WILLIAM TINDALE

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

From the Magdalen Hall Portrait now in Hertford College, Oxford

"Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water."

The Translators to the Reader, 1611.

SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH VERSIONS FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS DOWN TO KING JAMES'S VERSION

In order to understand the history of our English Bible it is necessary to recall the nature of the original documents out of which it arose.

In the case of the Old Testament, these consisted of a number of rolls, or books in roll-form, the time of whose composition extended over a period of several centuries. These rolls were written (with a few trifling exceptions) in the Hebrew language, and mainly, if not entirely, on skins. And it is characteristic of the conservatism that generally prevails in religious matters, that to this day the Jews still prefer the use of leather and the roll-form for Synagogue use (No. 1). And though, as a matter of fact, the oldest Hebrew MS. we possess does not date further back than the ninth century after Christ, there are many proofs known to scholars which show that the original text has on the whole been faithfully preserved.

Nor must we forget that it is not only in the original Hebrew that the Books of the Old Covenant have been preserved for us. About two hundred years before Christ, the whole Old Testament was translated into Greek. And while this translation was intended primarily for the Jews of the Dispersion, it came to be largely used in Palestine itself by those to whom the original Hebrew was gradually becoming more and more unfamiliar, owing to Aramaic having taken its place in general use. The Septuagint indeed, as this Greek translation was called, may be said to have formed the Bible of our Lord and His Apostles, if we may judge from the fact that the majority of quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament approximate more closely to the Greek than to the Hebrew version.

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As regards the New Testament, its books, in the form in which we have them now, were all written in the ordinary vernacular Greek of the day, and, it can hardly be doubted, on papyrus, then the common writing material (No. 2). Nor, at first, did any such authority or sanctity attach to them as was the case with the books of the Law and the Prophets. Gradually, however, they won their way to canonical acceptance, until about the close of the second century the Christian Church virtually possessed what is now our Bible, with its two parts, the Old and the New Testaments, both of which are preserved for us in the great codices of the fourth century-the Codex Vaticanus (No. 3), and the Codex Sinaiticus (Nos. 4 and 5).

By the aid of these Greek MSS., and many others of varying degrees of value, critics are now engaged in the all-important work of reconstructing, as far as possible, the actual words of the sacred writers.

In this task a welcome aid is afforded by the different versions or translations into which from a very early date the books of the Bible were rendered. And amongst these there is one which has a very direct bearing on our present inquiry.

From the second century onwards parts of the Bible had appeared in a Latin dress; but, gradually, so many various readings and renderings had sprung up, that, towards the close of the fourth century, the need of an authoritative revision became apparent. This task was accordingly entrusted by Pope Damasus to Eusebius Hieronymus, or Jerome, as he is generally called. And the result of his labours was the Vulgate, or commonly received Latin Text, which in the Sixtine-Clementine recension of 1592 is still the only authoritative Scripture of the Roman Catholic Church (Nos. 6-9).

It is this Latin Bible, then, that St. Augustine and his fellowmissionaries brought with them to England in the sixth century, and consequently it formed the basis of those Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman paraphrases which for nearly seven hundred years formed the only vernacular versions of Scripture which the people in this country possessed.

The story of the early paraphrasts is a very interesting one, embracing as it does the names of the Saxon cowherd Caedmon, who, in obedience to a Divine vision, sang "the beginning of

created things" (No. 10); of the venerable Bede, the most famous scholar of his day in Western Europe, whose last work was a translation of the Gospel of St John; and of the priest Aldred, who, about the middle of the tenth century, wrote an Anglo-Saxon word-for-word translation between the lines of the Latin Gospels at Lindisfarne in honour of St Cuthbert (Nos. 11-12).

But important as the work of these and others was, it cannot be said to have done more than familiarize the minds of the people with the leading facts in Old and New Testament history, until such time as they should have the whole Bible in their own hands.

The man to whom this was principally due was John Wyclif, "the morning star of the Reformation." Struck by the evils and distresses of his times, Wyclif felt that what, above all, the people required was a wider acquaintance with the truths of the Gospel. "Christian men," so he wrote, "ought much to travail night and day about text of Holy Writ, and namely [especially] the Gospel in their mother-tongue, since Jesus Christ, very God and very man, taught this Gospel with His own blessed mouth and kept it in His life." To this task, accordingly, either directly or indirectly through his scholars and friends, Wyclif set himself, producing first of all a translation of the Apocalypse, which seemed to have a message peculiarly fitting the time, and following this with the Gospels accompanied by a commentary that with God's grace poor Christian men may some deal [partly] know the text of the Gospel... and therein know the meek and pure and charitable living of Christ and His Apostles to sue [follow] them in virtues and bliss." Other books followed, until in 1382 Wyclif had the joy of seeing the whole Scriptures in the hands of the people "in their mother-tongue." Six years later a revised edition was issued by John Purvey, with a most interesting preface which ended: "God grant to us all grace to know well, and keep well Holy Writ, and suffer joyfully some pain for it at the last! Amen."

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For the work was not carried through without the bitterest opposition and even danger to life. "The organ of the devil," the idol of heretics," the storehouse of lies" were some of the epithets that were hurled against Wyclif by the monkish writers of his time. But he and his fellow-workers found their reward in the eagerness with which the new version was welcomed