The only early edition is that just referred to; but nothing of it remains except four pages of one copy now in the monastery of Porta Celi, near Valencia. A note on one of these pages preserves the name of Ferrer as the translator, and tells us the translation was made by him, with the assist- ance of other scholars, from the Latin. During last century, by the efforts of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a version of the NT in Catalan was made and circulated. The first edition was printed in London in 1832, and later it was reprinted in London and Barcelona.
Lirrrature.—S. Berger, ‘Nouvelles recherches sur les Bibles Provengales et Catalanes’ in Romania, xix. 505 ff., ‘Les Bibles Castillanes,’ etc.; ib. xxviij. 360 ff., 508 ff. (with a bibliography and list of MSS, etc.); Eguren, Memoria descriptiva de los Codices notables, etc., Madrid, 1859; Plaine, art. ‘Espagnoles Versions de la Bible’ in Vigouroux’s Dictionnaire de la Bible ; BOW, The Bible in Spain; Mayor, Spain, Portugal, and the Bible.
iv. PORTUGUESE VERSIONS.—1. A 14th cent. MS in the Escurial (O. j. 1) contains a Portuguese translation of the first part of the Historia General of Alphonse (see p. 408”), which of course had a Scripture basis. This translation may have been made by order of king Denis (1279-1325), the grandson of Alphonse, but it does not give the literal text of the Bible. In the same century we are told that king John I. (1385-1483) had a translation made by distinguished scholars of the Gospels, Acts, and St. Paul, but nothing more is known of it. His granddaughter Philippa, who died in 1497, is said to have had a translation made from French into Portuguese of the Gospels and Epistles of the Church year, and the MS of such a translation now exists at Lisbon.
2. A 15th cent. catalogue of the library of king D. Duarte (1433-1438) mentions among the books a translation of Genesis, another of the Gospels and Acts, another of the Books of Solomon. From this we may infer that before the date of his death a Portuguese version of these books existed.
3. In the same century we hear of the compila- tion of a Life of Christ preserved in a MS of the monastery of Alcobaca; and a paraphrase of the Acts, mixed with a good deal of legend, is found in another MS of the same monastery. We also know from the writings of D. Manuel of Cenaculo, bishop of Beia from 1770-1802, that twenty years
CONTINENTAL VERSIONS
before he wrote there was in existence a para- phrastic translation made in the 15th cent. by a Portuguese acquainted with Hebrew. Of this he gives a specimen from the beginning of the Book of Genesis, which shows that the translation kept fairly close to the text of the Bible. There was also in a MS of Alcobaca, which has since been lost, a less literal translation, or rather summary, of OT history. Some extracts of this which have been preserved are said to be written in language of the 14th cent., more archaic than the passage quoted by Cenaculo.
Most of the statements mentioned here are in- capable of being tested by the evidence of MSS containing the version, but there is nothing im- probable about them, and they imply that the Portuguese translation dates from the 14th cent., that at first only some parts of the Bible were translated, and those the parts most likely to be in use, and that the translation was made from the Spanish and the French, and no doubt also from the Latin.
4, It is not till the end of the 17th cent. that we meet with the first printed Portuguese Bible. This was a translation made by a native of Lisbon, John Ferreira d’Almeida, who went out to the East as a Roman Catholic missionary, and after- wards became a Protestant. He began with the NT, which, after being revised, was printed at Amsterdam in 1681; and a second edition appeared in 1712. Almeida’s work, completed only as far as Ezekiel, was continued by others, and gradually the whole Bible was published, the last part to appear being the Major Prophets, which was printed in 1751. Almeida’s version was not very popular, partly because it was antiquated in style, and partly, perhaps, from prejudice on account of his change of religion.
5. In 1784 a Catholic translation by Anton Pereira de Figueiredo was published at Lisbon. This work, with notes, in twenty-three volumes, was based on the Vulgate, but does not follow it slavishly, and sometimes departs from it in favour of the Greek. A revised edition was begun some years later, but not completed till 1819.
Both of these translations have been circulated in Portugal by the British and Foreign Bible Society, but not in very large numbers.
LITeRATURE.—S. Berger in Romania, xxviii. p. 543, where a full bibliography will be found.
vy. GERMAN VERSIONS.—l. The oldest fragment of the Bible in German is to be found in a MS, twenty-three leaves of which are at Vienna (MS N. cexxxiii.) and two at Hannover. These leaves, recovered from the bindings of other MSS, come from a MS of the 8th cent. which belonged to the Bavarian monastery of Monsee, and they preserve fragments of a Latin and German translation of St. Matthew, the first of which begins at 8* and the last ends with 28”. The ending of the Gospel is followed by a Latin subscription, from which it is clear that only this Gospel was translated. The translation is unexpectedly good. The Latin is closely but not slavishly followed, and there are few mistakes due to misunderstanding the Latin. The German is clear, and ‘it was the aim of the translator to give not only correct but good German,’ in a dialect which is ‘a Bavarian redac- tion of a Frankish or Alsatian original.’ There is an edition of this very early and interesting MS by Massmann (Vienna, 1841), and more recently by Hench (Strassburg, 1890). f