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Beyond Mere Translation: The Radical Work of William Tyndale
From: The British Library
| By:
David Daniell |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
William Tyndale (1494-1536) was the first person to translate the Bible into English from its original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale's radical aim, as he informed one disapproving cleric, was simply this: "I will make the boy that driveth the plough shall know more of Scripture than thou doest." Not only did his efforts achieve exactly this but, through his use of Saxon construction, he gave us the English Plain Style as well. Undermining as he did the power of the clerical establishment in England (at the time, possession of an English translation of Bible passages was a punishable offence), Tyndale was condemned to death for his efforts. And yet, just months later, King Henry VIII licensed the first complete printed Bible in English, which owes more than 80 percent of its text to Tyndale. Dr. David Daniell, the world's foremost Tyndale scholar, discusses his work and reads from a newly reprinted edition of Tyndale's Bible. |
Fathom: Why was Tyndale's translation the single most significant act of the English Reformation? |
David Daniell: That's a very good question. You are to understand that the New Testament was written originally in Greek. The Church, however, had it in Latin from the fourth century, and the Latin translation made by Saint Jerome, though honourable in intent, was not always very accurate. In sixteenth-century Europe, the humanist scholars--people such as Erasmus--were finding many things wrong with that Latin translation. |
The Church had been using that translation for over 1,000 years, and wouldn't allow there to be any other translation but their own, because all their practices were based on that translation. Erasmus himself in 1516 published his own Latin translation from the original Greek New Testament. It caused a scandal. In one column he had his own Latin translation, and in the other column he had the original Greek. This was the first time the original Greek had been circulated in print, and instantly it went through Europe like wildfire; it was probably the most significant volume of the sixteenth century in any subject. Martin Luther seized on it and in 1522 he produced his German New Testament. This was the first time the Greek New Testament had been in any European vernacular. |
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| From Chapter Fifteen of the Gospel of St Luke, read by David Daniell. | |
Tyndale was at Oxford for nearly 12 years as a scholar, and recognised that what England needed was a translation from the original Greek, not from the Latin. This would be revolutionary in England, moreover, as the Church had kept the Latin translation to themselves. Only a few bishops and priests were allowed anywhere near it, and many priests didn't know any Latin. Tyndale recognised that if England was going to have the New Testament, everybody should have it, and in a very famous quotation he said that even the ploughboys should have it. |
Fathom: What exactly is the quotation? |
Daniell: He was working in Gloucestershire, teaching the small children of a local county squire, Sir John and Lady Walsh, while he translated Erasmus's Greek New Testament. Now, you couldn't get bigger in Europe than Erasmus. But the Walshes used to invite all sorts of people to their meals, and one day an exceptionally ignorant cleric said to Tyndale, "We were better without God's law than the Pope's," to which Tyndale said, "I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will make the boy that driveth the plough shall know more of scripture than thou doest." In that he succeeded. He needed a bishop's permission to translate even a verse, even a word, of the Greek into English. So he went to the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, who was a great scholar and a friend of Erasmus, to get his permission to translate the Greek New Testament into English. He took with him his own translation of an incredibly difficult classical Greek passage from the rhetorician Isocrates--it's one of the hardest things in Greek--just to show he could do it. Cuthbert Tunstall would have nothing to do with him, because Tunstall was under the thumb of Cardinal Wolsey, who was very anti-Lutheranism, and Wolsey wanted to be pope himself. |
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| Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter Thirteen, read by David Daniell. | |
Tyndale hung around London for a year and then, supported by cloth merchants, he went to the Continent. In Cologne he started to print an English New Testament from the Greek. He was betrayed to the authorities, and escaped up the Rhine to the safe Lutheran city of Worms, where in 1526, with a small printer there, he succeeded in printing 6,000 copies of the first ever printed English New Testament from the Greek. It was pocket-sized--in fact, exactly the size of the little modern printed edition that the British Library has just produced. It was smuggled down the Rhine in bales of cloth and eagerly bought. They must have been confident of buying, because 6,000 copies is a very big print run for the time. The average print run of a book at that time was 500 to 700. These books were rapidly bought and read, but the Church was furious and equally rapidly seized them and burned them, and often burned the owners. |
Fathom: What was the perceived threat? |
Daniell: There were two heresies. One was disobedience: the Church had forbidden for many hundreds of years--in England in particular--anybody to translate the Bible into English. Even to own a scrap of paper could incur the penalty of being burned alive. Just before Tyndale did his translation in 1526, a teenage boy in Norwich was burnt alive for his crime. His heresy was owning a piece of paper on which was written the Lord's Prayer in English. The Church was terrified in England in particular. |
For historians, one of the mysteries of the Reformation is: How did one of the most Catholic nations in Europe become one of the most Protestant? The Catholic Church was terrified because the Lollard Movement, dating from about the 1350s, was anti-clerical and very pro an English translation. They produced an English translation--handwritten, of course--in the 1380s under the inspiration of John Wycliffe, who was Master of Balliol. These were seized and burned. People were burned for owning them. In 1408, the then Bishop of London had held a special session in Oxford at which he stated that possession of any part of an English Bible meant death. |
What Tyndale did with that 1526 volume was to open the box, and though many copies were burned and many people suffered, the box would never be shut up again. |
Fathom: What happened to Tyndale? |
Daniell: A lesser man would have given up, but Tyndale went on to learn Hebrew. Nobody in England knew Hebrew, so he learnt it in Germany. He'd translated half the Old Testament, but his enemies hunted him down. He also wrote other books. One of the most important books of the English Reformation is his The Obedience of a Christian Man. His enemies were putting out, especially his chief enemy, Sir Thomas More, that Luther and people like Tyndale were preaching sedition, but as he writes in The Obedience of a Christian Man, a Christian obeys the King as long as the King obeys God. His Genesis and Pentateuch and the historical books, making half the Old Testament, were printed, but his enemies had caught up with him and he was seized and delivered into the secular hands in 1535. For 16 months he languished in a dark dungeon, forbidden light, forbidden his own clothes which had been confiscated, and then, on the 6th of October of 1536, early in the morning, he was taken out and strangled and burned. He was strangled before he was burned as a tribute to his great scholarship. |
His work went on. His revised New Testament and half the Old Testament were published in a volume edited by the Chaplain to the English House at Antwerp. Because Tyndale's name couldn't be used, they called it Thomas Matthew's Bible. The other half of the Old Testament was taken from a translation by Miles Coverdale, which was from the Latin, not from the Hebrew. Tyndale's Hebrew, by the way, was as good as his Greek, if not better, which is very remarkable. |
There is a majestic line of 11 Bible translations into English between Tyndale in 1526 and the famous 1611 Authorised Version, the King James version. Even in Shakespeare's lifetime (Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616), 630,000 English Bibles were bought. That's well over a half a million in a population of 6 million. Tyndale's influence is gigantic. We now know, thanks to some very good American scholarship with a computer, that of the King James New Testament 83 percent is Tyndale. So his influence has been tremendous. On the one hand, he opened the box; on the other hand, he wrote an English style which completely changed the way English went. |
Fathom: Could you say a bit about the state of the English language at the time that Tyndale was translating? |
Daniell: In the 1520s, English as a language was dead in the water. It was a mixture of decayed Norman French, decayed Anglo-Saxon and decayed Latin. A hundred and fifty years before there had been Chaucer, when the English language had been very fine, but the language had shifted and died in a curious way. Latin, the new humanist Latin in particular, or the bad Latin of education, the law and medicine, was the language of communication. English was just ridiculous as a language. There are poems of John Skelton in which he is scathing about English, and there is prose that meanders about uncertainly in all three directions. Tyndale came, went straight back to the Saxon and gave us a direct English Saxon syntax, which is simply subject, verb, object, in short units with Saxon words. The register is common speech just a little raised, which is the same level of register as proverbs. It is pithy, enclosed, and unambiguous. Tyndale uses Latin words when he needs to, of course, but Jesus's words in Matthew 7--"Ask and it shall be given you: seek and ye shall find: knock and it shall be opened unto you"--that couldn't be more straightforward and clear. Tyndale understood that the strength of Greek lay in verbs. The strength of Latin lies in nouns, and nouns are slightly slippery. As the strength of Saxon is in its verbs and the strength of Greek is in its verbs, they go beautifully together in Tyndale. Indeed, he said that Hebrew went better into English than it did into Latin, and he's quite right about that. |
Now he gave us, technically, the English Plain Style, which then meant that everybody could write, because everybody was reading the Bible and hearing the Bible. We mustn't ever forget that until the late eighteenth century reading meant reading aloud. So the Bible was read at hearths, in pulpits, in fields. They were hearing an English Plain Style that was very easily imitated. The result was that anybody could write: you didn't have to be an elite, educated, Italian-influenced cultural elitist like Sir Philip Sydney, or Edmund Spenser, or Lord Veralum in order to write. So he gave us a direct language. |
When Shakespeare wants to turn our hearts over, in "Henry IV Part One," he doesn't make Falstaff, who's a Latin-educated knight, say on the morning of the battle of Shrewsbury, as a Latin person would say, "the imminence of the approaching hostilities elevates my apprehensions," but he says, "I would 'twere a bed time, Hal, and all well." A wonderful sentence. It's pure Saxon, and it's a gift from Tyndale. The ability to use Saxon language--simple syntax and a startlingly clear vocabulary--goes back to Tyndale and everybody reading him. |
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