"Read God's Word diligently, and with a good heart, and it shall teach thee all things.'' William Tyndale
Like Caedmon and Bede and Wycliffe, William Tyndale occupies a commanding position in the history of English literature, as well as in the history of the English Bible. His translation of the New Testament, 1525, fixed our standard English once for all, and brought it finally into every English home. He held fast to pure English, and we owe our current religious vocabulary to him more than to any other. In his two volumes of political tracts, ' there are only twelve Teutonic words which are now obsolete a strong proof of the influence his translation of the Bible has had in preserving the old speech of England. Three out of four of his nouns, adverbs, and verbs, are Teutonic. There were those in his time who declared that the English language was so rude that the Bible could not be translated into it; and his reply was as direct as it was indignant. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than the Latin; a thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.
In many essentials the Authorized Version, when it came, was no more than a revision of Tyndale's Bible; and if there is to be honor to whom honor is due, this must never be forgotten in our rejoicings over all it has achieved. "It is strange to think," said Dr. A. B. Davidson, "that we are still reading his words." Many portions of the New Testament, in spite of all the revisions it has undergone, are almost Tyndale's very words. In some of the shorter books, it has been calculated that nine-tenths are his; while even in longer epistles, like the Hebrews, five-sixths remain unchanged. Or as Mr. Froude put it, in a passage which can hardly become hackneyed however often it may be quoted: "The peculiar genius which breathes through the English Bible, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the grandeur, unequalled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, ... all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man, and that man William Tyndale."
"In rendering the sacred text," said Westcott, "he remained throughout faithful to the instincts of a scholar. From first to last his style and his interpretations are his own, and in the originality of Tyndale is included in a large measure the originality of our English version. . . . It is of even less moment that by far the greater part of his translation remains intact in our present Bibles than that his spirit animates the whole. He toiled faithfully himself, and where he failed he left to those who should come after him the secret of success. His influence decided that our Bible should be popular and not literary, speaking in a simple dialect, and that so by its simplicity it should be endowed with permanence." According to the Revisers, the Authorized Version was the work of many hands and of several generations. But the foundation was laid by William Tyndale. His translation of the New Testament was the true primary version. The versions that followed were either substantially reproductions of Tyndale 's in its final shape, or revisions of versions that had been themselves almost entirely based on it.
When Tyndale was still a young man, a tutor in a country house, during a heated discussion with some of the neighboring priests one day at his employer's table, he passionately exclaimed that if God spared his life, before many years he would cause the boy who drove the plough to know more of the Scriptures than the Pope knew. It was a noble ideal which was to be nobly realized, although he had to spend his life and at last lay it down in carrying it out. Erasmus, as we have seen, had the same ideal after his own fashion; but with Tyndale it was perhaps more definitely evangelical. Wycliffe had had it too, and with him also it was the desire of the man of God to give the Good News to the weary, perishing multitude which was supreme. These two great Englishmen both held that the Gospel had its message for all, and gave themselves up to the work of bringing it within reach of all in a form they could use and understand. Nor is any kind of evangelism more permanently fruitful than that of bringing men and women into touch with the Savior in His own Word.
For centuries Rome had kept the Bible from the common people. Even where there is no sufficient proof that this was deliberately done in order that they might be kept in ignorance of the truth, the fact remains that that was the result both of what was left undone and of what was done. In England the ban had been very definite. The seventh of the Constitutions of Thomas Arundel ordains "that no one hereafter translates into the English tongue or into any other, on his own authority, the text of Holy Scripture, either by way of book, or booklet, or tract." This was directed against Wycliffe's translation, which had been severely proscribed; but it was applied all round.
The popular knowledge of Scripture has so uniformly proved antagonistic to the doctrines and claims of Rome, that it is not surprising that she has never favored the spread of it; and it would appear that in proportion as men drift towards Rome in their sympathies and aspirations, their love for the free and unfettered circulation of the Bible diminishes. To hear the Church was to hear the Bible in its truest and only true sense. Was it not an abuse of the Bible to send shiploads of copies across the seas to convert the nations, is how one of those who in our own time have come under this tendency, expresses what is truly a striking and illuminating reversion to type. The recollection of these events should suffice to prove the mistake of supposing that the Sacred Scriptures, without note or comment, in the hands of all, are a sufficient guide to truth; the Bible thus used is not useless only, but dangerous to morality and truth, is how another of the same school illustrates the same attitude. Yet another has it that the crucifix should be the first book for their . . . English Home Missionaries . . . disciples; and the Holy Scriptures must never be put into the hands of unbelievers. When even a tendency to Romanism in the twentieth century gives rise to such sentiments, there need be no suggestion that it is ungenerous to hold that undiluted Romanism in the fifteenth century did not encourage men to read the Bible for themselves.
The unwillingness of the Mediaeval Church to put God's Word in the vernacular into the hands of the people, based as it was on the theory that they ought to receive the Divine message through the priests, would have had greater justification of a sort if the priests themselves had known the Scriptures or loved them in such a way as to be able to expound them. But the notorious Bishop of Dunkeld who boasted of his ignorance of Scripture was probably not singular in his ignorance; nor were the priests in the diocese of Gloucester even in the Reformation era, who did not know accurately the Creed, or the Commandments, or the Lord's Prayer, alone in their incapacity. That such blind leaders of the blind should set themselves to stand between the people and God's message for them was indeed intolerable.
It is full of significance that early in the conflict which ended in the English Reformation a new importance began to be put on the study of the Scriptures. Not only was the spirit of inquiry abroad, but the printing-press was at work to stimulate and satisfy it. Not a few of those in power in the English Church shared in the new spirit; while many who did not share in it saw that it could not be altogether ignored or defied. In the first set of Injunctions to the clergy, issued in 1536, they were enjoined to give themselves to the study of the Bible; while in the second set, issued two years later, they were enjoined to provide one whole Bible of the largest volume in English and to put it in the church where the parishioners could most easily read it. That was the plan adopted by those who wished to meet the new strivings without any drastic reform, and above all without any breach with the See of Rome. Inevitably, however, it only increased the longings of the earnest and truth-loving for changes such as Rome at her best could never allow.
All the Reformers believed that in the Scriptures God spoke to them, as in earlier days He had spoken to His prophets and apostles. In describing the authoritative character of Scripture, however, they always insisted that its recognition was awakened in believers by that operation which they called the witness of the Holy Ghost. Their description of what they meant by the Holy Scriptures is just another aspect of their doctrine that all believers have access to the very presence of God. No wonder, therefore, that a man like Tyndale should set himself to put even the ploughboy in possession of God's Word in his mother tongue. That was the ploughboy's birthright, what he was entitled to as made at first in the Divine likeness; and this was recognized by men of Tyndale 's spirit in other lands, so that translations into the vernacular began to appear in Germany, Denmark, Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as in England. As for those who were hostile to all this, it could not but be assumed that they who objected to the ploughboy entering into his inheritance had never found the Word very vital or inspiring for themselves, and had never bowed to its supremacy over all human tradition and everything else which the ecclesiastics had put in its place.
Scholar as he was, it was Tyndale's ambition to give his countrymen an English version which would be more than a translation of a translation, and would render the sacred Oracles into their tongue direct from the Hebrew and Greek originals, which were now at length available for such a purpose. This ambition he was able happily to realize, and although much of his work was done while he was a fugitive and concealed in secret hiding-places, it is of the very highest quality, as has already been shown from the mouth of many witnesses. There was no royal patronage or historic Jerusalem Chamber, nor any groups of sympathetic and competent colleagues for him; yet no other worker in this field has left his impress on all subsequent work as he did, and what he did can never become obsolete . In one sense his work was actually destroyed Of the original 3,000 quarto volumes of his New Testament only one mutilated fragment remains, and now lies in the British Museum. Of the first 3,000 octavo copies only two are now known to exist. Yet his work remains all the same, and will remain for ever. At the very time when he was dying for his loyalty to Scripture, in a foreign land, laying down his life that the ploughboy might come to his own, a complete edition of his Bible for which the royal licence was ere long to be obtained was actually being prepared, and about to be freely scattered abroad.
All who have ever taken any part in continuing what he began have been impressed by the splendor of his inauguration of the work. He did not live to see the day of victory, but the dawn was at hand when he passed away. There is no grander figure than that of William Tyndale in all the English Reformation story; and in connection with the Tercentenary of the Authorized Version no name should be more gratefully remembered and reverenced than his. Its triumphs are in reality his. In a very real sense it is no more than his version revised, as those who have shared in one revision after another rejoice to proclaim.
After he had begun his great work, Tyndale soon found that there was no room in England for what he was doing; and therefore he crossed to the Continent and finished his translation of the New Testament at Hamburg. While it was being printed at Cologne, he discovered that the authorities were about to seize it; and with such sheets as were ready he fled to Worms, where it was ultimately published in 1525. The new volume, so fraught with significance, first reached England in 1526. Every effort was put forth by those in power to suppress it; and it had to be smuggled into the country, where, however, there was no lack of purchasers. It was read in all sorts of places and under all kinds of circumstances; read by merchants, workmen, and scholars. Copies were bought up by its enemies, in the hope that the whole impression might be destroyed; but the effect of that was that Tyndale was enabled to print further improved copies, and to encourage him to go on with the translation of the Old Testament.
In the year 1530, his New Testament was publicly burned in St. Paul's Churchyard, after it had been condemned at a Council summoned by King Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More, with extreme bitterness, attacked it as misleading and inaccurate; not, however, in reality, because the work had not been well done, but because to him the rendering of certain words and phrases with scholarly exactness seemed a mischievous perversion of those writings intended to advance heretical opinions. Tyndale's fidelity, however, alike to scholarship and truth was not only vindicated at the time by himself, but has been still more amply vindicated throughout the ages; and the survival of the fittest has ensured the survival of what he did so nobly, so devotedly, and so prayerfully.
In doing his work he made use of every available help; the Vulgate, the new Latin Version of Erasmus, and Luther's German Bible. But he translated directly from the text of the Greek Version of Erasmus. As regards his work in the Old Testament, it has been denied that he was a Hebrew scholar ; but in his last days we find him writing from prison pleading to be allowed to have his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and dictionary, that he might spend his time in that study. An eminent German scholar, too, Herman Buschius by name, described him as so skilled in seven languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, that whichever he spoke you would suppose it his native tongue; and this testimony does not stand alone.
In the year 1534, Tyndale published a revised version of his New Testament with marginal notes; and two later editions are thought to bear traces of further revision by himself. Before he died, seven editions each representing several thousand copies had been issued; and there were "pirated" editions besides. At least thirty-three editions, practically reprints of his, are known to have appeared before 1560. He was not, however, spared to translate and issue the whole Bible. The Pentateuch was issued by him in 1530, and before he died he had got as far as Chronicles with his work. Two years after his death, there appeared what was called Matthew's Bible, but which was in reality Tyndale's. It contained his New Testament revised, and his translation of the Old Testament so far as he had carried it. The remainder of the Old Testament was taken from Coverdale's Bible, which had appeared shortly before, and was actually the first printed version of the whole Bible in English. It, however, was not a translation from the Hebrew and Greek, like Tyndale's; but from the Latin and German. In Matthew's Bible the Apocrypha was taken from a French translation; and as that was the Bible which was by and by sanctioned by the King, it may be described as the first Authorized Version. That it did not appear under his name, although so much of it was his work, would nowise have distressed Tyndale. It was not his own glory he sought, but the glory of his Savior and the well-being of men; and it was enough for him that the ploughboy and all others who cared to read it had now the Word of God in their own tongue and in their own hands.
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