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INTRODUCTION

THE Old Testament, as we have it in the King James' Authorized Version, is the product of a long series of translations. In the third century B.C. the Jews of Alexandria for their special use turned it from the Hebrew into Greek. Aside from the fact that it practically furnished the present arrangement of the books, this translation, known as the Septuagint, was the basis of the first Bible of modern Europe, the Latin Vulgate. In 383 A.D. Jerome was commissioned to prepare a specially revised version in the ecclesiastical Latin of his day. It was this Bible, the Vulgate, that remained the Bible of the Church to the time of the Reformation, and was the starting point and basis for every translation into English, influencing even the style of the English renderings to an extraordinary degree.

The first attempt, however, to turn the Bible into English is the paraphrase of the seventh century attributed to the poet Cadmon. His Genesis and Exodus are a free poetic rendering of parts of these two Old Testament books in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, and his Daniel is a rather close following of the first five chapters of the book of Daniel. Cædmon was followed in the next century by Cynewulf with poems dealing with Bible themes, both canonical and apocryphal, as well as with Christian myths and legends.

Side by side with these poetic adaptations, which continued on even through the Middle Ages, were translations into the vernacular speech of parts of both the Old and New Testament, of the four Gospels and the Psalms, in particular.

But we wait till John Wycliffe (1324-1384) to get the first approximately complete translation of the Scriptures into English. Wycliffe was a scholar and reformer, the first great protestant, a prolific pamphleteer, appealing to the people in tracts written in their own vernacular. At the same time that Chaucer, with his Canterbury Tales, was showing the capacity of the New English as a vehicle for the highest literary expression, and William Langland, with his Piers the Plowman, was putting into forthright verse that the plain people could understand the growing discontent with the reigning ecclesiasticism, John Wycliffe was saying, “Since, at the beginning of faith, so many men translated into Latin, and to the great profit of Latin men; let one simple creature of God translate into English, for the profit of Englishmen. Also, Frenchmen, Bohemians, and Britons have the Bible translated into their mother language. Why shoulden not Englishmen have the same in their mother language, I cannot wit (know)." By 1380 he had translated the Apocalypse and the New Testament. The work of translation was continued by his friend Nicholas de Hereford. His labors, however, were interrupted by his excommunication in 1382, which forced him to leave England. Wycliffe himself. then took up the work, and by the time of his death, 1384, saw his plans realized in an approximately complete version of the Scriptures in the mother tongue.

Wycliffe's translation was widely circulated in manuscripts, and its influence for a time was great; but it was not wholly satisfactory. It was a more or less literal rendering of the Latin Vulgate, and the text of the Vulgate, at least that which Wycliffe used, was in many places corrupt, and his own translation is said to be obscure. About 1388 John Purvey carried to successful conclusion a complete revision, which superseded Wycliffe's Bible in popular use.

The next translation, that of William Tindale, 1525-1535,

is due to the new spirit of scholarship that came with the Revival of Learning and to the rapid spread of the religious ideas of the Reformation. John Colet at Oxford and Erasmus at Cambridge brought to their study of the Scriptures both the critical attitude and methods of the new scholarship and the spirit of the religious reformers. They insisted upon a pure text and upon such a translation into the common speech as all the people, even the most unlearned, could understand. In 1516, in speaking of the Gospels and the Epistles of Saint Paul, Erasmus said:1 "I wish that the husbandman may sing parts of them at his plow, that the weaver may warble them at his shuttle, that the traveller may with their narratives beguile the weariness of the way." It is barely possible that William Tindale, attracted by the fame of Erasmus, went about 1510 from Oxford to Cambridge, and there by personal contact caught the spirit and aims of the great Dutch scholar. At any rate, when later, as tutor in the family of Sir John Walsh, he became involved in a controversy, he is reported to have said to a "learned" man: "If God spare my life, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest."

In this spirit and with this aim he entered upon his task. But in his native land he could find no congenial place. In his own quaint way he himself says: "I understood at the last not only that there was no room in my Lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England." He goes to the Continent, to Hamburg and Cologne. At the latter place he began, in 1525, the printing of the New Testament. But the enemies of the Reformation forced him to seek refuge in Worms, and here, in the same year, he printed two editions of his New Testament. By the beginning of the next year it was read in England. In 1530 he published a translation 1 Gardiner, "The Bible as English Literature," p. 313.

of the Pentateuch, and six years later at Antwerp met a martyr's death.

Tindale was an independent scholar who, while using all known authorities, the accepted Vulgate, Luther's translations into German of 1522, Erasmus' Greek text and Latin translation of 1516, yet based his translation upon the original Greek and Hebrew. He thus set the scholarly standards, and furnished methods for all future translators. Moreover, his passionate zeal, his sensitiveness to the rhythms of English speech, his uncompromising purpose to bring the meaning of the Bible within the understanding of even the most unlettered, also set standards of clearness, simplicity, and emotional beauty. Hence it may be truly said that the English Bible, as we now have it, its peculiar qualities of style and rich literary values, are our inheritance from the labors of William Tindale.

In his spirit and according to his methods in rapid succession others took up the work of translation. In 1535 his friend Miles Coverdale published a translation, dedicating it to Henry VIII. The second and revised edition was brought out in 1537, "set forth with the King's most gracious license," the first permitted edition of the Bible in the vernacular speech, and that, too, just one year after the martyrdom of Tindale. Another friend of Tindale's and possibly a kind of literary executor, John Rogers, together with a certain 1 Thomas Matthew, in the same year published what is known as the Matthew's Bible. In 1538 Cromwell engaged the services of Coverdale, and in the spring of the next year there was published what is known as the Great Bible. In the same year, a layman, R. Taverner, printed a revision of the Matthew's Bible.

For a time activities in translating and printing the Bible

1 It is not known who this Matthew was. Some assume that he and Rogers were one and the same person.

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