The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  Luther’s Old Testament was condemned by the Catholic Church for its structure as well as its theology. The principle of sola scriptura, of remaining faithful to the original words of the Bible, demanded that he include in his Old Testament only those books which had appeared in the Hebrew canon. For centuries there had been a debate about the validity of a collection of writings that had been included in the Greek Septuagint, but which were absent from the Hebrew text. Known as the Apocrypha, from a Greek root meaning ‘concealed’, and including works like books 1 and 2 of the Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, Judith and Tobit, the biblical status of these texts had divided opinion among the early Church fathers. Jerome had argued that they should not be included in the Old Testament, but they did find their way into a later recension of the Vulgate, and had generally been considered as a full and authentic part of the Bible ever since. Luther however, following sola scriptura, extracted them from the Old Testament, inserting them instead into a separate section. The consequence was that, in Rome’s eyes, Luther had not just translated the Bible illegitimately and interpreted it wrongly, he had actually constructed a deficient Old Testament. In 1546 the Council of Trent, established in the wake of the Reformation to support and clarify Catholic doctrine, affirmed that the Apocrypha was part of the Old Testament canon. That remained the Catholic position ever since. Protestants disagree. Today the Apocrypha, which is now more commonly known as the Deuterocanon, or ‘second canon’, is included in Catholic Bibles but omitted altogether from most modern Protestant versions.

  Predictably, the publication of Luther’s translation created a backlash. However this time it was not the vernacular Bible that caused the most offence, but rather the translator himself. The Duke of Saxony, a long-standing opponent of Luther, ordered all copies of the translation in his lands to be confiscated and destroyed. His order backfired, and by drawing public attention to the translation’s existence the Duke created additional demand for the work. Luther’s sales increased. The Duke then turned to Jerome Emser, a loyal theologian, instructing him to produce a critique of Luther’s Bible and to issue a competing translation. Emser did as he was bid, publishing both a lengthy polemic against Luther’s work and his own translation. But his translation was based so closely on Luther’s that the two works could scarcely be told apart. Emser even used the same illustrations! Even though thirty-eight editions of Emser’s translation were eventually published it never came anywhere near attaining the same stature as Luther’s work.63

  Luther was anxious that his Bible be seen as a literary work grounded in exemplary use of the German language. He struggled at times to find the best form of words; one reason why the translation of the Old Testament took so long was that he and his team spent four days agonizing over the best way to render just three lines from the notoriously difficult book of Job. Excellence of language was more important to him than literal meaning; he was not afraid to deviate from the direct translation of a phrase in order to convey the sense better in German. Perhaps the best known example is his translation of the Vulgate’s ‘fat mountain’ in Psalm 68.16. Not wanting to conjure up images of a mountain smeared with lard, he decided upon ‘a fruitful mountain’.64 The sense is the same but the Vulgate had already departed from the obscure Hebrew word which the Jewish grammarians, with whom Luther wanted no affinity, associate with the mountain’s shape, rather than its fertility. Luther had merely ameliorated the Vulgate’s terminology, instead of addressing the lexical issue.65

  But even if the meaning of some words in his Bible deviated from the principles of sola scriptura, Luther’s insistence on literary excellence was transformative. By producing a readable, literary, vernacular Bible, he made a substantial contribution to the structure and standardization of the German language. Wholly aside from its theological position, Luther’s Bible remains a classic work of German literature today.

  By the time of Luther’s death in 1546 half a million of his bibles had been sold. A consortium of businessmen grew rich on the sales. They didn’t share the profits with Luther.

  William Tyndale, an Englishman, was a younger contemporary of Luther. He too went down in history as a translator of the Bible. But his story, and his fate, were far more tragic than Luther’s. Luther was a shrewd operator; the translation of the Bible was just one of many achievements that helped him create a vigorous and successful alternative to the hegemony of Rome. Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English, was far less confrontational and he paid for it with his life. The murderous age of Bible translations was heating up.

  6

  The Murder of Tyndale

  No Place in All England

  If credit can be given to any individual for the majestic language that suffuses the English Bible, at least until its more recent revisions, that person has to be William Tyndale. Some of the phrases he coined are used so frequently they’ve even become clichés – ‘fall flat on his face’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘the powers that be’ and many more. Tyndale did for English what Luther had done for German; his precision and artistry in translation standardized the vernacular. David Daniell rightly says that ‘he made a language for England’;1 so much of later literature depends upon him.

  Tyndale was born in 1494 to a relatively prosperous Gloucestershire family. Educated at Magdalen College in Oxford, and then later in Cambridge, he studied the works of Erasmus and of Luther. They were to define his life.

  Tyndale was painfully aware that England was the only European country not to possess a printed translation of the New Testament. Luther’s German translation was the immediate catalyst for him, but he almost certainly knew that an Italian translation had been made as early as 1471 with Czech, Dutch and Catalan versions following in quick succession and a Danish recension in 1524.

  Tyndale was deeply conscious of the disadvantage that England was under. He felt that his own early religious education had suffered due to unlearned priests, and if an intelligent, educated man such as he had been left in partial ignorance, what chance that less talented people could gain a true understanding of scripture?

  Manuscript copies of Wycliffe’s translation, although illegal, were still in circulation. The Lollards had made sure of that. As was an English paraphrase of the Gospels, made by William Caxton, the first English printer. With the Church’s blessing and in the tradition of the Diatessaron, Caxton had produced an abridged version of Jesus’s life. But it was all a far cry from an accessible, readable English Bible which educated lay people could read, and the illiterate have read to them.

  Tyndale purposed to put the matter right. Following in the footsteps of Erasmus, he resolved to print an immaculately composed, English translation directly from the Greek. It would, he believed, place the Bible into the hands of the laity, circumvent the censorious influence of the clerics and revitalize the religious spirit of the nation.

  Of course he couldn’t just sit down and write a translation; the age was not yet ready for such autarchy. It wasn’t just a question of money; naturally he would need to find finance for the printing costs but important as this was, even more essential was ecclesiastical sanction. A project of this nature could not possibly proceed without permission of the religious authorities. Fortunately, or so he thought, the bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, would warm to the project. The bishop was a friend and fan of Erasmus, and he’d even worked with him on the second edition of his Greek New Testament. Tunstall would be just the man to become Tyndale’s patron, to find him backers and steer him through the complex waters of church politics and ecclesiastical regulation.

  Tyndale turned up at Tunstall’s London residence, armed with a translation of a speech of the Greek orator, Isocrates, as proof of his scholarship. But Tunstall wouldn’t see him. He certainly wouldn’t help. Tyndale had miscalculated; he’d been too naive. He’d failed to realize that, however learned and honourable Tunstall may have been, he was an Establishment man with a position to uphold. Tyndale had already acquired a reputation as a Lutheran
and potential trouble maker. Tunstall may have quietly sympathized with his intellectual aspirations but there was no chance that he would compromise his own standing within the Church, let alone his positions as bishop of London and Lord Privy Seal, to assist a little-known radical, an avowed admirer of the troublesome German reformer Luther; particularly when Tyndale’s project had the potential to cause as much damage in England as Luther’s translation was beginning to cause in Europe. Lutheran books had already been burned in England, and Cardinal Wolsey was busy rooting out anyone suspected of importing or distributing ‘heretical’ literature. The Church was a powerful landowner, the largest in London, and the greatest employer. It also owned many prisons. The fact that Tunstall didn’t have Tyndale arrested when he brought the idea for a printed Bible to him suggests that privately he may have sympathized. But with his career, reputation and even his life at stake, Tunstall was never likely to put his head above the parapet.

  But Tyndale did not give up. He turned to Humphrey Monmouth, a free-thinking alderman of London (who would eventually be cast into the Tower for reading heretical books and associating with Lutherans). Humphrey Monmouth belonged to a group known as the Christian Brethren, an informal ring of merchants who imported Lutheran books from Europe and supported scholars and translators. The books they imported were distributed through Lollard networks.2

  Monmouth, who had heard Tyndale preach on a couple of occasions, offered him lodging within his house. Tyndale stayed for six months, studying ‘most part of the day and of the night . . . he would eat but sodden meat . . . nor drink but small beer’.3

  But for all the time he spent in Monmouth’s home, Tyndale’s plans for a translation of the Bible were making no progress. He took a position as a preacher at St Dunstan’s in Fleet Street, but this did not satisfy his ambition; the opportunity to compose his translation was all that he craved. He grew increasingly frustrated by those who were in a position to sanction and support his endeavours but were not prepared to do so.

  Tyndale came to the conclusion that London was just not the right place for him to work. Years later, in his prologue to the book of Genesis, he allowed himself to express the frustration he had felt. In a masterpiece of scorn and mockery he sounded off against ignorant and unlearned priests, boastful praters, pompous prelates and the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, who reviled and berated him ‘as if he had been a dog’. He explains in the Prologue that, as a result of his experiences, he came to the realization ‘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, as experience doth now openly declare’.4

  Tyndale’s next move was to make contact with a group of German merchants and traders living in an area close to London Bridge, known as the Steelyard. The merchants were well connected with printers and bankers in Germany, and most importantly, were sympathetic to the Lutheran cause. Many of the so-called heretical books distributed in England had been imported by these men. With their help, and a little money donated to him by Humphrey Monmouth, Tyndale set off in April 1524 for Germany. He was next heard of in 1525 in Cologne.

  Danger in Germany

  If William Tyndale thought that relocating to Germany would solve his problems, he was sorely mistaken.

  Not much is known about the first few months of Tyndale’s sojourn in Germany. He is thought to have spent time in Hamburg and Wittenberg before travelling to Cologne. Somewhere along the way he was joined by William Roye, an apostate Franciscan friar who had also fled England after being accused of displaying heretical tendencies. Whether or not Roye had travelled to Germany with the intention of assisting Tyndale is not clear, but by 1525 the two men were working together in Peter Quentell’s Cologne print shop, turning out their first copies of the New Testament.

  Tyndale and Roye did not start as good friends and their relationship deteriorated the longer they worked together. In one of his tracts, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, Tyndale describes Roye as ‘somewhat crafty . . . whose tongue is able not only to make fools stark mad but also to deceive the wisest’. He depicts Roye as something of a parasite, attaching himself to new acquaintances only for as long as he needed their support and then, when things turned difficult, finding someone else to sponge off. Even though, as Tyndale acknowledges, Roye had been helpful to him in preparing the texts for printing, when their work came to an end he ‘bade him farewell for our two lives and, as men say, for a day longer’. Tyndale also tells us that after the two men separated, Roye found himself new friends, and, when he had stored up enough money, headed for Strasbourg ‘where he professeth wonderful faculties and maketh boast of no small things’.5

  Roye apart, the city of Cologne should have been an ideal location for Tyndale. It was blessed with a thriving printing industry; Peter Quentell had printed a Dutch Bible there in 1478. But it wasn’t a safe place for Tyndale to realize his printing ambitions. The city was under the authority of the Catholic archbishop, Hermann von Wied. In due course Wied would fall out with the papacy and drift towards Lutheranism, but at the time that Tyndale was in the city he was still fiercely opposed to the reformers. He had even agitated at the Diet of Worms for Luther to be declared an outlaw. Cologne may have been a centre of printing but Tyndale was nervous, and cautious. He’d made too many enemies on the other side of the Channel; English spies were already hunting for him. The last thing he wanted was for von Wied to find out what he was up to.

  Tyndale’s caution was well founded. Just as he and Roye were on the point of completing their printing of the book of Matthew in Peter Quentell’s print shop, they received news that the authorities were on to them. They’d been betrayed by Johann Cochlaeus, a local scholar and fierce opponent of Luther, who was having his own works printed in the same press. One drunken evening a printer let slip that the Bible was also being printed on the premises. Cochlaeus guessed immediately whose Bible it was. He swiftly reported the matter and spent the rest of his life dining out on the tale of how, when they were warned that their works were about to be seized, the two Englishmen snatched up the quarto sheets that had been printed and fled up the Rhine by boat to Worms.

  Worms was a Lutheran city where, on the face of it, Tyndale should have been safe. But by now Tyndale was battle scarred and wary. He engaged a local printer, Peter Schoeffer, urging him to print as rapidly as he could. His overriding concern was to finish the New Testament and get as many copies as he could to England before anything else went wrong. He didn’t bother to write a prologue or to add marginal notes. David Daniell suggests that the style of the epilogue and the list of errata suggests a man working under stress.6

  Tyndale accomplished his objective. By the beginning of 1526 the New Testament was complete. The first copies arrived in England during March, probably smuggled across with the aid of the large expatriate English community in Antwerp. What began as a trickle turned into a deluge. Tyndale’s Bible began arriving in its hundreds, concealed among consignments of other books from the continent. A network of distributors disbursed them across the country. None of the printed Bibles carried Tyndale’s name, nor did they display the details of where they were printed. But nobody was in any doubt regarding who was behind them.

  In the summer of that year Cardinal Wolsey convened a meeting of English bishops. They agreed that the recently arrived Bibles should be seized and burned, and that anyone found in possession of them should be dealt with severely. Archbishop Tunstall, upon whom Tyndale had placed such high hopes, preached a sermon in St Paul’s in which he claimed to have identified two thousand errors in the new Bible. He summoned the booksellers in London, confiscated their stock and adjured them against having anything to do with the work of Tyndale and Roye. Having rounded up as many copies as he could of Tyndale’s Bible, Tunstall had them publicly burned, on 28 October 1526.

  Tyndale was horrified when he discovered that Bishop Tunstall had described his New Testament as doctrinam perigranam: strange
learning.7 He was even more horrified to discover that Tunstall had ordered his Bible to be publicly burned. This was the friend and colleague of Erasmus, the man whom Tyndale had once considered a potential ally. One can only guess at the extent of his disillusionment.

  Still, if the story is to be believed, Tyndale did have one success at Tunstall’s expense. A 1548 chronicle by Edward Hall tells of a visit to Antwerp by Tunstall.8 While he was there, the bishop told a local merchant that he was keen to burn as many of Tyndale’s Bibles as he could. The merchant told him that he could obtain a large quantity. A price was agreed. The merchant purchased the Bibles from Tyndale and handed them over to Tunstall to be burned. Tunstall was delighted. So was Tyndale. He used the proceeds to finance his next round of printing.

  Neither Tunstall’s efforts nor the wrath of the Church could stem the flow of Tyndale’s printed Bibles into England. Even pirated copies began to appear, printed in Antwerp by Christopher von Endhoven. They were not of the same high quality as Tyndale’s own imprint, but the market easily absorbed them. Little wonder that Wolsey, as anxious as ever to destroy Tyndale’s work and covetous for greater recognition from Rome, was incensed.

  Still, Wolsey had all the power of the state behind him. Nobody with a connection to Tyndale was safe. Thomas Bilney, a meek, scholarly lawyer, and by no means a rabid radical, was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for a year. Unsure of his crime he recanted and repeated his genuine rejection of Luther. He was eventually released, a broken man and probably suicidal; his friends made sure he was never left alone. Other supporters and followers of Tyndale, including Humphrey Monmouth who had helped him when he first came to London, and the monk Richard Bayfield, were rounded up. Subjected to the full range of medieval torture they were grateful for those days in which they were only whipped, gagged and stocked. A group of young scholars in Oxford, members of Wolsey’s own Cardinal College, were thrown into a dungeon where salt fish were stored. The stench killed them. All for the sake of a printed Bible, and a church hierarchy that had completely lost its sense of perspective.