Page 5 - Moravian Messenger July 2018

The Hungarian Hussite Bible
Jan Hus (1369-1415), the Bohemian Roman Catholic priest whom many see as the spiritual founder of the Moravian Church, was a firm believer in the right of the common people to read the Bible in their own language. In this he was much influenced by John Wycliffe, the early translator of the Bible into English.
The entire Bible had already been translated into Bohemian (now generally called Czech) by the time of Hus and he himself made use of it. While the Roman Church was not against translations into local languages in principle, it was both suspicious of heresy (translations being associated with those who disagreed with some aspect of the Roman Church, such as Wycliffe or the Waldensians) and concerned that translations would encourage individual rather than ecclesiastical interpretation of scripture. Unauthorised translations had already been banned by Pope Innocent III in 1199.
The Hussites of the Czech Reformation supported the use of translations and the Czech Bible was much improved by Hus and his followers. The Bethlehem Chapel, of which Hus was priest, also used a Czech translation of the Latin liturgy. Of course, at that time the common people were overwhelmingly illiterate and any translation into a local language would be either for wealthy laymen who could not cope with Latin or for reading to the illiterate.
These early translations (almost invariably made from the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate) decreased following the Czech Reformation as the Roman Church became increasingly suspicious of their influence.
Then, with Luther and the German
Reformation, Protestant translations into
local languages took off. The Kralice Bible,
a translation into Czech by the Moravian
Brethren between 1579 and 1593, falls more
clearly into this category. It remains the classic Czech Bible translation and Church House holds a rare early copy. The Hussite tradition of reading the Bible in a living language would certainly have been one of the incentives for this translation too though. These later Protestant translations however were far more likely to be based on the original Hebrew and Greek than on the Latin Vulgate version.
Although German was the other language of Bohemia there was no need for a specific Hussite translation as there were already several German translations from the Latin Vulgate. In fact one of these, known as the Wenceslas Bible, was produced in Prague in the 1370s.
The only Bible translation of which I am aware that was produced as a result of the Czech Reformation is the Hungarian Hussite Bible, only parts of which are still extant. This appears to receive no attention in histories of the early Moravian Church.
The evidence that the translation is Hussite is found in an early sixteenth century manuscript. This states that two Hungarian priests, Tamás (Thomas) Pécsi and Bálint (Valentine) Újlaki, who had studied in Prague, completed the work in the early fifteenth century. These two names are in fact recorded in the student register of Prague University which is still extant. They are there shown as having attended the University between 1399 and 1411. Here they became acquainted with Hus's teachings and become Hussites themselves. This presumably led them to the
view that Hungarian speakers, like Bohemian speakers, should also be able to read the Bible in their own tongue. They are believed to have started their translation in about 1416 and completed it by 1441.
There is other evidence that the translation is Hussite. First, the spelling of the Hungarian appears to be based on Hus's theories of how Czech should be spelt. Secondly, the 16th century source also mentions that the translation is 'heretical' and that in 1439 in order to escape persecution the priests were obliged to flee with their followers to Moldavia (now Bacau County, Romania) where there had been (and still is) a Hungarian settlement since the 13th century. They were nonetheless pursued and their translation confiscated. This would make sense in the context of Hungary's persecution of the Hussites.
How much of the Bible they translated is not known given the disappearance of the original manuscript. If the entire Bible was translated then we can be fairly certain that most of it had been lost or destroyed by 1516 since another manuscript of that date states that there are no extant translations in Hungarian of the entire Bible. What now remains of this Hungarian translation is found in three early codices (manuscripts):
• Vienna Codex c.1450 contains the books of Ruth, Judith, Ester and Maccabees;
• Munich Codex c.1466 contains the four Gospels;
• Apor Codex c.1500 contains the Psalms.
The two later codices updated the language somewhat or amended it to reflect the dialect of the copyist.
have been heretical since, despite being Hussite, it was later made use of by the Roman Catholic Church. The Apor Codex, for
example, was intended for reading by or to nuns.
Just as Moravian missionaries translating the Bible into native tongues had to invent new words to describe new concepts, so did the two early Hungarian translators. The extant books contain about 200 new words. Although the language is archaic it is still easily understood by a Hungarian speaker.
The production of this translation was a considerable step in the history of Hungarian writing and no small achievement. Whereas there already existed a substantial tradition of writing in Czech from the early 1300s, including non-religious works, there was very little in Hungarian. Latin remained the usual written language of Hungary throughout the Middle Ages. In fact it remained the official language of Hungary until 1844 and was a familiar spoken language for Hungarian nobility well into the 19th century.
The Hungarian Hussite Bible was followed by about eight later Bible translations into Hungarian before the translation of Gáspár Károlyi from the original Hebrew and Greek published in 1590. This remains the classic translation for Hungarian Protestants, rather as our King James's or the German Lutheran Bibles. It is, however, a comforting thought for those who love the Moravian Church that the Hussites began it all.
Adrian Wilsdon
Volunteer in the Moravian Church Archives, London
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