The Adventure of the English Bible – David Gregson
In 1969 I bought a copy of “The Books and the Parchments” by FF Bruce. This taught me a lot about the biblical languages, the canon of Scripture and the Old and New Testament texts. To my great surprise, one chapter of the book held a special fascination for me, that entitled “The English Bible”. My fascination with the extraordinary development of the Bible in English has, if anything, grown over the years. Most church attenders in this country, however, seem to have either a very sketchy knowledge of the subject or complete ignorance. That is one of the main reasons for my preparing this paper because in the adventure of the English Bible, we can see one of the clearest evidences of God’s goodness to our nation.
For almost 500 years, the number of Bible translations in English has been far greater than in any other language. Before then, however, it was quite a different story. When the Christian message was brought to South East England by missionaries from Rome in 597AD, the Bible they carried with them was the Latin Vulgate. This was the work of a Roman scholar by the name of Jerome. The Vulgate version of the Bible was a Latin text for the common man, completed around 400AD. It held sway in England for almost 1000 years.
The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon people of Britain before the Norman conquest of 1066 is now known as Old English. Bede, our first writer of English church history, is said to have been completing the dictation of an English version of John’s Gospel with his dying breath on Ascension Day, 735. Sadly his translation has been lost. Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 until 899 and he was a godly ruler. He had an English version of the Ten Commandments inserted into his law code and is said to have translated part of the Psalms.
The most memorable development in this realm in Anglo-Saxon times involved the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels. These illuminated manuscripts were completed in Latin around the year 698 in Northumberland. Two hundred and fifty years later, Aldred, a monk in Chester-le-Street, placed an Anglo-Saxon translation in his own handwriting above the large Latin words of the Lindisfarne Gospels. That means that 600 years before the Reformation, around 950, the whole of the Gospels could be read in Old English, at least in the Northumbrian dialect. This is the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels in any form of the English language. You could say that the story of the Bible in English begins here, with Aldred in the year 950. It could only be read and heard by the monks in the monastery, however, not by lay people outside.
The invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066 changed the English language and culture. A new way of speaking took over, Middle English, which was quite different from Anglo-Saxon. Bible translation took a step backwards. Indeed, until the middle of the fourteenth century, it occurred to no-one that a Bible in English, the language of the people, might be an asset. Church services went on in Latin with a Latin Bible and the whole thing was incomprehensible to any but the educated clergy. They were remote affairs with the overall emphasis on mystery; the priests were like members of a secret society. The whole thing was intended to impress and subdue, not to instruct or edify. Mystery plays were allowed in cities like York or Chester; these, however, were nothing more than biblical soap operas, not the authentic Bible. For the Roman church of the time, God spoke exclusively in Latin. The monopoly the English church had on the Bible in Latin enabled it to maintain its tyrannical hold on the English people. It was an abomination.
Then something new began to appear in England in the 1380s: laboriously hand copied manuscripts of the whole Bible translated from the Latin Vulgate into English. These were said to be linked with the name of the Oxford scholar, John Wycliffe. He was born near Richmond in North Yorkshire in 1324, spent twenty years at Oxford University, then became chaplain to Edward III and finally Rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire before his death in 1384. John Wycliffe, often known as the Morning Star of the Reformation, became a controversial figure. He boldly questioned papal authority, wrote against prayers to the saints and pilgrimages, criticised the sale of indulgences, denied the reality of transubstantiation and spoke out against the hierarchy of the Roman church. Moreover he concluded that the reason for the parlous state of church and nation at the time was a lack of faith in the Scriptures. His solution which was quite revolutionary in his day was the translation of the Bible into the English language.
Over two hundred and fifty manuscripts of the Wycliffe Bible, whole or in parts, survive. The idea that John Wycliffe himself translated the Bible into English rests on a statement of his great Bohemian disciple, Jan Hus. Many scholars like FF Bruce and David Daniell feel that it is unlikely that Wycliffe, pen in hand, actually translated any of his Bible. The two Wycliffe versions of the Bible were the work of two of the great man’s followers, Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey. The project was carried out under Wycliffe’s influence and in accordance with his principles. It was a translation into Middle English, not from the original Bible languages, but again from the Latin Vulgate. The English read like Latin; at times, it was stilted and clumsy but it did represent God’s Word in English. Indeed certain phrases which appear in the Wycliffe Bible have entered current English: woe is me, an eye for an eye, cock crowing, humanity, Philistine, pollute, schism, unfaithful, zeal etc.
This first complete Bible in English constituted an act of rebellion in the eyes of the Church of Rome. A full Bible in English had never been authorised by the church. For the clergy, it was potentially seditious, even heretical! Rooms in quiet Oxford colleges built in gentle Cotswold stone became revolutionary cells; production lines were established for turning out the Scriptures in English by hand. Rome had never before seen such a determined guerrilla campaign in the English Church.
Around the same time, “Poor Preachers” or Lollards went out preaching in England and Wales, each with a copy of the Wycliffe Bible in his hand. The church authorities in England were in uproar, hating the Lollards, the English Bible and, of course, John Wycliffe. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1396 until 1414, had these words to say: “This pestilent and wretched John Wycliffe, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent, endeavoured by every means to attack the very faith and sacred doctrine of Holy Church, devising the expedient of a new translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”
Before 1401, no-one had ever died in England for reading the Bible in English. Following a law passed in that year against so-called heretics and the “Constitutions of Oxford” passed in 1409, people could be burned at the stake simply for possessing or even just reading an English Bible. Thomas Arundel was of course under orders from Rome and succeeded in setting up one of the most draconian pieces of censorship in English history. For well over a hundred years after 1409, the religious life of England was in the iron grip of the church authorities with terrifying restrictions that were unique in Northern Europe. Not surprisingly, Wycliffite Bibles became more and more scarce.
During the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century, three events of the greatest importance took place. One was a revival of learning which came to be known as the Renaissance and which made the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek more readily accessible to scholars in Western Europe. The fall of Constantinople, the head of the Byzantine church, in 1453 before the advance of the Turks had a positive outcome for the church in the west. Scholars fled to different parts of Europe with important manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek in their possession. Another was the introduction of printing with William Caxton setting up his press in Westminster in 1476. The third was Martin Luther’s nailing of his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517 and that precipitated the Reformation. The first printed Hebrew Bible appeared in Italy in 1488 and the first Greek New Testament to be published in print was that of the Dutch monk, Erasmus, in 1516. Then Luther’s New Testament translated from the original Greek into German appeared in 1522. Meanwhile the name of William Tyndale began to be known in England. His ambition was to do for England what Luther had done for Germany and “to make the boy that drives the plough in England know more of Scripture” than the church leaders. The day of the monopoly of the Latin Vulgate in England was almost over.
William Tyndale was born in 1494 and brought up in the Dursley area of Gloucestershire. He was able to study the Greek text of Erasmus at Cambridge University. He went to London with a passionate desire to translate the Bible into English but was snubbed by Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London. He therefore slipped quietly across to the continent and in 1526, his New Testament in English started to roll off the press in Worms. Six thousand copies were produced in the first print. William Tyndale had the financial backing of wealthy wool merchants from his native Gloucestershire, men like Sir John Walsh for whom he had previously worked as a children’s tutor. Copies were smuggled into England across the Channel and were greeted by vicious opposition in ecclesiastical circles. Naval vessels patrolled the Channel seeking to intercept ships that carried the forbidden Bibles. Ships were boarded, searches were undertaken, Bibles were confiscated and men were arrested. Bishop Tunstall deceitfully claimed to find 2,000 errors in it and ordered all copies found to be burned. Sir Thomas More wrote a critique of Tyndale’s New Testament in which he pilloried it. He called Tyndale a “hell-hound in the kennel of the devil….discharging a filthy film of blasphemies out of his brutish, beastly mouth,”
For the next ten years Tyndale lived as an outlaw hunted by Henry VIII’s agents, slipping from Cologne to Worms and then to Antwerp to try to avoid detection. Finally, he was betrayed by a certain Henry Phillips, arrested, interrogated at length and made to languish for seventeen months in prison at Vilvorde Castle near Brussels. There in October 1536, William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake. By then, he had produced a second edition of the New Testament in 1534. In addition, he had also translated a considerable part of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into English. Before his death William Tyndale had managed to translate all the Old Testament books between Genesis and 2 Chronicles.
The task of finishing the first complete English Bible was undertaken by Miles Coverdale (1488-1569). He was born in York, in mid-life changed from catholic dogma to Reformation principles and spent three spells in exile on the continent, in the meantime becoming Bishop of Exeter for a short period. Miles Coverdale was a self-effacing, gentle scholar but he did not have the same brilliance as Tyndale, having no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek. The New Testament of Coverdale’s complete English Bible is largely Tyndale’s work as are large parts of the Old Testament. For the rest, Coverdale used the Vulgate Latin Bible and Luther’s Bible in German. He did introduce some lovely expressions into his translation like “loving kindness”, “tender mercies” and “saving health”. Elsewhere some of his renderings now seem quaint to us: for Jeremiah 8v22, we read, “There is no more treacle at Gilead” and for Psalm 91v6, “You shall not be afraid for any bugs by night”. That is why some of Coverdale’s contemporaries amusingly called his Bible, “The Treacle Bible” or “The Bug Bible”. It appeared in 1535.
Shortly afterwards, in 1537 another complete English Bible was published and known as Matthew’s Bible. It was really the work of John Rogers, the chaplain of the English House in Antwerp and a friend of William Tyndale. Later, John Rogers was the first to be burnt at the stake in London in 1555 during Queen Mary’s persecution. Matthew’s Bible also owed a huge debt to the work of Tyndale. By then Henry VIII had broken with the Church of Rome and had changed his attitude to the Bible in the vernacular, provided it did not have the hated name of Tyndale attached to it. He actually gave a royal licence to Coverdale’s and Matthew’s Bibles in 1537. Then Coverdale was asked to revise Matthew’s Bible and this became known in 1539 as the Great Bible because of the large sheets of paper on which it was printed. Then what would have seemed impossible three years earlier happened. Henry VIII authorised that a copy of the Great Bible should be placed in every church in the 9,000 parishes of England. He proclaimed, “In God’s name, let it go forth among our people.” As Tyndale died a martyr’s death, he had prayed, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes” – and God had, beyond all expectation!
The final years of the reign of Henry VIII saw a reaction against the Reform movement in England. In 1546 the impetuous king proclaimed that “no man or woman was to receive, have, take or keep Tyndale’s or Coverdale’s New Testament”. During the reign of Catholic Queen Mary (1553-58), three hundred Reformers were martyred and English Bibles were publicly burnt but copies of the Great Bible were not removed from parish churches. People continued to read the scriptures in English; the Bible in the native language had indeed come to stay.
In addition another excellent English version appeared in 1560. During Mary’s persecution, eight hundred English Protestants had sought exile in Germany and Switzerland. There was a significant group in Geneva, the city where all aspects of life were marked by the influence of John Calvin. Among them were John Knox and Miles Coverdale. Under the direction of John Whittingham, an Oxford scholar, a new English translation was undertaken from the original languages. It was characterised by accurate scholarship and once again, Tyndale’s work was the basis. The Geneva Bible as it became known really encouraged the readers to study it carefully. It was printed in clear Roman type and had clear numbered verses, maps and illustrations, italic summaries at the head of each chapter and marginal notes of which only a minority had a calvinistic bias. A copy of the Geneva Bible was presented to Queen Elizabeth I at the beginning of her reign. In a sense, it was the first great achievement of that golden age. It became the Bible of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and prose writers, including Shakespeare, the Puritans and the Pilgrim Fathers. In addition, copies of the Soldier’s Pocket Bible that Oliver Cromwell issued to his army in 1643 contained extracts from it. The Geneva Bible was immensely popular and went through 140 editions between 1560 and 1644. The less calvinistic, more Anglican Bishops’ Bible of 1568 could not halt its sales. The Geneva Bible became known as the “Breeches Bible” because in Genesis 3v7, it says that Adam and Eve “sewed fig tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.”
What God accomplished in this country in the sixteenth century through the English Bible and William Tyndale in particular was nothing short of a miracle. Other European countries had had a Bible in their own languages two generations before the complete English Bible of 1535: Germany in 1466, Italy in 1471, France in 1474 and Spain sometime before 1500. The iron grip which Thomas Arundel had imposed in the early 1400s had been effective for well over a century. When God’s time came, however, with His raising up of William Tyndale, all the ecclesiastical and political obstacles disappeared. Middle English gave way to Modern English around 1450. In Tyndale’s time, however, the English language was still a poor, uninspiring thing, unknown outside our shores. He, however, translated the Greek of the New Testament for what it is – rough, everyday language and he was faithful to that in his English. What he wrote in his English translation was just a notch above everyday speech. In the most recent edition of “Nothing but the Truth”, Brian Edwards entitles the chapter on the Bible in English “From the Vulgate to the Vulgar”. That’s what William Tyndale’s English Bible was, vulgar in the very best sense of that word. Yet in his plain style English, William Tyndale created a prose of dynamic power. His gift to the English language was immeasurable. It has been said with some justification, “Without Tyndale, no Shakespeare.” To Tyndale, we owe expressions like “the powers that be”, “eat, drink and be merry”, “bearing the burden and heat of the day”, “scapegoat”, “let there be light”, “my brother’s keeper”, “filthy lucre”, “fight the good fight”, “the apple of his eye”, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”, “signs of the times”, “stumbling block”, “taskmaster”, “Passover” and “Jehovah”.. At the same time there was such a hunger for biblical truth that in the hundred years after the first English Bible, two million copies were sold for a population of six million. At the same time, all over the country, handfuls of people met together in homes to study the Bible; humble men and women acquired a deep and extensive knowledge of the Scriptures; and the level of literacy increased dramatically as people learned to read, motivated by the desire to study the Bible for themselves. According to Melvin Bragg, no other book has had a greater influence on the development of any language than William Tyndale’s Bible on the development of English. It is no exaggeration to say that under God, William Tyndale is one of the greatest of Englishmen and our English heritage is one of the most privileged of all.
A year after James I became King of England, he convened a meeting of senior clergy at Hampton Court Palace (1604). The aim was to discuss tensions in the Church of England which really meant disagreements with the Puritans. The conference ended in failure but in the final session, it was agreed to undertake a new translation of the English Bible. This pleased James I because he wanted to get rid of the Geneva Bible with it notes. To his mind, it was too Protestant and too Reformed and after all, he was the son of Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. The work of preparing the new translation was divided up among forty-seven scholars who were each assigned to one of six groups. Two met in Westminster, two in Oxford and two in Cambridge. They worked from the Hebrew and Greek texts and the various sixteenth century versions of the English Bible including the Geneva text but the base text was the Bishops’ Bible, even though it was inferior to the Geneva Bible. What was eventually published in 1611 was in fact a revision of the Bishops’ Bible.
JH Skilton calls the 1611 Bible now known as the Authorised Version “the noblest monument of English prose”. Alister McGrath calls it “the greatest English Bible ever produced”. PW Comfort praises its “gracious style, majestic language and poetic rhythms. No other book has had such a tremendous influence on English literature, and no other translation has touched the lives of so many English-speaking people for centuries and centuries, even until the present day.” David Daniell writes “The sheer longevity of this version is a phenomenon without parallel. English translations come and go, some with strong effect: but the King James’s is still the best selling book in the world”. I personally was bought up on the AV and have a special affection for it. I do, however, recognise that a very unhelpful mythology has grown up around it.
Paradoxically, the “Authorised Version” of the English Bible was never actually authorised by any monarch or parliament in the way the Great Bible of 1539 or the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 had been. The term “Authorised Version” was first used in 1824! Sometimes individual translations in the 1611 version are wrong, clumsy or baffling. As we have seen, the New Testament was originally written in every day koine Greek. William Tyndale in his robust Anglo-Saxon expressions and style sought to reproduce that in his English versions of 1526 and 1534. The AV on the other hand was intended to set the standard of the solid middle-of-the-road Anglican establishment. That is why the translators sometimes opted for heavy Latinisms rather than contemporary English. They thought that it would bring with it the great weight of the authority of the past. One glaring example is the use of the Latinist word “charity” instead of the much more appropriate Anglo-Saxon word “love” in 1 Corinthians 13. What is more, the Greek text used was the Textus Receptus of 1550 which was largely Erasmus’s text of 1516. The Greek manuscripts used only went back to the tenth century and many considered them to be of an inferior sort. Indeed by the early seventeenth century, German scholars had shown great reservations about the Textus Receptus. In our day, Don Carson has written vigorously against false statements which are so widespread in America in particular, for example that the AV is the most accurate translation, that it honours Christ more than do other versions etc. Despite its many merits, that is simply not true.
In fact, Tyndale’s contribution to the King James’s version New Testament text is about 83% and to the Old Testament text about 76%. Where the AV’s rhythm, vocabulary and cadence are so exquisite, that is largely due to Tyndale’s genius rather than to the translators who added their latinisms. High Anglican William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1633 and 1645, waged a determined campaign to suppress the Geneva Bible and to promote the AV. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the AV had triumphed largely due to the commercial interests of the owners of the monopoly on the text, the King’s Printers with Cambridge University Press. David Daniell concludes, “The replacement from 1611 of the remarkable, accurate, informative, forward looking Geneva Bible even at the time of its greatest growth and power, with the backward looking, increasingly latinist, often badly unhelpful KJV is one of the tragedies of our culture.” Some will find that statement very controversial.
After the restitution of the monarchy in 1660, the 1611 Bible was established as the accepted English version. There were revisions of the AV in the eighteenth century like the 1769 Oxford ‘standard’ edition but there were no rivals to its monopoly of the market. In the meantime, there had been a continued study of the New Testament text and this bore much fruit. In addition, older New Testament manuscripts dating back to the fourth century had been unearthed. In 1881, Dr BF Westcott and Dr FJA Hort published a new Greek text of the New Testament based not on the Textus Receptus but on two of those more recently discovered early manuscripts, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus. At that time, the hierarchy of the Church of England proposed a new translation of the Bible. It became known as the Revised Version (1885) and was sympathetic to the views of Westcott and Hort. Initially it was greeted with enthusiasm but its popularity then waned because most people still preferred the King James’s Version.
Across the Atlantic the American Standard Version appeared in 1901. New important manuscripts were discovered in the 1930s and 1940s, like the Dead Sea Scrolls which contained very early Old Testament documents and the Chester Beatty Papyri which were three very early manuscripts containing most of the New Testament. The American Revised Standard Version was published in 1952. The translators used an eclectic New Testament text, that is a Greek text put together from various available manuscripts. The RSV was popular in this country in the 1950s and 1960s; it was easy to read but the translators were criticised for a liberal bias which showed in references to the deity of Christ in their version.
Other Bibles followed in quick succession: the Good News Bible (1966) which is more like a paraphrase using tabloid newspaper English; the New English Bible (1970) which never really caught on; the New American Standard Bible (1971) which is an accurate, evangelical version though it does not always read fluently; the New International Version (1978) the work of an international evangelical team who sought to produce a version midway between a literal rendering and a free paraphrase; the New King James’s Version (1982) which is a revision of the 1611 Bible with conservatively modernised elements; and the English Standard Version (2002) which has had a largely favourable reception from Evangelicals.
The adventure of the English Bible – and what an adventure! We should never stop thanking God for it, praying that we by our lives might seek to be spreading to others genuine biblical knowledge of God. Since William Tyndale’s first complete New Testament in 1526 to the year 2000, there have been 3,000 new translations of the Bible into English. David Daniell concludes his masterly book ‘The Bible in English’: “For nearly five centuries, the Word of God has gone out unhindered and souls have received it with blessing. What Tyndale opened has indeed never been shut up.” I add, O may Britain as in Tyndale’s day become the “people of the Book” again and may the nation’s heart again be biblical and Christ-honouring.
DW Gregson
10/2/06
Bibliography:
“The Bible in English” – David Daniell (Yale) 2003
“The Books and the Parchments” – FF Bruce (Pickering & Inglis) 1950
“Nothing but the Truth” – Brian Edwards (Evangelical Press) 2006
“Bible Versions” – Philip W Comfort (Living Books) 1991
“The King James Version Debate” – DA Carson (Baker) 1979
“In the Beginning – the story of the King James Bible” – Alister McGrath (Hodder & Stoughton) 2001
“The Adventure of English – the biography of a language” Chapters 7 & 9 – Melvin Bragg (Sceptre) 2003
David Gregson
Reeth
