BYU Studies Quarterly
Keywords
Mormon studies, Spanish language, Bible
Abstract
After the release of the first Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible in 1979 and a new edition of the Triple Combination containing the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price in 1981, Elder Boyd K. Packer declared:
With the passing of years, these scriptures will produce successive generations of faithful Christians who know the Lord Jesus Christ and are disposed to obey His will. . . . The revelations will be opened to them as to no other in the history of the world. . . . They will develop a gospel scholarship beyond that which their forebears could achieve. They will have the testimony that Jesus is the Christ and be competent to proclaim Him and to defend Him.
Decades of experience have proven the value of those scripture editions for millions of Latter-day Saints, and yet, as Elder Packer went on to relate, “even all of this is but a beginning, for we have it only in English.” Although the Triple Combination has been translated into forty-four languages, for many years only English-speaking Saints could enjoy the advantages of reading the Old and New Testaments in a Church-sponsored edition. That changed in September 2009 with the publication of the Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009, a Spanish edition of the LDS Bible and the first new language edition to be published since the English version thirty years earlier (fig. 1). The Santa Biblia marks a significant milestone in the history of Latter-day Saint scripture both because of its contents and because of what it indicates about the internationalization of the Church. In this article, I will attempt to capture some of that significance by analyzing the Santa Biblia’s translation, textual basis, study aids, and impact.
Recommended Citation
Sears, Joshua M.
(2015)
"Santa Biblia: The Latter-day Saint Bible in Spanish,"
BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 54:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol54/iss1/5