Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Volume 8 Issue 2 Article 6

5-1988

The Bible in Poland

Unknown Authors

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THE BIBLE IN POLAND

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I. Catholic translations The oldest preserved Polish translation of the biblical text is the three- language Latin-Polish-German pastoral from the end of the 14th century , discovered in the Monastery of St. Florian near Linz in 1825. It is linked with the name of Blessed Hedwig, Queen of Poland. The pastoral, called the Florian pastoral after the name of the place of its discovery , contains 397 illuminated pages; purcha sed in 1931, it is now in the National Library in Warsaw. The Bible of Queen Zofia (wife of the Polish King Ladislaus Jagiello), completed in 1455, is probably the translation of the entire Scripture from the Vulgate. The preserved manuscript is the first volume of the work, since 1627 kept in the Library of the Hungarian Reformed College in Sarospatak in Hungary. Probably only several copies existed. The Pu lawy pastoral comes from the end of the 15th century or the first half of the 16th century. It has 300 parchment pages. The translation is preceded by explanations, which are considered to be the first Polish commentary to the psalms. The pastoral is now kept in the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow. Permanent printing houses were established in Poland at the beginn ing of the 16th century. The first printed Polish translation of the whole Bible was brought ou t in Cracow in 1561 by the Mikolaj Scharffenberg printing house. The trans lation, also called the Leopo­ lita Bible (the name stands for a professor of the Jagiel lonian Uni­ versity, Jan Nicz) did �ot satisfy the readers owing to numerous defects, especiall y in view of the fact that in 1563 the Calvinist Bible, the so-called Brzesc Bible, was published, which was much superior as regards language to the Leopolita's work. In 1584, Jesuits from Kalisz ordered a new translation of the Bible to be made by the Reverend Jakub Wujek from Wagrowiec (1540- 1597). Wujek completed the translation of the whole Bible in mid- 1596. It was published posthumously in 1599. The trans lation, based chiefly on the Vulgate, was compared with the Greek text. The work of Mr. Wujek was the best translation of the Bible at that time. Un til the latter half of the 19th century there was no new Catho­ lic translation of the Bible in Poland. For almost three centuries Wujek's Bible was reprinted in Wroclaw, Warsaw, Moscow , Lepzig, Lvov, and Vilna. Un t il the early 20th century Wujek's Bible had about twenty editions. Owing to its great linguistic value, the Bible translated by Wujek was also published by representatives of other denominations, either the New Tes tament or the whole Bible. Over three-hundred years of using the same text of the Bible made

-4 6- it evident" that Wujek's text shou ld be modernized. From the mid-1 9th century modernized parts of the Bible started to be publis hed. In 1924, Polish bishops decided to prepare an edition of the whole Bible with the revised text of Wujek. With extensive assistance o£ Polish biblicists five volumes of the so-called Poznan Bib le were published· in the years 1926-1932 (only to, and including, the Acts of the Apostles). Parallel to the editions of the modernized Wujek's text in the 19th and 20th centuries, new trans lations were also brought out: there were translations of individual books of both the Old and the New Testaments made from both original texts and from the Vu lgate. After World War II, in 1965, a group of Polish biblicists under the editorship of the Benedictine Brothers from Tyniec gave a trans la­ tion of the Bible from the original languages. Th is translation, called the Bib le of the Millenium (brought out by the publishing house of the Pallotin Friars in Poznan on the eve of the one-thousandth anniversary of Poland's baptism celebrated in 1966) has already had several editions with a total impression of 250,000 copies. Moreover, the Bible of the Millenium was published abroad with the use of the photo-offset technique--not always with permission of the Polish publisher and not always the full text. Apart from that, the Poznan theological center prepared a translation of the wh ole Bible from the original languages, which was pub lished in Poznan in 1974-1975 under the title Pismo � Starego .! Nowego Testamentu (Books of the Old and New Testaments), vol. 1-3, with extensive forewords to individual books and pastoral commentaries.

II. Non-Catholic trans lations First translations of the Bible from the original languages into the Polish language were made by Protestants. The first one was the translation of the New Testament by Stanislaw Murzynowski, published in 1553 in Krolewiec by Jan Seklucjan. In 1557, Jan Laski initiated a translation of the Bible from the original languages for the use of Polish Calvinists. After his death , the work on the translation was first conducted by Grzegorz Orszak with a group of translators, and then, following doctrinal disputes, by J. Lubelczyk and Szymon Zac­ jusz. The Bible was pub lished in 1563 in Brzesc on the Bug under the sponsorship of Mikolaj Radziwill, hence it is called the Brzesc or Radziwill Bible. It was printed in 300 copies. 1 From the communities of Polish Brethren came the trans lation of the Bible made by Szymon Budny, initially a follower of Calvinism, then the leader of the most extreme wing of Polish Anti-Trinitarians. The Budny translation with the addition of Deuterocanonical Books as Apocrypha was published in 1572.

-47- Of paramount importance for Polish non-Catholic denominations was the so-called Gdansk Bible. It was prepared in Calvinist circles with 2 cooperation of the Bohemian Brethren, and was later accepted by all Polish Protestant denomination s. The work on the translation was carried ou t in the years 1600-1626, and was published in Gdansk in the years 1606- 1632. The Gdansk Bible, closer to Wujek's translation than to the Brzesc Bible, was a great achievement of Polish Protestants in the field of biblical translations and had a great number of edit ions in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Apart from the above-mentioned trans lations of the Bible, at that t�me numerous Protestant transla­ tion s of individual books or the·New Testament were also published (the whole--80 translations, New Testament--120). They have been

appreciated in the Protestant cir�l�s until today. In the latter half of the 1.9 th century, at the initiative of Polish Protestant activists and with the participat ion of outstanding Catholic philologists, a new edition of the New Testament was pub­ lished in Vienna in 1881, which enjoys great esteem of both the Church . and the scholars. In 1975, the British and Foreign Bible Society in Warsaw pub­ lished a new translation of the Bible from the original languages made by a group of theologians associated with the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw. The team work�d from 1949. The New Testament was published in 1966, the whole in 1975. Am ong non-Catholic translat ions of the Bible from the original languages worth mentioning is also the Polish translation of almost all books of the Jewish canon made by Izaak Cylkow, and published mainly in Cracow and Wa rsaw in the years 1883-1914. It is worth adding that since 1972 a commission, comprising representatives of Protestant Churches (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, the United Evangelical Church, Methodists, and Adventists) as we ll as the Orthodox Church and the Old-Catholic Church of the Mariavi tes, has been working on a new, "dynamic" translation of the Bib le.

III. Polish �ranch of the British and Foreign Bible Society ·. Great credit for the publishing and distribution of the Bible in Poland goes to the British and Foreign Bible Society. An impulse for the development of its activity in Poland came from the lack of Bib les 3 in all three partition zones, sin�e the occupying powers purposefully limited the printing of Polish pub�ications fearing the kindling of patriotic moods. The branch of the Society in Warsaw was established in 1816. Representatives of almost all Protestant Churches as well as outstand­ ing representatives of Polish culturai life took part in the work of

-48- the organizational committee. In order to preserve the ecumenical character of the new institution it was decided that the authorities of the new Society would include representatives of various Chris tian denomina tions and the Bible would be distributed without commentar ies and footno tes. Stan islaw Potock i, minister for Re ligious Denomina­ 4 tions and Public Enlightenment of the Congress Kingdom became presi­ dent of the new center. In the first year of activity some 18 thou­ sand copies of the Bib le were distributed. The attitude of the Catholic clergy to the newly established Society was generally indifferent or unfavorab le, and that of the Holy See--decidedly negative. A positive attitude was assumed only by Archbishop of Mogilev, Stanislaw Sietrzencewicz-Bohun , who approved of the publishing by the Society of the New Testament in Rev. Jakub Wujak's translation and issued a pastoral letter encouraging the reading of the Bible published by the Bible Society. The suppressed Polish national uprising against Russia in 1830 caused intensification of the russification policy in the Con gress Kingdom. It also had a negative impact on the work of the Society, e.g. , in 1837 only 395 copies of the Bible were distributed. Al l in all, three editions of the New Tes tament were pub lished in Warsaw before 1863, 10,000 copies each. In effect of repressions after the successive uprising against Ru ssia, which broke out in January 1863, the work of the Society also subsided. It was invigo­ rated only after the difficulties on the part of the occupying author­ ities had been removed in 1867. Until the outbreak of World War I, distribution of the Bible under the Russian partition was as fo llows: in 1883 it amounted to 27,368 copies; in 1890, 14,979 copies; in 1897, 18,090 copies; in 1912, 10,201 copies. The outbreak of World War I impeded the normal activity of the Society. It was only in 1920 that, thanks to the assistance of the London headquarters of the Society, the Warsaw branch obtained biblical texts in several score languages. From the beginning of the Society's activity until 1924 alto­ gether 141 editions of the Bible and the New Testament were published as well as 37 editions of the Gospel and other parts of the Ho ly Writ. In the inter-war period the Warsaw branch of the Society distributed every year 30-40 thousand copies of the Bible. In 1938 an increase was noted up to 50 thousand copies, while in 1939 the number of distributed copies grew to 135,644. All in all, in the period 1816- 1939, 2,544,452 copies of the Bib le were distributed. The outbreak of World War II interrupted the work of the Society. After the war, in 1946 efforts were started to reactiva te the opera­ tion of the Polish branch of the Bible Society. The ceremony of opening the branch at the new premises at 40, Nowy Swiat Str. , which has been the seat of the Society until today, took place in Au gust

- 49- 1947. The ceremony was attended by numerous representatives of Prot­ estant Chrches in Poland. Since then, the activity of the Society has been characterized by a systematic growth of printings. Published were many editions of Wujek's Bible, the Gdansk Bib le, and sin�e 1975 a new translation of the Ho ly Writ made by the Protestants. In the years 1947-1971, the branch pub lished annually on the average 110- 140 thousand copies of the Bible. Since the early 1970s the printing has been systematically growing. Between 1971 and 1986, over 4 million copies of the Bible were published and distributed. The Society also imports, depending on the needs, 5-7 thousand copies of the Bible in other languages, mostly for scientific pur­ poses, among them also Catholic editions. The Society is an associate member of the Polish Ecumenical Council.

1 Polish Brethren (Ariana, An ti-Trinitarians)--an extreme wing of the Polish Re formation, formed in 1562 -1565 as a secession from the Polish Calvinist Congregation--rejected the teaching about the Holy Trinity and voiced radical social views.

2 Bohemian Brethren--next to Calvinists and Lutherans--were the third Protestant denomination (in 1570 the three denominations signed the so-called Sandom ierz accord, mutual recognition of the pulpit and the Lord's Supper).

3 rn the years 1772, 1793, and 1795 Russia, Prussia, and Austria carried out three territoria l divisions of the Polish land s. Poland regained independent sta tehood only in 1918.

4semi-autonomous state with the Russian Tzar as the Polish King formed from a part of the Polish lands by the decision of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The initial partial autonomy was totally renounced after the two successive national risings against Russia in 1830 and 1863.

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