History
of the Bible
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Romanized Bible Text
General Information
The original manuscripts which represented the Bible in ancient times are believed to have been written in ancient Hebrew (Old Testament) and ancient Greek (New Testament). Those alphabets use many letters which don't exist in our modern alphabet. One way of creating a printable version is the so called Romanized Text. To illustrate just what this source material of the Bible is like, a portion of Genesis is shown below in the Romanized form.
None of those actual original manuscripts appear to still exist today. In general, modern Bibles are all based on many copies of the actual manuscripts, and very few of those copies are older than about 1,000 years. See the BELIEVE presentation of the Septuagint for an extensive discussion of the many specific source targums and codices.
Finally, the actual translation of the Bible was complicated by several extra facts. The original Ancient Hebrew in which the Old Testament was first written, would have been written without any vowels being recorded. For example, God was referred to as JHWH in the Bible. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek (in the Septuagint), vowels were added, to make words that were meaningful in the Greek language. Since JHWH was apparently unpronouncable, ancient people used several other Names to refer to God, one of which was Adonai. The vowels of this Name were inserted between the letters of JHWH to create a Name we refer to as Jehovah.
Greek manuscripts were also somewhat difficult to translate, because they were written with all letters the same size and with no spaces between words or sentences.
There is another entry on this diskette which is the Literal Translation of each of these words in the original sequence shown here. You might want to look at that, too.
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Article by Believe Project
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