The Bible in English 9780300183894

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THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH

THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH ITS HISTORY AND INFLUENCE

David Daniell

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Copyright

e 2003 by David Daniell

.All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Gillian Malpass Printed and bound in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PubHcation Data Daniell, David. The Bible in English I by David Daniell. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-09930-0 (alk. paper) 1. Bible. English-Versions-History. I. Title. BS455 .D27 2003 22o.s'2'oQ!r-dc21 2002153177 A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

Frontispiece An opening of the Lindisfarne Gospels, made in AD 698 or soon after, showing the first verses of St John's Gospel in Latin, and the interlinear handwritten gloss in Old English made by Aldred between AD 946 and 968, which is the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into any form of the English language. (MS BL Cotton Nero D. iv; reproduced by permission of the British Library).

To the memory ofWilliam Tyndale, ?1494-1536,

translator of genius, martyred for giving English readers the Bible from the original languages.

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface I

Introduction

PART I

BEFORE PRINTING

X

Xlll

I

17

The Bible in Britain from the Earliest Times to AD 850

19

3

The Anglo-Saxon Bible, 85o-1066

44

4

Romance and Piety, 1066-1350

56

2

5 The Wyclif ('Lollard') Bibles 6

Before and After Wyclif: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

PART2

AFTER PRINTING

66 96

III

The Greek New Testament of Erasmus, 1516 and Mter

113

8

The Reformation in England

120

9

William Tyndale ?1494-1536

133

IO

After Tyndale

160

II

Coverdale's Bible, I535

173

I2

'Matthew's' Bible, 1537

I90

I3

The Great Bible, I539

I98

7

Contents

Vlll

Towards the Reign of Edward

15

An English Plain Style, and Bible Reading

248

16

The Geneva New Testament, 1557

275

17

The Geneva Bible, 1560

291

18

Reformation Psalms

320

19

The Bishops' Bible, 1568

338

20

Laurence Tomson and the Revision of the Geneva New Testament, 1576

348

21

The Rheims New Testament, 1582

358

22

'Geneva-Tomson-Junius', 1599

369

23

Explorers of the Revelation: Spenser and Shakespeare

376

The English Bible in America: From the Beginnings to 1640

389

25

The King James Version, 1611

427

26

Printing the King James Bible

451

27

The Bible in England in the Seventeenth Century

461

28

The Consolidation of KJY, 166o-1710

487

29

The Bible in England and Ireland, 171o-176o

499

30

More Psalms, and Hymns

518

31

The Bible in America to 1776

539

32

The English Bible against Fashionable Deism: Handel and Pope as Examples

555

The English Bible in America, 1777 to the Early Nineteenth Century

580

34

Towards 1769, and After

604

35

Mathew Carey and the American Bible Flood

624

24

33

VI,

1547-1553

221

14

36 The Nineteenth-Century Bible in Britain, and Two Artists

659

37

The English Revised Version, 187o-85

683

38

The English Bible in America, 1841-1899

701

Contents

IX

39 Bible Translation into English in the Twentieth Century

734

40 Conclusion

769

Appendix

775

Abbreviations

794

Notes

795

Chronological List of Bibles in English

843

Select Bibliography

852

Index

867

Photograph Credits

900

Acknowledgements

CORNELIUS NARY WAS A LEARNED Paris-trained Roman Catholic priest in Dublin who in 1719 courageously attacked the Rheims Catholic New Testament of 1582 for being linguistically over a hundred years out of date, and too bulky and expensive for his parishioners. In that year, he published a new translation of his own, in a handy octavo, the first new English version ever to be made in Ireland. It had a remarkable Preface. Here is the second paragraph. I am not insensible of my insufficiency for so great an undertaking, nor of the many censures and reprehensions to which my weakness shall render my work obnoxious. I have always before my eyes the answer which the learned Genebrard made to Henry III of France, who being desirous to have a good French translation of the Bible, asked Genebrard, how much time would the finishing of such a work take up, and what would be the expense thereof? This great man, who had thoroughly understood the matter, and was very well apprized of the difficulty of such an undertaking, answered. That it would take up to thirty years, that there should be thirty divines well read in the oriental languages employed in the work, that no less than two hundred thousand crowns would defray the charges, and that after all he would not promise his Majesty that the work should be free from all manner of imperfections. The enterprise is a different one, but the content of this book has been in my mind for a long time, though I have been far from doing nothing else. Excellent help has been given me, though not from thirty divines well read in the oriental languages. From several institutions I have received generous support, but, sadly, the two hundred thousand crowns failed to arrive. I have, however, very special sympathy with the good doctor's first sentence and last words. The imperfections in this book are my own. They would be almost infinitely greater had I not received so much help. It is a privilege to acknowledge here first of all my thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for a two-year Emeritus Fellowship, without which

Acknowledgements

X1

most of the research assistance would have been impossible. I thank also the British Academy for a small Humanities grant. I am grateful to the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, for awarding me a Visiting Fellowship and for permission to reproduce in chapters 14, 18 and 20 material from my Waynflete Lectures, delivered in Trinity Term, 1996, and also to the Fellows' Librarian at Magdalen and her staff. To the Principal and Fellows of Hertford College, Oxford, and to the Master and Fellows of St Catherine's College, Oxford, I express my appreciation of the honour of being elected to life-time Honorary Fellowships there. To the Chairman and Governors of the Henry E. Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California, I am most grateful for the award of the Mayers Fellowship for March 1998. To ten people I owe thanks for special assistance with research: Christopher Daniell, Lucy Davies, Meraud Grant Ferguson, Liana Lupas, Juliette Marsh, Ruth Mayers, Greg Patton, Gillian Stickings, James Stickings and Victoria Thompson: their dedication, sometimes over a long period, and the quality of their resulting work, were, as well of great value, an inspiration. Errors and infelicities that remain are mine. I acknowledge help given by David Alexander, Peter Auksi, Michael Billington, Ruth Bottigheimer, Joan Bridgman, Tom Buhler, Mary Clow, W R. Cooper, Hilary Day, Martin Holt Dotterweich, Richard Duerden, Susan Felch, Jonathan Finch, John Goldfmch, Paul Gutjahr, Andrew Hadfield, Ralph Hanna, Marylin Hollinshead, Andrew Hope, Robert Ireland, Gordon Jackson, Kate Jones, John King, Guido Latre, Simon McKeown, Jeanette Mitterhofer, Anne O'Donnell, Michael Parsons, Andrew Pettegree, Anne Richardson, Michel Roquebert, Alec R yrie, Herbert Samworth, Michael Schmidt, A. J. Slavin, Michael Smythe, Steve Sohmer, Carsten Peter Thiede, Peter Thuesen, Grace Tiffany, Nicholas Watson, Ralph Werrell and Michael Wood. For particular help in San Marino and Pasadena I am grateful to Alan Jutzi, Tom Lange and David Zeidberg. Joe Johnson and his family in Paxton, Florida, held up my arms (as in Exodus 17: 12) at a crucial stage. I owe special thanks to the Trustees, officers and members of the Tyndale Society for their special support and forbearance while their chairman so obviously had his mind elsewhere. For skilled help with matters of computing I thank Andrew Daniell, Christopher Daniell and Deborah Pollard. For excellent typing I am grateful to Elizabeth Noone. Parts of this book were given in earlier forms as the Hertford Tyndale Lecture, University of Oxford; the A. G. Dickens Lecture, Robinson College, Cambridge; the Beatrice Ward Lecture, London; the Lambeth Tyndale Lecture, Lambeth Palace; the Staley lectures at William Tyndale College, Michigan; the Forum Lecture at Brigham Young University, Utah;

xu

Acknowledgements

the Hertford Lecture at Hartford University, Connecticut; at conferences at the Catholic University of America, the Huntington Library, the Karoli Gaspar Reformed University and Pazmany Peter University, Budapest and Piliscsaba, Hungary; the International Tyndale Conferences at Oxford, Geneva and San Diego; the International Shakespeare Conference 2000, Stratford-upon-Avon; the annual lecture of the Dissenting Deputies; the Christadelphian Fellowship, Bristol; the British Library; and as lectures at University College, London, the University of St Andrews, Peterborough, Wells and Gloucester Cathedrals, the University of Mainz, the Catholic University ofLeuven, Roehampton Institute, the University ofBristol, the University of Kent at Canterbury, the Theological Society, Nottingham, the Literary and Philosophical Society, Leicester, the British Council, Brussels, the University of California at Los Angeles and Tyndale College, Toronto. I owe special thanks to the unfailing skills and help of the librarians of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the London Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Dr Williams's Library, the Bible Society (Cambridge), the American Bible Society (New York), the Huntington Library, and the Humanities Library of California Institute of Technology. Out of all the books on which I have relied, I make here special mention of four. The first two are the essential tools in the craft of writing English Bible history: T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, whose two-volume (four-book) catalogue of 1903-n was revised and expanded by A. S. Herbert as Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525-1961 (1968); and Margaret T. Hills, The English Bible in America [. . .] 177-r-1957 (New York, 1962). I am among many who have valued David Norton's breadth of knowledge, wisdom of judgement and generosity of spirit, and therefore single out his History of the Bible as Literature, in both its two-volume (Cambridge, 1993) and condensed one-volume (2ooo) versions. I also join many people who are firmly kept on the right lines with dates and discernments in A Traveller's History of England (Adlestrop, 1991, rev. 1996) by my elder son, Christopher Daniell, who has for that, as for much else, my special gratitude. Ruth Thackeray copy-edited the text and Meg Davies compiled the index. It has been, as always, a privilege to work with my editor, Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press. She has my special, and warmest, appreciation. My greatest debt is to my family. For the patience, understanding, love and support of my wife Dorothy and our sons Chris and Andy, over a long time, I can only express here a fraction of my thanks.

Preface

This book is about how important the Bible in English has been in the life of Britain and North America. To many people, thoughtful and thoughtless alike, that is something that hardly needs saying. 'Everyone knows' that 'the world's bestseller' has been significant. As attention is directed elsewhere, however, into overwhelming immediacies of ephemera, what 'everyone knows' slips the mind. The English Bible has tended to disappear. Of course that is not true for hundreds of thousands of believing Christians, for some of whom a Bible in English is a part of daily life. But for well over a billion English speakers in the second Christian millennium, when the global English language is as alive as it has ever been, the Bible, if known of at all, is no more than a distant oddity. Even among the culturally knowing, like teachers of western history, awareness of the content of the Bible seems to have vanished altogether- often from ignorance, but sometimes from hostility. The aim of this book is to begin in a small way to put English Bibles back into the picture, and challenge some assumptions.

LARGE NUMBERS

English is the most translated-into language in the world. It is, for example, Homer's second language; while there have been little more than a dozen translations of the Diad and Odyssey into French, English has had several hundred. So it is with the Bible, only many, many times more. Since Tyndale's first printed Bible translations into English from the original languages of Greek and Hebrew, in the 1520s and 15305, there have been published in English over 350 new translations of the complete Bible, and some thousands including new translations of the New Testament alone, and some separate books like the Psalms. It is part of the point of this book to comment on the chief of these. Trying to put the English Bible back into discussions of events and experiences in British and American history where it was important is an activity of some variety. For Wyclif's time in the 1380s and after, as from

XIV

Preface

Tyndale's in the 1520s, we need to be thinking of sheer numbers: more Wycliffite Bible manuscripts, about 230, have survived than of any other kind in English - the nearest rival is Chaucer with over sixty - and that survival was in spite of 130 years of the most long-lasting repression ever seen in the life of Britain, that beginning with the Act of 1401, De heretico comburendo (that heretics should be burned), but made fully effective by Arundel's Constitutions in 1409, still in force in the 1530s. In the English Reformation, hundreds of thousands of printed Bibles were bought: during the reign of Elizabeth, in a population of under six million, easily half a million copies; and before 1640 a clear million.'

CONTEXTS

In a different cultural procedure, room must be found for the English Bible in considering English writing. Scholars of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean literature have been happy to find many modern matters of state and power adumbrated there, and to rejoice in the extraordinary depth of reading and thought shown by Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne or Jonson. That a lot of this was direcdy biblical in origin, indeed could hardly be otherwise, is now regarded as a matter for the briefest footnote, if that. The pious work, begun in Victoria's reign, oflocating Shakespearean words and phrases in their biblical sources is now, surely, complete. 2 But to stand and suggest to a young Shakespeare scholar that a detailed knowledge of the New Testament is an essential companion to Shakespearean study is to find one's hearer looking across the room for someone more interesting. Again, the English Bible was involved in - indeed, made - public affairs. It came to many in the mid-1990s as a surprise that ideas put about in the English Civil War came not so much from the struggles for power by a few driven men, or from economics, but from the Bible: not just from a specific English Bible, the Geneva Version, but from its even more specific marginal notes. 3 That its rival, the originally much-disliked 1611 'Authorised Version', the King James Version (KJV), by then known in extraordinary detail, was after 1660 an instrument of government control, and foremost in the consciousness of Royalists and Parliamentarians alike, even if not - as it so often was - explicitly quoted, has now to be restated.

LIGHTING

Some of the work in this book has to be the switching-off of special lighting, to reveal an illusion for what it is. The sudden elevation of that

Prqace

XV

1611 'AV' (KJV) to near~divine status in 1769, and, for many people, for ever after, so that 'Avolatry' went hand in hand with the mindless adoration of Shakespeare ('Bardolatry') for two hundred years and more, is a strange phenomenon, especially as it went with the radical alteration of both texts. Stranger still is a twentieth-century insistence in large parts of the United States of America that this version, imagined to be the personal work of King James the First, and known. often as the 'Saint James Version', is the 'inerrant Word of God', unchallengeable even to its merest dot and comma. In the later twentieth-century work of translating the Bible into English from Greek and Hebrew, mundane lighting became the fashion. From the 1980s, the trend to issue the English Bible in 'the language we use today' went a long way further into reducing the Bible's magnificence, and magnificent variety, to a uniform dreariness.

MYTHS

Not long ago, in a room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I found myself in front of a Raphael Madonna and Child, and by chance alongside a group of older teenagers. Their scholarly instrUctor pointed out the painting's strong perspective, and that it is led into by, on the left, St Peter, 'who, as you see, has keys on his belt, because he ·was the first pope', and on the right, St Paul, 'who has a sword on his belt, because he had been a soldier'. Both statements are plain wrong. Even defenders of the popes agree that St Peter was not the first. 4 St Paul was never a soldier: he has a sword because he is, prominently, holding the open Scriptures, 'the sword of the Spirit'. Jesus told Peter that he would give him 'the keys of the kingdom of heaven' because of his statement of faith (Matthew 16:19), with no mention of popes. Paul included in 'the whole armour of God [...] the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God' (Ephesians 6:13-17).What Raphael's picture tells the observer was, in that recent moment, twisted into one-line 'facts' which simply wiped out both faith and the Bible.

DISPROPORTIONATE ATTENTION

An odd partitioning must be revealed. From the 197os, serious writers have shown a marked 'Bible-blindness', even while the new theorising about everything biblical was energising high intellectual excitements. One more specific blindness, or at least astigmatism, needs comment. Where the Bible is in our contemporary picture, when critics and commentators are dealing

XVI

Prefoce

with historical effects or theories of literature, the New Testament does not receive the attention it should. To take a clear example: a milestone in the intellectual revivification of the Bible and its books was the publication in 1987 of The Literary Guide to the Bible edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. This drew together nearly twenty years of new interpretative work, and it was illuminating for many academics and common readers. These large pages, 666 in total (perhaps a coincidence to the famous number in Revelation IJ:I8}, devote attention to all the books of the Bible, with introductions to each Testament, and seven general essays at the end. The Old Testament occupies 375 pages, the New Testament 170, with a mere twenty-four pages given to all Paul's epistles, the same number as to 1 and 2 Samuel. The impression given, which may well be accurate for the late twentieth century, is that for the editors of that book, Hebrew narrative is more interesting and important than the bedrock of Christian theology. Five of the seven general essays are strongly Hebrew in interest. True, there are, in the Western Christian Bible, thirty-nine books in the Old Testament as against only twenty-seven in the New. True again, the New Testament absorbed much of the Old: the presence of the Old Testament in the New is not mere literary effecttheologically the Jewish Scriptures are vital both to Jesus and to Paul. True yet again, all the essays are stimulating. For a very serious book for use in largely, and officially, Christian societies, however, and in countries whose histories are overwhelmingly Christian, in which over many centuries the Christian writings of Paul have had greatest effect, the proportions feel wrong. One notices this effect elsewhere: in David Lyle Jeffrey's big Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992) 5 the work of Jewish scholars on the Old Testament far outweighs that of Christians on the New Testament, quite disproportionately for the literature considered. Why is this? There has not been so much less recent Christian intellectual activity. By chance or Providence, it happens that the present writer's stronger interest is in the New Testament. A lifetime with the Greek New Testament, a study begun as a schoolboy under the encouragement of my father, will be seen to have made its mark. When undergraduate Hebrew (as an extra, voluntary, subject) had slipped away almost to nothing, there was surely the hand of Providence during vital years in the writing of this book in the presence for me of an unmatchable guide into Hebrew matters, the late (and still greatly lamented) Dr Michael Weitzman, to whose brilliance, clarity, energy, generosity with time and knowledge, and above all, friendship, I here pay tribute.

Prifoce

XVll

'KJV'

I gave time to considering what name to use for the great 16n English Bible. To give it its older name, 'Authorised Version', or 'AV', would have had two disadvantages: first, it was the name hallowed across the British Empire - but that version has had its greatest influence outside that part of world history, particularly in North America. Secondly, as a tide it is simply not true- the 'Authorised Version' was never authorised. The 'King James Bible', or 'King James Version', 'KJB' or 'KJV', or simply 'King James', are customary in North America, though they still feel strange to older British Christians. Again, the words are simply not true, as King James's involvement was litde more than receiving the sugary dedication to him. One solution would have been simply to call it 'the 16n': but that would have reduced the world's most important written text to the form of an entry in a railway timetable. Wishing that there were some other tide, like 'Miles Smith's Version' (he was the modest, clever, academically skilful general editor, and a fine English stylist), I setded for 'KJV' as being most widely understood.

PURITANS - WHO TAUGHT THE ENJOYMENT OF SEX

I have tried to avoid using the weasel word 'puritan'. It was adopted in the 1570s by Roman Catholic writers as a vaguely insulting term for their reforming enemies, and gained prominence in the literary controversies of the 1580s and after. 6 It was first used by 'Puritans' about themselves in 1605.7 It has since then carried the most awkward freight. Thomas Fuller in 1655 wanted to banish it because of its imprecision. 8 For one thing, from the beginning, the word was loose enough to mean different things. For another, it must always be pointed out that in general usage the word 'Puritan' means something different on either side of the Adantic, a difference that is confusingly invisible. In common speech in America, the 'Puritans' are largely historical, reverentially held as Founding Fathers, views of their emotional rigidity being drawn from high-school reading of The Scarlet Letter. In Britain their distinction is more usually theological. One meaning, can, however, surely be found to be constant: it has been a truth universally acknowledged that the Christian God's strong disapproval of pleasure of any kind, and especially sexual pleasure, even within marriage, is a doctrine that came from 'the Puritans'. Thus the philosopher A. C. Grayling wrote:

xviii

Preface

It was in particular Christian Puritanism after the Reformation that added the final touch to western attitudes to sex. Puritanism regards sex as an evil attendant on the expulsion from Eden. At its extreme, it teaches that husbands and wives sin if they enjoy their conjugal duty to reproduce. The generalisation of this miasma of prudery spread in Europe from the 17th century until its apogee in the 19th. 9 Evidence is not given in support of these remarks, made in spite of the fact that it has been the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that God's highest calling for a man or woman was to be celibate - more, to be separated from the life of the world, especially sexual life, as a monk or nun. What undoubtedly has, however, large evidence is the mainstream Puritan understanding which taught exactly the opposite. The Puritan's rejection of the monastic life, of celibacy as a requirement for ministerial office, and of the notion that marriage was a lower form of spiritual life than the life of the voluntary virgin who devoted him- or herself to God - all of this meant that the Puritans, in a very central area of life, upheld a life-affirming, life-accepting attitude: within the confines of the marriage bed, sexuality and sexual pleasure were not only permitted, but seen as good things. Sex was not simply for procreation or to avoid fornication but was good in itself to the degree that it gave pleasure and comfort to both husband and wife. 10 This pleasure is strongly visible in the writings of, for example, Daniel Rogers (1642); Thomas Gataker (1620, who quotes Proverbs 5:15, 18-19, ending 'let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and delight in her love continually' (Geneva); and Richard Baxter (1678, exhorting 'Keep up your Conjugal Love in a constant heat and vigour'). 11 The Puritans 'called for an emotional intimacy between men and women and a physical intimacy which required erotic delight on both sides'. 12 Sexuality was celebrated not only in mainstream Puritan teaching. A glance at the writings of opponents shows what disturbing fantasies a perceived 'licence' could cause. Now, to try to construct a picture of 'Puritanism' from the satirical publications of its enemies is like trying to study Soviet missile strength in the 1950s using only information supplied by the Pentagon. Nevertheless, Kristen Poole's deductions from studies of pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays show 'Puritans' as examples of'corporeal transgressions (such as over-eating, drunkenness, promiscuous sexual behavior, and nakedness)'. 13 Much-publicised satirical attacks were made on radical sects that were minute in numbers, their invisibility leaving room for fervid inventions. Seventeenth-century curiosity and excitement were high in Europe about the promiscuity within the gatherings of the

Priface

XIX

extreme 'Puritan' sect 'The Family of Love', which probably never existed. Certainly the parallel 'Adamites', who worshipped not only naked but in arousal, were invented. 14 In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Maria calling Malvolio 'a kind of puritan' may not be because he seems to her to be a repressive killjoy. 15 The word's meaning, in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and in the twentieth and twenty-first, centuries, was and is impossibly wide; and invariably, however used, it carried strong feelings. 16 What is, perhaps, common to all the usages is disturbance from something felt to be let loose, sometimes shown in reaction in repressive restriction, but as much (newly in the sixteenth century for the clergy) in joyful married sexuality as in anything else. In the book that follows, when I do use the word, I shall try to restrict it to its ecclesiastical meaning, which is reasonably precise for British life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early in the modern debate about the term, in 1965, Basil Hall pointed out that in the period 157o-1640 the word 'Puritan' would have been applied to the 'resdessly critical and occasionally rebellious members of the Church of England who desired some modifications in Church government and worship, but not to those who deliberately removed themselves from that Church'. 17 The latter was a later, and altogether looser, application.

A TRUE REVOLUTION

Earlier chapters in this book describe the arrival in England of Latin Bible texts; translations of parts of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon and Middle English; and the great work of the followers of John Wyclif in the 138os in translating the whole Bible into English, from the Latin, and circulating many hand-written copies.

It needs to be stressed, however, that in what is properly called the Reformation, the arrival in the 1520s and ISJOS of the whole Bible, translated into English from the original Greek and Hebrew texts, and printed for the widest distribution, was a true revolution in the history of the West. For the medieval Church, the Bible certainly had authority, but it was alongside the greater authority of the practices and traditions which had grown over the centuries, including the 'unwritten verities.' In the teaching and preaching of the Church, the Bible, in Latin, was a sacred text from which verses, or illustrative incidents, could be extracted and used to underpin the common people's proper attention to the liturgies. The whole Bible was not in the picture. Eamon Duffy puts this well:

XX

Priface

He [Cardinal Pole in 1553] abhorred religious argument and the spirit of self-sufficiency which he believed indiscriminate Bible-reading by lay people was likely to encourage. Better for the people to absorb the faith through the liturgy, to find in attentive and receptive participation in the ceremonies and sacraments of the Church the grace and instruction on which to found the Christian life. This was the true Catholic way, the spirit of the parvuli, the 'little ones' of Christ, for whom penitence, not knowledge, was the true and only way to salvation. The object of preaching and teaching was not to impart knowledge, but to cause the people to lament their sins, seek the healing of the sacraments, and amend their lives. 18 An opponent of John Wyclif in the early fifteenth century wrote of his horror that Wyclif was giving 'the pearl of the Gospel' to lay men and women, to be 'trodden underfoot by swine' -the Gospel, he wrote, 'that Christ gave to the doctors and clergy of the Church.' 19 It is said, furthermore, that the ordinary English Christian had no need of an English Bible, as his or her faith was strengthened by biblical wall paintings or stained glass in the churches, or by biblical plays, or Caxton's Golden Legend (see below, pp. 107-8). Yet such paintings or glass, of Adam and Eve, Noah's ark or the Crucifixion, could represent only the smallest fragment of the Bible. True, the great fifteenth-century Mystery Play cycles in York or Coventry or Chester or elsewhere did dramatise more Bible stories: but few ordinary people could cross England to see them. And Caxton's Golden Legend, as well as being wildly beyond the reach of the milk-maid or ploughboy, turns out on investigation of its many forms to contain little of the Bible at all. Access to the whole Bible in a vernacular opens up rich continents of new, and different, understanding of New Testament faith. At John 5:39, Christ exhorted his followers to 'Search the scriptures'. They found barriers in the way. Some of Christ's fiercest words are against the Pharisees because they 'shut up the kingdom of heaven against men' and the lawyers who 'have taken away the key of knowledge' (Matt. 23:I], Luke n:52). The first makers of the printed Bible in English, a document that in various forms has swept the world for almost five hundred years, understood those words well. The Bible in Latin had been locked away from the common people. William Tyndale, early in his Preface to his 1534 New Testament, commenting on the locking out described in those passages, referred to 'the kingdom of heaven, which is the scripture and word of God.' 20

Chapter

I

INTRODUCTION

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BIBLE in the culture of the world should not need to be spelled out. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures, flowing together as they do, have for two thousand years flooded into all levels of Western living, a permeation greater even than the classical inheritance from Greece and Rome. The Bible has been high, often supreme, in its influence. At the start of the twenty-first century, to many educated Western minds, the Bible is a ridiculous irrelevance. Since the eighteenth century, university syllabuses have been made by men hostile to the word of God. 1 Yet, if by some hideous accident at the divine computer keyboard the 'delete' key were pressed for the Bible, much of the content of Western culture would disappear and it would shrivel like a deflating balloon. Spelling out, however, is just what is needed. In I997. a great British university press issued the King James Bible, the 'Authorised Version', in a famous paperback series. The advertising of this special event was handled by a public relations firm. Early in the printed handout were these words: 'The Bible will stand alongside other conical [sic] classics such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Zola's Germinal and Louisa May Alcott's Little U.Vmen.'

Bible stories, poems, proverbs, prophecies and teaching have the authority of great literature, shaping cultures. The Bible has been, and still is, the spiritual handbook of the faithful, studied and cherished as a companion of daily religious life. It is always both familiar and strange. Men and women who have never opened the covers are aware of it as something odd and special. Bible students of the greatest learning, working over a lifetime with the original languages, still find themselves surprised by new revelations of God within the familiar phrases. WHAT THE BIBLE IS

To Christians, the Bible is the Word of God. The New Testament, written in the workaday Greek of the eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the

2

The Bible in English

first century AD, and shortly after, has four accounts of the life and work of Jesus ('Gospels'), followed by a narrative ('Acts') of the founding of some of the earliest congregations, across the Mediterranean as far as Rome, and letters ('Epistles') to those congregations. The New Testament has twenty-seven books, some short. What is in the New Testament has been for most of its life fixed at those twenty-seven books, though one African branch of Christianity, the Ethiopic church, has from the beginning included eight extra writings. Placed before the New Testament, the first part of the Christian Bible is the Jewish Scriptures, known to Christians as the Old Testament, because to Christians these writings show an earlier understanding of God, pointing to the coming of Jesus. The Jewish Scriptures divide into three: the Law, probably better called 'The Teachings' (especially the Pentateuch, the five books beginning with Genesis), the Prophets (for example Jeremiah) and the Writings (including the Psalms) making a total of thirty-nine books, many of them long. All the Old Testament, with a small exception, was written in Hebrew, the ancient language found only in those Scriptures, and in the non-biblical literature found in the caves of Qumran. 2 Thus the whole Bible has sixty-six 'books', giving it as a name the Latin word for books, biblia. Christians in the West are divided about fourteen additional books, found only in a pre-Christian Greek translation of the Hebrew, not in the original, often printed in English Bibles between the Testaments as the 'Apocrypha', but in Roman Catholic Bibles placed at various points in the Old Testament. They bring the total to eighty. For Christians the root, core or heart of the Bible is the forgiving, regenerating and redeeming work of Jesus, the 'Word made flesh'. This is what the New Testament is about, and Christians understand the three sections of the Old Testament as pointing forward to Jesus as the expected Messiah, which means the anointed one of God (in Greek 'the Christ'). The teachings ofJesus are unique: attentive reading shows them to be startlingly more than an injunction to be nice to people. Jesus' work of healing describes also his restoration of human beings to the condition in which they were made by God. Christians focus particularly on the death ofJesus as a sacrifice made for all believers, and his resurrection. Soon after that event, his followers were unexpectedly activated by a new Spirit from God, a force which changed them from being frightened, timid and grieving people hiding in Jerusalem to adventurers carrying the good news of the releasing power of Christ far and wide. Jesus taught his followers that God was his, and everyone's, Father. Christian theologians in later centuries, defending the New Testament revelation against other alluring speculations, formulated God as Father, Son

Introduction

3

and Holy Spirit, developing a thought first expressed by Jesus in Matthew 28:19, and by Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:14. One way to see the work of Jesus in the Gospels is as the only part of the story of God that can be told, that we can understand. 'The story behind the story' in fact cannot be told because God is God. 3 What we get is only a fragment of what God as Father means: but enough, as many generations of sons and daughters have found.

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TEXTS

Hebrew is a language built on roots of three consonants. Because the Hebrew Scriptures have always been used in daily worship, survival of the manuscripts has been good. Problems arose with the pronunciation and interpretation of the consonants and 'vowel letters'; then a system of signs ('points') below and between the consonants was added in the early eighth century.4 Because the text was sacred, special attention had to be given to the additions, with continual interpretation and disputation. The documents discovered from 1947 at Qumran, 'The Dead Sea Scrolls', have generally supported traditional readings. Problems continue to arise because Hebrew is a language which appears only in the Scriptures. Thus when there is a word occurring once which is difficult to understand, as in the accounts of the furnishings of the Tabernacle in the later chapters of Exodus, or Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 6 & 7 and in 2 Chronicles 3 & 4, it is not possible to appeal for help from other records (as one can, for example, with Greek writings). For Jews in Alexandria in Egypt in the second century BC, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, on the whole well. This version circulated widely in the Mediterranean area, and it was the version known to, and quoted by, the earliest Christians when they wrote to each other. From a legend about the supposed miraculous making of identical copies by seventy-two isolated scholars, it is known as the Septuagint, or LXX. Further problems come from differences between that Septuagint and the Hebrew. The New Testament was written in the ordinary Greek of everyday literature, biographies, historical writings or fictions: in other words, the contemporary 'hellenistic' Greek. Only the first four verses of St Luke's Gospel are in the stylised 'classical' Greek of historiography, though the prologues to some of the Episdes follow classical Greek styles. The Greek New Testament is the best-attested document in the world, surviving in about five thousand manuscripts. Since the sixteenth century, more, and earlier, Greek manuscripts have steadily been found: and the discovery of papyri of very early date indeed has added to knowledge. Leather manuscripts -

4

The Bible in English

as at Qumran - or parchment scrolls were on treated animal hides: texts written on papyrus, made from the stem pith of the papyrus plant, were found preserved in the arid Egyptian soil, and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at a few other places, including Herculaneum. Caves in Qumran have yielded, as well as Hebrew, valuable Greek texts. The modern technical study of the relationships of the oldest texts has produced a reasonably stable Greek New Testament, though there remain disputes about some verses, and about the authority of certain families of ancient documents. This book is about translation, and though we can be happy that the base texts of Greek and Hebrew are sufficiently secure, there are still problems. To illustrate the nature of disagreement, without stepping into the minefield of half a dozen disputed phrases which tend to raise strong feelings, I take a word in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Here, at I Corinthians IJ:J, Paul is arguing that whatever grand actions are performed, if their basis is not love, then they are without profit. It is understood that his famous list is aimed especially at the Corinthian church. What then does he mean by his phrase 'Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned'? The first part is easy; the second very difficult on two grounds: first that martyrdom by burning was largely unknown there and at that time, and in any case 'give my body' is a peculiar phrase for it ('my body being taken' would be more logical). Second, the Greek word for 'to be burned', Kau9~oro!J.at (kauthisomm), differs by only one Greek letter from the word at that place in many manuscripts, x:auxT}oroJ.tat (kauxesomai), which means to exalt, or to boast. To dispose of the difficulty about burning by going over to this alternative reading is simply to raise a new problem - what can it mean? Certainly Paul seems to have some kind of selfsacrifice in mind, but handing over one's body to boasting is a peculiar idea. A solution may be in the nature of his own ministry as explained to the Corinthians elsewhere (2 Cor. 11:23-9 and I2:IO), in which his consciousness of all kinds of sufferings in his body in the name of Christ might produce a 'boast', as if he were saying: 'This is what I have been through in bringing you the Gospel.' Yet if even this is done without love, he would then be saying in the controversial verse (I Cor. IJ:J), it will still 'profit me nothing'. Such problems are, mercifully, not frequent: but the complexity of Paul's rhetorical skills means that they tend to arise with him rather than in the Gospels, something recognised in New Testament times (see 2 Peter J:I6). In only a very few cases, fragmentary in the whole New Testament, do such variants have more than a minor effect. More troublesome has been the larger question of manuscript authority. The general principle is always that the earlier is the better, on the grounds that fewer copyists' errors

Introduction

5

will have crept in. Scientific work at the end of the nineteenth century, extended in the twentieth, challenged the grounds of many readings from late and even incomplete manuscripts which, in a Greek New Testament printed in the sixteenth century, had later been made to set hard, as it were. From an incidental remark by a printer it became known as the 'Received Text', the Textus Receptus, as if it had exceptional authority: because it was the basis of KJY, some twenty-first century people will brook no criticism of it. Modern chapter divisions in the whole (Latin) Bible are said to have been made by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1206 and 1228. Verse divisions did not appear in the New Testament until 1551, in a Greek and Latin edition made in Geneva. Before those times, quite elaborate systems of division were often made.

OBJECTIONS

People read the Bible for many different reasons. A hungry soul seeks and finds spiritual food. Some read it for daily insight into the goodness of God, or an immensity of experience described. Clever people dispute small or large sections. Others deny any possibility of truth when reported events seem wrong historically, or, as the alternative, they bend a historical record to fit. Some parts of the Bible, particularly of the Old Testament, produce revulsion and dismay, as in tales of slaughter in the books of Joshua and Judges, all apparendy at the command of God; or in details of tribal laws. In the New Testament, some deride what they read as the appalling gender politics of Paul, without regard to whatever else he said. Even sympathetic readers find long stretches of Leviticus or Numbers troublingly tedious, or passages of some of the Prophets incomprehensible. Paul at his most theological is not an easy read. At the very end of the New Testament, the book of Revelation can be read merely as accounts of hallucinations, or as foretelling imminent catastrophes. Even devout Christians can sympathise with the Scottish minister who finished his reading with the words: 'If it hadna been the Lord's will, that verse had been better left out.' 5 A religion is a revelation of God or it is nothing. Thomas Jefferson was one of many later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers who took scissors to cut up and paste the Gospels to reveal the remarkable system of ethics in the teaching of Jesus. Jefferson, like others at the time, threw away the 'superstitious nonsense' which was all the rest. He was awed by the ethical originality of what he found in the teaching of Jesus. What he put in his paste-up book in 1804 he found admirable, but it was quite

6

The Bible in English

untrue to the original. The revelation of God as Father in any of the four Gospels is in the whole experience, 'superstitious nonsense' and all. If enlightened Jefferson found the accounts of the birth, death and resurrection ofJesus, his healings and other miracles offensive, then that should be no surprise. Philosophical systems of ethics do not embrace the raising of the dead. So challenging is the whole Bible that it has always been tempting to make of it a magic book. The unscrupulous can try to make a few words - taken out of context, especially from the Old Testament - to act like a fairy-tale potion. Down the ages, people have tried to make ancient ritual commands into modern dogma: John Wyclif tackled the matter in Latin at the University of Oxford in the 1370s (see p. 71 below). The problem has got worse. For example, a certain prominent American broadcaster regularly attacks homosexuals because the third book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, states that their acts are 'abomination' (18:22). In September 2000, a listener posted on the internet a letter in reply, which illuminates the problem in terms obviously not intended to be flippant. Dear Dr Laura, When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is that my neighbours complain that the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them? I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine says this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarifY? Why can't I own Canadians? I have a. neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 31:15 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? [. . .] My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19: 19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev. 24:10-16}. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with our in-laws? Thankyou again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging. 6

Introduction

7

The Hebrew book of Leviticus, which those questions mock, was intended as part of a seamless single composition, the five-book Pentateuch, from the opening of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, written for a special hierarchy ofJerusalem priests working in the later Temple and thus exceptionally conservative. Leviticus gives the rules for proper procedures of ritual, and for purity. Both systems were aiming towards an ideal of Holiness for particular priests and occasionally for lay people as well. These ritual ordinances, here and in Exodus especially, have, as David Damrosch observed, 'warmed the hearts of few'. 7 (One can hear growls of sympathy from the Scottish minister.) Understanding the intention of such passages, an ideal of Holiness in a particularly limited circumstance, may help: as may taking to heart Jesus' words at Matthew 23:23, that too much attention to detailed literalness of the Law can lead to neglect of the weightier matters-judgement, mercy and faith. Otherwise in such passages one is reduced to echoing the words of another sturdy Scottish churchman, this time objecting to a different issue altogether, that of the union of Scottish churches: 'It is unconstitutional. It is impractical. It is illogical and absolutely idiotic. But I hae nae doot it is God's will.'8

THE BIBLE AND THE PEOPLE

Like Jews and Muslims, Christians are people of a book. It was made by the earliest believers. All these early Christian communities, for which the Greek word is mainly EmT)aia (ekklisia) or O'Uvaycflin you plen tcoufl'9inall~bomctc!.

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10 T h e title- page of Coverdale's 1535 B ible, th e fi rst complete B ible in English , th ough ' translated o ut of Douc h e [Ger man] and Lati n' rath er th an th e orig inal H ebrew and G reek. T h e design is d o min ated by th e radi ant N am e of God at the to p ; at th e foot, a m o dest King H enry V lll d istributes ' thy words' and ' th e Gosp el' to clergy and nobles (a contrast w ith th e title of th e 'Grea t' Bible, 1539)

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