We live, think, reason and (for some) believe within the languages our personal histories have supplied us. Mine are very few: English by birth, and French a bit later on. English translations of the Bible have been around for so long that they can feel for many like the original language. If something sacred is understood about the Bible's nature, then it is naturally understood to be the translation that is also sacred, to such a point that its nature as a translated is hidden from our view.
Possibly the most central word to the English Bible apart from "God" is "Lord". Yet, as far as I can tell, Lord has only been around for a third of Christianity's history on this planet at best (I'm hoping that this proportion will not grow) and most English speaking Christian folk today might find that hard to believe.
Indeed, many modern translations of the Bible still keep going with "Lord" - I have a series of five reasons I will soon provide to help us understand why this title is showing such resilience. I also will provide some statistical research to suggest that in mainstream discourse, 'Lord' is indeed fundamentally religious and historical and not a contemporary term to designate authority.
Today, I just want to very briefly provide you how I understand the history of the word. Many people, myself included, presume that the English translation came about as a result of the King James Version, or maybe Tyndale might ring a bell of earliness. Of course, it all coincides with the printing press, so maybe that's when everything happened and Christianity moved itself out of Latin-only-mode.
That's not accurate.
Here's the complexity of it, in boiled-down form: translations of parts of Scripture had been going on well back in the middle ages. But back in the middle ages the language people in the island now known as the UK spoke a language so different to what is spoken today it should be understood as an entirely different language. From the Anglo-Saxon I have looked at, I literally only understand very occasional words, often simple conjunctions like "and" (we will see an example in a minute). Let's get back to Lord.
So the Wessex Gospels, variously dated but probably early 1000s, used drihten, a proto-germanic word that meant governor, Lord, etc., and was also used to translate Yahweh (or Latin's Dominus), i.e. God. From the few passages I have looked at, the article is missing. That is relevant for my research into the implications of using Lord today, since nearly 7000 occurrences of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible were written and subsequently translated deliberately without the article. This ensured that God's Name carried over into new cultures and languages as a proper name. Drihten appears to have maintained that tradition:
Drihtnes ys eorðe, and eall þæt heo mid gefyld is; and eall mancynn þe þæron eardað is Drihtnes. ("The earth is the Lord's, and all that she is filled with; and all mankind that dwell thereon is the Lord's") --Psalm 23 (24 in King James Version), King Alfred Translation (Paris Psalter)
Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drihten
The Hatton gospels use the same anglo-saxon term.
Where we notice a switch occurring is with the Wycliffe translations in the 14th century. "Lord" makes its appearance at last! But it hasn't yet stabilised. In 1522, Martin Luther's German Bible gave HERRN for Yahweh, all caps. 1529 was the year that Tyndale published the Pentateuch translation, in which we see a curious "the LORde" for Genesis, and "the Lord" from Exodus onward. 1539 gave rise to the "Great Bible", commissioned by King Henry VIII, which appears to be the last translation to spell Lord with an "e", Lorde, except that it consistently applied the full caps throughout (the LORDE). The last major milestone before the KJV is the Bishop's Bible in 1568, where Lord reverts back to its current spelling (and maintained capitalisation, the LORD, for translation of Yahweh). The KJV simply continued in the Bishop's Bible standardised format in 1611.
I hope that helps!
Possibly the most central word to the English Bible apart from "God" is "Lord". Yet, as far as I can tell, Lord has only been around for a third of Christianity's history on this planet at best (I'm hoping that this proportion will not grow) and most English speaking Christian folk today might find that hard to believe.
Indeed, many modern translations of the Bible still keep going with "Lord" - I have a series of five reasons I will soon provide to help us understand why this title is showing such resilience. I also will provide some statistical research to suggest that in mainstream discourse, 'Lord' is indeed fundamentally religious and historical and not a contemporary term to designate authority.
Today, I just want to very briefly provide you how I understand the history of the word. Many people, myself included, presume that the English translation came about as a result of the King James Version, or maybe Tyndale might ring a bell of earliness. Of course, it all coincides with the printing press, so maybe that's when everything happened and Christianity moved itself out of Latin-only-mode.
That's not accurate.
Here's the complexity of it, in boiled-down form: translations of parts of Scripture had been going on well back in the middle ages. But back in the middle ages the language people in the island now known as the UK spoke a language so different to what is spoken today it should be understood as an entirely different language. From the Anglo-Saxon I have looked at, I literally only understand very occasional words, often simple conjunctions like "and" (we will see an example in a minute). Let's get back to Lord.
So the Wessex Gospels, variously dated but probably early 1000s, used drihten, a proto-germanic word that meant governor, Lord, etc., and was also used to translate Yahweh (or Latin's Dominus), i.e. God. From the few passages I have looked at, the article is missing. That is relevant for my research into the implications of using Lord today, since nearly 7000 occurrences of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible were written and subsequently translated deliberately without the article. This ensured that God's Name carried over into new cultures and languages as a proper name. Drihten appears to have maintained that tradition:
Drihtnes ys eorðe, and eall þæt heo mid gefyld is; and eall mancynn þe þæron eardað is Drihtnes. ("The earth is the Lord's, and all that she is filled with; and all mankind that dwell thereon is the Lord's") --Psalm 23 (24 in King James Version), King Alfred Translation (Paris Psalter)
Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drihten
The Hatton gospels use the same anglo-saxon term.
Where we notice a switch occurring is with the Wycliffe translations in the 14th century. "Lord" makes its appearance at last! But it hasn't yet stabilised. In 1522, Martin Luther's German Bible gave HERRN for Yahweh, all caps. 1529 was the year that Tyndale published the Pentateuch translation, in which we see a curious "the LORde" for Genesis, and "the Lord" from Exodus onward. 1539 gave rise to the "Great Bible", commissioned by King Henry VIII, which appears to be the last translation to spell Lord with an "e", Lorde, except that it consistently applied the full caps throughout (the LORDE). The last major milestone before the KJV is the Bishop's Bible in 1568, where Lord reverts back to its current spelling (and maintained capitalisation, the LORD, for translation of Yahweh). The KJV simply continued in the Bishop's Bible standardised format in 1611.
I hope that helps!
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