Bible translations into Esperanto
The translation of the New Testament is influenced by the English King James Bible, so it closely follows the Textus Receptus rather than the more modern accepted text based on the most ancient Greek manuscripts.
According to Arieh ben Guni, in preparing his Esperanto version, Zamenhof appears to have relied primarily on the 1783 German Pentateuch translation and commentary by Moses Mendelssohn, ספר נתיבות השלום והוא חבור כולל חמשה חומשי תורה עם תרגום אשכנזי ובאור (Sefer Netivot ha-shalom - ṿe-hu ḥibur kolel ḥamishah ḥumshe torah ʻim targum askhenazi u-veʼur — in which the German was written in Hebrew characters; and the Russian Synodal Bible (Синодальный перевод)[1] — a work characterized by considerable archaic vocabulary and the use of grammar which is essentially that of Old Church Slavonic.
From 1919 until 1926 the Bible committee read through and corrected the text, harmonizing the language of the New Testament to the Old (according to a Protestant Christian point of view), then typesetting and proofreading.
The first volume of his projected New Testament appeared as Leteroj de Paŭlo kaj lia skolo ("Letters of Paul and his school", 2004), which contained the entire Pauline canon.
In the Kava-Pech edition (see below) the Deuterocanonical books are dispersed through the Old Testament in the locations typical of Roman Catholic editions of the Bible, but the portions (whether whole books like Judit (Judith) or La Saĝeco de Salomono (Wisdom of Solomon) or portions included in the Septuagint and Vulgate but not in the Protestant Canon, in Ester (Esther) and Daniel (Daniel)) that are not in the Protestant canon are italicized, facilitating their identification as deuterocanonical/apocryphal without interrupting the flow of the text.
[1] After completing his investigation and analysis, Gregor characterized Zamenhof's Esperanto translation as being consistently clear and accurate, managing to be simultaneously "both conservative and original," and writes that it "deserves a high place among the great Bibles of the world.
"[1] Arieh ben Guni, writing in La nica literatura revuo, deprecates himself as nur humila spicovendisto ("only a humble spice vendor") and commends Gregor's remarkable polyglot abilities.
