Glossary

The vocabulary this subject cannot be discussed without. Every term is linked the first time it appears in the notes, and hovering one shows the definition without sending you anywhere.

• Abbey Psalms

  The Abbey Psalms and Canticles, a 2018 revision of the Grail Psalms, adopted for recent English-language lectionaries.

• Alexandrian text

  Also: Alexandrian codices · Alexandrian

  The earlier, shorter Greek text represented by Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century. Unavailable to the King James translators; its arrival in the nineteenth century is what made the 1881 revision necessary.

  See also: Byzantine text · codex

• ambo

  The reading desk in a church from which the Scriptures are proclaimed.

• Biblia Hebraica

  Also: BHS · BHQ

  The Masoretic Text as printed for scholars — Kittel (BHK) 1937, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) 1977, and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) in progress. The Hebrew base of essentially every modern Old Testament.

• Byzantine text

  Also: Byzantine manuscripts · Byzantine

  The large, late and remarkably uniform body of Greek manuscripts that dominates the surviving evidence by number. The basis of the Textus Receptus.

  See also: Alexandrian text

• codex

  Also: codices

  A manuscript in book form — leaves bound at the spine — rather than a scroll. The great fourth-century Bibles are codices.

• concordance

  An index of every place a word occurs in a Bible, keyed to a particular translation.

• Council of Trent

  Also: Trent

  The Catholic council of 1545–63. Its 1546 decree declaring the Vulgate the authentic text for the Latin Church is why the Douay-Rheims was translated from Latin rather than from Hebrew and Greek.

• critical apparatus

  Also: apparatus

  The record, printed alongside a text, of where the sources disagree and which witness supports each reading. An apparatus tells you what the sources say and leaves the conclusion to you; a commentary tells you what a verse means.

  See also: textual variant

• critical text

  A Greek or Hebrew text reconstructed by weighing the manuscript evidence rather than reprinting one manuscript family. Westcott and Hort and Nestle-Aland are both critical texts.

  See also: Westcott and Hort · Nestle-Aland

• cross-reference

  Also: marginal reference

  A pointer in the margin from one verse to related verses — parallel accounts, quotations, prophecy and fulfilment.

• Dead Sea Scrolls

  Hebrew copies found from 1947, a thousand years older than the oldest Masoretic manuscript. They confirmed how faithfully the text had been copied.

• deuterocanon

  Also: deuterocanonical books · deuterocanonical

  The books received as Scripture by the Catholic and Orthodox churches but not in the Hebrew canon — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees and additions to Esther and Daniel. Protestant Bibles usually call them the Apocrypha and omit them.

  See also: Septuagint

• divine name

  The name itself, rendered in English as Jehovah or Yahweh — or replaced by a title such as "the LORD," which is what most English Bibles do.

  See also: Tetragrammaton

• dynamic equivalence

  Also: functional equivalence

  Translating the meaning into whatever the receiving language would naturally say, rather than mirroring the original's form. The Good News Bible was the first mass-market English Bible built on the principle.

  See also: formal equivalence · paraphrase

• formal equivalence

  Translating so as to account for the form of the original — its words and structures — as closely as the receiving language allows. The New American Standard and the Revised New Jerusalem Bible both aim at it.

  See also: dynamic equivalence

• Grail Psalms

  A translation of the Psalms of 1963, made to be sung, and substituted into several Catholic Bibles and lectionaries in place of the psalter the rest of the Bible came with.

  See also: Abbey Psalms

• imprimatur

  Official permission to print, granted by a Catholic bishop, certifying that a work contains nothing contrary to faith or morals. Not a claim about translation quality.

• interlinear

  An edition printing the original-language text with a word-for-word rendering directly beneath each word, following the original word order rather than English order.

• J-sources

  The list, numbered J1 to J27, of works cited in the New World Translation Reference Bible as supporting the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures. Most are translations of the Greek Scriptures into Hebrew; a few are not Hebrew versions at all.

  See also: divine name

• Latin Vulgate

  Also: Vulgate

  Jerome's Latin Bible, c.405. The Western Church's Bible for a thousand years, declared the authentic text for the Latin Church by the Council of Trent, and the text the Wycliffite Bibles, the Douay-Rheims and Knox were all translated out of.

  See also: Council of Trent

• lectionary

  The book of readings appointed for use at Mass. Its text is chosen by each bishops' conference and confirmed by Rome, and it is never simply the Bible it is made from — readings are given openings that make sense out of context, and Rome requires changes at confirmation.

  See also: ambo

• Liturgiam Authenticam

  A 2001 instruction from Rome on translating liturgical texts, calling for closer correspondence to the Latin. It shaped several Catholic revisions that followed.

• Masoretic Text

  The Hebrew Old Testament as fixed and vowel-pointed by Jewish scribes between the 6th and 10th centuries CE. The Old Testament base of nearly every English Bible.

  See also: Biblia Hebraica · Dead Sea Scrolls

• Nestle-Aland

  Also: Nestle / Nestle-Aland · Nestle

  The standard scholarly critical Greek New Testament, continuously revised since 1898. The New Testament base of most modern Bibles.

• papyrus

  Also: papyri

  Writing material made from reed, and by extension the earliest New Testament fragments written on it. The Chester Beatty and Bodmer papyri are the most important.

• paraphrase

  A free rewording of an existing text for readability. Not a translation: no one goes back to the original languages. The Living Bible is the clearest example.

• Peshitta

  The standard Syriac Bible, an early and independent witness to both Testaments, and one of the ancient versions cited when the sources disagree.

• recension

  A deliberate revision of a text by an editor, producing a version that then gets copied in its own right.

• Samaritan Pentateuch

  The five books of Moses as preserved by the Samaritan community, differing from the Masoretic Text in thousands of small places and occasionally agreeing with the Septuagint against it.

• Septuagint

  Also: LXX

  The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, begun in the 3rd century BCE. Quoted by the Christian writers themselves, the source of the deuterocanonical books, and a witness to a Hebrew text older than the Masoretic.

  See also: deuterocanon · Masoretic Text

• Targum

  Also: Targums

  An Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures, produced when Aramaic had displaced Hebrew as the spoken language. Useful as a witness to how the Hebrew was read and understood.

• Tetragrammaton

  Also: YHWH

  The four Hebrew consonants of God's personal name, written nearly 7,000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. What each translation does with it is one of the sharpest lines that can be drawn across the family tree.

  See also: divine name

• textual variant

  Also: variant

  A place where the surviving manuscripts do not read the same, so a translator has to choose. Most are trivial; a few change the sense of a verse.

• Textus Receptus

  A printed Greek New Testament assembled by Erasmus (1516) and Beza (1589) from a handful of late Byzantine manuscripts. The King James's New Testament, and the reason it differs from every critical-text Bible in a few dozen places.

  See also: Byzantine text · critical text

• version

  Simply a translation. Authorized Version, Revised Version, Revised Standard Version — the word carries no claim about manuscript families or method. Older English Bibles say Version; twentieth-century ones increasingly say Translation. The naming is fashion, not substance.

• Westcott and Hort

  A critical Greek text of 1881 built on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, published by two members of the Revised Version committee. Still the principal Greek base of the New World Translation.