The Spanish Bible Reina Valera. Old Testament and New Testament.
The Bible, which is, the sacred books of the Old and New Testaments. Translated in Spanish. The Word of our God remains forever. 1569, also known as the Bear's Bible, is the first complete translation of the Bible into Spanish, published on September 28, 1569. Its translator was Casiodoro de Reina. The Bible of the Bear is usually referred to as Reina-Valera (RV) for having made Cipriano de Valera's first revision of it in 1602.
The Reina-Valera was widely disseminated during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Today, the Reina-Valera (with several revisions through the years) is one of the most widely used Spanish Bibles by most of the Christian churches derived from the Reformation (including the Evangelical churches), as well as by other groups of Christian faith, such as the Seventh-day Adventist Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the International Gideons and other non-denominational Christians.
Translation of Reina
Casiodoro de Reina, Spanish Hieronymite monk of the Monastery of San Isidoro del Campo, after leaving for exile to escape the persecutions of the Inquisition, worked for twelve years in the translation of the Bible. The Bear Bible was published in Basel, Switzerland. It is called the Bear's Bible because of the illustration on its cover of a bear trying to reach a honeycomb hanging from a tree. This illustration, logo of the Bavarian printer Mattias Apiarius, was placed on the cover to avoid the use of religious icons, because at that time any translation of the Bible into vernacular languages was forbidden.
Biblical texts
The translation of the Old Testament, as Casiodoro de Reina expressly states in his "Admonition of the interpreter of the sacred books to the reader", was based on the Hebrew Masoretic text (Bomberg edition, 1525). As he considered that the Latin Vulgate had already fulfilled its role and contained errors and changes, he preferred to use as a secondary source the Latin translation of Sanctes Pagnino (Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio, 1528), because "to the vote of all the learned in the Hebrew language is considered to be the purest that up to now there is ", correcting the Masoretic version whenever it departs from the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament. The Bible of Ferrara (Abraham Usque and Yom-Tob Athias, 1553) was always on hand to solve the doubts, translation of the Hebrew into Judeo-Spanish used by the Sephardic Jews, which Reina considered "work of the greatest esteem", "for giving the natural and first significance of the Hebrew words and the differences of the tenses of the verbs ".
For the translation of the New Testament, Reina was based on the Textus Receptus (Erasmus 1516, Stephanus, 1550), the Polyglot Complutense and the best Greek manuscripts known at the time. Apparently, it had in sight the versions of the New Testament of Juan Pérez de Pineda of 1556, Francisco de Enzinas of 1543 and translations of Juan de Valdés.
