Nou Testament - Catalan New Testament
Translation by Ramon Rocaspana

Published in 1999 by

Trinitarian Bible Society
Tyndale House, Dorset Road
London, SW19 3NN
ANGLATERRA

Hard cover, 13,5 x 21 cm, 279 pp.

The translation of the Bible to the Catalan language with rigorous care has been a project that has always met with many difficulties within the Evangelical Christian circles. Many contended that the Spanish Reina-Valera version sufficed. It is true that many of us Catalan Evangelical Christians have been raised with this glorious Spanish version that has circulated since 1569 and seen many careful revisions, and which has been at the root of the Evangelical movement in all the territories of Spain and of Spanish America. But Catalan Evangelical Christians sorely felt the need of a faithful version, true to the original texts, without Apocryphal books and without notes, through which the Holy Spirit could also talk to those of us that had grown from the cradle in the Catalan language. In Revelation, the Scripture says, in words addressed to John the Apostle: «Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings». It is therefore necessary that each language should have the testimony of Scripture, and the fact is that Catalan has been a language that for a long time has been lacking, with the circulation of versions of Scripture that were not really useful for public use at church meetings and for general Gospel work.

So it is gladly that we present this new version rooted in a Greek text representative of the huge mass of MSS. of the testimony of the Evangelists and Apostles, the great classical text known as Textus Receptus.

To order it, you can address yourself directly to the Trinitarian Bible Society.

Ramon Rocaspana was born in Lleida (in Spanish known as Lérida) in 1958, and he graduated as M.A. in Catalan Philology, with minors and parallel study in classical and koine Greek. For two additional years he did comparative language studies. He was substitute professor of historical Catalan grammar at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, and is now professor of Secondary Education at the Guindavols High-School in Lleida.

Having become an earnest Christian, he started to read the Greek New Testament, which he obtained from the well known Atlàntida Book-Shop in Barcelona, and started to do a comparative study of different versions, working an interlinear presentation of the Greek original with translations as those published by the Monks of Montserrat, the translation published by the Evangelical Biblical Institution of Catalonia, and others.

In 1980, having become aware of the need of a modern Catalan translation, but avoiding liberties with respect to the originals, he started the task. He began with a translation draft, and in 1984 he contacted the Trinitarian Bible Society, which agreed to an eventual publication of the translation. The Gospel of John, finished in 1985, was published in 1989. The draft of the whole New Testament was ready by 1987. That year saw a first revision. After, in a coordinated endeavour between the Trinitarian Bible Society, Ramon Rocaspana and Mr. Milton Portugal, a Christian worker in the ministry in Cerdanyola del Vallès, a Reading and Revision Committee was established, to refine the translation with careful comparison to the Greek New Testament (TR).

The Committee began its task in 1990 and ended its work in 1997. All this work was done by means of regular fortnightly meetings, sometimes weekly meetings, and some occasional intensive seminar of two or three days. All work, the translator's and that of the members of the Committee, was done on a voluntary basis. The members of the Reading and Revision Committee were:

• Mr. Milton Portugal, coordinator with the Trinitarian Bible Society
• Mr. Ramon Rocaspana (the translator)
• Mrs. Una Herbage (Graduated of the London Bible College, and consultant of the Bible Societies)
• Mr. Jordi Grayling i Milian (M.A. in Classical Languages, specialized in the Greek language, and then Doctoral candidate doing research in koine Greek)
• Mr. Antoni Mendoza i Miralles (Graduate of the A.L.E.R.T.A. Bible School, and President of Edicions Cristianes Bíbliques)
• Mr. Santiago Escuain i Sanz (State Official Interpreter and Professor of English, translator/adapter into Spanish of W. E. Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, and of A. T. Robertson's Word Pictures of the New Testament, and other reference works).