The Spanish Bible’s Battle for Survival

ON AN October day in 1559, some 200,000 Spanish Catholics flocked to the northern city of Valladolid. The attraction was an auto-da-fé, where “two victims were burned alive, ten were strangled.” They were “heretics.”

The popular young king Philip II himself presided over the event. When a condemned man appealed for mercy, the king retorted: “If my own son were such a wretch as you are, I myself would carry the faggots to burn him.” What was the hapless victim’s crime? He had simply been reading the Bible.

At the same time, the apparatus of the Catholic Inquisition was busy in the Andalusian city of Seville. There, a group of monks at the monastery of San Isidro del Campo, had just received a secret consignment of the Bible in Spanish. Would informers betray them? Some who realized that they were in mortal danger fled the country. But 40 of those who remained were less fortunate and were burned at the stake, among them the very man who had smuggled the Bibles into the country. Sixteenth-century Spain was a perilous place for Bible readers​—few eluded the clutches of the Inquisition.

Among the few was a former monk, Casiodoro de Reina (c. 1520-94). He fled to London, but even there he could not find safety. The Inquisition put a price on his head, and the Spanish ambassador to the English court schemed to lure him back to Spanish-controlled territory by hook or by crook. In a short time, false accusations of adultery and homosexuality forced him to leave England.

With scanty resources and an ever growing family to sustain, he first found refuge in Frankfurt. Later, his quest for religious asylum led him to France, Holland, and finally Switzerland. Yet during all this time, he kept busy. ‘Except for the time I was sick or traveling, . . . the pen didn’t fall from my hand,’ he explained. He spent many years translating the Bible into Spanish. Printing of 2,600 copies of Reina’s Bible was finally started in 1568 in Switzerland and completed in 1569. One outstanding feature of Reina’s translation was that he used Iehoua (Jehová) rather than Señor for the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters of God’s personal name.

The Spanish Bible in the Making

Paradoxically, at a time when, thanks to the invention of the printing press, Bibles were proliferating in Europe, in Spain they were becoming a rarity. It had not always been this way. For centuries the Bible was Spain’s most widely distributed book. Handwritten copies were available in Latin and, for a few centuries, even in the Gothic language. One historian explained that during the Middle Ages, “the Bible​—as a source of inspiration and authority, as a standard for faith and conduct—​was more prominent in Spain than in Germany or England.” Diverse Bible histories, Psalters (or, Psalms), glossaries, moral stories, and similar works became best-sellers of the age.

Trained copyists painstakingly reproduced exquisite Bible manuscripts. Although it took 20 scribes a whole year to produce just one first-class manuscript, many Latin Bibles and thousands of commentaries on the Latin Bible were circulating in Spain by the 15th century.

Furthermore, when the Spanish language began to develop, interest arose in having the Bible in the vernacular. As early as the 12th century, the Bible was translated into Romance, or early Spanish, the language the common people spoke.

A Short-Lived Awakening

But the awakening was not to last long. When Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites used the Scriptures to defend their beliefs, the reaction was swift and violent. The Catholic authorities viewed Bible reading with suspicion, and the fledgling translations in the common languages were denounced outright.

The Catholic Council of Toulouse (France), which met in 1229, declared: “We prohibit that any layman possess the books of the Old or New Testament translated into the common language. If some pious person wishes, he may have a Psalter or a Breviary [book of hymns and prayers] . . . but under no circumstances should he possess the above-mentioned books translated into Romance.” Four years later, James I of Aragon (king over a large region of the peninsula) gave all those who owned a Bible in the common tongue just eight days to hand them over to the local bishop for burning. Failure to do so, whether by clergyman or by lay person, would make the possessor suspect of heresy.

Despite these proscriptions​—which were not always strictly observed—​some Spaniards could boast the possession of a Romance Bible during the latter part of the Middle Ages. This came to an abrupt end with the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition under Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in 1478. In 1492, in the city of Salamanca alone, 20 priceless handwritten copies of the Bible were burned. The only Romance biblical manuscripts to survive were those housed in the personal libraries of the king or a few powerful noblemen who were above suspicion.

For the next two hundred years, the only official Catholic Bible published in Spain​—apart from the Latin Vulgate—​was the Complutensian Polyglott, the first polyglot Bible, sponsored by Cardinal Cisneros. It was certainly a scholarly work, definitely not meant for the man in the street. Only 600 copies were made, and few could understand it because it had the Bible text in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin​—not in Spanish. Furthermore, the price was exorbitant. It cost three gold ducats (equivalent to six months’ pay for a common laborer).

The Spanish Bible Goes Underground

In the early 16th century, a Spanish “Tyndale” arose in the person of Francisco de Enzinas. Son of a rich Spanish landowner, he began to translate the Christian Greek Scriptures into Spanish while still a young student. Later he had the translation printed in the Netherlands, and in 1544 he valiantly tried to obtain royal permission for its distribution in Spain. The emperor of Spain, Charles I, was in Brussels at the time, and Enzinas took advantage of this opportunity to request royal consent for his project.

The extraordinary conversation between the two men has been reported as follows: “What kind of book is this?” asked the emperor. Enzinas replied: “This is the part of the Holy Scriptures that is called the New Testament.” “Who is the book’s author?” he was asked. “The holy spirit,” he replied.

The emperor authorized publication but on one condition​—that his private confessor, a Spanish monk, also give his seal of approval. Unfortunately for Enzinas, such approval was not forthcoming, and he soon found himself imprisoned by the Inquisition. After two years he managed to escape.

A few years later, a revised edition of this translation was printed in Venice, Italy, and it was this edition of the Scriptures that Julián Hernández secretly spirited into Seville, Spain. But he was caught, and after two years of torture and imprisonment, he was executed along with other fellow Bible students.a

At the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Catholic Church reiterated its condemnation of Bible translations in the vernacular. It published an index of prohibited books, which included all those Bible translations that had been produced without the church’s approval. In practice this meant that all Spanish vernacular Bibles were outlawed and that the mere possession of one could end in a warrant for the person’s death.

A few years after the publication of Reina’s translation, Cipriano de Valera, another ex-monk who escaped the wrath of the Inquisition in Seville, revised it. This version was printed in Amsterdam in 1602 C.E., and some copies were spirited into Spain. In its original and revised versions, the Reina-Valera Bible is still the most widely used translation among Spanish-speaking Protestants.

The Floodgates Open

Finally, in 1782 the tribunal of the Inquisition decreed that the Bible could be published as long as it included annotations on history and dogma. In 1790 the Catholic bishop of Segovia, Felipe Scio de San Miguel, using the Latin Vulgate, translated a Bible into Spanish. Unfortunately, it was expensive​—1,300 reals, a prohibitive price at that time—​and the wording was obscure, so much so that one Spanish historian described it as “very unfortunate.”

Some years later, Spanish king Fernando VII ordered the bishop of Astorga, Félix Torres Amat, to make an improved translation, also based on the Latin Vulgate. This translation came out in 1823 and received a wider distribution than the translation of Scio. However, as it was not based on the original Hebrew and Greek, it had the usual drawbacks of a translation of a translation.

Despite this progress, the church and the country’s rulers were still not convinced that the Scriptures should be read by ordinary people. When George Borrow, a representative of the British and Foreign Bible Society, asked for permission in the 1830’s to print Bibles in Spain, he was told by government minister Mendizábal: “My good sir, it is not Bibles we want, but rather guns and gunpowder, to put the rebels down with, and above all, money, that we may pay the troops.” Borrow went on to translate the Gospel of Luke into the language of the Spanish Gypsies, and in 1837 he was imprisoned for his efforts!

Finally, the tide could not be held back anymore. In 1944 the Spanish church printed its first translation of the Holy Scriptures based on the original languages​—some 375 years after the translation of Casiodoro de Reina. This was the translation of Catholic scholars Nácar and Colunga. This was followed in 1947 by the translation of Bover and Cantera. Since then there has been a flood of Spanish translations of the Bible.

Victory Assured

Although the Spanish Bible for centuries had to struggle to survive, the battle was finally won. The great sacrifices of valiant translators like Reina were certainly not in vain. How many people who buy a Bible today stop to think of the time when possession of a Bible was forbidden?

Today, the Bible is a best-seller in Spain and in Spanish-speaking countries, and many translations are available. Included among these are the Versión Moderna (Modern Version, 1893), which consistently uses God’s name, Jehová; the Pauline Edition of the Bible (1964), which uses the name Yavé in the Hebrew Scriptures; the Nueva Biblia Española (New Spanish Bible, 1975), which unfortunately uses neither Jehová nor Yavé; and the Traducción del Nuevo Mundo (New World Translation, 1967), published by the Watch Tower Society, which uses Jehová.

Jehovah’s Witnesses visit the homes of millions of Spanish-speaking people every week in order to help them to appreciate the value of the Holy Bible​—a book worth dying for, a book worth living by. In fact, the story of the Spanish Bible’s battle to survive is one further proof that “the word of our God . . . will last to time indefinite.”​—Isaiah 40:8.

[Footnotes]

[Picture on page 10]

The Complutensian Polyglott has been reproduced and thus can readily be examined. (See page 8)

[Credit Line]

Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Spain