Translating the ‘Hebraeo-Hellenic Apostles’: Hugh Broughton and the Scholarly Context of the English New Testament

It is well known that the sixteenth century’s surge of vernacular biblical translation was enabled by a greater knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. But by the century’s end, the most exciting work on these languages had far surpassed issues of comprehension. In the chiefly continental, Latinate world of the most advanced biblical scholarship, scholars studied the Semitic influence on New Testament Greek, explained strange features of the Gospels through post-biblical Judaism, and analysed the historical-philological connections between the Testaments. Despite the significant implications such work had for vernacular translation, the relationship between these two fields has rarely been explored. This article will offer a preliminary study by using new evidence relating to the biblical scholarship and translation efforts of the English Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). It will demonstrate how the theories and methods he developed in the course of his own research into Apostolic Greek were not only central to his vision of the English Bible, but also affected such details of translation as style and lexical choice. In doing so it argues that, for Broughton, it was within vernacular translation that the implications of the most innovative contemporary biblical scholarship were applied, explored, and developed further