'In the beginning was talk'

In 1519 Erasmus translated the first line of John 1:1 as In principio erat sermo, and it shook Europe’s respublica litteraria. As Neil Rhodes put it, Erasmus’s translation "familiarized the remote authority of the divine word as the more mundane speech form of conversation. In a moment, the purest original of the pure source was made common" (Common, 2018, p. 43).

Providing the first fresh translation from the Greek to the Latin in a thousand years, Erasmus rendered ὁ λόγος not with the familiar verbum of Jerome's version, sermo -- discourse, conversation, talk. This translation was not without precedent. Tertullian and Cyprian — the very wellsprings of Latin theology — had used sermo when referring to John 1:1 in their own writings. But, they came before Jerome and long before the Vulgate had cased to be a mere vulgarization of the sacred writings and had become the unrivaled form of the Bible in the West.

The effect can be well simulated in English. Instead of the familiar version pioneered by Wycliffe and taken up by Tyndale, "In the beginning was the word" it is "in the beginning was the conversation" or "in the beginning was talk." “Talk” expresses something more dynamic than “word,” which seems more static; and “talk” conveys the idea less formally than “conversation.”

The difference is, in fact, heightened in 21st-century English. We tend to think of "word" in terms of writing or print. A word, for us, is usually indistinguishable from the letters with which it can be inscribed on the page or the screen. But, when Tyndale translated ὁ λόγος as "the word" he had the spoken word primarily in view. Only a minority of English speakers could read and fewer still write. Tyndale wrote an English Bible to be heard, to be read aloud to the people in the words they spoke, in their native tongue. Jereme didn't have a written (much less a printed!) word in mind when he used "verbum" any more than John had a written word in mind when he used "logos" but active speech -- the spoken word.

The subsequent shockwaves of Erasmus’s new Latin translation changed the world in ways that he never anticipated — and often did not like. Calvin adopted the same translation for his commentary on John, highlighting the more lively, active quality of sermo. His successor Beza used sermo in his fresh Latin translation at the end of the same century. And, of course, for them (as for Erasmus, though in different ways) the willingness to turn from the familiar out of fidelity to ancient sources formed part of a much larger project in which everything established was subjected to reconsideration…