Landmark translation follows anglophone bishops approving Protestant Bible translation for Catholic Churches
By JULES GOMES
Mere Matchlight
March 1, 2025
In a historic ecumenical initiative, Italian churches divided by the East-West schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformation of 1517 have united to publish a literary translation of the New Testament, based entirely on the original Greek text.
The Vatican-backed collaboration, which for the first time involves the Eastern Orthodox churches, is aimed at a “non-denominational dissemination” of the Bible in the traditionally Catholic country where church attendance has catastrophically plummeted since the late 1990s.
The translation is an “unprecedented non-denominational version that unites the Christian Churches to make the Gospel known in schools, among ordinary people, and in the church,” Mario Cignoni, secretary general of the Bible Society of Italy (BSI) told an ecumenical audience during the launch of the publication at the Waldensian Church in Rome on Thursday.
Evangelization of Italy
The translation is aimed at evangelizing a post-Catholic Italy, “where the Bible permeates art, culture and daily life but still represents a little-read and little-known book,” the BSI noted in a press release.
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (president of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) and a key frontrunner to succeed Pope Francis), Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti (former president of the CEI), and Cardinal Kurt Koch (prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity) were three high-ranking Catholic prelates who endorsed the new translation at the gathering.
Eighteen denominations, including the Greek and Romanian Orthodox as well as multiple evangelical churches, were part of the historic project, with Bishop Dionysios Papavasileiou of the Holy Orthodox archdiocese of Italy, Alessandra Trotta of the Waldensian Church, and Fr. Luca Mazzinghi from the Pontifical Biblical Institute speaking at the event.
“The most significant feature of this translation is its truly ecumenical collaboration: each book or group of books of the New Testament was translated in pairs by a Catholic and an evangelical,” explained Mazzinghi, who is also president of the Italian Biblical Association.
Literary Translation
The new translation is a “formal” or “literary” translation: “this means that it privileges the source language, the Greek of the New Testament, while still trying to offer correct and fluent Italian,” Mazzinghi said.
The translation was like a “choral” work, Mazzinghi observed, “which has given dignity and space to all ecclesiastical traditions and interpretational sensibilities, in true brotherhood between the Churches.”
Words can have “different interpretations” and this can become a major impediment in “meeting each other” across denominational boundaries, Papavasileiou stressed. The new translation manages, finally, to be the “first instrument that gives us the possibility of working all together, thus becoming an indispensable tool for the whole Church.”
Such a translation was necessary because the earlier interconfessional translation of 1978 was based on the translational principle of “dynamic equivalence” which “privileges understanding in the target language (Italian), sometimes sacrificing the original text,” the biblical scholar noted.
In comments to The Stream, Rome-based Greek and Latin scholar Lorenzo Murrone explained why he would “welcome the attention given to the biblical text in Italy, especially in the wake of Vatican II.”
Murrone, a confessional Lutheran minister, continued:
Before the 1960s, biblical translations in Italian were, by and large, either relegated to the evangelical minority (like the Diodati and Luzzi versions) or not based on the original Greek–Hebrew text and mostly accessible to an academic minority. It is only in the last century or so that Italian translations began to become commonplace, and even nowadays interest for Sacred Scripture hardly percolates from the halls of academia to the average Christian. I hope that Christian churches in our country will see this as an opportunity to intensify the faithful’s knowledge of God’s Word.
The 18 churches involved in producing the ecumenical translation said that work had already begun on an ecumenical Old Testament and the translators were seeking to offer Italians an interconfessional version of the whole Bible as soon as possible.
Catholic Bishops Adopt Evangelical Bible
Meanwhile, in another historic ecumenical breakthrough, the Catholic bishops’ conferences in India as well as England and Wales have adopted the English Standard Version — an evangelical Bible translation — for use in their lectionaries for reading the Bible during the Eucharist.
Nigel Fernandes, an Indian who heads the Asian Trading Corporation, the continent’s best-known Catholic publishing house, was the brainchild behind getting Crossway, the publisher of the ESV, to make it possible for Catholics to endorse the translation by adding a supplement of the deutero-canonical books and create a Catholic edition.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales had begun to use the new ESV-based lectionary since Advent 2024, Fernandes told The Stream. The publisher also explained that biblical scholarship and basing the translation on the Hebrew and Greek texts had “narrowed translational differences so the extent they were almost negligible and noncontroversial.”
Historians, theologians, and biblical scholars have extensively explored how flawed Bible translations like the Latin Vulgate led to the medieval church adopting fallacious doctrine, which were challenged after the Dutch Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus, known as the scholar who “laid the egg that Luther hatched,” produced his Greek edition of the New Testament.
Overcoming Historic Divisions
The Vulgate, which was made the official version of the Roman Catholic Church, had several egregious errors, like Genesis 3:15 which read: “she [Mary] shall crush your head” instead of “he [Jesus] shall crush your head” — an error finally corrected by the Vatican in the Nova Vulgata (1979). Pope Sixtus V’s edition of the Vulgate contained at least two thousand errors.
Catholic translations like the Douay-Reims version which uncritically adhered to the Vulgate replicated philological, translational, and copyist errors, translating presbyteros as “priest” instead of “elder,” agape as “charity” instead of “love,” metanoia as “[do] penance” instead of “repentance,” and dikaiosune as “make righteous” instead of “declare righteous.”
While the Council of Trent (1545-1563) opposed the Reformation by dogmatically declaring an anathema on anyone who did not receive the biblical texts “as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition,” the Vatican joined hands with the Protestant United Bible Societies in 1987 and published its “Guiding Principles for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible.”
Rejecting the exclusive authority of the Vulgate, the Vatican announced that “interconfessional translations will continue to be based on a Hebrew text of the Old Testament and a Greek text of the New Testament which have been agreed on by scholars from various church traditions.”
“The clear goal of this interconfessional effort is to produce editions of the Holy Scriptures which provide all speakers of the language with a common text,” the statement noted. “This will in turn make possible, often for the first time, a common witness to the Word of God in the world of today.”
Originally published in The Stream.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
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