The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  His translation of the New Testament came out in 1525. It was the first printed Bible in English. Technology, as so often, energised and restructured society’s view of its possibilities. Fortune, timing, favoured his cause. So much else did not. In his short life he was mostly penurious, often hungry, isolated, hounded, vilified and cruelly, deliberately, misrepresented. Tyndale lived a life which would have done credit to an Apostle. He laid down his life to put what he thought of as soul-saving words on to the English tongue for the benefit of the common people.

  He was a Roman Catholic whose work would become a beacon for Protestants of all denominations all over the world. He was a defender of the divinity of the King who persecuted him, planned his assassination and tried by whatever means to wipe his work off the face of the earth.

  He was a quiet, fervent scholar whose voice shook the almighty Holy Roman Empire, rattled the gilded cage of Henry VIII and goaded the corrupted papacy into a panic of revenge. Tyndale is the keystone of the King James Version of the Bible which was published seventy-five years after he was burned at the stake.

  But he was not the first. The way had been paved before him.

  In 1382, another Oxford scholar, John Wycliffe, had organised the first version of the Bible in English. He was not a translator but a brilliant intellectual general whose battle plan was to wrest the Bible from the Latinists and make it available in English. We tend to think of medieval Oxford as the elite and exclusive battery farm for tame clerics and lawyers who would go on to do the bidding of the authoritarian Church and state. It was in Oxford that they were plumped up for the privileged slots waiting for them after university. But there were among them independent and courageous young men who had minds willing to be tested. And within that smaller cluster of questioning young men there were those who rebelled against the authority of a Church which decreed that the Bible must be in Latin.

  Wycliffe, a major philosopher and theologian, was critical of what he saw as the materialism, impiety and dictatorial management of the Roman Catholic Church of which he was a member. Wycliffe, too, had his precursors, notably John Ball whose plain fundamentalist Christianity had helped drive on the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 which had all but toppled the Church and the aristocracy. And before John Ball there had been other attempts to put at least some small part of the Scriptures into the language of the people who made up the overwhelming majority of the congregation but whose voice was not heard. In the eighth century the Venerable Bede translated St John’s Gospel into English, but alas it is lost. King Alfred the Great in the ninth century had the Gospels translated and may himself have worked on them. Certain Psalms and favoured passages had been rendered into English a little later but they were sporadic and modest efforts.

  John Wycliffe’s project was on a different scale. He invited the finest Latin scholars in Oxford to translate St Jerome’s Latin masterwork into English. This was completed and published in 1382, precisely 1,000 years after Pope Damasus had invited Eusebius Hieronymus (St Jerome) to pull together a hotchpotch of Latin variants and old Greek translations. This was the Vulgate and it stayed unchanged and unchallenged for a millennium. St Jerome’s version became known as the Vulgate because of its common use in Roman Catholic churches.

  Latin was the language of the Roman Empire which under the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity as its official religion. Latin became the language of the Pope whose empire was also centred in Rome. When military Rome was conquered and its empire overrun, its language lived on in the Roman Church. Length of time and usage and Catholic politics made this Latin seem sacred, invincible and untouchable. Wycliffe and his Oxford scholars challenged that and their English manuscripts were distributed all over the kingdom by the scholars themselves. Oxford bred a revolutionary cell right inside an ostensibly safe breeding ground of the Catholic Church.

  We are talking about a degree of centralised regulation in medieval Christian Europe which had a great deal in common with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and with much of Hitler’s Germany.

  The Roman Church, rich, its tentacles in every niche of society, could be a vital ally in war, a diplomatic master force whose nuncios infiltrated all the courts of Europe. It was often crucial in the web of strategic alliances. Above all, it had a monopoly on eternal life. Eternal life was the deep and guiding passion of the time. The Vatican said you could only gain everlasting life – the majestic promise of the Christian Church – if you did what the Church told you to do. That obedience included forced attendance at church and the payment of taxes to support battalions of clergy. And accepting that the Bible had to be in Latin and not in your own tongue.

  Daily life was subject to scrutiny in every town and village; your sex life was monitored. All rebellious thoughts were to be confessed and were punished, any opinions not in line with the Church’s teaching were censored. Torture and murder were the enforcers. Those suspected of even doubting the workings of this monumental monotheistic machine were forced into humiliating public trials and told to ‘abjure or burn’ – to offer a grovelling and public apology or be eaten by fire.

  Wycliffe wanted to burst out of what he saw as these man-made bonds for which he saw no justification in the Bible. He saw the Catholic Church structure as an offence against true faith. Its teaching had become a corruption of the true message of Jesus Christ. It was no more than a degenerate institution. Behind the screen of its astounding cathedrals, its magnificent pageants, its music, its luring of artists and even the unique benefits of its hospitals and schools, Wycliffe, the severe Oxford scholar, saw the false gods of greed and oppression. He also realised that much of its power came from its control over religious language. He spoke out and demanded that everyone ought to have the right to read or hear the Bible in their own tongue.

  His translators were writing in the age of the mystery plays – one of the few ways in which ordinary people could receive the Bible stories in English, though they had to be performed outside the churches and cathedrals. It was the time of Chaucer, who brought in the dawn of English literature, and of Piers Plowman, the epic English poem written by William Langland, a Wycliffe sympathiser.

  From the start there was heavy criticism of the very idea of a translation into English. One chronicler complained that ‘the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine’. But the swine wanted to be fed and immediately and for a century afterwards these Oxford manuscripts were in high demand.

  This translation from the Latin could be literal and lumpen: ‘Lord go from me for I am a man sinner’ and ‘I forsooth am the Lord thy God full jealous’. And Latinate words weave through the text: ‘mandement’, ‘descrive’, ‘cratch’, but also ‘professions’, ‘multitude’ and ‘glory’. But this was the first proper English oasis in a thousand years. It began:In the beginning God made of nougt heune and erthe. Forsooth the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of the depth; and the spirit of the Lord was boren on the wateris And God seid, Light be maad, and Ligt was maad.

  [In the beginning God made of naught heaven and earth. Forsooth, the earth was idle and void, and darkness was on the face of the depth, and the spirit of God was borne on the waters. And God said ‘Light be made!’ And light was made.]

  Although the fortress of Latin had not been taken and would be secure for about 150 years, a breach had been made and the Bible in English had begun its long campaign.

  The medieval Oxford scholars, long-woollen-gowned, staff in hand, took to the mud tracks of medieval England with their concealed manuscript Bibles in English. They travelled secretly through unculled forests and barely inhabited wildlands, hiding in safe houses, forever fugitive. They were a guerrilla movement and they were called Lollards. Their mission was to give people access to the Word of God in English.

  The authorities would not endure it. They summoned Wycliffe to London to meet a synod of bishops and other churchmen in 1382, the year the translation was completed. It was a show trial.
Wycliffe was condemned for heresy. His Bibles were outlawed. Anyone caught with a copy was to be tortured and killed. Yet the Lollards persisted; for more than a century they roved the land and passed on the Word.

  Revenge could not be severe enough. More than forty years later, Wycliffe’s bones were dug up and burned. This, it was believed, would deprive him of eternal life for at the Last Judgement the body had to rise from the grave and reunite with the soul.

  His remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards, a Lollard prophecy appeared:The Avon to the Severn runs

  The Severn to the sea.

  And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad

  Wide as the waters be.

  In English.

  What was it that the Church was so afraid of?

  The elders of the Church knew as well as Wycliffe and certainly Tyndale that the Bible had in its history moved through several languages and versions. Moses had brought down the tablets chiselled in Hebrew. Christ had preached to assemblies in their own languages – Aramaic and Syriac. The Greek version arrived to meet the needs of a Greek-speaking empire as did Roman versions. This culminated with Latin in the fourth-century Vulgate of St Jerome. But after that the Word of God was frozen. Despite the many languages the Church had dominion over, only the increasingly ancient Latin was permitted to speak for Christianity. To dispute that was a sin, seen as an attempt to undermine the foundations of the Church.

  Language can be a means of control. It has always been used and abused by those claiming omnipotence. The medieval Roman Church’s mission was to impose recognition of its omnipotence the world over.

  The Church attracted men of wisdom, scholarship and compassion. It also attracted ambition, corruption and brutal politicians. To save their souls, to celebrate their faith, to give thanks or express sorrow and repentance, the faithful were encouraged to offer gifts, often vast gifts, of land and money. This made the Church rich and ripe for plucking. The enterprise of some churchgoing men – in the profitable wool trade in England for example – turned them into princely landowners and successful merchants in England’s biggest manufacturing and trading business, and they paid into the treasure of the monasteries to express their thanks and seek favour with the Almighty. The treasure was there to be plundered.

  The ancient credentials of Jerome’s Vulgate helped make the Bible an oracle. Its antiquity made it hard to challenge. To have lasted so long was surely in itself proof of truth. Its spiritual supremacy was absolute. This was good for commerce. Selling safe passages to heaven, dealing in relics and monetising miracles were profitable and the Church grew more and more fat on dealing with these practices. And Latin padlocked the faith which underpinned the whole edifice.

  The longer it lasted the more inviolable the Latin became. Very few could read or speak it. Even the clergy were not necessarily familiar with it. In the sixteenth century the Bishop of Gloucester did a survey of 311 deacons, archdeacons and priests of his diocese. He found that 168 could not remember the Ten Commandments and 40 could not say the Lord’s Prayer.

  It is doubtful whether this mattered to the more cynical and worldly prelates who tended to take the choicest pickings. Perhaps they thought the less general understanding the better. Good that the Word of the Lord was owned by the few. In effect the Catholic Church had long ago become just another arm of the ruling caste. From the beginning of the institutionalised Church, the rich families had sent in their younger sons (after the court and the army) and sometimes their daughters to take command of these plump Godly landholdings. They saw the new wealth, the thousands of acres, the magnificent monasteries and abbeys, the treasures piled up on earth, and they wanted to own it.

  From the seventh century, in England, the Church’s leaders had largely been a cadet branch of the old aristocracy. By the Middle Ages, the Church was seen by the ruling classes as just another route to increase their grip on the top. With their mistresses and robes of silk, their booty and their immunity from the laws of the land, these churchly princes and prelates were not accountable to other mortals. And they guarded the Word as their ultimate weapon.

  The Latin Vulgate had become an icon, as revered as a saint. Verses from it were whispered at the altar so that the common herd could hear nothing. They were separated from the crucial rituals by screens which blocked out the officiating cadre. Mystery plays and simple stories had to serve for them. The language of God was sacred and the sacred became secret and the secrecy spawned ignorance, spun fear. The traditional mechanisms of tyrannical suppression evolved over the centuries.

  To throw off the language – to let in fresh air, and new words – was unthinkable. Save for a few brave and evangelical scholars. But when they tried, in all good faith and with no intention but to improve and to purify a Church to which they were devoted, they were set upon. When it feared its supremacy challenged, as it did at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Church reacted swiftly.

  William Tyndale walked into the perfect storm.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FOUNDATION IS LAID

  At the centre of the storm was Martin Luther. The scriptural work and political actions of this German priest had an eruptive effect. The fallout is still with us. For not only in 1517 did he attack with learning and virulence the many failings and corruptions of the Church, in 1522 he translated the New Testament into German. The Church was destabilised. The violence of his preaching was believed to have stirred up a peasants’ revolt against the princes and the states in 1524 – 5 in which more than 50,000 people were slaughtered. Out of this turbulence came the Protestant Reformation which ripped apart the Catholic monolith for ever and set a new course in European and American history and beyond which was to reconfigure the world.

  He put the fear of revolution into the kings and prelates. They looked at what we might for convenience call ‘Germany’ and cowered. They feared for their titles, their booty and their lives. Few more than Henry VIII, who, in his full pomp as king, said that he hated Luther more than any man on earth. Henry’s defence of the Pope and the Catholic Church against Luther’s 1517 eruption had earned him a most coveted title, a gift from Rome, ‘Defender of the Faith’.

  Henry became a militant and a fanatical Roman Catholic. With the help of Wolsey, a cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England, his spies raked the land for dissidents. Wolsey, dressed in gowns suppurating in silk and satin, his fingers glittering with precious stones, his entourage pharaonic in its splendour, relished the hunting down of those godly men. He loved to toy with them in mock and mocking trials, to have them tortured but he did not condemn people to burning at the stake. Others, including Sir Thomas More, applauded and supported Henry’s anti-Protestant zeal.

  Into this London stepped William Tyndale, unblemished in his Catholic devotion and a monarchist who had argued that the King was outside the law and subject only to God’s law. Outwardly he was a gentle scholar but one who proved to have within him a will which would not be broken. He never once gave in or gave up his vow to make the Bible accessible even to ‘a plough-boy’.

  At Oxford in the early sixteenth century he had been drawn to the ideas of the Lollards, who were still at large. The hand-copied manuscript translations of the Bible were still passed on, more than a century after the death of John Wycliffe, despite persecution, torture and executions. The English hunger for a Bible of their own was not to be thwarted. Tyndale was ordained priest in 1521. Despite his academic distinction, which had been developed at Oxford and was then burnished at Cambridge where he inherited the example of the recently resident Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, he turned away from further formal study.

  It is a speculation but I think that he was already preparing himself for what he knew would be an unorthodox vocation. He became a chaplain and tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh in the village of Little Sodbury in the Cotswolds, a lush and hilly area of the rich wool trade i
n the west of England.

  He was twenty-six, a wonderfully accomplished linguist, with a gift for poetry. He was in a sympathetic community which included Christian Brethren, another name for the Lollards. Soon he was preaching in the open air outside the church on College Green and his ideas were nettling some of the local bigwigs. At one stage he was accused of heresy, and brought before the vicargeneral, who ‘threatened me and rated me as if I had been a dog’. It was a taste of what was to come. Most importantly, he had begun to take up his vocation as a translator. He was on his way and so was the King James Bible.

  The much praised Greek translation of Erasmus, then thought the greatest scholar in Europe, was his ideal. And his purpose was clear: to put the Scripture plainly before the lay people in their mother tongue, that they might see and hear for themselves the words and the meaning of the Scriptures. A few years later, near his death, when he was racked by persecution, abuse, poverty and exile, he still held to his resolution, to continue his work ‘out of pity and compassion which I had and yet have, on the darkness of my brethren, and to bring them to the knowledge of Christ’.

  Unsurprisingly, having flagged up his position in a country which was alarmed at all that he stood for, he found no position in London. Partly, he himself thought, because he was unimpressive and awkward in any interview about his future. Perhaps his character was too transparent for comfort, his meek demeanour thought to be camouflage. For whatever reason, aged thirty, he sailed for Hamburg in 1524. He would never again set foot in England.

  It is thought that he went to Wittenberg where he met and very possibly worked with Luther – the new Satan. He certainly admired Luther. That sealed his fate. The English court turned on him and set out to silence him and to hunt him down.