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the Bible. Facilities for trade and other reasons made this city attractive to the Jews. Greek, however, was the prevailing language of the community. Early in the third century B. C. the proportion of Greek-speaking Jews became so large that there was a call for their Scriptures in their adopted tongue. To supply this religious need of the Jews, the Hebrew Bible was translated (about 280-130 B. C.) into the Greek language. This Greek Bible contained all the books of the Hebrew Bible, and several other small books now called "the Apocrypha." #5.# This Greek Bible, now called the Septuagint ("Seventy"), so named because it was thought to have been translated from the Hebrew by "seventy" men, became the Bible of the Old Testament for the Greek-speaking world. In the time of our Lord it was largely used by the New Testament writers. It was quoted by them, and especially by Paul, almost everywhere. It was the Bible of the early Christian church until the conquest of Rome and the Latin tongue required a translation into Latin. These early Latin translations of the Old Testament were all made from the Septuagint. There were also some scholars in the church who, not being satisfied with the translation of the Septuagint, made translations of their own. These were of some value to scholars, such as that most famous of all Biblical students, Origen (186-254 A. D.) who were trying to construct the best Greek text of the Bible. #6.# The many and differing Latin translations that were current in the second, third, and fourth centuries led Jerome, a fully equipped and competent scholar, to translate the whole Bible from the original languages into good idiomatic Latin (384-405). His translation differed so much from those versions in general use that it was sharply and bitterly criticized by the less scholarly and more hostile enemies of progress. But the faithfulness of his translation to the original text commended it to the most thoughtful men of the Christian church, and before many centuries it became the Bible of the Latin-speaking and Latin-using world. That was the Bible adopted by the Council of Trent, April 8, 1546, as the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. With the exception of the Psalms, which is simply a revision of an old Latin Psalter, and the apocryphal books included in the collection, this is Jerome's translation, made 384-405, which was so drastically condemned when it first appeared. #7.# In no
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