JOHN WILKINS’ ESSAY (1668) UND DIE ‘LONDONER BIBEL’
JOHN WILKINS' ESSAY (1668) AND THE "LONDON BIBLE"

Summary/Abstract: Among the text samples from foreign languages in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins prints an Old Lithuanian Lord’s prayer whose source is unknown. According to Andreas Müller (1680) it was taken from the ‘London Bible’, i.e., Samuel Bogusław Chyliński’s Old Lithuanian Bible translation of which only a part of the Old Testament had ever been printed (1660–1662). A comparison of Wilkins’ text, here edited for the first time, with all relevant Lithuanian versions of the Lord’s Prayer shows that Chyliński’s handwritten translation of Matthew is indeed the version closest to Wilkins’ text. But the differences, however slight, are significant: Wilkins, who did not speak Lithuanian, could not have modified the text in this way. Taken together, the facts point to the conclusion that Chyliński wrote down an ad hoc translation of the Lord’s Prayer for Wilkins. Johannes Bretke’s spontaneous new translation of a Bible passage in an album entry of 1599 thus would not be an isolated case.

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