Victor R. Claveau, MJ
There are three major religions which observe the sanctity of their book writings—Judaism (Tanakh), Christianity (Bible), and Islam (Qu’ran). Other religions retain access to their sacred writings, but they do not hold them in the same regard. Yet among the three named, there are two very distinct attitudes. To the Muslims, the language as well as the matter of the Koran is considered so sacred that its translation amongst the laity is not permitted. The Hebrews and the Christians, on the other hand—but most notably the Christians—have persistently sought to avail their Bible to the public in all languages, at all times.
By the time the writing of the New Testament was completed, the Roman Empire had dominated to such an extent that the common folk were speaking in Latin as often as they spoke in Greek (which was still the language in vogue) and, gradually, empowered by political power, Latin systematically gained on Greek, until it virtually replaced Greek as the language of the common people. It is impossible to now say when the first translations of the Bible were transcribed into Latin. Certainly, there were some translations within two centuries after Christ, and by 250 A.D. an entire Latin Bible was known to be in circulation throughout the Roman Empire; however, the first entire translation of both the Old and New Testament was from the Greek,[1] and the Latin versions of the Old Testament were, therefore, translations of a translation.
There were so many of these evolved transliterations that were lacking in veracity, that there was naturally a great demand for a Latin translation that should be authoritative. And so, the Latin Vulgate came into being, whose very name indicates their desire to get the Bible back into the original blueprint and into the vulgar or common tongue. Saint Jerome began by revising the earlier Latin translations, but he ended by going back over all the translations to the original Greek, and back to the Septuagint, to the original Hebrew verses wherever he could do so. For fourteen years he labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, Palestine, to do his work. The principal Latin version of the Bible, prepared mainly by Saint Jerome in the late 4th century, met with a storm of protest for his effort to go back to the Septuagint—so dominant had the Latin translation become. Jerome fought for it tooth and nail, his version was heralded as victorious, and it finally became the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible.
For seven or eight centuries, it held strong influence as the version nearest to the tongue of the people, and Latin had become the accepted tongue of the Church, but there was little general acquaintance with the Bible except among the educated of the population. These centuries added to the conviction of many that the Bible ought not to become too common, that it should not be read by everyone, and that it required a certain amount of tutelage to make the reading of it safe. They came to feel that it was as important to have an authoritative interpretation of the Bible as it was to have the Bible itself.
When the movement then began to translate the Bible from Latin into English, this provoked the most violent opposition. Latin had sufficed and flourished for a millennium; why cheapen the Bible by resorting to an English translation? There had grown deep into the bones of the people a feeling that Saint Jerome, who had already been canonized, was the most inspired translator of the Latin Bible. Any criticism of his biblical version was condemned as impious and profane. It is one of the ironies of history that the version for which Jerome had fought, and which was accused of being, in part, impiety itself, actually became the ground on which solid Christian men stood when they contended against any other version.
The fact is that, until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, there existed no complete version of the English Bible in existence. Indeed, there was only coming to be an English language, gradually emerging, taking definite shape and form, so that it could be distinguished from the earlier Normandy French, Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in which so much of it is rooted.[2]
Prior to the time of John Wycliffe,[3] the Church had made many Bible translations in various countries. Catholic convert,[4] the Right Reverend Henry G. Graham, in his Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church stated:
“We know form history that there were popular translations of the Bible and Gospels in Spanish, Italian, Danish, French, Norwegian, Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian for the Catholics of those lands before the days of printing, but we shall confine ourselves to England, so as to refute once more the common fallacy that John Wycliffe was the first to place an English translation of the Scriptures in the hands of the English people in 1382.”[5]
“To begin far back, we have a copy of the work of Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, in the end of the seventh century, consisting of great portions of the Bible in the common tongue. In the next century we have the well-known translations of Venerable Bede, a monk of Jarrow, who died whilst busy with the Gospel of St. John. In the same (eighth) century we have the copies of Eadhelm, Bishop of Sherborne; of Guthlac, a hermit near Peterborough; and of Egbert, Bishop of Holy Island; these were all in Saxon, the language understood and spoken by the Christians of that time. Coming down a little later, we have the free translations of King Alfred the Great who was working at the Psalms when he died, and of Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury; as well as popular renderings of Holy Scripture like the Book of Durham, and the Rushworth Gloss and others that have survived the wreck of ages. After the Norman conquest in 1066, Anglo-Norman or Middle-English became the language of England, and consequently the next translations of the Bible we meet with are in that tongue.”[6]
“Saint Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII who says: ‘The whole Bible long before Wycliffe’s day was by virtuous and well-learned men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people with devotion and soberness well and reverently read’ (Dialogues III). Again, ‘The clergy keep no Bibles from the laity but such translations as be either not yet approved for good, or such as be already reproved for naught (i.e., bad, naughty) as Wycliffe’s was. For, as for old ones that were before Wycliffe’s days, they remain lawful and be in some folks’ hand. I myself have seen, and can show you, Bibles, fair and old which have been known and seen by the Bishop of the Diocese, and left in laymen’s hands and women’s too, such as he knew for good and Catholic folk, that used them with soberness and devotion.’”[7]
Although Wycliffe was not conversant in Greek or Hebrew, he was considered by many to be the foremost scholar of Oxford in the fourteenth century, insofar as he was an adviser of Edward III. Wycliffe set out to give the common people the full text of the Bible for their common use. Of course, all of this occurred prior to the days of printing, and copies were made only by hand, yet they were in plenty. One hundred and fifty manuscripts, in whole or in part, are extant still—a score of them of the original version.
It was in 1455 that Gutenberg printed his first book, an edition of the Vulgate, now called the Mazarin Bible. The impact of the invention on the spread of common knowledge is beyond description.
One hundred years exactly after the death of Wycliffe, William Tyndale[8] was born. He had already taken a degree at Oxford, and was a student in Cambridge when Luther distributed his theses. Tyndale was ordained to the priesthood in 1521, and soon began to speak of his desire, which eventually became his life’s obsession, to translate the Scriptures into English. About 1523, Tyndale began to translate the Scriptures into the current English. He set out to London fully expecting to find support and encouragement there, but he found neither. He found, as he once said, that there was no room in the palace of the Bishop of London to translate the New Testament; indeed, that there was no place to do it in all of England. The final version of the Tyndale translations was published in 1534, and that becomes the notable year of his life.
The King was Henry VIII, and he was by no means a willing Protestant. In 1526, Tyndale’s New Testament was burned at St. Paul’s by the Bishop of London; ten years later, 1536, Tyndale himself was strangled and burned through the connivance of the English government; and yet, one year later, 1537, two versions of the Bible in English, three-quarters of which were the work of Tyndale, were licensed for public use by the King of England, and were required to be made available for the people!
Therefore, all of England awoke one morning in 1537 to discover that it had been given a translation of the Bible—two of them actually—for their use. The very Bible that had been so forbidden the day before—and that, one year after Tyndale had been burned in France for, was now issued in an English translation! Two versions were now authorized and made available. What were they? That of Myles Coverdale,[9] which had been issued secretly two years before, and that known as the “Matthew” Bible, though the name has no significance, issued within a year.
This liberty was so sudden that the people naturally abused it. Henry became vexed because the sacred words “were disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every ale-house.” So, Henry began to put restrictions on the use of the Bible: There were to be no notes or annotations in any versions, and those that existed were to be blacked out. Only the upper classes were allowed to possess a Bible. Finally, the year before his death, all versions were prohibited except the Great Bible,[10] whose cost and size precluded secret use. The decree led to another great burning of Bibles in 1546—Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew—all but the Great Bible. The leading religious reformers took flight and fled to European Protestant towns like Frankfort and Strassburg, but the Bible remained and Henry VIII died.
Under Edward VI, the boy king, coming to the throne at nine and dying at fifteen, the regency with Crammer at its head earned itself a bad name. But while its members were shamelessly despoiling churches and enriching themselves, they cast off all restrictions on the Bible’s translation and publication. The order for a Great Bible in every church was renewed, and there was to be added to it a copy of Erasmus’ paraphrase of the four gospels. Nearly fifty editions of the Bible, in whole or in part, appeared during those six years.
Presently it was found that two versions of the Bible were taking the field—the old Great Bible and the new Geneva Bible.[11] On all accounts the Geneva was the better and it was driving out its rival. Yet there could be no hope of gaining the approval of Elizabeth for the Geneva Bible. For one thing, John Knox[12] had been a party to its preparation; so had John Calvin. Elizabeth detested them both, especially Knox. For another thing, its notes were not favorable to royal sovereignty, but smacked so much of popular government as to be offensive. For another thing, though it had been made mostly by her own people, it was made in a foreign land, and it was under suspicion on that account. The result was that Elizabeth’s archbishop, Parker,[13] set out to have an authorized version made, selected a revision committee, with instructions to follow wherever possible the Great Bible, to avoid bitter notes, and to make such a version that it might be freely, easily, and naturally read. The result is known as the Bishops’ Bible. It was issued in Elizabeth’s tenth year (1568), but there is no record that she ever noticed it, though Parker sent her a copy from his sick-bed. The Bishops’ Bible shows the influence of the Geneva Bible in many ways, though it gives no credit for that. It is not of equal merit; it was expensive, too cumbersome, and often unscholarly. Only its official standing gave it life, and after forty years, in nineteen editions, it was no longer published.
Naming one other English version will complete the series of facts necessary for the consideration of the forming of the King James Version. It will be remembered that all the English versions of the Bible thus far mentioned were the work of men either already out of favor with the Roman pontiff, or speedily put out of favor on that account.
It must be made clear that the Catholic Church’s opposition was not to the Bible, not even to popular use and possession of the Bible, but only to unauthorized and incorrect versions. So there came about the Douai version, instigated by Gregory Martin,[14] and prepared in some sense as an answer to the Geneva Version and its strongly anti-papal notes. It was the work of English scholars connected with the University of Douai. The New Testament was issued at Rheims in 1582 and the whole Bible in 1609, two years before the King James Version. It is made, not from the Hebrew and the Greek, though it refers to both, but from the Vulgate. The result is that the Old Testament of the Douai Version is a translation into English from the Latin, which in large part is a translation into Latin from the Greek Septuagint, which in turn is a translation into Greek from the Hebrew. The Douay-Rheims Version was the correct answer to all of the incorrect versions of the Bible that existed at the time. It was also used as a source for those who were preparing the King James Authorized Version.
[1] Matthew’s Gospel was an exception as it was originally written in Aramaic.
[2] McAfee, Cleland Boyd, A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and its Influence on Life and Literature, (New York: Harper Brothers) 1912.
[3] John Wycliffe (c. 1320 –1384) was an English Catholic priest, scholastic philosopher, theologian, Biblical translator, reformer, seminary professor at Oxford. He was an influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood during the 14th century. The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic on 4 May 1415, and banned his writings. The Council decreed that Wycliffe’s works should be burned and his remains removed from consecrated ground. This order, confirmed by Pope Martin V, was carried out in 1428. Wycliffe’s corpse was exhumed and burned and the ashes cast into the River Swift. Wycliffe was condemned because his Bible translation was incorrect and because he was using it to corrupt the people’s faith by teaching them false doctrine. In addition to his denial of transubstantiation, Wycliffe expounded three doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church recognized as subversive: first was his emphasis upon private interpretation of the Bible as the best guide to a moral life; second was his opposition to the Church’s additional emphasis on good works; and third, the reception of the Sacraments as vitally important to salvation.
[4] Church of Scotland.
[5] Graham, Henry G., Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, (Rockford, Illinois: TAB Books and Publishers, Inc.), 1977, p. 98.
[6]Ibid.p. 99.
[7] Ibid. p. 100.
[8] William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) was an English scholar who became a leading figure in Protestant reform in the years leading up to his execution. Tyndale’s translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English one to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Church of England and the laws of England to maintain the church’s position. In 1535 Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) outside Brussels for over a year. In 1536 he was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake. His dying prayer that the King of England’s eyes would be opened seemed to find its fulfillment just two years later with Henry’s authorization of the Great Bible for the Church of England—which was largely Tyndale’s own work. Hence, the Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and, eventually, to the British Empire.
[9] Myles Coverdale, first name also spelled Miles (1488 –1569), was an English ecclesiastical reformer chiefly known as a Bible translator, preacher and, briefly, Bishop of Exeter (1551-1553).
[10] The Great Bible of 1539 was the first authorized edition of the Bible in English, authorized by King Henry VIII of England to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England.
[11] The Geneva Bible is one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into English, preceding the King James translation by 51 years. It was the primary Bible of 16th century Protestantism.
[12] John Knox (c. 1513 – 1572) was a Scottish clergyman, theologian, and writer who was a leader of the Protestant Reformation and is considered the founder of the Presbyterian denomination in Scotland. He served King Edward VI as a royal chaplain. When Mary Tudor ascended the throne and re-established Roman Catholicism, Knox was forced to resign his position and leave the country. Knox moved to Geneva and there he met John Calvin, from whom he gained experience and knowledge of Reformed theology and Presbyterian polity. On his return to Scotland, he led the Protestant Reformation in Scotland.
[13] Matthew Parker (1504 –1575) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559 until his death in 1575. He was also an influential theologian and arguably the co-founder (with Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker) of a distinctive tradition of Anglican theological thought.
[14] The Reverend Father Gregory Martin (c. 1542 – 1582) was an English Catholic Priest, a noted scholar of his time, academic and Doctor of Divinity, and served as the chief translator of the Douay-Rheims Version of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate.