I refer to your editorial ‘Divorce: On tolerance, sorrow and fundamentalism’ (TMID, 27 April) wherein you state, inter alia, that “the Bible as we know it was written by an English scribe in 1384.”

This is a presumptuous statement which shows ignorance of what the Bible is, the time span during which it developed and of the history of its translation. The Bible was not just written, it grew. The Bible is a collection of books by various authors over many centuries.

The Catholic Bible consists of the Old Testament containing the 39 books of Hebrew Scripture together with 7 deuterocanonical books (which are not accepted by Protestants), and the New Testament containing 27 books.

The Old Testament was written between 1400 BC and 400 BC, primarily in Hebrew, with some books in Aramaic. In 250 BC it was translated into Greek in Alexandria. The New Testament was written in Greek (45-95 AD).

The English scribe you referred to was John Wycliffe whose translation of the New Testament was completed in 1380 and the Old Testament in 1388 (completed by others after his death in 1384). He translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate (late 4th/early 5th century translation by St Jerome). Wycliffe’s is a translation from a translation and not from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek as he did not know these three languages. It was the first Bible to be translated into English and is considered the main precursor of the Protestant Reformation.

The whole Bible has been translated into over 350 languages and continues to be the most translated book in the world.

■ Alfred Fabri

Attard

Editor’s note: The Bible as we know it was indeed translated and written by John Wycliffe (mostly the New Testament) his assistant John Purvey and other helper scribes – the Lollards. A scribe, actually writes, by hand. The person in question put together the English Bible as we know it today, with his own quill. This same person was declared a heretic and his bones were eventually dug up on the orders of Pope Martin V, burnt and thrown into the river Swift in 1428. No one disputes that the Bible is a collection of books and writings over time, but the fact of the matter is that an English scribe first put together the scripture we have today.