Proud the Hebrews hew a path with swords
Through the press thirsting for the onset of the spear.
Victory is won, and the field is left covered with slain Assyrians, meat for the gathering ravens.
Although these Old English versions must have acquainted the people of Saxon England, so far as they could be reached from the pulpit, with the Hebrew origins of Christianity and made a living drama of the history of ancient Palestine, yet the future English Bible owed nothing to these earlier fragments. For one thing, the language in which they were written would have been quite unintelligible in Wyclif’s time, not to mention Tyndale’s. For another, the Conquest made a break with the past; the culture that preceded the conquerors was ignored and soon largely forgotten. The lack of Latin and the bare literacy that had so distressed King Alfred and Aelfric had been responsible for the early translations, which were simply designed to teach—to acquaint the people with their religious heritage, just as simplified Bible stories are today read to children. But post-Conquest England, with greater Latin and dominated by the dialectics and text-slinging of the Scholastics, was held in strict subservience to the Latin Bible and to the Fathers, at least until the age of Wyclif. Such free paraphasing as Aelfric’s Maccabees or his epitome of the Old Testament, with all the difficult passages and Levitical laws left out, would have been as good as heresy, even supposing its language could have been understood.
The next attempt, by the Lollards, to make the Bible comprehensible to the people was made, not by the authority of Crown and Church as in Saxon times, but against it, although Wyclif was himself a priest. Fiercely suppressed through the fifteenth century, this attempt at last burst the dykes with the advent of the Reformation, and it changed the history of Europe. Tyndale’s proud boast to the “learned man” who upheld papal authority over that of the Bible, “I wyl cause a boye that dryveth ye plough shall know more of scripture than thou doest,” contains the essence of the change.
When Tyndale began his work in the 1520’s unauthorized translation of the Bible was still a punishable act, for Henry VIII had not yet broken with Rome. It was, then, in exile that the true begetter of the English Bible went to work in a little garret room in Cologne, with Hebrew and Greek grammars open on the candle-lit table. The Wyclifites, working from the Latin Vulgate, had produced a translation of a translation; but Tyndale, who knew Greek and some Hebrew, worked from the original languages. Nor did he have any recourse to the Wyclif Bible: he began afresh. As he explicitly states in his Epistle to the Reader prefacing his New Testament, “I had no man to counterfit nether was holpe with Englysshe of any that had interpreted the same or such lyke thynge in the Scripture before tyme.” Since Wyclif’s time the New Learning had revived the study of Greek and Hebrew, so long ignored in the Latin-dominated Middle Ages. Cardinal Wolsey had just founded a college at Oxford, later to be known as Christ Church, in which Robert Wakefield held the first chair of Hebrew; and at Cambridge Christ’s and St. John were also founded to teach in the new trilingual tradition.
At Oxford Hebrew scholarship had flowered briefly during the thirteenth century when the newly founded Franciscan order devoted itself to learning and philosophy under the teaching of the great Bishop Grosseteste. The Jews had had at Oxford one of their largest communities before their expulsion, and both Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, brightest ornaments of the Franciscans, had studied Hebrew with them there. Bacon believed that a knowledge of Hebrew was necessary for true learning, for he said that all knowledge stemmed from the revealed word of God first given to the world in that language. A fragment of a Hebrew grammar believed to have been his work exists. But after the decline of the Franciscans Hebrew learning died out until its revival in the Renaissance.
In the 1480’s and ‘90’s new Hebrew Bibles published under the direction of Continental Rabbis were printed. In 1516 Erasmus published a new edition of the original Greek New Testament with his own Latin translation based on it. Luther used the Greek of Erasmus for his German translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1522. His Old Testament in German (1534) was done from the Hebrew Masoretic text published in 1494.
Tyndale began with the New Testament, and his finished translation was printed in Germany and smuggled into England in 1526. Of some six thousand copies only three have survived into our time, for severe measures were taken to suppress it. In fact, the bishops’ anxiety to buy up the copies in order to destroy them provided Tyndale with a steady income while he went to work on the Old Testament. Hall’s Chronicle written at the time tells how Sir Thomas More, then lord chancellor, was examining one George Constantine for suspected heresy and said to him: “Constantine, I would have thee plain with me in one thing.… There is beyond the sea Tyndale, Joye and a great many more of you. I know they cannot live without help. Someone sendeth them money and succoreth them, and thyself, being one of them, hadst part thereof and therefore knowst from whence it came. I pray thee who be they that thus help them?”
“ ‘My Lord,’ quod Constantine, ‘will you that I shall tell you the truth?’ ‘Yea I pray thee’ quod my Lord. ‘Marry I will’ quod Constantine. ‘Truly’ quod he, ‘it is the Lord Bishop of London that hath holpen us; for he hath bestowed among us a great deal of money in New Testaments to burn them and that hath been and yet is our only succour and comfort.’ ‘Now by my troth’ quod More, ‘I think even the same and I said so much to the Bishop when he went about to buy them.’ “
Apart from this unexpected source of funds Tyndale, and later Coverdale and their associates, received their main financial support and encouragement from a group of well-to-do London merchants, representatives of the rising capitalist class, who were as eager as any to throw off the taxing grip of the Roman bureaucracy. These men supported Tyndale in exile, paid for the printing of the new Bibles in Germany, and arranged for them to be smuggled into and distributed in England. Later when official sanction brought the process into the open the entire cost of printing the Great Bible, the one that Henry VIII ordered read in the churches, was borne by a rich textile merchant, Anthony Marler, who incidentally made a good business speculation of it. He received the exclusive concession for its sale, was able to fix its cost, which he put at ten shillings (overruling Cromwell, who wanted to make it thirteen shillings, four pence) and received back more than his original investment.
But that was ten years later; at the time when Tyndale’s first New Testaments were being smuggled in, the merchants were risking their necks though not their capital, for the demand exceeded the supply. It continued unabated; four years after the first appearance of Tyndale’s translation the Bishop’s efforts had so far failed to suppress it that he found it necessary to stage a public burning of the book in St. Paul’s churchyard. In that year, 1530, Tyndale finished his translation of the Pentateuch, which was printed at Marburg and sent on its way to eager hands in England by the busy agents across the Channel.
Meanwhile on the political front, under the masterly engineering of Thomas Cromwell, events were gradually being pushed toward the final break with Rome. After Cardinal Wolsey—who would or could not give Henry what he wanted—was executed in 1530 Cromwell’s rise began. Within a short time he gave his sovereign a new wife and a new title. The marriage with Anne was performed in 1533, the submission of the clergy to the King followed by act of Parliament in 1534, and in 1535 the Act of Supremacy confirming Henry as “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” At once efforts were made to provide an official English Bible. Tyndale’s work could not be recognized, because his barbed marginal comments pointing out how original meanings had been twisted in the Vulgate to suit Catholic doctrine had already made it too controversial. The clergy petitioned the King in 1534 for a new translation “to be meted out and delivered to the people for their instruction.” This was met by the so-called Matthew Bible, which was really a composite of Tyndale’s translation, as far as it had gone, and of Miles Coverdale’s work, which took up the Old Testament where Tyndale
left off. Brought to England in printed sheets and issued in 1535–36, it was revised and reprinted under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer in 1538–39, the first complete authorized English Bible printed in England. Known as Cranmer’s Bible or the Great Bible, this was the book that figured in the King’s proclamation of 1538, and it bore on the title page the culminating line of a hundred and fifty years’ struggle: “This is the Byble apoynted to the use of the Churches.” It was also provided with an elaborate frontispiece designed, some say, by Holbein, which shows a crowd of little figures receiving the book with cries of “Vivat Rex!”
While this was happening Tyndale, the gallant, devoted, stubborn scholar, the “apostle to England” as Foxe called him, was burned for his share in unchaining the Scriptures. His death was not at the hands of the English, but ironically enough, it was the result of the English Church’s having now come around to his position. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in whose dominions the English translators had done their work, sent Tyndale to the stake as a representative of the now heretical Church of England, which dared to secede from Rome. For another irony, Tyndale’s execution followed by only a few months that of his great opponent, Sir Thomas More, who laid his head on the block in England for refusing to acknowledge the King as Supreme Head of the church. More, trying to hold back the wave of Protestantism and Tyndale doggedly, passionately determined to spread it, had clashed in a bitter, brilliant controversy contained in More’s Dialogue and Tyndale’s letters in reply. Both accepted death for their faith, but on opposite banks of the great schism. Despite More’s greater fame Tyndale left the greater mark, for his work was to echo through the English-speaking world forever after.
“It was wonderful to see,” wrote Strype a century later, speaking of the Great Bible, “with what joy this book of God was received, not only among the learned sort, but generally, all England over, among the vulgar and common people and with what greediness God’s word was read. Everybody that could bought the book and busily read it or got others to read it to them.” As the biographer of Archbishop Cranmer Strype was giving a prejudiced view, actually a good half or more of England was still at heart faithfully Catholic and regarded the vernacular Bible with the same horror it would a snake. An example is the story in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of fifteen-year-old William Maldon of Chelmsford, in Essex, whose secret reading of the Bible enraged his father almost to the point of murder. “I and my father’s prentys,” goes the boy’s account, “layed our money together and bought the newe testament in engelyshe and hidde it in our bedstrawe … then came my father up into our chamber with a great rodde.… Then said my father to me serra who is your scholmaster tell me, forsooth father sayd I, I have no scholmaster but God.” The infuriated father failing to extract an admission of sin by beating his son, then cried, “Fette me a haulter, I will surely hang him up … and my father cometh up with ye haulter and my mother intretyted him to lette me alone but in no wise he wolde be intretyd but putte the haulter about my neke I lyinge in my bedde and pullyd me with the haulter almost clene out of my bedde then my mother cryed out and pullyed him by the arme and my brother rycherd cryed out and laye on the other syde of me and then my father let go his holde and let me alone and went to bede. I thynke VI dayes after my neke greved me with the pullyng of the haulter.”
Closer in sympathy to William’s father than to the boy, King Henry and the bishops were soon aghast at the flood of Lutheranism let loose by their authorization of the Great Bible. Henry himself was a Protestant only up to the point of getting rid of the Pope, not in doctrinal matters. He allowed a translation of the Bible only because the English Bible would be a symbol of the displacement of papal authority by his own. He regarded himself more or less as pope in England and was as anxious to subdue doctrinal rebellion as if he had been pope in Rome. In fact, in 1540 he burned three Lutherans for heresy at Smithfield on the same day he executed three papists for treason. Luther commented on this occasion: “What Squire Harry wills must be an article of faith for Englishmen for life or death.”
But the dam had been breached, and even Squire Harry could not stem the flood. Despite proclamations warning his subjects to use the book “humbly and reverently,” to read it only in a quiet voice and not to go disputing and arguing over its puzzling passages in alehouses, “nor having thereof any open reasoning in your open Tavernes,” the people, at last given open access to the Scriptures in their own tongue, were consumed with excitement and interest. They clustered around the huge folio volumes chained to every pulpit and listened avidly to whoever could read them aloud, as men today listen to the World Series results. In St. Paul’s, where six Bibles had been fastened to “divers pillars, fixed unto the same with chains for all men to read in them that would,” the scenes of enthusiasm appalled the authorities. Foxe says that these Bibles were much resorted to by the people, “especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read unto them.” One John Porter, “a fresh young man of big stature,” became very expert in this “godly exercise,” and “great multitudes would resort thither to hear this Porter because he could read well and had an audible voice.” Such lay preaching was hardly welcome to the clergy. Porter was arrested, charged with making expositions on the text and attracting crowds and causing tumults contrary to the King’s proclamation. He was thrown into Newgate prison and “laid in the lower dungeon of all, oppressed with bolts and irons where within six or eight days after, he was found dead.”
An act of Parliament followed, expressly forbidding unauthorized persons to read the Bible aloud. It stipulated that noblemen and gentlemen householders might have the Bible read aloud quietly to their own families; that noblewomen, gentlewomen, and merchant householders could read it privately but not aloud to others; but that people of the “lower sort”—women, artificers, prentices, and others under the degree of yeomen—were forbidden to read it privately or openly unless the King, seeing that their lives were amended by the practice, gave them special liberty to do so.
There was about as much chance of enforcing this act as of enforcing Prohibition. Not that the population as a whole became Bible readers over night. But enough convinced Protestants, or Lutherans as they were called then, made free and individual access to the Scriptures a basic article of faith to nullify Henry’s attempt at suppression. Especially during the Catholic reaction under Mary, in whose reign the Bible was torn out of the churches and proscribed, it acquired the extra life that always attaches to words that tyrants have endeavored to stifle. As the “good Doctor Taylor” went to the stake he called to the people who had been his parishioners: “Good people! I have taught you nothing but God’s holy word and those lessons that I have taken out of God’s blessed book, the Holy Bible; and I am come hither this day to seal it with my blood.” In that flaming year, 1555, sixty-seven Protestants were publicly burned in Mary’s vain attempt to enforce the resubmission to Rome. Some, like Rowland Taylor, died in unswerving loyalty to their principles, some like Cranmer recanting previous recantations, but all through the manner of their death were to live on as heroes and martyrs. Bishop Latimer’s last words at the stake signalized Mary’s failure: “We shall this day, by God’s grace, light in England such a candle as I trust shall never be put out.”
Then in the reign of Elizabeth everything was turned upside down again, the reforms were restored, and the Bible put back in the churches. A new version was commanded, but its editors were cautioned to follow the Great Bible and “not to recede from it but where it varyeth manifestly from the Greek or Hebrew original.” Thus their version carried forward for another generation the continuity of Tyndale’s translation. Known as the Bishop’s Bible, this Elizabethan edition held the field until the reign of King James. By that time the rise of the Puritan sects that favored a Calvinist version called the Geneva Bible brought about a situation in which the official Bible read in the churches did not agree with the Bible read privately in many homes. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 a new ver
sion was petitioned; and so was set in motion the immense task, shared by fifty-four scholars, that was to result in the King James version.
Almost a century had passed since Tyndale began his work, and in that time much new research into ancient texts and many new grammars, dictionaries, and treatises had resulted from the advance in Greek and Hebrew scholarship. Among the revisers were Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge; Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, who knew Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and some ten other languages; William Bedwell, fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, the greatest Arabic scholar of Europe; and at least nine others who were then or afterwards professors of Hebrew or Greek at Oxford or Cambridge. The revisers were grouped in six companies of nine each, two sitting at Oxford, two at Cambridge, and two in London. For their guidance was laid down a set of thirteen rules that shows the workmanlike approach of these seventeenth-century divines and scholars. Each company was given a number of books to work on, and each man was to work by himself on a designated number of chapters. Then all were “to meet together, confer what they have done and agree for their Parts what shall stand.” Next the several companies were to exchange their finished books “to be considered seriously and judiciously for His Majesty is very careful on this point.” If any point was in disagreement afterwards, then the revisers were to write each other their doubts, “note the Place and withal send the Reasons to which if they consent not, the Difference to be compounded at the General Meeting which is to be of the chief Persons of each Company at the end of the Work.” Further elucidation might be asked of any learned person outside the group. Every bishop was instructed to send news of the project to any scholar of ancient tongues that he might know of, encouraging him to send in helpful observations to the “companies.”
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