The First Parallel Bible

Last month, the papers from the Text & Canon Institute’s first academic colloquium were published as The Forerunners and Heirs of Origen’s Hexapla. Thanks to our supporters, the book is available open access. This article is written to introduce Origen’s work and to celebrate this milestone.

Sound Bible study often requires careful comparison of different translations. After strewing different translations over a desk and reading each one individually, one wishes for a more organized tool to ease comparison.

One could consult a volume like the NIV, KJV, NASB, Amplified, Parallel Bible for such a purpose. With each version in its own column to be read from top to bottom and the verses arranged in parallel fashion, one can simply compare the different translations. The bible software user can create their own parallel bible by opening and arranging windows however preferred. With so many translations, a vast amount of knowledge must be collected and organized so that it works for the user.

The history of parallel bibles shows a human impulse for ordering textual knowledge. The late Renaissance Polyglots (multi-language Bibles) were products of this tendency. Biblical scholars produced monumental editions in international cooperation in Alcalá, Spain (Complutensian Polyglot; 1522); Antwerp, Belgium (The Antwerp Polyglot; 1572); Paris, France (The Paris Polyglot; 1645); and London, England (The London Polyglot; 1658). The culmination of these great Polyglots, Brian Walton’s London Polyglot, contained biblical texts in nine languages assembled in parallel: Hebrew, Samaritan, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian. But where did this idea to produce such Bibles come from?¹For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

There were Medieval precursors to these massive tomes, but even these appear to owe their inspiration to the work of a classically Greek trained catechetical instructor from Alexandria, Egypt named Origen.

Who is Origen?

Origen is best known today as a philosopher or theologian. But both his followers and detractors note that he was trained thoroughly in grammar or philology and devoted himself to this discipline. Origen did not just know his parts of speech. Rather, training in philology meant that he was a diorthōtēs (διορθωτής) or a corrector of copies of ancient books as well as an exegete of those same texts. Thus, he collected many copies of the scriptures and even evaluated whether they belonged to the accurate, old, or majority copies. Likewise, he collected the various translations of the Scriptures and evaluated their “expressiveness” and clarity or whether a version was enslaved to the Hebrew idiom.

As Origen studied the copies of the books of the Old Testament, he described his work in terms of classical Greek philology:

I found that the discord (between the copies) could be healed, if God grants, by using the rest of the editions as a criterion. For by making a judgment, based on the rest of the editions, concerning ambiguous texts in the Seventy [= the Septuagint] due to the discord between the copies, I kept the accord among them. I marked with an obelos some passages not in the Hebrew because I was not reckless to remove any of them. And I added some passages with asteriskoi in order that it might be clear that I added passages not in the Seventy from the rest of the editions agreeing with the Hebrew. (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14)

Elsewhere, Origen says the Greeks called the critical signs asterisk (※) and obelus (—) referring to the tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians who had accomplished similar textual work on the copies of Homer’s Iliad (Origen, Epistle to Africanus 7). Thus, Origen as a philologist created scholarly editions of the biblical books. Furthermore, just as the Alexandrian grammarians produced commentaries on their texts, in various places in his sermons and commentaries Origen also recorded variants or differences between copies and translations and offered his readers solutions. Perhaps Origen, but more probably his followers, began to use the margins of manuscripts to record valuable comments known as scholia on the texts.

Thus, although Origen is most known for his theological and philosophical work, he was first and foremost a philologist and textual critic. He, therefore, left copies of his critical editions for his followers to consult and use in the library at Caesarea. Eusebius, the fourth-century Church historian, informs his readers that Origen left behind copies of his Hexapla (HECK-suh-pluh) “six-fold” or “six-column” Bible and another edition which was later called the Tetrapla (te-TRUH-pluh) or “four-fold” edition.

What was the Hexapla?

Since a few church fathers described the Hexapla in some detail (Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus), Origen must have compiled (not authored) such a magnificent and complex text requiring his followers to explain and interpret it. The six-column work in Hebrew and Greek probably had no exact precedent, even though other bilingual (Greek and Latin), literary, multi-column texts probably existed around Origen’s time.

Interestingly, Origen nowhere calls his massive textual construct “the Hexapla.” The term comes from Eusebius. In the first mention of this text, Eusebius says, “Having collected all of these (editions), he divided them into sections, and placed them opposite each other, with the Hebrew text itself. He thus left us the copies of the so-called Hexapla.” Other church fathers describe the work similarly, and there are a few fragmentary manuscript remains of the Hexapla, mostly Psalms, which do afford some evidence to aid the reconstruction of the columnar layout of the Hexapla: (1) Hebrew, (2) Hebrew in Greek transcription, (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) Septuagint, (6) Theodotion.

This six-column text of the Old Testament would have granted Origen and his followers access to the Hebrew and to the most significant Greek translations of the day. A user of this text could read vertically any one version from top to bottom or all six versions from left to right across the entire spread of a folio in the codex.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. If one of those texts was shorter or longer (like in the case of the Book of Job), a reader of the Hexapla would be able to observe the additions and omissions plainly. Furthermore, at disputed places like Isaiah 7:14, the reader of the Hexapla would immediately grasp two different translations of the Hebrew: (1) the Septuagint’s “behold the virgin (parthenos)” and (2) the Jewish Revisers’  “behold the young woman (neanis),” a difference still reflected in Bible translations today.

Origen’s textual scholarship gave the church a real advance in knowledge of the biblical text in its several versions so that the reader of the Hexapla would know the similarities and differences between the church’s version and the Jewish versions used in the synagogue. But he probably had other reasons for producing this synopsis.

Related

• 
  Illustration by Jordan Daniel Singer
  The Legacy of the First Revised Bible Translations

  The modern impulse to get the Bible right in translation has its roots in the Jews who revised the Septuagint.

  John D. Meade

What was the Hexapla for?

Origen probably had many reasons for compiling the Hexapla. These include apologetics, textual criticism, exegesis, or perhaps even to learn the Hebrew language. A massive text like this cannot be reduced to any one purpose. But one significant reason for the Hexapla seems clear: it was a preliminary tool for a corrected text or diorthōsis. Origen used it to prepare a later, more accessible and economic critical text of the Old Testament with signs. This text was later called the Tetrapla, and it is probably the text that Origen described in his Matthew Commentary quoted above. This text contained only one column of text, but it would still give readers immediate access to the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek versions. A manuscript dated to soon after Origen’s death (P. Grenf. 1.5; 250–350 AD) containing a fragmentary text of Ezekiel 5:12–6:3 with asterisks furnishes the earliest material evidence for Origen’s second edition. This edition, or one based on it, must have circulated quite early, and it was still available to the Syriac Bishop, Paul of Tella, who translated it into Syriac in 616 AD (a text known as the “Syro-Hexapla”).

If Origen’s Septuagint version lacked text that was contained in the Hebrew, he would add Greek text from one of the Three Jewish revisers (normally Theodotion) to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew. These additional words or lines were marked with an asterisk (※). The ending of Job 42:16–17 illustrates the point. The original Greek translation of Job did not contain the text about Job’s death (“and Job saw his sons … and Job died old and full of days.”) found in the Hebrew. As the later manuscript below shows, Origen added those three lines from the Greek revision of Theodotion and marked them with asterisks so the reader would know the Hebrew was longer and the Greek had been augmented.

Similarly, if the Hebrew lacked a word or verse that the Septuagint contained, Origen would not remove the Greek text, but would mark it with an obelus or a lance (— or ÷) to make the Hebrew omission known to Christian readers. Thus, the quantitative differences that would have been visually obvious in the columnar Hexapla would now be observed in a text that contained the critical signs. In this way, no text from either language was lost for the careful reader.

Furthermore, this Tetrapla or “four-fold” version contained exegetically and textually significant readings or scholia from the three Jewish revisers: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. This was important for the scholar who did not have access to these works independently, but now could access the more significant and interesting readings through the margins of Origen’s critical text. In this way, Origen and his followers could diffuse textual knowledge not only about the Hebrew text vis-à-vis the Greek but now also information about how contemporary Jews interpreted the Hebrew text in Greek, exegetical information that Christian interpreters also used and incorporated into their own commentaries.

The Hexapla, therefore, functioned as a necessary and preliminary tool for Origen’s later critical edition. Origen’s followers innovated and enhanced his critical edition, and they promulgated it in the early part of the fourth century.

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Origen’s philological work remains a reminder that early Christians adopted and innovated scholarly methods of their day for serious study of the biblical text. Part of the early Christian DNA, so to speak, was serious study of the manuscript copies of the Scriptures. This fact in itself justifies researching Origen’s textual work today and is a reminder that Christians should continue in this tradition of serious study of the biblical text.

Besides this, Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament, giving us valuable knowledge of the state of the Hebrew text in Caesarea in the second and third centuries AD. There are precious few remains of Hebrew manuscripts from this period, but the remains of Origen’s textual work, even in Greek dress, provide us access to what form the Hebrew text had from this period. The Hexapla’s value on this point cannot be overstated.

Finally, the independent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are entirely lost to history. Almost all access to these works depends on the marginal readings that come from the Tetrapla or similar texts that were ultimately excerpted and quoted from the Hexapla. As such, retrieving and reconstructing Origen’s textual work gives us access to Jewish Greek exegesis of the Hebrew text from the 1st–2nd centuries AD. The readings of the Three give us significant textual information for reconstructing the text histories of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Greek translations.

The first parallel Bible in history witnesses to our desire to order textual knowledge. Although the methods for such organization change over time, the desire to know the Scriptures through intense study of their copies continues. Origen and his followers stand at the headwaters of this stream in which Christians still work today. As then, the goal today is to heal the discord between copies.

Notes

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  For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

John D. Meade

John (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Professor of Old Testament and Codirector of the Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary and a contributor of the Hexapla Project. He is the author (with Ed Gallagher) of The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity and Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible (with Peter Gurry).