For more than four centuries, the Bible of most Spanish-speaking Protestants has been the Reina-Valera. Its revisions are still among the most widely read Bibles in the world, from Madrid to Mexico City to Buenos Aires. It began as the work of one refugee scholar, Casiodoro de Reina, who translated it over many years while moving from city to city, and it was printed far from Spain because it could not be printed there.

This article tells that story, beginning with the Spanish Bibles that came before Reina and ending with the many Spanish translations of today.

Medieval Spanish Bibles

Spain had vernacular Bibles long before the Reformation, and in some respects it was ahead of the rest of Europe. In the thirteenth century, translations of parts of the Bible into Castilian were made, and King Alfonso X, “the Wise,” included much of the biblical text in his great General Estoria, a history of the world.

Several of the medieval Spanish translations of the Old Testament were made directly from the Hebrew, often by Jewish scholars or converts. The most famous is the Alba Bible, translated between 1422 and 1433 by Rabbi Moses Arragel for Don Luis de Guzmán, Master of the Order of Calatrava, and richly illustrated. It is a reminder that in medieval Spain, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side and that translation often passed between them.

That changed in the late fifteenth century. After the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, vernacular Bibles came under growing suspicion. In the sixteenth century, as Protestant ideas spread, Spanish Bibles were placed on the Inquisition’s Index of forbidden books; the Index of 1559 prohibited Bibles in the vernacular. For the next two centuries, Spanish Bibles were printed abroad, by exiles.

Two Bibles from exile: Ferrara and Enzinas

The first was Jewish. In 1553 the Ferrara Bible, a Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible, was printed in Ferrara, Italy, for Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled the Iberian Peninsula. It was printed by Abraham Usque and financed by Yom Tob Atias. Its translation is extremely literal, following the Hebrew word by word, and it preserves a long tradition of Jewish Spanish translation. Casiodoro de Reina later used it.

The first Spanish New Testament translated from Greek was the work of Francisco de Enzinas, a young humanist from Burgos who had studied with Melanchthon in Wittenberg. It was printed in Antwerp in 1543, and Enzinas presented it to the Emperor Charles V. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned in Brussels, though he managed to escape in 1545. Another exile, Juan Pérez de Pineda, published a revised Spanish New Testament in Geneva in 1556.

Casiodoro de Reina

Casiodoro de Reina was born around 1520, probably in Extremadura. He became a monk in the Hieronymite monastery of San Isidoro del Campo, near Seville. In the 1550s this community became a centre of Protestant ideas, reading Reformation books smuggled into Spain. When the Inquisition began to close in, in 1557, Reina and a group of other monks fled.

The years that followed were hard. Reina went to Geneva, then to London, where he served as pastor of a congregation of Spanish Protestants under Elizabeth I’s protection. Accusations, some of them doctrinal and some personal, forced him to leave England in 1563; years later he returned to London and was cleared. He lived in Antwerp, Frankfurt and other cities. Meanwhile, in 1562, the Inquisition in Seville burned him in effigy. Through all this he was translating the Bible.

The Bear Bible, 1569

Reina’s complete Bible was printed in Basel in 1569. It is known as the Biblia del Oso, the “Bear Bible,” because its title page carries a printer’s emblem showing a bear reaching up to a honeycomb in a tree. The emblem was the device of the printer Samuel Apiarius, though most of the printing seems to have been done by Thomas Guarin; neither name appears in the book, and it is often said that it had the advantage of giving no sign of the book’s Protestant origin. Printing costs were partly met by friends and supporters; the print run is usually given as about 2,600 copies, though that figure comes from later reports.

Reina worked from the Hebrew and Greek. In his preface to the reader he describes his sources: the Ferrara Bible and the Latin translation of the Hebrew by Santes Pagnini, among others, as well as the original texts. His Spanish is rich and vigorous, the Spanish of the Golden Age, the period of Cervantes and Teresa of Ávila.

He included the books that Protestants call the Apocrypha and Catholics the deuterocanonical books, placing them among the Old Testament books as they appear in the Latin Bible. In John 1:1 he translated the Greek logos as “la Palabra,” the Word, a choice later revisers changed.

Cipriano de Valera, 1602

Another monk who had fled San Isidoro del Campo in 1557, Cipriano de Valera, spent most of his later life in England, where he studied and taught. He spent some twenty years revising Reina’s Bible, and his revision was printed in Amsterdam in 1602. Its title page shows a man planting and another watering, a reference to 1 Corinthians 3:6, which gave it the nickname Biblia del Cántaro, the “Pitcher Bible.”

Valera did not retranslate. He corrected and adjusted Reina’s work and moved the Apocrypha into a separate section between the Testaments, following the practice of Protestant Bibles of his time. In John 1:1 he wrote “el Verbo,” which has remained in the Reina-Valera tradition. Ever since, the translation has carried both names.

Revisions: 1862 to 1960 and beyond

Reina-Valera has been revised many times, chiefly by the Bible societies. The revisions of the nineteenth century, including one published in 1862, modernised the spelling and language and brought it closer to the Greek text then in use. The 1909 revision became the standard for half a century and is now in the public domain. Its John 1:1 reads:

En el principio era el Verbo, y el Verbo era con Dios, y el Verbo era Dios.

The 1960 revision, prepared under the United Bible Societies, became the best-known Spanish Protestant Bible of the twentieth century; it is still under copyright. Further revisions followed, including those of 1995 and later. Each revision has had to balance two loyalties: to the language and cadence that generations have memorised, and to clearer modern Spanish and better understanding of the original texts.

Catholic and modern Spanish Bibles

Catholic Spanish Bibles came later. In the second half of the eighteenth century the rules were relaxed, first in Rome in 1757 and then by the Spanish Inquisition in 1782, to allow approved vernacular translations with notes. The first complete Catholic Spanish Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate by Felipe Scío de San Miguel, appeared in 1790–93. Another, by Félix Torres Amat, followed in the 1820s. In the twentieth century Catholic scholars translated from the Hebrew and Greek, beginning with the Nácar-Colunga Bible of 1944, often described as the first complete Catholic Bible in Spanish translated from the original languages, and later produced Spanish editions of the Jerusalem Bible and other versions.

Today there are dozens of Spanish translations, Catholic, Protestant and interconfessional, at every level from very literal to very simple. Many are copyrighted, and the Reina-Valera 1909 remains one of the few complete Spanish Bibles freely available to anyone.

Open Word Bible in Spanish

Open Word Bible is drafting a Spanish translation, but not by translating its English. Like Reina, it works from the Hebrew and Greek, with each Spanish sentence sharing the same meaning decisions as the English and its own record of wording decisions for Spanish. Where Spanish readers have real preferences that do not change the meaning, such as how to render the divine name, the project offers reader settings rather than a single choice. The Spanish drafts are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers fluent in Spanish and trained in the original languages; none is yet marked reviewed. Like the 1909 Reina-Valera, the result is free for anyone to use, but here by design: it is released under CC0 from the start.

Sources

  • Boehmer, Edward. Bibliotheca Wiffeniana: Spanish Reformers of Two Centuries from 1520. 3 vols. Strasbourg: Trübner, 1874–1904.
  • Kinder, A. Gordon. Casiodoro de Reina: Spanish Reformer of the Sixteenth Century. London: Tamesis, 1975.
  • Lazar, Moshe, ed. The Ladino Bible of Ferrara (1553). Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1992.
  • Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. 3 vols. Madrid, 1880–82.
  • Greenslade, S. L., ed. The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
  • Cameron, Euan, ed. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Reina, Casiodoro de. La Biblia, que es, los sacros libros del Viejo y Nuevo Testamento. Basel, 1569. Including the preface “Amonestación del intérprete de los sacros libros al lector.”
  • Valera, Cipriano de. La Biblia, que es, los sacros libros del Viejo y Nuevo Testamento. Segunda edición. Amsterdam: Lorenzo Jacobi, 1602.