Who was the first to translate the Bible into Portuguese?

“According to some documents and reports by historians, this uncle was a priest. He took responsibility for Almeida’s upbringing and care,” says researcher Thiago Merkey, associated with the Hagiographic Society of the United States, in the report.

“The truth is that little is known of this man’s childhood and adolescence, but he would have had an excellent education, and might have been prepared to pursue a religious career, including.”

At fourteen he was already in Asia. There, he ended up settling in Batavia, the current capital of Indonesia, which is today called Jakarta. At that time the area was disputed between the Portuguese and the Dutch.

The city was the administrative center of the Dutch East India Company, and next to it, Malacca, in present-day Malaysia, was a Portuguese colony that was later conquered by the Dutch.

“The following year,” Merkey continues, “he left the Catholic Church and converted to Protestantism.” This shift was fundamental to the path Almeida was to follow as a translator of the Bible.

For historical reasons, it is worth noting. After all, in the context of the so-called Protestant Reformation, based on the case raised by Martin Luther (1483-1546) and which shook the foundations of Catholicism at that time, it was important for believers to have access to biblical texts directly and in their own language. Now, this prompted a series of biblical translations to be carried out around the world, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Almeida joined the so-called Dutch Reformed Church in this context. He soon saw that there was a gap to fill: until then, the Portuguese-speaking faithful had no version in their language.

Almeida’s conversion to Protestantism was not accidental, but rather the result of his contact with members of the Dutch Church in Batavia. “[A conversão] It was after he had read a work that came with an anti-Catholic perspective, questioning the points of Protestantism. [histórico] Questions related to Catholicism,” notes Cotto.

It is a manifesto titled “The Christ Difference”. Among the attacks the pamphlet promoted on the Catholic Church was a point that would have served as a greater stimulus to the proto-translator: the exacerbated use of Latin during religious services, to the detriment of the local languages.

“Translating the Bible into local languages ​​is an achievement of the Protestant Reformation. An insight for Protestants was exactly that: translating the Bible into the languages ​​of the people, the languages ​​spoken by the people,” fits BBC News Brazil historian, philosopher and theologian Gerson Light de Moraes, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.

Precisely for this reason, Merky defines Almeida as a young man “with impetus and a desire to show how much he actually penetrated the Protestant atmosphere, enchanted by the Reformed Church.”

And he adds: “Because one of the main elements in it is precisely the translation of the Bible into the vernacular.”

The basis for Almeida’s translation was the consecrated Latin version prepared by the French Protestant theologian Teodoro de Pisa (1519-1605). But he was not the only source—historical records indicate that, as is customary in translation works of this kind, he compared his version with choices made by other authors.

Beza was a theologian who worked a lot on biblical archeology, and he has many commentaries [em sua tradução]. Almeida used this, but he also used versions of the Bible in Spanish, French, and Italian,” Cotto points out. During this period, we already had a great deal of Bible translations into other languages. “

Almeida finished his first edition of the New Testament in 1645, when he was only 17 years old. He intended to publish the material and, as some researchers claim, sent it to a publisher in Amsterdam. “However, this first copy of his work has been lost,” says Cotto.

The translator only found out about this in 1651, when he was approached by people interested in publishing the Portuguese version. So he decided to turn to the saved drafts to re-work.

Since then, there have been intense debates about whether or not to publish his work, with some of those who had access to the manuscripts beginning to criticize the quality of the translation. In 1656 he was ordained a minister of the Reformed Church and sent to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. There, in addition to serving as a priest, he taught Portuguese to other religions and taught catechism.

In parallel with his community activities, he devoted himself to revising the Bible.

“His text was published,” Cotto says, “but soon after, they identified problems with the translation. Everything was collected in haste, so as not to circulate.” “He was able to preach and make use of some of these texts, but a team was dedicated to reviewing everything.”

Some of these versions have even been circulated. The British Museum in London holds a copy dating back to 1681. But it is still restricted and not accepted among Portuguese-speaking Christians.

Not much is known about Almeida’s life. Most biographical texts state that he was to marry, in Ceylon, a woman named Lucrécia Valcoa de Lamos. Like him, she will also be a Protestant of Catholic descent. The couple reportedly had two children, a boy and a girl.

His life was filled with conflicts, both with the Catholics and the local congregations. For his rhetoric against the Catholic Church, he faced a ban from the Batavia government in 1657. He also faced similar punishments in Colombo, in present-day Sri Lanka, between 1658 and 1661.

In the then possession of Tuticorim, now part of India, the Portuguese had problems with the local population. There, years earlier, entourages of the Inquisition had promoted the burning of his portrait in a public square, suggesting that the Catholic Church did not respect him well, which he sharply criticized.

In his time as chaplain there, about a year, he suffered the consequences. The natives refused to listen to him, and few accepted baptisms or religious people to bless their marriages.

Almeida died in present-day Indonesia in 1691 at the age of 63. He had not yet completed his final translation of the Old Testament and this work was continued with one of his fellow missionaries, the Dutch priest Jacobus op den Acker (1647-1731).

Officially, neither Aker nor Almeida have seen the work done. According to the Sociedade Bíblica do Brasil, what is considered the first edition of a complete Bible in Portuguese was only published in 1753, in two volumes. The first combined edition in one volume dates from 1819.

An additional curiosity of Almeida’s life is that many ancient prints ascribe to him the title of “priest”. “Actually, he was never a priest. He was a Calvinist pastor,” Moraes asserts.

Even today, there are several versions of the Bible in Portuguese bringing the genesis of the Almeida version. This is the condition known as ARA, so called because it is a revised and updated Almeida. There is also Almeida Corrigida Fiel and the Revised and Corrected Edition, among others.

“It’s a sign in Portuguese, and it’s a very good translation. But it makes sense to make adjustments over time and that’s also important to point out,” Moraes comments.

The historian and theologian give an example of these modifications. For example, when the sons of Noah are mentioned in the Old Testament. “Before the 1990s, they were called Sem, Cão, and Jafé. So they started calling them Sem, Cam, and Jafé. So as not to generate any weirdness with the word ‘dog,’” Moraes explains.

Another well-known passage was also recently modified. It is the twenty-third psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not.”

There, the old copies had the words “Your staff and your staff give me rest”. Translators [contemporâneos] He modified this expression, because with the word ‘stick’ you can generate a great attitude,’ says Moraes. ARA brings ‘your employees and your employees comfort me.’

Theologian Cotto also identifies problems in translating Almeida. In the account of the creation of the world, in Genesis, for example, the passage in which God created “man in our image, in our likeness,” is followed by the phrase “Let us have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps” On the ground “.

The idea of ​​human beings dominating nature, if not incorrect, seems outdated for current times, as environmental discourse calls for taking care of the environment.

“The point is that the verb to dominate comes from the Hebrew language and this translation is very poor. It is difficult to find an exact translation, because the idea of ​​domination conveys an image of superiority, which suggests that humans dominate nature and nature is inferior to them.”, comments Kotto.

“But, in fact, the original word had a different connotation, a sense of responsible management, that is, it is man who must take care of creation,” explains the expert.

Researcher Merkey sheds light on other intriguing passages, some of which are responsible, according to him, for “distortions”.

“One of the problems that scholars have pointed out is the translation of the word fetish from Hebrew and Greek,” he says.

Almeida translates as carved and images in sculptures, not as idols. [sacras]. It was the problem of translation that led to a theological debate.”

He notes that “another strange passage is found in the Book of Isaiah, when he translated the word originally meaning ‘little girl’ in Hebrew as ‘virgin’, even though there is another word in the Hebrew for ‘virgin'”. This is the prophetic passage that Christianity, especially Catholicism, uses to justify the doctrine of the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus: […]. “

Troubles and problems aside, there is a unanimous recognition that the work of pioneers like Almeida deserves respect for the difficulty of translating such complex texts in antiquity. “There were no resources today and the translator always has to make choices. We are talking about texts that were originally written in languages ​​with different structures and even characters, such as Hebrew and ancient Greek…”, Moraes comments.

“The work of those men who have translated the Bible in the past is a work most commendable because in addition to the knowledge they must have had in the so-called original languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin itself, and other versions they actually used it to compare and determine the best translation options, such as French And Italian and English, that was a completely new subject, ”adds the professor, recalling that the Protestant Reformation headed by Luther which opened up these possibilities was not very far from that time.