'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, but as sermo -- discourse, conversation, or 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 his translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue become the unrivaled form of the Bible in the West and Latin the language of the elite.

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 would be “in the beginning was talk.” Talk expresses something more dynamic than word, something verbal rather than written or printed, and lacks the formality of conversation or discourse.

The difference is between word and talk is, in fact, heightened in the 21st-century. For us a word 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 version of the 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 either when he used verbum any more than John had a written word in mind when he used the common word ὁ λόγος to characterize that non-thing which was in the beginning with God and who indeed was God and by whom God made all things.

The subsequent shockwaves of Erasmus’s sermo, talk, 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…