When the first generation of Jesus’s followers died, the texts that would later become the New Testament didn’t suddenly “go official.” They were circulating like a flock of migratory letters, memoirs, and sermons—copied, traded, translated, and argued over for nearly three centuries before the canon was formally fixed. That messiness makes the translation history a little wild, but it’s a fascinating kind of wild.
Here’s the landscape, in a story-shaped walkthrough
As early Christian communities spread across the Mediterranean and into the Near East, believers needed Scripture they could actually read. Greek was widely spoken, but not everywhere, and certainly not forever. So translators started doing the necessary work.
The earliest translations that show up before the canon solidified:
The Syriac translations. Some Christians in the East were Aramaic-speakers, so translating from Greek into Syriac was natural. Before the more polished Peshitta emerged, there existed “Old Syriac” versions—most famously the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts. They’re rough, like field notes rather than finished manuscripts, but they testify to very early translation activity.
The Latin translations. Christians in North Africa and the western empire needed Latin Scriptures. That gave rise to the awkwardly named “Old Latin” versions. They weren’t a single translation but a swarm of regional ones, each a bit different—some careful, some sloppy, some paraphrastic. It was a textual free-for-all until Jerome came along much later and created the Vulgate.
The Coptic translations. In Egypt, believers translated Greek into the local language—first Sahidic (upper Egypt), then Bohairic (lower Egypt). Many of these are surprisingly early and preserve readings close to the Greek sources.
Armenian, Georgian, and Gothic translations come a bit later—some before the final canonical crystallization, some just after—but the big three for the pre-canon world are Syriac, Latin, and Coptic.
Were any of these attacked for not being faithful to the “autographs”? This is where the story gets spicy.
No one in the second or third century was criticizing translators for deviating from the autographs in the modern sense, because no one had the autographs anymore. They had copies of copies, and communities often possessed only local exemplars. What they did argue about was accuracy—usually in comparison to other Greek manuscripts, not the original authors.
You see hints of the criticism in a few places:
Latin translations took the most heat. Augustine grumbled about the chaos of the Old Latin tradition. He complained that “anyone who got their hands on a Greek manuscript” would produce yet another translation, and the result was an unhappy patchwork. He wasn’t accusing them of heresy so much as inconsistency.
Syriac translations drew some suspicion. Because there were multiple Old Syriac forms, Christian scholars later noticed discrepancies and questioned their closeness to Greek sources. But again, no one accused them of corrupting the lost originals; they were judged by comparison to the Greek manuscripts available in their era.
Heresy-suspicions did sometimes appear around intentional alterations. For example, certain Gnostic groups produced their own versions or preferred certain texts. But that wasn’t a critique of translation accuracy—it was a charge of theological tampering.
The modern question of “Were they accused of not translating faithfully according to the autographs?” is anachronistic. Early Christians had no mechanism for that kind of policing, and no one imagined a pristine original text frozen in amber. They judged translation quality the way travelers judge the honesty of road signs: does this get me to the right place, or am I heading off into the weeds?
The more interesting issue is that these early translations preserve different textual traditions. They sometimes contain readings that vanished from later Greek manuscripts. That makes them windows into the earliest strata of Christianity—sideways snapshots of the family tree.
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