the 2013 liturgical Septuagint sketch two competing economies of authority—catechetical utility versus ritual continuity—without collapsing one into the other. Eran Shuali’s discussion of a Modern Hebrew New Testament translation raises, with welcome frankness, the cultural and theological freight of moving a Christian canon into the mother tongue of Judaism; Myrto Theocharous’s portrait of a “descendant” of the Septuagint in Modern Greek shows how a self-conscious lineage can innovate without severing memory. Together these chapters exemplify the volume’s strength: they treat translation as an act of social mediation in which philology, pedagogy, confessional identity, and state frameworks are mutually constitutive.
The editorial architecture largely supports this ambition. The two-part structure keeps diachronic pressures visible when the book turns to present initiatives, and the inclusion of a full bibliography and a biblical citation index makes the collection unusually navigable. The bilingual apparatus, including twin introductions, reflects the project’s cross-border aims, though it also creates a practical asymmetry for monolingual readers who will inevitably be able to consult only a subset of contributions with full ease. The production choice to juxtapose essays in French, English, and German underscores the point that Bible translation is always already multilingual; still, tighter cross-referencing between historically paired studies—for example, between the French early-modern controversies and the modern French liturgical experiments, or between Vasileiadis’s Greek typology and Theocharous’s Septuagint essay—would have further amplified the comparative dividends.
If there is a structural limitation, it is the volume’s unavoidable Eurocentrism. The inclusion of Sango materially widens the horizon, and the chapters on Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian traditions complicate any simple Western narrative. Even so, readers hoping for sustained engagement with translation movements in, say, East Asia, South Asia, or Latin America will find only indirect points of contact. Likewise, while several essays touch implicitly on translation theory—dynamic versus formal equivalence, domestication and foreignization, skopos—more explicit theorization would have helped unify the case studies and sharpen the account of how versions construct their publics. The digital present—revision cycles, corpus-based checking, paratextual design—receives relatively little attention despite its immediate relevance to the “today” of the subtitle.
These caveats aside, the collection’s intellectual payoff is substantial. It shows, patiently and with comparative tact, that translation is never merely a delivery mechanism for a stable content; it is a site where ecclesial authority, national identity, pedagogy, and readerly ethics are negotiated. By placing descriptive scholarship alongside reflective advocacy—often within single essays—the editors allow the normative stakes to surface without collapsing into confessional apologetic. The result is a book that will serve historians of biblical translation and contemporary practitioners equally well: historians will appreciate the archival breadth and the recovery of neglected actors; practitioners will find in the typologies, reception analyses, and case-specific cautionary tales a set of tools for making defensible choices under constraint. That the volume leaves the reader wanting more—more non-European case studies, more shared theoretical vocabulary—is less a failure than an index of its generativity. Translating the Bible: Past & Present does not seek the last word on fidelity; it offers a learned map of the living disputes in which fidelity must be defined.
Μεταξύ των συνεισφορών, η μακροσκελής μελέτη του Παύλου Δ. Βασιλειάδη σχετικά με τις μεταφράσεις της Καινής Διαθήκης στην καθομιλουμένη ελληνική κατά την εποχή της τυπογραφίας παρέχει την πιο πλήρη θεωρητική παρουσίαση του τόμου για το πώς οι κειμενικές αποφάσεις ενσωματώνονται στην εκκλησιαστική και εθνική ιστορία. Αποτελεί ταυτόχρονα λεπτομερή κατάλογο και επιχειρηματολογία. Ιχνηλατώντας την τύχη των μεταφραστών από τον Καρτάνο και τον Καλλιουπολίτη μέχρι τον Βάμβα και μετέπειτα, και εκθέτοντας τις εκκλησιαστικές απαγορεύσεις στις επαναλαμβανόμενες ουμανιστικές εκκλήσεις για κατανοησιμότητα, ο Βασιλειάδης αναδιατυπώνει την «μη μεταφραστικότητα» ως μια ιστορικά παραγόμενη στάση με σκοπό την άσκηση ελέγχου. Η τυπολογία του—η διάκριση των κειμένων βάσης (Textus Receptus, «Εκκλησιαστικό Κείμενο», σύγχρονες κριτικές εκδόσεις), οι μεταφραστικές στάσεις (από την τυπική ισοδυναμία ως την παράφραση), το γλωσσικό μητρώο (από την Καθαρεύουσα ως τη Δημοτική), η ορθογραφία (πολυτονική έναντι μονοτονικής) και η ομολογιακή συνταύτιση—προσφέρει ένα αυθεντικό εργαλείο σύγκρισης που άλλα κεφάλαια [ενν. του τόμου] θα μπορούσαν να είχαν υιοθετήσει πιο ρητά. Τα παραρτήματα και οι εικόνες εντός του κεφαλαίου συμπυκνώνουν σύνθετες ιστορίες σε εύχρηστους οδηγούς· η σύγκριση δειγμάτων εδαφίων αποτελεί υπόδειγμα για χρήση στην τάξη. Σε κάποια σημεία η ρητορική σκληραίνει σε πολεμική κατά της Ορθόδοξης φύλαξης των πυλών, διακινδυνεύοντας να υποτιμήσει τα λειτουργικά και κατηχητικά σκεπτικά για τον κειμενικό συντηρητισμό. Ωστόσο, η συνολική υπόθεση—ότι η καθυστερημένη καθιέρωση της καθομιλούμενης δεν μπορεί να γίνει κατανοητή ανεξάρτητα από τις ομολογιακές ανησυχίες και την μακρά μετά θάνατον επιβίωση της διγλωσσίας—είναι πειστική και σχολαστικά τεκμηριωμένη.
