For example, one of the toughest questions they faced was about the relationship between parts of the Old Testament that survived only in Greek and Latin, usually known as the ‘apocryphal’ books, and the parts that survived in Hebrew. “These new sources show us how complex those problems were, and how strongly the translators could disagree with each other about how to solve them. “The translators consulted him because they were still dealing with a lot of unresolved problems in the original texts which they were translating from,” said Hardy. Even something that seems very distinctively, quintessentially English can actually turn out to be a bit more complicated than that.”Ĭasaubon was visiting London at the time of the translation and could “barely speak or write English”, according to Hardy, so he corresponded with the other translators in Latin. “We think of the King James Bible as a distinctively English cultural product, but as the most famous scholar of ancient Greek literature of the period, was far more celebrated and pre-eminent than any of the translators who worked on the translation, and increased the prestige of the translation from their point of view. “I discovered a series of documents that had been sitting in libraries since they were written, for 400 years basically, but their significance hadn’t been realised,” said Hardy. Once Hardy identified Casaubon as a translator, he studied the Frenchman’s notebooks, which have been held in the Bodleian since the 1670s, finding records of the conversations Casaubon had with the translator Andrew Downes about other complications in the Bible’s text.
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