Thomson's Translation of the Bible is a direct translation of the Greek Septuagint version of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

into English, rare for its time. It took Charles Thomson, the secretary of the

Continental Congress The Continental Congress was a series of legislative bodies, with some executive function, for thirteen of Britain's colonies in North America, and the newly declared United States just before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. ...

from 1774 to 1789 and a Founding Father of the United States, 19 years to complete, and was originally published in 1808. Thomson is credited with having created the work with little to no help from other scholars. Thomson was a Greek scholar, and before the American Revolution, he had been a teacher at several prominent schools. Thomson's translation of the entire Greek Bible, excluding the Apocrypha, was published in one thousand sets of four volumes each, the fourth volume being Thomson's translation of the New Testament in that same year. The printer was Jane Aitken of Philadelphia. Thomson's was the first English translation of the Septuagint published and was considered by British biblical scholars to represent the best in American scholarship. David Daniell, in his compendious work ''The Bible in English'' (2003), states that the scholars who worked on the 1881

Revised Version The Revised Version (RV) or English Revised Version (ERV) of the Bible is a late 19th-century British revision of the King James Version. It was the first and remains the only officially authorised and recognised revision of the King James Versio ...

consulted Thomson's translations (among others, of course) during their work. Thomson's translation of the New Testament is the first translation into English that was accomplished in America. Thomson's personal copy, containing final corrections to the manuscript, is in the Philadelphia library. Thomson also published a ''Synopsis of the Four Evangelists'' in 1815, a book which came out of the notes for this work.

Resources

* ''Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Covenant, commonly called the Old and New Testament. Translated from the Greek by Charles Thomson''. Philadelphia, 1908. 4 vols

The Septuagint Bible: History

PDFs of Charles Thomson's Septuagint Translation

JSTOR article called "Charles Thomson, First American N. T. Translator--An Appraisal"
* iarchive:synopsisoffourev1815thom, A Synopsis of the Four Evangelists - By Charles Thomson * *

References

1808 non-fiction books Bible translations into English Editions of the Septuagint {{bible-translation-stub