Abstract
This article fills an important gap in the historiography of translations of the Bible into Polish, documenting the origins, subsequent history, and controversies surrounding a translation of the New Testament made near the close of the nineteenth century. First published in its present form by the British and Foreign Bible Society in Vienna in 1881, it is referred to by the present-day Bible Society in Poland (the successor organization to the British and Foreign Bible Society in Poland) as Nowy Testament tzw. warszawski [the Warsaw New Testament]. No longer published by the Bible Society in Poland, this translation is maintained in print today by the British-based Trinitarian Bible Society, which until October 2017 referred to it—erroneously—as a “revision of the Gdańsk text by Count Wegierski,” while most people who have any experience of this translation refer to it—also erroneously—as przekład Goetza [the Goetze translation].
Among other things, this study demonstrates the following:
The translation of the New Testament in Polish currently circulated by the Trinitarian Bible Society is not the translation the Society for several decades claimed it to be.
The translation of the New Testament in Polish published by the Trinitarian Bible Society in London in 1876 contained a number of errors introduced by Karol Węgierski acting on his own initiative in England and was rejected outright by the Warsaw-based committee that had produced the Gospels–Acts portion of this translation in 1873.
The committee eliminated Węgierski’s errors and published its own version of the New Testament with the help of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1881.
In the 1920s, the Trinitarian Bible Society substituted the Polish New Testament it had first published in 1876 with the version first published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1881, and without making any changes to it began publishing it as their own “new edition,” calling it an “uncorrupted version” produced “after very careful revision.”
This substitution was exposed by the British and Foreign Bible Society but was not properly acknowledged at the time. This was particularly unfortunate in view of the Trinitarian Bible Society’s strident and sustained criticism of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Very little credit for the actual translation is due to Karol Węgierski; most is due to Karol Gustaw Manitius and the Warsaw translation committee.
The confessional diversity of the translation committee, which included representatives of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic Churches, means that the Gospel of Matthew published by the Trinitarian Bible Society in 1870 was the first ecumenical translation of any part of the Bible into Polish and that the 1881 Warsaw New Testament was the first ecumenical translation of the entire New Testament into Polish.
