William Tyndale, born about 1494, was an ordained priest who had studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, arriving first at Oxford at the age of twelve and earning his master’s degree by the age of nineteen or twenty. Contemporary comment on him inevitably stresses his extraordinary skill at languages. He came under the influence of the continental reformers—Luther and those who soon followed Luther—by reading their published works, widely (if surreptitiously) circulated thanks to the new urban phenomenon of printing presses.
He began to translate the New Testament into English, using Erasmus’s text. And Tyndale’s English was the exquisitely clarified, ringing English of the West Midlands, especially the Malvern Hills, Gloucestershire, the Cotswold scarp, the Vale of Berkeley, and the ancient Forest of Dean, all within tramping distance of musical Wales to the west and the Shakespeare family’s Stratford-upon-Avon to the east. In studying Tyndale’s choice of words the reader is repeatedly confronted by his elegant simplicity, for, as Proverbs has it, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Though the gradual rise in dignity of the vernacular languages and the ever-wider dissemination of printing presses were encouraging more widespread literacy, it was still true that a translator of Tyndale’s ambition wrote preeminently not for readers but for hearers of the fitly spoken word.
Tyndale found himself more and more exasperated at the sodden ignorance of his fellow priests. An English bishop who surveyed his Gloucester clergy a decade or so after Tyndale’s time would find that of 311 churchmen 168 were unable to recite all ten commandments and thirty-one couldn’t say for sure whose commandments they were. Forty churchmen were unable to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in full in English, nor would they speculate as to who the author of the prayer might be.
In one encounter with a fellow priest, Tyndale kept insisting on the authority of the Bible rather than that of the pope. His frustrated interlocutor exclaimed finally that we’d all be “better without God’s law than the pope’s!” To this Tyndale replied in the most famous sentence attached to his name: “I defy the pope and all his laws, and if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.” Though in its essence this is close to the far more pacific sentiment expressed nearly two centuries earlier by Wyclif about the ability of even simple souls to read the Bible, it also glows with the combativeness that we necessarily associate with the outraged exchanges of the sixteenth century. And this combativeness will continue to power exchanges on both sides of the issues. If you meant to translate the Bible into a vernacular, and especially into English, you could no longer expect to die in your bed.
Tyndale was not in the dark about the danger he was placing himself in. The very existence of an unrepentant and unchastised rebel only encouraged others to rebel. Since never in all of human history have those in power willingly and graciously ceded that power to others, Europe was becoming a powder-keg society, in which new explosions might be expected anywhere, at any time. Eternal vigilance and aggressive response were quickly becoming the order of the day.
In autumn 1523 Tyndale journeyed to London to seek the patronage of its bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, a learned humanist associated with critics of the church such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, then Speaker of the House of Commons. Tyndale met with a cold reception from Tunstall, who was also an intimate of the young king and Lord Keeper of his Privy Seal and who smelled in Tyndale not the playfully ironic detachment of fellow humanists, but the sharp odor of the true zealot. Both More and Tunstall, after all, were already engaged in providing Henry with verbal weapons in the royal attack against Luther—for which the pope awarded Henry the title “Defender of the Faith,” a title still claimed by British monarchs.
Luther had already called Henry “a pig, a dolt, and a liar.” Henry had already replied that Luther was “an ape, a drunkard, and a lousy little friar.” Gentlemen did not then confine themselves to logical argument. Defenders of the faith felt no constraints upon their pens or their tongues in the face of opposing argument. And as these ever more acrimonious verbal conflagrations were joined, bonfires of Luther’s writings, as well as of Wyclif’s increasingly archaic translations, were being lit across the land.
Half a year after his unrewarding encounter with Bishop Tunstall, Tyndale sailed for the continent, never to return to his native land. In Wittenberg he may have met with Luther, then settled himself in Cologne, a precarious choice, where he completed his great translation of the New Testament into English. Tyndale’s plan was to print a first edition of six thousand copies at Cologne, but he was tipped off in the nick of time that the printer’s shop was about to be raided, after which he slipped off to the more staunchly Lutheran precincts of Worms, where in late 1525 the New Testament in modern English was finally printed, bound, and shipped to England, concealed amid cases of grain, fabric, and other dry goods.
Many volumes were confiscated, but in the course of the ensuing years thousands more made their way to the hands of English readers. Henry VIII could not allow such treasonous activities to pass unremarked. Many public burnings were arranged for seized copies of Tyndale’s defiant work. Thomas More was set the task of defending the status quo against the revolutionary incursions of this pestiferous translation, “so corrupted and changed,” according to More, “from the good and wholesome doctrine of Christ” that it had been deformed into “a clean contrary thing.”
What especially irritated More was that by translation alone Tyndale had won the battle of competing theologies. The Greek word ekklesia, which was always translated into English as “church,” Tyndale translated as “congregation.” The Greek word presbyteros, always translated as “priest,” Tyndale translated as “senior” and in later editions as “elder.” Now, after the long expanse of time that separates us from this controversy, we may say without fear of contradiction that Tyndale was right and More wrong. The ancient church was simply a congregation, not a hierarchy. Each local congregation was likely to have a resident elder, someone who had been witness to the life of Jesus, not in any sense a member of a hieratic order, for which Greek had quite another word (hieros).
Many other words that had been assigned theologically technical meanings by the medieval church had only plain, open meanings when read in the original Greek. So the word that had been translated as “penance,” suggesting a reference to the church’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance, Tyndale translated as “repentance,” suggesting not a sacrament but an interior attitude. Similarly, the word normally translated as “confess” Tyndale translated as “acknowledge.” For the word usually translated as “grace” (or “gratia” in the Latin Vulgate), Tyndale rightly used “favor,” at least by implication endangering the hierarchy’s cherished doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, supposedly born “full of grace” (gratia plena) and therefore without stain of original sin. Most daringly perhaps, he translated the wonderful Greek word agape, not by the then-conventional (and Latinate) English word “charity,” but simply as “love.”
Tyndale issued a defense (Answer unto Sir Thomas More) in response to which the normally considered More published perhaps his least considered work (Confutation of Tyndale), describing Tyndale as “discharging a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth.” He was, claimed More, the son of Satan. Not that Tyndale was incapable of his own intemperance: in the margins of his translation, he had printed his “pestilent glosses,” as Henry termed them, accusing the pope, for instance, of defying scripture by cursing “whom God curseth not” and asserting that “bishops and abbots desire no better tenants” than whores and that the pope would be happy to increase his revenues by levying a tax on the business of prostitution. Many such glosses were unnecessarily combative and sometimes mean-spirited, even when they were not absolutely untruthful.
Doughty Tyndale spent years on the Continent, living hand to mouth and moving from one place to another so as to avoid detection and
capture. As More and his minions (as well as the—somewhat less persevering—agents of the pope) pursued him and diplomatic relations between England and the continental powers were often in flux, no place was safe for long. Despite his fugitive status, Tyndale managed to perfect his knowledge of ancient Hebrew and to translate into English the first fourteen books of the Old Testament from Genesis through Second Chronicles.
At last, in 1535 a fanatical, disreputable Englishman, Henry Phillips, one of those inveterate privateering secret agents who pop up through history, discovered where Tyndale was lodging—in rooms in Antwerp, which had previously provided the translator safe haven. Pretending to befriend Tyndale, Phillips identified him to the Antwerp authorities and collaborated in his capture. Tyndale was cornered in a narrow lane while in conversation with Phillips, who—Judas-style—“pointed with his finger over Tyndale’s head” so the arresting officers “might see who to take.” Tyndale offered no resistance, and the imperial officers “pitied to see his simplicity.”
Imprisoned in the cold, damp dungeon of Vilvoorde Castle, north of Brussels, Tyndale suffered horribly for nearly a year and a half. We have his letter to the prison’s governor, begging for warmer clothes and a lamp. “But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew bible, grammar, and dictionary, that I may continue with my work. In return I pray every good may come to you, consistent with the salvation of your soul.” Tyndale had already completed his translation of the Torah (or Five Books of Moses). Thanks to the “clemency” of the governor, he was able to complete his translations from Joshua through Second Chronicles, an amazing accomplishment. He had fallen in love with the Hebrew language and found many similarities between it and his plainspoken native tongue: “The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word.”
In August 1536, Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a church court, defrocked as a priest, and turned over to the state for burning. One of his two prosecutors, Ruwart Tapper, a theologian at the University of Louvain, remarked: “It doesn’t matter whether those we execute are really guilty or not. What matters is that the people are terrified by our trials.” Tyndale may not have been executed till October 6. Out of pity, he was strangled with a chain before his corpse was burned in the prison yard of the castle. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”
The king for whom Tyndale prayed was Henry VIII. After showing initial promise as an artistic intellectual, Henry proved to be one of the worst kings the English have ever had, a Tudor Stalin who sent to the gallows anyone who displeased him, including two of his six wives and many of his most loyal and devoted servants, including, once he had embarked on his endless rounds of marrying, his fast friend Thomas More. As Henry’s lord chancellor (1529–1532), More had helped organize the hunt for Tyndale, though by the time Tyndale was executed, More had already lost his head. The older Henry became, the more arbitrary and irrational he grew and the more he was feared by anyone who had to have anything to do with him. This aging, gorging athlete grew so fat that he could be moved only by machinery or the efforts of many muscular attendants. After his death in 1547, his casket is said to have exploded, dripping putrid fat everywhere—as fitting an end as Tyndale’s prayerful one.
What Tyndale prayed for was that his king, once his eyes were open, would support the reformation of the English Church. As we all know, Henry did this—sort of. But there was to be no royal enlightenment. His motives were entirely selfish and supremely egotistical. He did not believe in reformation, only in his own superiority.
Henry was succeeded by his three “legitimate” but fruitless children in turn, after which the Tudors were no more. Scotland’s James VI, son of the executed Mary Queen of Scots and descendant of Henry’s sister Margaret, ascended the English throne in 1603 as James I, the first of the Stuart kings. James, though not as ominous a figure as Henry, was no royal paragon. A crusty, suspicious Scotsman, he wore so many layers of padded clothing (for fear of being surprised and stabbed) that he waddled like a duck. His Scottish experience had left him with a loathing for all things Presbyterian and, especially, Puritan. He was glad to bid farewell to many of these annoyances when the Puritans headed off to North America on a ship called the Mayflower. He thought the English parliament, like anything that smacked of democracy, a nuisance that, unfortunately, “I cannot get rid of.” His relationship to the translation of the Bible that bears his name is more tenuous than is usually assumed.
At the beginning of 1604, the first full year of his reign, James assembled a group of churchmen at Hampton Court Palace. During the course of their three-day conference, which proved inconclusive on most matters, a “new translation of the Bible” was proposed. James approved the proposal for such a Bible, dedicated to him as head of the (relatively new) monarchical national church. Surely, he assumed, it would not include Tyndale’s “pestilent glosses.”
It would not. The marginal notes would be confined to citations of parallel texts and occasional references to unresolved ambiguities in the language of the original. Fifty-four eminent scholars worked on the translation, apportioned among six “companies,” each assigned a specific set of biblical books. Though all had been appointed by the monarch to their various academic posts, they were also overseen by bishops with safely predictable theological opinions. Ekklesia would be translated as “church,” not as “congregation,” episkopos as “bishop” (really just a shortened Anglo-Saxon rendering of the Greek word), not given its less mysterious municipal meaning of “overseer, inspector, superintendent.” Agape would be translated not as “love” but as “charity.”
Despite these conservative touches, the finished product would not be in any sense a new translation. The instructions provided to the translators specifically pointed them toward consulting existing translations. They consulted even the Douai-Reims, the existing Roman Catholic translation. What emerged at the end of all their work was a translation that was as accurate as they could make it but also fashioned to be spoken “trippingly on the tongue” and received by the ear with “a temperance that may give it smoothness,” as Hamlet says in his advice to the players. As a result, countless phrases of the KJV have entwined themselves permanently into our language—from “In the beginning” to “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Numerous longer expressions—such as “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat”—scan as smoothly as lines of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter.
The translators worked without recompense from the king or from anyone else—and they worked so diligently for the eight years of the undertaking that the neglected Lady Margaret, wife of Sir Henry Savile, warden of Merton College and one of the most diligent overseers of the process of translation, was heard to lament, “I would I were a book too.”
Though James had virtually nothing to do with the effort, the extravagant dedication to him as “the principal mover and author of this work” seemed almost to place the British monarch but a step lower than God himself, the prime mover and author of all life. The theory of the divine right of kings, then coming to enjoy general acclaim and enthusiastically endorsed by James and many of his fellow princes, has long since lost its allure, even in the royal house of England. Beyond the Isle of Britain, even among dis-established Anglican churches throughout the world, no one today would dream of taking the theory seriously. Nor, for that matter, would any Anglican beyond Britain take seriously the claim of the monarch to be head of the church.
Many perfectly orthodox and serious Christians now resist even the once universal doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, though it is also true that American fundamentalists cling to the KJV to this day, even if their Pilgrim ancestors used the translation only because they had no printing presses for composing more agreeable editions of the Bible. To locate whole societies of those who would kill b
ecause of perceived mistranslation (or because of the rending of some equally cherished religious principle), we today would need to journey beyond the borders of the Christian world altogether. And for this we can all whisper Deo gratias. Or perhaps less grandly, hominibus gratias.
But even after so many centuries of continuing political upheavals around the globe and mind-boggling cultural transformations throughout the Western world, the KJV remains. Indeed, it has more printed copies to its name than any other book ever published—and more than 80 percent of its text must be credited to that inspired and doomed priest, William Tyndale. “Yes verily,” as Paul, quoting Psalm 19, reminded the Romans, “their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.”
1520s: ENCOUNTERS AND EVASIONS IN PARIS
The University of Paris had been the largest and most prestigious European institution of learning well before the time of Thomas Aquinas in the high Middle Ages,14 and it continued to draw the keen interest of Christian intellectuals, as well as a large and lively population of international students, who resided and studied at its sixty-odd constituent colleges. One of these colleges, Montaigu (or Montagu or Montaigue, given the lack of standardized spelling at the time), housed in the early sixteenth century any number of soon-to-be-famous religious figures, such as Jean Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, as well as men who would distinguish themselves in other fields, such as the dashing explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (“half pirate, half scientist,” according to one historian). Erasmus had been a student at Montaigu, and one is not surprised to learn that he had not cared for the place. The Scottish reformer John Knox would also spend some time there, as would the great mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, discoverer of the greenhouse effect.
Heretics and Heroes Page 25