Magyar
Deutsch
English
Русский3. Scripture is available
Sometime …
The first Christians took the mission of Jesus seriously: "Go then, and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The disciples spread the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ to many people.
The centuries have passed and the official ecclesiastical language became Latin. Until the middle of the XX. century, Latin was so widespread as English is today, and knowledge of Latin was part of basic education. Before the Reformation, the Bible was only available in Latin - for a few people, as ordinary people did not know Latin.
The reformers realized 500 years ago that the ordinary people, the members of the Church did not understand the Latin mass, and they did not have access to the texts of the Scriptures and its explanation for their lives.
Luther and his followers wanted to make the Bible accessible to everyone and they wanted to help people think for themselves, using their free will, and make decisions on their own.
This was the greatest achievement of Reformation.
Gutenberg and Luther are two fantastic persons: "They were in the right place at the right tiime". Thus, we can briefly say that the typographer and the reformer have reinforced each other's activities. Church teaching urging renewal spread so fast like wildfire, since many copies of the ideas were created by press-houses and previously this had only been possible by handwriting.
In Hungary, for the first time in 1541, the translation of János Sylvester's Hungarian New Testament was published in the press-house at Újsziget on Tamás Nádasdy's Sárvár estate.
After that, Gáspár Károlyi was the one who translated the entire scripture to Hungarian in 1590, and it was printed in Vizsoly's press-house, therefore it was called the "Bible of Vizsoly". The 2500-page work was done by four setters, the types of print originated from Germany, and the paper from Poland. It was the largest book of that time.
And now...
In the past centuries, the Bible has been re-translated many times. Revision of the Károlyi Bible was made in 1908, and many people use this version. The translation to the modern Hungarian language were made by the Hungarian Bible Society in 1975, 1990 and the latest in 2014.
Today, Bible translation to the latest Hungarian is available in countless editions and hundreds of thousands of people have access to it.
Tip
If we are willing to read the Scriptures, we can do it book by book. We can also find a variety of reading plans for daily readings - we can read the entire Bible in a year. But we may also start with the gospels, for example, with the gospel of Luke.
God's word
"And let not your behaviour be like that of this world, but be changed and made new in mind, so that by experience you may have knowledge of the good and pleasing and complete purpose of God."
(Paul's letter to the Romans 12, 2)