Back in the 16th century, there was a revolution. At its heart was the belief that people had a right to read the Bible in their own language, and not to rely on the authorities of the church to tell them what God required of them.
In England, one figure towers above all others in the story of that revolution. The Bible translator William Tyndale was driven by the conviction that the Word of God should be available to the common people in the language of everyday. Tyndale was passionate about that belief — so much so that, some 470 years ago, he gave his life to see it fulfilled.
Today, those of us who believe the Bible’s message to be as up to date and relevant now as it always has been, ought to acknowledge the debt we owe to Tyndale and his collaborators. The best way to do that is by doing what Tyndale himself would have wished: ensuring that the Bible we use in our reading, preaching and study, and the content of our worship, are in the language of the present day, accessible and clear to all.
That is not, of course, always the case. Ironically, it is Tyndale’s own language, the language of the 16th century, that has dominated worship and Bible reading through much of the intervening period. Let’s look first at how this language achieved such a dominant position.
Good news for the plowboy: the Bible in English
The England of the early 16th century was a repressive place for religion. The law forbade anyone to translate or even to read a version of the Bible in the common tongue without official permission.
But it was also a world ripe for change. The last half of the fifteenth century saw the invention of the printing press; the reflowering of learning — the Renaissance — in Europe, and the arrival in the West of many Greek scholars together with their manuscripts after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in l453. For those who valued the Bible, a vital contribution was made by Erasmus, the Dutch scholar who recognized the errors of the Latin Bible then in use, the Vulgate, and in the early years of the sixteenth century prepared as accurate a version as he could of the Greek text of the New Testament. Some of his work was done in England, at Cambridge, though it was at Basle in Switzerland that Erasmus’s Greek Testament was printed and published in 1516. Although Erasmus made no attempt to translate the work into English, his preface reveals how he longed for others to do so:
“I totally disagree with those who are unwilling that the Holy Scriptures, translated into the common tongue, should be read by the unlearned… I wish that the farm worker might sing parts of them at the plow, that the weaver might hum them at the shuttle, and that the traveler might beguile the weariness of the way by reciting them.”
Although Erasmus had left Cambridge by the time Tyndale arrived there around 1516, his influence on the young Tyndale is shown by a well-known story recounted in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Tyndale was disputing with a learned cleric who asserted: “We were better to be without God’s law than the Pope’s.” Echoing Erasmus, Tyndale’s answer was: “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of Scripture than thou dost.”
Tyndale was as good as his word: using Erasmus’s Greek text as his basis, he published in 1525 the first printed English translation of the New Testament. Sadly, his work on the Old Testament — he translated the Pentateuch, the historical books, Jonah, and other fragments — was cut short when he was betrayed in 1535 and martyred the following year. But Tyndale’s genius lived on: as the Reformation created a climate more receptive to the Bible in English, it was Tyndale’s phrasing and wording that dominated later translations.
Tyndale, like Erasmus before him, longed that the Bible should be available and accessible in the everyday language of ordinary people. No church, no priest, no self-appointed authority should come between the sincere believer and the Word of God. It is to Tyndale’s lasting credit that his ringing phrases and genius of expression shaped the English Bible — indeed, the English language — through the centuries. It is largely due to him that the King James version, which follows his New Testament translation closely, has been such a remarkable and lasting success.
The genesis of the King James Bible
Particularly successful among the later Protestant translations influenced by Tyndale was the Geneva Bible, so called because it was the work of exiled Protestants in the Swiss city during the bloodstained reign of Mary, the Catholic daughter of King Henry VIII. Eventually published in 1560, it won wide acceptance in the England of the new Queen Elizabeth — for instance, it was Shakespeare’s Bible. But the Geneva translation, and particularly the marginal notes it contained, alarmed the political and ecclesiastical establishment. One note, on Exodus 1:19, pointed out that the Hebrew midwives were right to disobey Pharaoh’s command to kill male babies. Another note on Daniel 6:22 drew attention to Daniel’s disobedience to the king’s command, in order that he might obey God. Such ideas accorded with the strong Puritan movement in England, but went down badly with those who believed in the “divine right of kings”, and with the religious establishment which supported the compromise between Reformed and Catholic ideas that was (and to some extent still is) the Church of England. It was required by law that the Church’s services use the less popular but officially approved Bishops’ Bible of 1568.
One firm believer in the divine right of kings was, of course, James I. At his accession in 1603 the English Puritans had high hopes that church reform would bring the English church practice closer to the Calvinist, Presbyterian practice of Scotland, where James already reigned as James VI. But James was no Presbyterian, and the English bishops played on his concern for royal authority to encourage the new monarch to resist the Puritan lobby. As Alister McGrath and others have shown, there was much at stake for the religious life of England, and feelings ran high (see In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001). When James convened a conference of senior church figures at Hampton Court early in 1604, there was little on which he was inclined to give ground to the Puritans — James defended the Prayer Book against criticism, and resisted calls for the Geneva Bible to be authorized for use in Church of England worship.
James did find one proposal which he could support, however — the request from John Reynolds, an Oxford don and Puritan leader, for a new Bible translation. Here was a proposal that would defuse demands for the wider use of the Geneva Bible, while giving the Puritans something to show from the conference. The bishops, led by the ultraconservative Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury, initially resisted the idea along with anything else that smacked of change. Seeing that the king’s mind was made up, though, Bancroft changed his position. Backing the new translation, he saw to it that he would have a strong influence in selecting the translators and writing the rules that would constrain their work — and ensured he would have the opportunity to edit the final text.
Bancroft’s rules were clear. The Bishops’ Bible was generally to be followed, and altered as little as possible. King James’ translators kept so closely to the preceding versions that they retained forms of English that were already becoming outdated by 1611 — the use of ‘thou’ instead of ‘you’, and ‘his’ as a possessive pronoun in place of ‘its’ are examples. No marginal notes, other than to clarify difficult words, were to be permitted. Traditional ecclesiastical words were to be kept — a key point, since they carried connotations convenient to the established Church authorities but gave misleading impressions to the reader. Tyndale had replaced several such words — ‘church’ by ‘congregation’, ‘charity’ by ‘love’, ‘priest’ by ‘senior’ or ‘elder’.
The result of the work, the King James Bible of 1611 (there is no record that it was ever formally ‘Authorized’ by the king), was slow to win acceptance. Nonetheless over time it displaced the Geneva and other translations to take a unique place in the affections of the English-speaking peoples — so much so, that for many years it was the Bible, almost as if the prophets and apostles had written in the English language.
A language for today?
It was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the dominance of the King James Version was challenged by a succession of new translations. These took into account the huge growth in textual evidence, and while some were ‘one-man’ paraphrases, others sought to retain a high degree of fidelity to the original text and drew on large groups of scholars to produce each new version. Yet some Bible believers chose to keep to the KJV for worship and study, and the language of the KJV — in large measure the language of the 16th century with its characteristic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ pronouns, and so on — continues to occupy a central place in the meetings, hymns, public prayers, and Bible talks of many of our congregations today.
Is this the right approach for believers today? Those who say it is point to three main reasons. We will look at them in the next article.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One