Norton, David. A History of the English Bible as Literature, pp. 1-114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Norton chronicles the history of English Bible translation, showing how the English Bible, originally perceived as a theological project, eventually assumed the aura and prestige of an exceptional literary work, and also attracted the attention of England's leading scholars, writers, philosophers, and scientists.]

CREATORS OF ENGLISH

THE CHALLENGE TO THE TRANSLATORS

To the early reformers, the Bible was a central part of religion hidden from the people in the occult language of the Church, Latin. For the sake of their souls, the people needed the Bible in their own language. So, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, John Wyclif and his followers, the Lollards, translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate. Then, from 1525 to 1611 came the great period of English Bible translation. Making a fresh start, William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale translated the whole Bible into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. They, with other lesser-known figures, were the pioneers. A succession of translators developed their work into what became the King James Bible (KJB) of 1611. This Bible slowly became the Bible of the English-speaking world; more slowly, it became the Bible acclaimed as literature both for the great original literature which it represented and for the quality of its language.

The translators would have been astonished to find their work acclaimed as literature, and many of them would have been horrified. Wyclif, for instance, condemns priests

who preach tricks and lies [japes and gabbings]; for God's word must always be true if it is properly understood … And certainly that priest is to be censured who so freely has the Gospel, and leaves the preaching of it and turns to men's fables … And God does not ask for divisions or rhymes of him that should preach, but that he should speak of God's Gospel and words to stir men thereby.¹

Similarly, Tyndale reviles the popular literature of his time while condemning the Catholic Church's refusal to let the people read the Bible:

that this threatening and forbidding the lay people to read the Scripture is not for the love of your souls … is evident and clearer than the sun; inasmuch as they permit and suffer you to read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus, with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantonness, and of ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think, to corrupt the minds of youth withal, clean contrary to the doctrine of Christ and his apostles.²

Fundamentally, literature is a lying alternative to the book of truth.

Whatever we now think of the achievement of the translators must be set against an awareness that the creation of literature was no part of their intention. As the reception of the translators' work is followed, we will see that there was a long period in which the thought that they might have created something worthy of literary admiration would have seemed laughable. The much-repeated modern idea that the KJB is a literary masterpiece represents a reversal of literary opinion as striking as any in the whole history of English literature. One of the prime purposes of this book is to trace and account for this reversal.

Wyclif and his followers and, later, Tyndale and Coverdale were all educated as Catholics and did not necessarily set out to be enemies of the Roman Church, but they found themselves in conflict with it on the inseparable issues of the comprehensibility and the source of truth. In essence the Church was committed to a mystery religion of which it was the infallible guardian and interpreter. In this mystery the Bible was but one source of truth. The Church, directly guided by God, had laboriously developed a theological tradition based on interpretation of the Bible and the wisdom of the Fathers and their successors. The Bible alone was not enough - it was too difficult, too easily misunderstood. The Church, with the Bible and so much more, was the source of truth; moreover, the preservation of its secrets in an occult language to which it alone had access confirmed its power.

Naively, the translators might not see their work as challenging the established theology, but to give the people a basis on which to come at their own sense of the truth was to challenge the Church's power and inevitably to split Christendom. That the Church resisted this was not just a case of an institution protecting its power. Truth, power and the possession of Latin seemed inseparable. If the Church had spent centuries building up an inspired knowledge of the truth, with all the coherence that such knowledge must have, the poor uneducated individual, struggling to teach himself from the Bible alone, could not possibly come to know the truth as the Church knew it. For common men Christianity must remain a mystery religion: the salvation of their souls was at issue.

Forces of opposition, worldly and spiritual, gathered round the act of translation. The Church had grown ignorant, corrupt, hungry for power and money. Truth had to be rediscovered to reform or break its power and to bring about the same issue, salvation. If the Church was no longer credible as the voice of God, there was one possible and one sure place to find it, the inspired heart of the individual, and the Bible. Older translators such as Jerome had worked within the Church, facing scholarly and linguistic challenges only, but now language and the possession of the Bible were a major religious battlefront and the translators were in the front line, facing the enormous challenge of rediscovering the truth and creating a new church. The religious responsibility of translating had never been higher.

For the Church, translation and heresy went hand in hand, but the early heretics were still sons of the Church and could not, even if Tyndale wished to, rid themselves of the belief that the Bible was difficult. They had learnt that there were levels of meaning beyond the literal, they had learnt too that every detail of the text was to be pressed for its sacred meaning. This might all seem a heritage of moribund pedantry but it could not be dismissed. The words they chose would not be the whole truth and might perhaps be no more than the beginnings of truth, but they would certainly be examined minutely: if the scholarly did not dismiss them out of hand, they would examine them for their fidelity to the detail of the text (that is, the Vulgate), and if the unscholarly were to use them as the translators wished, it would be with an equal, though sympathetic, attention. Further, the people Tyndale and Coverdale worked for would have the translation alone as the key to truth: such people could not use it as a way to the genuinely sacred text, Latin, Greek or Hebrew, nor could they use it side by side with other translations as an approximation to the truth; they could not even use it with a gloss, since vernacular commentary on the text had yet to be created. The translation had to be, as nearly as possible, perfect in itself.

The challenge to attain accuracy was, from these points of view, enormous. The translators had available to them no sophisticated theory of how accuracy might be achieved, nor did they spend much time developing such a theory. The simple answer was to be, in the first place, literal. Consequent on these overwhelming pressures and this simple answer were other challenges, the first being to make the translation comprehensible to the people.

Roughly, there are four levels of language available to translators, the literal (wherein the vocabulary, idiom and structure of the original language dominate the new language), the common, the literary and the ecclesiastical. All four can be subdivided and each can merge into the other. Ecclesiastical English had yet to be created, and English, in spite of the achievements we now recognise in the late medieval period, and even in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times of the KJB translators, had no prestige as a literary language. Given the early translators' hostility to the literary, it is hardly likely they would have used such a register even if it had had some prestige.

Thus the only kind of English acceptable as a first move beyond the literal was common English, and this fitted Tyndale's ideal of making the Bible, at its verbal level, comprehensible to the people. But the common language presents its own challenges. Beyond the fact that it shades into a variety of dialects and may have no established standard, there is the question of its expressive adequacy. When in doubt, older translators had not scrupled to borrow from the original languages, but if the English translators were to do the equivalent and borrow from the Vulgate, they would not only be departing from the common language but also retaining the language of the Roman Church. The linguistic issue was again clouded by the battle of the Reformation. Further, there is the complex matter of prestige. Unless special circumstances such as a reaction against excesses in literary language exist to give prestige to the common language, it is the lowest form of the language. On the other hand the Bible was the highest of books, and there is, usually, a desire to have the prestige of the language match that of the book, that is, a desire to have the feeling evoked by the language match the divine heights of the meaning. Literal translation, with its mysterious dislocations of language and novelties of vocabulary, may perhaps produce some feeling of awe, but a common language version, lacking any such strangeness, demeans. In moving beyond the literal, the early translators had little choice but to abase the Scriptures; if there was a challenge to preserve the prestige of the Bible, it was reserved for their successors.

The early Reformation especially was a time for heroes—heroes on both sides, Sir Thomas More as much as Tyndale. Persecution was inevitable, the martyr's bitter crown likely. Beyond the enormous challenge to definition and accuracy, beyond the challenge to common clarity, there were the challenges of simply finding the courage to work, and then of finding ways of staying alive to prosecute the work and, somehow, to publish it. There were the difficulties of textual scholarship, of discovering the true original texts, of learning Greek and Hebrew with little or no aid from the scholarship of others, there was the sheer size of the undertaking—and so onehis could go on. The modern scholar, safely salaried in a university, free to pursue his studies with ready access to an enormous accumulated community of learning, can only stand in awe that the work was achieved at all, and he must guess that the early translators must have possessed a certain simplicity not to be daunted into silence by the weight of the task and the pressures of the time. That simplicity, perhaps, mitigated the challenges sketched here: they had to shut their eyes, deafen their ears and work as best they could. Hasty, instinctive answers to enormous problems must often have had to suffice. In short, the reality of getting the work done, the greatest challenge of all, must have rendered manageable all the other challenges.

The later translators, from William Whittingham and his colleagues at Geneva to the scholars assembled under the auspices of King James, were all, more or less, revisers rather than pioneers. Their work was not attended by the same perilous, solitary urgency that had been Tyndale and Coverdale's lot, and the changing nature of their task may readily be imagined. It will be of central interest to see if they believed themselves able to go beyond questions of scholarly accuracy and theological definition to tackle as artists the question of the English of the Bible.

.....

WILLIAM TYNDALE

INTRODUCTION

William Tyndale (?1494-1536) rightly believed himself to be a pioneer. He wrote of his work, ‘I had no man to counterfeit [imitate], neither was helped with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the Scripture beforetime’ (1526 NT, p. 15). The Wyclif Bible had been largely suppressed so that he was working almost without English precedent to open the Bible anew to the people. He had to invent his own appropriate English. No subsequent English translators, not even his immediate successor, Myles Coverdale, ever again found themselves in this situation. Tyndale's English became the model for biblical English and he is indeed the father of English biblical translation. From a larger perspective, Sir Thomas More's jibe at the deficiencies of his English vocabulary, that they were such that ‘all England list now to go to school with Tyndale to learn English’ (Works, VIII: 187), has turned out true: more of our English is ultimately learnt from Tyndale than from any other writer of English prose, and many erstwhile illiterates did indeed ‘go to school with Tyndale’ and his successors.

One such illiterate was William Maldon. His story not only shows the connection between Tyndale's work and reading but movingly illustrates the internecine strength of the conflict over the vernacular Bible. He relates that when he was a young man in the reign of Henry VIII

divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford in the county of Essex where my father dwelt and I born and with him brought up, the said poor men bought the New Testament of Jesus Christ and on Sundays did sit reading in lower end of church, and many would flock about them to hear their reading, then I came among the said readers to hear them reading of that glad and sweet tidings of the gospel, then my father seeing this that I listened unto them every Sunday, then came he and sought me among them, and brought me away from the hearing of them, and would have me to say the Latin matins with him, the which grieved me very much, and thus did fetch me away divers times, then I see I could not be in rest, then thought I, I will learn to read English, and then I will have the New Testament and read thereon myself, and then had I learned of an English primer as far as patris sapientia and then on Sundays I plied my English primer, the Maytide following I and my father's apprentice, Thomas Jeffary laid our money together, and bought the New Testament in English, and hid it in our bedstraw and so exercised it at convenient times.

(Pollard, p. 115)

As a consequence of this reading he argued with his mother about worshipping graven images and was beaten by his father. Believing that he was beaten for Christ's sake, he did not weep. This so enraged his father, who thought him past grace, that he attempted to hang him; William was only rescued by the intervention of his mother and his brother. He concludes, ‘I think six days after my neck grieved me with the pulling of the halter’.

Tyndale translated more than half the Bible before he was martyred, the NT, the OT to the end of 2 Chronicles, and Jonah.³ This work put his stamp—his far more than anyone else's—on the language we now know from the KJB. For a long time his achievement went unremarked, and indeed could hardly have been expected to receive much recognition until after its familiar descendant, the language of the KJB, had achieved a solid reputation for excellence. Now few who have read in his translations or controversial works would dissent from C.S. Lewis's judgement that he was ‘the best prose writer of his age’ (‘Literary impact’, p. 34).

‘His influence,’ writes Brooke Foss Westcott, ‘decided that our Bible should be popular and not literary, speaking in a simple dialect, and that so by its simplicity it should be endowed with permanence. He felt by a happy instinct the potential affinity between Hebrew and English idioms, and enriched our language and thought for ever with the characteristics of the Semitic mind’.⁴ ‘Literary’ is used here to describe consciously fine writing: thereby the paradox of Tyndale's achievement is well recorded, for it was not literary in that sense and yet it was ‘endowed with permanence’ and has ‘enriched our language and thought’. To be so influential is an outstanding literary achievement, but it does not necessarily follow that Tyndale deliberately set out to create English of literary quality. The present perception of his achievement, so well demonstrated in David Daniell's Biography, has to be set aside for the time being in order to see just what real evidence there is both of his intentions and of his sense of the Bible as literature.

This is not to deny the value of literary appreciation of his translation, but to recognise that a writer may, in spite of himself, achieve something later acclaimed as literature. It is also to restore to something like equivalent value earlier opinions of Tyndale. These different perceptions may well have had as much value in their time as we now feel the modern literary appreciation has. The present study is not a study of achievement but of what people thought they were trying to achieve and of the perception of achievement.

LOVE FOR ‘THE SWEET PITH WITHIN’

To turn to Tyndale's own writings on the Bible and on Bible translation is to see at once that he was a scholar who loved the Bible, and to be confronted with the fact that the language the early English translators use to describe the Bible appears to be full of literary implications. The appearance is usually false. Thomas Bilney (c. 1495-1531), a contemporary of Tyndale's, also a Cambridge man and a martyr, has left an account of his conversion and responses to the Bible which shows the kind of distinction which has so often to be made. His initial response was to the language (this time the language was Erasmus's Latin of 1516): ‘but at last I heard speak of Jesus, even then when the New Testament was first set forth by Erasmus; which when I understood to be eloquently done by him, being allured rather by the Latin than by the word of God (for at that time I knew not what it meant), I bought it’. Bilney's original desire to read the Bible, then, was literary: he wished to read it for its style. Literary pleasure was enough so long as he did not know the real meaning of the word of God, but when that real meaning reached him a new pleasure took over: it is described in the same kind of language, but it is clearly not a literary pleasure. Rather, it is a delight in the meaning:

and at the first reading (as I well remember) I chanced upon this sentence of St Paul (O most sweet and comfortable sentence to my soul!) in 1 Tim. 1, ‘it is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be embraced, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief and principal.’ This one sentence, through God's instruction and inward working, which I did not then perceive, did so exhilarate my heart, being before wounded with the guilt of my sins, and being almost in despair, that even immediately I seemed unto myself inwardly to feel a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that ‘my bruised bones leaped for joy.’

After this the Scripture began to be more pleasant unto me than the honey or the honey-comb.

(Foxe, Acts and Monuments, IV: 635)

The imagery is from the Psalms: ‘my bruised bones leaped for joy’ is a version of Ps. 51:8, describing the Psalmist's response to hearing the ‘joy and gladness’ of God's truth; ‘more pleasant unto me than the honey or the honey-comb’ is part of the Psalmist's description of ‘the statutes of the Lord’ (Ps. 19:10). Traced to their source, the images are not of literary love but of a love for God's truth. Bilney goes on to write that he ‘began to taste and savour of this heavenly lesson’. Pleasure in the Scriptures, then, naturally described in terms that seem now to imply literary pleasure, can readily exist as something distinct and much superior, a pleasure in their content or Truth.

Tyndale calls this the pith of the Scriptures, and his love is for the pith. If an identifiable literary love is also present, then it must be searched out with care to avoid confusion with this primary religious love. Of Tyndale's many statements of the true nature of Scripture, the opening of his ‘Prologue showing the use of the Scripture’ prefixed to Genesis (1530) is the most useful, especially as it anticipates the resounding question in the preface to the KJB, ‘is the kingdom of God become words or syllables?’:

Though a man had a precious jewel and a rich, yet if he wist not the value thereof nor wherefore it served, he were neither the better nor richer of a straw. Even so though we read the Scripture and babble of it never so much, yet if we know not the use of it, and wherefore it was given, and what is therein to be sought, it profiteth us nothing at all. It is not enough therefore to read and talk of it only, but we must also desire God day and night instantly to open our eyes, and to make us understand and feel wherefore the Scripture was given, that we may apply the medicine of the Scripture, every man to his own sores, unless that we intend to be idle disputers, and brawlers about vain words, ever gnawing upon the bitter bark without and never attaining unto the sweet pith within, and persecuting one another for defending of lewd imaginations and fantasies of our own invention.⁵

Aptly incorporated in this is an allusion to Paul on the necessity of what we know as ‘charity’ but which Tyndale, to the disgust of More, translated ‘love’: ‘and though I bestowed all my goods to feed the poor, and though I gave my body even that I burned, and yet had no love, it profiteth me nothing’ (1 Cor. 13:3; Tyndale, 1534). Love is the heart of Tyndale's idea of the Scriptures. They are a precious jewel to those who love them, that is, those who have been given, like Bilney, the gift of understanding and feeling by God. Scripture demands an inner response expressible in the same terms used for literary response, but it is ‘the sweet pith within’, not ‘the bitter bark without’ - the divine message, not the words—which is to be felt and loved.

There are two principal aspects to Tyndale's emphasis on the meaning of the Scriptures, feeling and study. He gives definitive priority to feeling, writing repeatedly of the essential purity and brightness of the Scriptures and of how this can only be perceived by those who read or hear them with the true spirit and therefore feel their meaning. This is the simple belief that mitigates the challenges of translation. In his own words, ‘if our hearts were taught the appointment made between God and us in Christ's blood when we were baptized, we had the key to open the Scripture and light to see and perceive the true meaning of it, and the Scripture should be easy to understand’.⁶

If this baptismal precondition is met in the heart, then study is also appropriate, but, just as the feeling is not a literary feeling, so too the study is not literary, and is indeed explicitly opposed to the kind of attention popular literature receives. First he insists that Scripture has ‘one simple literal sense’ (OT, p. 4), a sense which is nevertheless spiritual, for ‘God is a spirit, and all his words are spiritual’ (DT, p. 309). This immediately distinguishes Scripture from literature, for literature is carnal, as are readings of the Bible that lack the baptismal feeling. He repeatedly encourages the true reader to ‘cleave unto the text and plain story and endeavour thyself to search out the meaning of all that is described therein and the true sense of all manner of speakings of the Scripture’ (OT, p. 84). Such searching out pays particular attention to what he calls ‘the process, order and meaning of the text’. ‘Process’ means ‘argument’ or the larger context of a passage, ‘order’ the immediate context. He is thus insistent on contextual reading and believes firmly that the light places will illuminate the dark. The need for such careful contextual reading as the key to religious truth is, he claims, his prime motive for translation. After objecting to the Church's traditional methods of exposition, he writes:

Which thing only moved me to translate the New Testament. Because I had perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text: for else whatsoever truth is taught them, these enemies of all truth quench it again.

(OT, p. 4)

The end result of this love and careful reading of the Scriptures is learning and comfort, or the application of medicine to the soul. He sums up his sense of the Scriptures and their effect thus:

All the Scripture is either the promises and testament of God in Christ, and stories pertaining thereunto, to strength thy faith; either the law, and stories pertaining thereto, to fear thee from evil doing. There is no story nor gest, seem it never so simple or so vile unto the world, but that thou shalt find therein spirit and life and edifying in the literal sense: for it is God's Scripture, written for thy learning and comfort.

(DT, p. 310)

This enforces a sense of religious purpose: nothing in it would have suggested literary quality to Tyndale's contemporaries. Nevertheless, some literary sense of the Bible may be inferred. It seems that ‘the world’ denigrated some Bible stories as simple and vile, and he is trying to reform these opinions. Such a reformation could have a literary aspect in addition to the theological purpose, but only a tantalizing glimpse of this possibility emerges, for nowhere does Tyndale develop the idea in a recognisably literary way.

Tyndale's emphasis on reading the Scriptures with the proper feeling for them could have led him to present the text alone. There is some suggestion in his earlier writing that he believed that the meaning of the Bible was open enough for the reader with the right spirit ‘that if thou wilt go in and read, thou canst not but understand’ (p. 27). This is part of the same feeling that led to the Lollards' desire for their translation to be ‘as open or opener’ than the Latin [see above]. It is natural that Tyndale should wish for this to be so: it removes the need for the controlling interpretative tradition of the Church at the same time as making the open Bible appear incapable of producing erroneous reading. However, this represents more optimism than real belief. A bare text, by leaving the reader's imagination most room to work, would be most liable to secular literary reading (to say nothing of heresy).⁷ In fact, the first complete edition of his NT (1526) was such a bare text, but this reflects circumstances beyond his control, not his deliberate intention: in keeping with his insistence on precise contextual reading, and his real recognition that Scripture did offer dark places, he had intended that this edition, like his later translations and editions, should contain explanatory notes. He believed that ‘it is not enough to have translated, though it were the whole Scripture into the vulgar and common tongue, except we also brought again the light to understand it by, and expel that dark cloud which the hypocrites have spread over the face of the Scripture to blind the right sense and true meaning thereof’ (Ex, p. 144). So his aborted first edition (1525) was substantially annotated.

The emphasis on feeling coupled with the emphasis on the pith could also have led Tyndale to conceive of paraphrase as the appropriate way of presenting the Scriptures to the people, but again the concern with studying the meaning led him to reject this option. His objection to ‘idle disputers and brawlers about vain words’ [see above] was to the medieval schoolmen who had, he believed, lost all feel for the meaning of Scripture. He maintained the old belief in the detailed significance of the text, and this prevented him from paraphrasing. So, when considering how his work might be improved, he writes:

If I shall perceive either by myself or by information of other that ought be escaped me, or might more plainly be translated, I will shortly after, cause it to be mended. Howbeit in many places me thinketh it better to put a declaration in the margin than to run too far from the text. And in many places, where the text seemeth at the first chop hard to be understood, yet the circumstances before and after, and often reading together, make it plain enough.

(NT, 1534, p. 3)

This is his resolution of the problems of translation and presentation of the Truth: to seek for the greatest plainness, to keep close to the original, to gloss where necessary, and to teach his readers how to read the Bible. He is indeed a lover of the Bible, but not of the Bible as literature, and he is ultimately a scholar.

There are perhaps contradictions evident in these attitudes, especially between his insistence on the luminance of the Scriptures for the pure in heart, and his recognition of the difficulties of the Scriptures, between his objection to glossing and his insistence on glossing, and between his objection to non-literal interpretation and his insistence that the literal meaning is spiritual. No more need be made of this than to suggest that it would not be surprising to find a degree of contradictoriness in another area: the conclusion that his idea of the Bible is emphatically non-literary may have to co-exist with the recognition that he brought some literary awareness, to say nothing of his literary talent as it is now perceived, to his work. Yet, as one turns to search for evidence of this awareness a single fact stands out: all of Tyndale's own writing apart from his translations is theological, and the evidence for the attitudes so far described abounds. Direct statements of literary awareness and considerations are, relatively, as rare as husks in well-milled corn. Beyond the stylistic decision of major literary consequence that he would translate as simply and clearly as possible, a decision that was of course made for religious reasons, literary questions hardly mattered to him.

LUTHER AND ERASMUS

If Tyndale needed influence for the decision to be simple and clear, it came from Erasmus and Luther, both of whom he greatly admired, and later, in a minor way, from More, whom he did not admire. Martin Luther (1483-1546), ‘this christian Hercules, this heroic cleanser of the Augean stable of apostasy’,⁸ is of course the towering figure of the Reformation, and he did as much for the German Bible and language as Tyndale did for the English. He seems to have given more thought to the linguistic responsibilities of a translator than Tyndale, and the result is not only an influence but an important contrast.

First, he loved the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, and this love had in it a degree of explicit literary appreciation not found in English writers of the time.⁹ His ‘Preface to the Psalms’ is full of literary as well as religious praise, and he even writes of them as having ‘more eloquence than that possessed by Cicero or the greatest of the orators’.¹⁰ This is enough to suggest a very different temper from the English in German ideas of the Bible as literature. Nevertheless, he conceived of the language of the Bible, particularly the OT Hebrew, as simple and lowly, so unliterary in fact that it is capable of giving offence. His conclusion is, ‘simple and lowly are these swaddling clothes, but dear is the treasure, Christ, who lies in them’.¹¹

Luther aimed at clarity and accuracy, but he had a further aim, to write good German. In general this aim led him away from literal translation, though occasionally in particularly tricky passages he put literalism ahead of naturalness.¹² His idea of good German is the idiomatic German of ‘the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace’, for his Bible is for them (IV: 181). In this way his idea of his language fits his idea of the Bible's language, simple and lowly both. Even so, he describes himself as working with the care of an artist like Flaubert or Virgil: ‘I have constantly tried,’ he writes, ‘in translating, to produce a pure and clear German, and it has often happened that for two or three or four weeks we have searched and inquired for a single word and sometimes not found it even then’ (IV: 180). This language is to be both clear and vigorous, and he takes an artist's pride in his enemy Emser's admission that his ‘German is sweet and good’ (IV: 176). Lastly, and very importantly, he sees himself as teaching Germans their own language: he was deliberately doing what More had sarcastically but rightly suggested Tyndale was doing.

These ideas are similar to Erasmus's ideas of the Bible language and of vernacular translation, which is hardly surprising since Luther's NT depended on Erasmus's work. In Enchiridion Militis Christiani, a work that Tyndale translated, Erasmus describes the language of the Bible as humble. It is imaged as manna, and part of Erasmus's interpretation of it as manna is this: ‘in that it is small or little in quantity is signified the humility, lowliness or homeliness of the style, under rude words including great mystery’.¹³ He also sees the Scripture as ‘somewhat hard and some deal rough and sharp’ (pp. 44-5), and later writes that ‘the wisdom of God stuttereth and lispeth as it were a diligent mother, fashioneth her words according to our infancy and feebleness … She stoopeth down and boweth herself to thy humility and lowness’ (p. 50).

Erasmus returned to this idea in his Paraclesis which prefaces his 1516 edition of his Greek and Latin NT. It adds one important element to his sense of the nature of the Bible by beginning with a desire for eloquence. This eloquence is to be ‘far different than Cicero's’ and ‘certainly much more efficacious, if less ornate’;¹⁴ it is to be modelled on the Bible, and Erasmus believes that the Bible, for all its lowness, is the most moving of writing. If he cannot achieve the eloquence he desires, yet the biblical model will be sufficient:

if there were any power of song which truly could inspire … I would desire that it be at hand for me so that I might convince all of the most wholesome truth of all. However, it is more desirable that Christ Himself, whose business we are about, so guide the strings of our lyre that this song might deeply affect and move the minds of all … What we desire is that nothing may stand forth with greater certainty than the truth itself, whose expression is the more powerful the simpler it is.

(p. 94)

This, because it takes biblical eloquence as secondbest, is a backhanded acclamation of simplicity as eloquence, especially when set against Luther, but it is significant nonetheless. Whether this or Luther's attitude and example gave Tyndale a sense of literary possibilities in simplicity is impossible to tell, but in Erasmus it precedes his wish that there should be vernacular translations of the Scriptures so that ‘even the lowliest woman’ may read them and so that the uneducated may enjoy them: ‘would that … the farmer sing some portion of them at the plough, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind’ (p. 97). Literary and religious enjoyment seem inseparable here, and this passage rang in Tyndale's mind as he formed his resolution to translate the Bible. Though he never writes of the lowness of the Bible, and never advocates literary enjoyment, Foxe reports him as saying to a clerical opponent in the heat of an argument, ‘if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost’.¹⁵ The echo is obvious, but the deletion, even in a spontaneous remark, of suggestions of pleasure, and the use of ‘know’ in all probability show the final distance between the two men. If the whole context of Erasmus and Luther's ideas of eloquence and the Bible lived on in Tyndale's mind, then it was as an undercurrent to the main tide of his ideas. Nevertheless, these ideas of simple eloquence in the Bible do anticipate the eventual acclamation of Tyndale's English for plough-boys as great English.

TYNDALE, THOMAS MORE AND ENGLISH

There is one passage in which Tyndale seems to give real evidence of a conscious literary sense both of his own work and of the originals from which he worked. It needs to be read in the light of a related passage in which he uses what sounds to modern ears an exceedingly interesting phrase, ‘proper English’. In his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ at the end of his 1526 NT, he reviews ways in which the work might be improved:

In time to come … we will give it his full shape: and put out if ought be added superfluously: and add to if ought be overseen through negligence: and will enforce to bring to compendiousness, that which is now translated at the length, and to give light where it is required, and to seek in certain places more proper English, and with a table to expound the words which are not commonly used, and show how the Scripture useth many words, which are otherwise understood of the common people: and to help with a declaration where one tongue taketh not another. And will endeavour ourselves, as it were to seethe it better, and to make it more apt for the weak stomachs.

(1526 NT, p. 15)

As a whole this repeats the point that Tyndale is concerned with accuracy and clarity. In detail it defines areas of concern, first to avoid amplification or omission, second with accuracy and clarity of vocabulary, third with different characteristics of different languages. ‘Proper English’, which at first sight suggests English of good quality, in fact means ‘accurate’ or ‘literal’ English. It is one aspect of the problem of ‘one tongue taking another’. This use of ‘proper English’ would already have been apparent had Rolle's passage about translation not been modernised, for the phrase that is given as ‘I find no exact English equivalent’ reads in the original, ‘I fynde na propir Inglys’ [see above]. The point is clear in what is effectively Tyndale's first draft of this epistle, the prologue to the unique copy of his 1525 NT. There he beseeches

those that are better seen in the tongues than I, and that have higher gifts of grace to interpret the sense of the Scripture and meaning of the spirit than I … if they perceive in any places that I have not attained the very sense of the tongue, or meaning of the Scripture, or have not given the right English word, that they put to their hands to amend it.

(Daniell, Biography, p. 120)

‘Proper English’ clearly means ‘the right English word’, and the only considerations here are sense and meaning.

The key passage must be read in the light of this evidence. It was published two years after the epistle in the preface to The Obedience of a Christian Man. Tyndale turns bitterly on those who oppose the vernacular Bible:

Saint Jerome also translated the Bible into his mother tongue: why may not we also? They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. 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; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.

(DT, pp. 148-9)

This is a defence against the prevailing view that English cannot properly express the Latin meaning because it lacks the features of Latin grammar, and because it is an aesthetically inferior language. Most of Tyndale's reply is to the first point: he concedes the grammatical differences between English and Latin, and the consequent difficulties of translation, but argues that Greek to some extent and Hebrew to a huge extent are grammatically and syntactically compatible with English. The result is that one may frequently be literal without violating the natural structure of English.¹⁶ His principal point is that English is a good instrument for accurate representation of the originals, especially of the Hebrew. Not only is it a good instrument: on these grounds it is a better instrument than Latin.

Do Tyndale's apparently aesthetic terms, ‘well-favouredly’, and ‘grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding’, go beyond an idea of linguistic correspondence and deliberately invoke a literary sense? What would once have seemed the obvious answer, that they do, now becomes doubtful. ‘Grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding’ consists entirely of words that in Tyndale have theological weight. ‘Well-favouredly’, preceding them, does however give them some aesthetic weight, since he uses ‘well-favoured’ with connotations of beauty, as in ‘Rachel was beautiful and well-favoured’ (Gen. 29:17).

Tyndale does not quite deal with the question of the perceived aesthetic deficiencies of English. Probably he is thinking of translating well-favouredly as translating into good English, that is, English which follows the normal syntax, grammar and vocabulary of English, as far as there is a sense of what is normal. Tyndale does indeed use the phrase ‘good English’ on one occasion, in response to an aspect of Sir Thomas More's (1478-1535) criticism of his ideas and work, criticism which includes more discussion of the linguistic responsibilities of a translator of the Bible than is to be found in Tyndale. In all probability, More increased Tyndale's awareness of these reponsibilities.

More's chief concern is with heretical tendencies in the translation. Among these is the choice of certain words through which, with some justification, he sees Tyndale as attacking the teaching and practice of the Church. Some of these choices More attacks not only because they have heretical tendencies but because they are poor English, and this leads him to suggest some linguistic principles of translation in the later of his two works against Tyndale, The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (1532).

In the earlier work, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), More instances some false translations of words, refers to the difficulties of translation and responds to the argument against English. Discussing Tyndale's use of ‘seniors’ for ‘priests’, ‘congregation’ for ‘Church’ and ‘love’ for ‘charity’, he observes that ‘these names in our English tongue neither express the thing that he meant by them, and also there appeareth … that he had a mischievous mind in the change’ (Works, VI: 286). In particular he comments of ‘senior’ that in English it ‘signifieth nothing at all, but is a French word used in English more than half in mockage’, that it misrepresents the Latin and in fact in English signifies an alderman. His primary point is that Tyndale will use any word rather than call a priest a priest. Tyndale accepted the linguistic point only: ‘of a truth senior is no very good English, though senior and junior be used in the universities; but there came no better in my mind at that time. Howbeit, I spied my fault since, long ere Mr More told it me, and have mended it in all the works which I since made, and call it an elder’ (Answer, p. 16). This is clear evidence not only of the theological pressures on translation but of Tyndale's care for ‘good English’, that is appropriate English usage, and of More's role in bringing out this awareness.¹⁷

In The Confutation More develops the linguistic point, arguing that ‘Tyndale must in his English translation take his English words as they signify in English, rather than as the words signify in the tongue out of which they were taken in to the English’ (VIII: 201; see also VIII: 187). Thus in almost playful mood, he writes, ‘though I cannot make him by no mean to write true matter, I would have him yet at the least wise write true English’ (VIII: 232). He demonstrates his ideas of true English by discussing the appropriate use of certain words, and points of grammar: More has a clear sense of English as a language with its own proprieties. He is ready not only to correct Tyndale's choice of words but also his grammar and his style. Although he recognises the dangers of translation and the difficulties of keeping ‘the same sentence whole’ (VI: 315), he believes Tyndale too often follows the word order of his originals to the detriment of both sense and English style (VIII: 236). As an example he proposes an alternative translation of John 1:1, remarking, ‘I say not this to show that I think that Tyndale meant any evil by this, nor I impugn not in this point his translation so greatly, but it may be borne: but I say the other is in English better and more clear’ (p. 237).

More, like Tyndale, respects English as a language. The Messenger in A Dialogue comments that opponents of vernacular translation ‘say further that it is hard to translate the Scripture out of one tongue into another, and specially they say into ours. Which they call a tongue vulgar and barbarous’ (VI: 333). More answers that those who will translate ‘well and faithfully’ can do so from Latin to English: ‘for as for that our tongue is called barbarous is but a fantasy. For so is as every learned man knoweth every strange language to other. And if they would call it barren of words, there is no doubt but it is plenteous enough to express our minds in any thing whereof one man hath used to speak with another’ (VI: 337). He concedes there may be a loss in the translation, a loss either of meaning or of aesthetic quality, but this loss is no more on translation into English than it is into any other language. Most important here is the assumption that the translator will naturally strive to give his work some aesthetic quality:

Now as touching the difficulty which a translator findeth in expressing well and lively the sentence of his author, which is hard always to do so surely but that he shall sometime minish either of the sentence or of the grace that it beareth in the former tongue, that point hath lain in their light [been known to them] that have translated the Scripture already either out of Greek into Latin or out of Hebrew into any of them both.

(VI: 337)

Tyndale's work, it is worth noting, does not appear to have been attacked by his contemporaries on the ground that he diminished the literary qualities of the Scriptures. The possibility is there in More's arguments but the issue was not perceived as a real one at that time. A closely related charge was more pressing, though it surfaced only once at this time. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal, whose patronage Tyndale had sought in 1523, attempted in 1526 to suppress the NT. He writes in his prohibition of Lutheran ‘children of iniquity’ who ‘have craftily translated the New Testament into our English tongue … attempting by their wicked and perverse interpretations to profane the majesty of Scripture, which hitherto had remained undefiled, and craftily to abuse the most holy word of God and the true sense of the same’ (Daniell, Biography, p. 190). The charge of falsification was to be the major one, but it is interesting that at this early stage the charge of profaning the majesty of the Scriptures comes first. Essentially it is a complaint that the occult power or holy beauty of the Scriptures has been lost.

This is an important issue in translation. The early translators were necessarily concerned with meaning, but words can be magical as well as meaningful, and their magic may be more important than their meaning, especially when that magic is felt to be their religious essence. An anecdote, normally told to illustrate clerical ignorance, well illustrates this. About the time Tyndale was working, ‘a certain boorish English priest’ was discovered to be mis-reciting in the Mass, ‘quod in ore mumpsimus’. When told that the correct word was ‘sumpsimus’, ‘he replied that he didn't want to change his old “mumpsimus” for some new “sumpsimus”’.¹⁸ Whether or not this proves anything about clerical ignorance, it is true to people's attitudes to the familiar, if incomprehended, sound of their religious formulae. The old priest's adherence to ‘mumpsimus’ was more than mere conservatism: to have changed ‘mumpsimus’ to ‘sumpsimus’ would have been, for him, to undermine the accepted magic of his religious devotion without enlightening him in any real way. A literally-understood religious text, one has to say, is a sine qua non neither of religious or moral teaching, nor of religious feeling.

To say this is to make a point not about theology but about the psychology of religion. According to one's theological viewpoint, one may argue that the text interpreted through the accumulated wisdom of the religious consensus is essential to religion, in which case the consensus, as represented by the Church, may well be considered to be the most essential factor. Alternatively one may argue that the directly encountered meaning of the text is fundamental. These opposing ideas are not simply a case of Catholic against Protestant ideas, as all Churches, no matter how important personal reading of the Bible is to them, are based on their own religious consensus, and all have their own interpretations of the text.

At the centre of the charge of profaning the Scripture is the distinction between sacred and profane. In this respect ‘majesty’ is important. Tunstal, writing in Latin, uses it in the literal Latin sense which became the earliest English sense, ‘the greatness and glory of God’ (OED 1b), or ‘the incomprehensible greatness of God’ (Wilson, Christian Dictionary, 1616). The most revealing English use comes in the KJB's rendering of Psalm 29 which calls its reader to ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ (v. 2), and then builds up a description of ‘the voice of the Lord’, including this: ‘the voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty’ (v. 4). This could be read as a description of the Bible, since the Bible is the voice of the Lord. ‘Majesty’, it seems from the parallelism, connotes power: it is part of ‘the beauty of holiness’ (a phrase the KJB uses several times). It is the divine word which comes closest to the secular idea of literary beauty. Yet it was not, in the time of the translators, a literary or secular word. It belonged with ‘faith’ and ‘truth’.

More's insistence on a translator's responsibility to his own language must have moved Tyndale towards a more conscious awareness of his use of English, and Tyndale's Answer shows signs of this. Further signs can be seen in some of the revisions he made for his later editions, many of which can be accounted for on no other grounds than a care for the quality of his English.¹⁹ However, this care is essentially for the clarity and naturalness of the language, something that would now be recognised as a literary virtue. To take one example, he accepts More's comments on his rendering of John 1:1, ‘in the beginning was that word, and that word was with God and God was that word’, that he should have used ‘the’, not ‘that’, and that ‘God was that word’ is not the appropriate word order for English, even though it is the Greek and Latin order. The result is our familiar rendering, ‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was God’.²⁰

Tyndale did not reply to The Confutation, but it seems More's comments on his language were made to good effect. Whether Tyndale would again claim that he spied his faults ere More told him them matters little since many of his revisions show the two men at one on questions of language where theology is not at issue. This leaves a picture of Tyndale as a devout scholar who never considered the Bible as a work of literature but who nevertheless took great care with his English. His care above all was for accuracy in representing the originals, then for clarity (which might sometimes have to be achieved through glossing since he tried to avoid expanding or contracting the original), lastly for fidelity to his sense of the proprieties of English grammar and vocabulary. There is only one explicit suggestion that he considered matters of style beyond the proprieties, his use of ‘well-favouredly’: any further sense of his bringing aesthetic considerations to his work must be deduced from literary criticism of his translation carried out with due awareness of the context within which he worked.

No one reading what Tyndale says would be led to a literary sense of the Bible, but as soon as one begins to read him (or, to a lesser extent, More) with an eye and an ear to how he expresses himself, it is obvious that, for all the denigration, English of the early sixteenth century could be a very powerful language. What he says and how he says it, a despised yet powerful language—these are teasing contrasts not to be resolved here. At their heart is the conflict between past and present attitudes. Tyndale was a primary creator of our well-favoured language; moreover, the present century is particularly well-disposed to pithy, rhythmic, unpretentious writing. We see him as a master of common English, but his own time saw him differently. At first his language seemed too far removed from the common, then it seemed too common.

JOHN CHEKE AND THE INKHORN

More desired that Tyndale should ‘at the least write true English’, and Tyndale was aware that he used ‘words which are not commonly used’ and ‘which are otherwise understood of the common people’ [see above]. Sir John Cheke (1514-57), first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, addressed the problem of true common English: ‘that, indeed, was Cheke's conceit’, writes his biographer, Strype, ‘that in writing English none but English words should be used, thinking it a dishonour to our mother tongue to be beholden to other nations for their words and phrases to express our minds. Upon this account, Cheke seemed to dislike the English translation of the Bible, because in it were so many foreign words’.²¹ Consequently, he translated Matthew and the beginning of Mark, avoiding words of Latin origin (and attempting also to reform spelling). This incomplete and rough work was not published until 1843.²² It can hardly have been of influence in its time, but it helps to show both the difficulties of language facing the early translators, and the difficulties of comprehension facing those of their readers who lacked Latin and biblical scholarship. Among his choices of words are ‘mooned’ for ‘lunatic’, ‘tollers’ for ‘publicans’, ‘hundreder’ for ‘centurion’, ‘bywords’ for ‘parables’, ‘orders’ for ‘traditions’, ‘freshman’ for ‘proselyte’, and ‘crossed’ for ‘crucified’. For him, rain does not descend but fall: ‘and there fell a great shower, and the rivers came down, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not for it was ground-wrought on a rock’ (p. 40; Matt. 7:25).

Throughout the century there was a sharp consciousness of the distinction between vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon origin and vocabulary of Latin origin. The significance of Cheke is that he underlines the difficulties there could be at this time even with what seem to be thoroughly ordinary words of Latin origin. Evidence from other comments on the Bible for this point is scarce because of the Protestant need to believe that the Bible was translatable (to say nothing of the wish to believe that it was easy to understand), and because Cheke's is an extreme position. Yet the point, even if treated with scepticism, is not to be dismissed. It is supported by the now familiar words listed as unfamiliar by Gardiner (see below), by Martin and his critics, also by Robert Cawdray's (or Cawdrey) A Table Alphabetical and by Thomas Wilson's A Christian Dictionary. Cawdray's work, published in 1604 but begun much earlier (fol. A2r) was for ‘teaching true writing, and understanding of hard usual English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French’ (title). ‘Hard usual’ is the significant collocation. Cawdray thinks of these words as inkhorn terms (fol. A3r), yet almost all of them are now familiar English. As the title goes on it becomes clear that he thinks of this mild inkhornism as a particular difficulty in religious matters: ‘whereby [unskilful persons] may the more easily and better understand many hard English words which they shall hear or read in Scriptures, sermons or elsewhere’. A few years later, Wilson writes that

not any, as yet, have set to their hands to interpret in our mother tongue … the chief words of our science, which being very hard and darksome, sound in the ears of our weak scholars as Latin or Greek words, as indeed many of them are derived from these languages: and this I have esteemed as no small let to hinder the profiting in knowledge of Holy Scriptures amongst the vulgar: because, when in their reading or hearing Scriptures they meet with such principal words as carry with them the marrow and pith of our holy religion, they stick at them as at an unknown language.

(fol. A6r-v)

The English people of the sixteenth century were learning a new English. However simple the language of the Protestant translators may now seem (archaisms apart), it had much in it that the people had to learn before they could understand and appreciate it.

Cheke's objection to words of Latin origin was soon to manifest itself as one side of the conflicting attitudes to what were generally decried as inkhorn terms. George Pettie, writing in 1586, sums up the situation:

For the barbarousness of our tongue, I must likewise say that it is much the worse for them and some such curious fellows as they are, who if one chance to derive any word from the Latin, which is insolent to their ears (as perchance they will take that phrase to be), they forthwith make a jest at it and term it an inkhorn term. And though for my part I use those words as little as any, yet I know no reason why I should not use them, and I find it a fault in myself that I do not use them: for it is indeed the ready way to enrich our tongue and make it copious, and it is the way which all tongues have taken to enrich themselves … Wherefore I marvel how our English tongue hath cracked it credit that it may not borrow of the Latin as well as other tongues: and if it have broken, it is but of late, for it is not unknown to all men how many words we have fetched from thence within these few years, which if they should be all counted inkpot terms, I know not how we should speak any thing without blacking our mouths with ink.²³

By the 1580s English had fetched so many terms from Latin that, for educated readers, Cheke's attitude to the English of Tyndale and Coverdale was thoroughly out of date. Initially, then, it seems that the English of the Bible, in spite of Tyndale's desire to be understood by ploughboys, had a real element of the inkhorn in it. But the pace of borrowing from Latin was so great that the vocabulary of the English Bible quickly came to seem part of a tradition of Anglo-Saxon simplicity, in opposition to the fashionable new English that abounded in Latin neologisms. When Gregory Martin in the Rheims NT deliberately introduced a substantial amount of Latin vocabulary, his work was seen as exhibiting the faults of the inkhorn: all sense of the Protestant Bibles tending that way was lost, even though those Bibles continued to present, as Wilson shows, difficulties of vocabulary to the uneducated.

One early-seventeenth-century writer recognized and commented on this situation. William L'Isle contrasts the Saxon versions of the Scriptures with the Rheims-Douai Bible (a text stuffed ‘with such fustian, such inkhorn terms’). The Saxon

hath words for Trinity, Unity, Deity and persons thereof; for Co-equal, Coeternal, Invisible, Incomprehensible … for Catholic and all such foreign words as we are now fain to use, because we have forgot better of our own. I speak not to have them recalled into use, now these are well known, sith I use them and the like myself for the same reason, but to give our tongue her due commendations, to show the wilful and purposed obscurity of those other translators, and to stop the base and beggarly course of borrowing when we need not.²⁴

MYLES COVERDALE

The task of completing and revising Tyndale's work fell to Myles Coverdale (1488-1568), a less scholarly but no less devout man. Not only did he produce the first complete English Bible of the Reformation (1535), but his revisions of his work became the Great Bibles of 1539 etc., and he was involved in the making of the Geneva Bible (1560). His Psalter, as revised for the Great Bible, became the Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer and thus until very recently the familiar version for Anglicans.

This familiar Psalter, like the KJB, has aroused much love and is the basis of Coverdale's reputation for literary achievement, though he also contributed significantly to the English of the prophetic books. For Coverdale, like Tyndale, has his reputation. Lewis expresses it with a memorable image in a paragraph that is particularly interesting as it begins with one of the rare recognitions of the argument being put forward here:

It is not, of course, to be supposed that aesthetic considerations were uppermost in Tyndale's mind when he translated Scripture. The matter was much too serious for that; souls were at stake. The same holds for all translators. Coverdale was probably the one whose choice of a rendering came nearest to being determined by taste. His defects as well as his qualities led to this. Of all the translators he was the least scholarly. Among men like Erasmus, Tyndale, Munster, or the Jesuits at Rheims, he shows like a rowing boat among battleships. This gave him a kind of freedom. Unable to judge between rival interpretations, he may often have been guided, half consciously, to select and combine by taste. Fortunately, his taste was admirable.

(pp. 34-5)

Coverdale's defect of scholarship was principally that he knew very little Hebrew, and so, where Tyndale had not pioneered, had to work by choosing among and adapting previous versions, notably in Latin and German. Since he was less able to reproduce the precise verbal detail of the originals and was not tied to the Vulgate, he was arguably freer than Tyndale to adopt what he felt to be the best English way of expressing the meaning, but this freedom may be understood in a different way, as a liberty to pursue the true meaning of the Scriptures, which was his only professed concern in translating them. He writes in the dedicatory epistle in his first Bible ‘that I have neither wrested nor altered so much as one word for the maintenance of any manner of sect, but have with a clear conscience purely and faithfully translated this out of five sundry interpreters, having only the manifest truth of the Scripture before mine eyes’ (Remains, p. 11).

This sets the tone for most of his comments on the Bible and translation: his devotion is to the truth; his zeal is for the people to know the truth. His first Bible also contains a prologue, and to read this with the epistle is to get a sense of a more diplomatic Tyndale, ignoring considerations of literary taste and judgement. Possibly his diffidence prevented him voicing such considerations, for he writes, as Luther never would have written, ‘as for the commendation of God's Holy Scripture, I would fain magnify it as it is worthy, but I am far insufficient thereto’. However, the continuation of the paragraph suggests that the praise would have had little of the literary in it:

and therefore I thought it better for me to hold my tongue, than with few words to praise or comment it; exhorting thee, most dear reader, so to love it, so to cleave unto it, and so to follow it in thy daily conversation [conduct], that other men, seeing thy good works and the fruits of the Holy Ghost in thee, may praise the Father of heaven and give his word a good report: for to live after the law of God and to lead a virtuous conversation is the greatest praise that thou canst give unto his doctrine.

(p. 15)

Most significant is that he calls the Bible not ‘Scripture’ or ‘writing’ but ‘doctrine’.

The one linguistic matter he gives consideration to here is variety of vocabulary, an issue he links with the use of a variety of sources because he sees both as relating to truth. In effect, he portrays translation as a hit or miss process: more translations will produce more hits, and a range of synonyms will prevent the truth from being limited by single words. He writes:

sure I am that there cometh more knowledge and understanding of the Scriptures by their sundry translations than by all the glosses of our sophistical doctors. For that one interpreteth something obscurely in one place, the same translateth another, or else he himself, more manifestly by a more plain vocable of the same meaning in another place. Be not thou offended therefore, good reader, though one call a scribe that another calleth a lawyer … For if thou be not deceived by men's traditions, thou shalt find no more diversity between these terms than between four pence and a groat. And this manner have I used in my translation, calling it in some place penance that in another place I call repentance, and that not only because the interpreters have done so before me, but that the adversaries of the truth may see how that we abhor not this word penance, as they untruly report of us.

(pp. 19-20)

Tyndale considered the matter of varying vocabulary on linguistic grounds, but Coverdale confines himself to the religious motive of ‘knowledge and understanding’. Further, he is mindful of More's objections to the tendentiousness of Tyndale's vocabulary, and wants this variety to reflect a spirit of religious compromise with the Roman Catholic Church.²⁵ Ultimately this is an expression of a translator's diffidence, and it directs the reader, if not exactly away from, certainly beyond the words.

Coverdale's exhortations on the proper use of the Bible are full of religious earnestness. Like Erasmus, he wants the Bible to be everyone's constant occupation, but there is no suggestion of singing or humming or lightening the weary way:

Go to now, most dear reader, and sit thee down at the Lord's feet and read his words, and … take them into thine heart, and let thy talking and communication be of them when thou sittest in thine house, or goest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou riseth up … in whom [God] if thou put thy trust, and be an unfeigned [sincere] reader or hearer of his word with thy heart, thou shalt find sweetness therein and spy wondrous things to thy understanding, to the avoiding of all seditious sects, to the abhorring of thy old sinful life, and to the establishing of thy godly conversation.

(pp. 16-17)

Later in the same vein he writes of bringing children up ‘in the nurture and information of the Lord’ (p. 21). Coverdale has shorn away the obvious literary implications of Erasmus's ideas even more absolutely than Tyndale did: no one reading the introductory material to his Bible could even suspect the possibility of a rhetorical or worldly pleasure in the Scriptures: sweetness lies in the religious meaning heard by the heart.

In 1538 Coverdale published a version of the NT made from the Vulgate. The prefatory writings to his two editions of this (a third was published in the same year without his concurrence) reflect interestingly his motives in making such a translation and are the only places where he writes about his principles of translation. The translation was designed to counter the charge ‘that we intend to pervert the Scripture and to condemn the common translation in Latin which customably is read in the Church; whereas we purpose the clean contrary’ (p. 25). It is thus an attempt at reconciliation, seeking to bring the benefits of the vernacular Bible to the orthodox, particularly to those of the clergy who knew little Latin. It is intended, as was Rolle's Psalter, in large part to be a guide to the Latin. Just as Coverdale is not rigorous in his terminology for such things as repentance, so he is not rigorous in his sense of a sole true text of the Bible, and believes that the Holy Ghost is ‘the author of his Scripture as well in the Hebrew, Greek, French, Dutch and in English, as in Latin’ (p. 26).

This was a parallel Latin-English Bible and Coverdale describes himself as ‘very scrupulous to go from the vocable of the text’ (p. 29); that is, he sought to be as literal as possible. He recognised limitations to this literalness because of the differing natures of the languages, so he writes of using ‘the honest and just liberty of a grammarian’ (p. 28), which means respecting, as Luther, More and Tyndale had done, what he calls ‘the phrase of our language’ (p. 33). His motive is solely the reader's ‘better understanding’ (p. 28), and for this reason he writes with a ‘tempered’ pen: ‘because I am loath to swerve from the text, I so temper my pen, that, if thou wilt, thou mayest make plain construction of [the Latin] by the English that standeth on the other side. This is done now for thee that art not exactly learned in the Latin tongue and wouldest fain understand it’ (p. 28). His care for ‘the pure and very original text’ (p. 29) of the version he is translating is such that, if he finds it necessary to expand it for the sake of clarity, he puts the expansions in square brackets, so that the text is ‘neither wrested nor perverted’ (p. 28). Later the same kind of care was taken with the Great Bible, though the intended annotations were not, in the end, printed.²⁶

Whether this brief description of his linguistic principles is applicable to his other translations is uncertain: the nature of this NT perhaps demanded a greater literalness than he felt appropriate for them, and the statement that he tempered his pen does suggest that his inclination was to be less literal. Further, this was his one biblical translation where the conditions which Lewis described do not pertain and he was controlled by a single text in a language he knew well.

This NT, then, gives some suggestion of a linguistic freedom in his other Bibles. If it is set beside his one deliberate attempt at a literary translation of some parts of the Bible, then it appears that he would have translated very differently in all his Bibles had he untempered his pen. This attempt was his Ghostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs, made sometime prior to 1539 when it appears in a list of proscribed books. It is an attempt to redirect secular literary pleasure to what Coverdale regards as the only proper object of pleasure, religion. He quotes on the title page Jas. 5:13, ‘if any of you be merry, let him sing Psalms’. He would have it ‘that when we are merry, our pastime and pleasure, our joy, mirth and gladness is all of [God]’ (pp. 537-8). In his prefatory address he echoes Erasmus:

would God that our minstrels had none other thing to play upon, neither our carters and ploughmen other thing to whistle upon, save Psalms, hymns and such godly songs as David is occupied withal! And if women, sitting at their rocks [distaffs] or spinning at the wheels, had none other songs to pass their time withal than such as Moses' sister, Glehana's wife, Debora, and Mary the mother of Christ have sung before them, they should be better occupied than with ‘hey nony nony, hey troly loly’ and such like fantasies.

(p. 537)

Thus this book is founded on a sharp distinction between the secular and the religious and does not involve approval of secular literature. He presents ‘such songs as edify and corrupt not men's conversation’ (p. 538). The right use of singing these is

to comfort a man's heart in God, to make him thankful and to exercise him in his word, to encourage him in the way of godliness and to provoke other men unto the same. By this thou mayest perceive what spiritual edifying cometh of godly Psalms and songs of God's word, and what inconvenience followeth the corrupt ballads of this vain world.

(p. 539)

Coverdale seems to have loved such songs. He writes in his preface to the Apocrypha in his first Bible of ‘the prayer of Azarias, and the sweet song that he and his two fellows sung in the fire’, and notes that he has included such songs in part ‘for their sakes also that love such sweet songs of thanksgiving’ (Mozley, Coverdale, p. 96). Clearly the love is religious in essence.

The contents do nothing to deny the earnest tone of the preface and little to create a merry alternative to secular songs. The Psalms especially are significant because of the reputation of Coverdale's prose Psalms. Here is the opening stanza of Psalm 137:

At the rivers of Babylon
There sat we down right heavily;
Even when we thought upon Sion,
We wept together sorrowfully.
For we were in such heaviness,
That we forgot all our merriness,
And left off all our sport and play:
On the willow trees that were thereby
We hanged up our harps truly,
And mourned sore both night and day.

(p. 571)

This is a terrible struggle with rhyme and metre, expanding Coverdale's own rhythmical prose versions to banality. To go back to his first Bible (which he later slightly improved) makes blatant the contrast: ‘by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees, that are therein’. This amounts to more than just the observation that Coverdale was a far better prose translator than poet: his prose translation did not meet his ideas of literary form but is far better writing. The paradox is that if Coverdale had tried to translate the Psalms in his Bibles in what he felt to be a literary manner, he would not have created versions capable of arousing any kind of literary affection. If, as we legitimately may, we find literary quality in his work, it is in spite of himself, for not only is there no explicit evidence of literary intentions in it, but there is evidence that he had no respect for literature and was not trying to be, by his own standards, literary.

FROM THE GREAT BIBLE TO THE RHEIMS-DOUAI BIBLE: ARGUMENTS ABOUT LANGUAGE

OFFICIAL BIBLES

The Bible in English was part of the larger battle, political as much as theological, for the English Reformation. The clergy's political allegiance might be relatively easily diverted from Rome to London, but beliefs were not so readily changed. By no means all the clergy were enthusiasts for the vernacular Bible: if they could not suppress it they could at least attempt to make it more acceptable to themselves, that is, more like the Vulgate. An attempt to do this was made in 1542. Though it came to nothing, it remains of interest because it gives further evidence of just how much the question of English vocabulary was tied up with larger issues. In parliament the archbishop ‘asked members individually whether without scandal, error and manifest offence of Christ's faithful they voted to retain the Great Bible in the English speech. The majority resolved that the said Bible could not be retained until first duly purged and examined side by side with the [Latin] Bible commonly read in the English Church’. The work went into committee, and the last one hears of it is a list of Latin words which Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, ‘desired for their germane and native meaning and for the majesty of their matter might be retained as far as possible in their own nature or be turned into English speech as closely as possible’ (Pollard, p. 117). Clearly Gardiner would have preferred these meaningful and majestic words to remain untouched. As one surveys the list, two things become apparent: many of the words are theologically important, and many are now familiar parts of English vocabulary. Here are some of Gardiner's words in the form he gives them:

Ecclesia, Poenitentia, Contritus, Justitia, Justificare, Idiota, Elementa, Baptizare, Martyr, Adorare, Simplex, Sapientia, Pietas, Presbyter, Sacrificium, Sacramentum, Gloria, Ceremonia, Mysterium, Religio, Communio, Perseverare, Hospitalitas, Charitas, Benedictio, Humilitas, Synagoga, Ejicere, Distribueretur, Senior, Apocalypsis, Satisfactio, Contentio, Conscientia, Idolum, Prudentia, Apostolus, Societas, Idololatria, Confessio, Imitator, Innumerabilis, Infidelis, Paganus, Virtutes.

(Pollard, p. 117)

The limitations of the vocabulary available to Tyndale and Coverdale are strikingly illustrated. Moreover, any time they ventured towards such words they were in danger not only of identifying their work with the Church they opposed, but also of maintaining a religion based on the preservation of divine mystery, hidden from the people and interpreted by the Church. The manner of English translation was a fundamental issue of the Reformation.

Though this attempt to make the English Bible latinate, ecclesiastical and majestic failed, anxiety about the proper use of the Bible persisted. Henry VIII's proclamation of 1541 warns lay readers that they should not ‘presume to take upon them any common disputation, argument or exposition of the mysteries therein contained, but that every such lay man should humbly, meekly and reverently read the same for his own instruction, edification and amendment of his life’ (Pollard, p. 113). The Great Bibles to which the proclamation applied were the first authorised English Bibles, and they declared themselves ‘the Bible appointed to the use of the Churches’. Coverdale's prologues and dedications were replaced by a ‘prologue or preface’ by Cranmer (1489-1556), ‘the most reverend father in God, Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan and Primate of England’. This exhorts readers, if in a somewhat gentler tone, to exactly that kind of reading demanded in the King's proclamation:

How shouldest thou understand if thou wilt not read nor look upon it: take the books into thine hands, read the whole story, and that thou understandest keep it well in memory; that thou understandest not, read it again and again; if thou can neither so come by it, counsel with some other that is better learned. Go to thy curate and preacher, show thyself to be desirous to know and learn. And I doubt not but God seeing thy diligence and readiness, if no man else teach thee, will himself vouchsafe with his Holy Spirit to illuminate thee and to open unto thee that which was locked from thee.

The next major Bible was the Geneva Bible, but the direct successor of the Great Bibles was the Bishops' Bible of 1568. This, the Bible on which the KJB translators were instructed to base their work, was presented to the public as a revision for accuracy of the Great Bible.²⁷ The translators were instructed to revise where ‘it varieth manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek original’. Only in one respect were they to consider English for its own sake: they were to find ‘more convenient terms and phrases’ for ‘all such words as soundeth in the old translation to any offence of lightness or obscenity’ (Pollard, p. 126). Given the later evidence of obscene reading of the Bible (see below), it seems likely that they were to remove possible doubles entendres. I doubt if bowdlerisation was contemplated as that would have been inconsistent with literalness. The translators worked separately rather than in committee, and so probably had to interpret the instruction as they saw fit. One of the translators, Richard Cox, Bishop of Ely, wrote that ‘I would wish that such usual words as we English people be acquainted with might still remain in their form and sound, so far forth as the Hebrew will well bear; inkhorn terms to be avoided’ (Pollard, p. 123). If this is a response to the instruction we may infer that some of the Bishops, like those who had tried for a revision in 1542, wished to Latinise the English, producing thereby some of the traditional grandeur and mystery of biblical language. Many of the Bishops were still close to Roman Catholicism in spirit, but any tendencies they had towards a re-Latinising of the English Bible were to be overshadowed by the Roman Catholic translation.

Cranmer's preface is retained, but preceding it is a preface by the organiser of the work, Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-75), which shows some subtle changes in attitude to the proper use of the Bible. It takes Christ's words, ‘scrutamini scripturas’, ‘search ye the Scriptures’,²⁸ for text, and exhorts the private reader to study the Bible: ‘let not the volume of this book, by God's own warrant, depart from thee, but occupy thyself therein in the whole journey of this thy worldly pilgrimage to understand thy way how to walk rightly before him all the days of thy life’. This implies both private readers and private ownership, which is probably a testimony to the popular domestic impact of the Geneva Bible. Like Tyndale and Cranmer, Parker believes that ‘the only surety to our faith and conscience is to stick to the Scriptures’. However, though he also believes that ‘no man, woman, or child, is excluded from this salvation’, he is less optimistic about Scripture being rightly understood than his predecessors:

For not so lieth it in charge to the worldly artificer to search, or to any other private man so exquisitely to study, as it lieth to the charge of the public teacher to search in the Scriptures, to be the more able to walk in the house of God (which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth) to the establishing of the true doctrine of the same and to the impugning of the false.

The official Bibles, then, encourage a studiously devout reading of the Bible without hinting at pleasure of any sort. Cranmer is relatively liberal in his belief in the Bible's comprehensibility and so more encouraging towards private study than Parker, who prefers the Bible to be for the clergy, allowing them to teach the people better. Cranmer's readers, it seems, should pore over the very detail of the text, while Parker's lay readers should look to the Church in preference to the Bible.

Parker develops Tyndale's wish to have his work corrected and Coverdale's advocation of a variety of translations into a new point in the address preceding the Psalms:

Now let the gentle reader have this Christian consideration within himself that, though he findeth the psalms of this translation following not so to sound agreeably to his ears in his wonted words and phrases as he is accustomed with: yet let him not be too much offended with the work, which was wrought for his own commodity and comfort. And if he be learned, let him correct the word or sentence (which may dislike him) with the better, and whether his note riseth either of good will and charity, either of envy and contention not purely, yet his reprehension, if it may turn to the finding out of the truth, shall not be repelled with grief but applauded to in gladness, that Christ may ever have the praise.

The acknowledgement of a customary linguistic form is important, but of special interest is the invitation to think of the English text as unfixed, and the encouragement to the learned reader to adjust it as he thinks fit for ‘the finding out of the truth’. This is an effort to destabilise the translation in the search for truth. Most scholarly users of the Bible until, roughly, the middle of the seventeenth century did indeed treat the English text as unfixed and were not much concerned to cite a particular version accurately. For them biblical truth did not lie in any particular form of English words. Unless the scholars were translators or were critics of theological and ecclesiastical tendencies that they disliked, they had little interest in the precise language of the English Bible. Such an attitude has implications for the literary fortunes of the English of the Bible: as long as there is a weak sense of the English of the Bible, it can only be a linguistic influence in the vaguest way and can hardly be appreciated. On the other hand, unscholarly people were becoming closely familiar with the English of the Bible: for them it could be an imitable, admirable standard.

OPPOSING CAMPS

THE GENEVA BIBLE

The Bible and Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testament. Translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages. With most profitable annotations upon all the hard places, and other things of great importance as may appear in the Epistle to the Reader. Such is the full title of the Geneva Version of the Bible (1560), prepared, probably under the leadership of William Whittingham (c. 1524-79), by the Protestants living there in exile. The title shows the two aims, to provide as good a translation of the Hebrew and Greek texts as possible, and to make clear any difficulties. The frank acknowledgement of ‘hard places’ contrasts strikingly with Tyndale's idea of ‘one simple literal sense’: there is a clear movement through these Bibles towards recognition of difficulties and attempts at explication.

Although the Geneva Bible did not have the sanction of the Church of England, it became the most popular of the translations which preceded the KJB and was the only Protestant Bible to rival it for a long time after its appearance. One simple reason for this is that Bibles, especially those in private ownership, have a long life. The Roman Catholic Thomas Ward (1652-1708), writing in 1688, attacks the Protestant Bibles using, as well as the KJB, ‘such English translations as are common and well-known in England even to this day, as being yet in many men's hands: to wit, those Bibles printed in the years 1562, 1577 and 1579’.²⁹ Even the much less popular Bishops' Bible continued to be used in some churches, according to Bishop William Beveridge, ‘to our days’ (1710). He says that the KJB is so little altered from the Bishops' Bible that people perceived no difference between the two versions.³⁰ But there were more particular reasons for the Geneva Bible's success: it was produced at a price that allowed for private ownership, and there were its ‘profitable annotations’. These were so popular that there were at least eight editions of the KJB between 1642 and 1715 which used them, and they continued in some form in other Bibles. The Geneva Bible as a whole was sufficiently popular to be published steadily until 1644. The popularity of the Geneva Bible is also suggested by the extent to which it is quoted in preference to other English versions until, roughly, the 1630s (see below). Shakespeare, for instance, used it, the KJB translators cite it rather than their own version in their preface, and it was used in the Cromwellian Soldiers' Pocket Bible (1643).

Only one contemporary account that could possibly refer to its literary merits survives, as far as I can discover. The poet and would-be Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin, Sir John Harington (1560-1612), calls it ‘the best translation read in our Church’,³¹ but does not indicate in what way it is best. The comment precedes a quotation about the duties of bishops in which Harington makes one alteration of Geneva's English, so it is difficult to presume that anything other than accuracy is meant.

The only preliminary material is a dedication ‘to the Most Virtuous and Noble Queen Elizabeth’ and the epistle to the reader, which contains this about translating into English: ‘the which thing, albeit that divers heretofore have endeavoured to achieve, yet considering the infancy of those times and imperfect knowledge of the tongues, in respect of this ripe age and clear light which God hath now revealed, the translations required greatly to be perused and reformed’. As usual, the emphasis is on textual accuracy, but, unlike the prefaces to the Great and Bishops' Bibles, this preface discusses the translators' practice. The following is its most interesting passage, particularly as it relates to literal translation and Tyndale's observation of the congruity between Hebrew and English (see above):

For God is our witness that we have by all means endeavoured to set forth the purity of the word and right sense of the Holy Ghost for the edifying of the brethren in faith and charity.

Now as we have chiefly observed the sense, and laboured always to restore it to all integrity, so have we most reverently kept the propriety of the words, considering that the apostles who spake and wrote to the Gentiles in the Greek tongue rather constrained them to the lively phrase of the Hebrew than enterprised far by mollifying their language to speak as the Gentiles did. And for this and other causes we have in many places reserved the Hebrew phrases, notwithstanding that they may seem somewhat hard in their ears that are not well practised and also delight in the sweet sounding phrases of the Holy Scriptures. Yet lest either the simple should be discouraged, or the malicious have any occasion of just cavillation, seeing some translations read after one sort and some after another, whereas all may serve to good purpose and edification, we have in the margin noted that diversity of speech or reading which may also seem agreeable to the mind of the Holy Ghost and proper for our language.

This contrasts with Tyndale's comments about the possibility of translating Hebrew phrases literally in that it supposes that such literalism will sound harshly in English ears.

It is one of the most striking passages so far from the translators because it seems to be aware that their language could be made to fit to contemporary standards, but rejects this possibility. The passage is not sufficiently explicit for one to know what kind of ‘delight in the sweet sounding phrases’ the writer has in mind, but the recognition of some such delight is one of the few pieces of evidence there is for the generally assumed point of view that such considerations played a real part in the forming of the language of our Bible translations. It might be argued that this must have had some positive effect on the translation, but such an argument would have to ignore the translators' statement that they did not try to conform their language to normal or good or well-sounding English but rather sought to represent the alien qualities of the Hebrew.³²

THE RHEIMS-DOUAI BIBLE

The Roman Catholic reluctance to have the Bible in English persisted into the seventeenth century, but the need to counteract the heresies of the Protestant Bibles, and the desire to exercise a proper control over Bible reading led eventually to the Rheims-Douai Bible. The NT was published in 1582 but the OT, for financial reasons, did not appear until 1609 (Genesis to Job) and 1610 (Psalms to Esdras IV). The NT is doubly interesting. Not only did it have a real influence on the KJB (the OT was published too late to be significant), but it was the primary element in the most important debate of this, the key period of English translation, on the way the Bible should be translated.

Although the controversy between the Catholics and the Protestants was a bitter, if not a desperate one (not just souls but institutions were at stake), from the present point of view there are important respects in which there is no real difference between the two sides. Chief among these is the insistence on the true understanding of the text. That the two sides differed bitterly on the nature of that true understanding is, for this history though not for them, a minor matter. Because both sides insisted on true understanding, the charge of corruption for literary reasons was one each side brought against the other but strenuously sought to avoid. The result was a re-emphasis on the need for literal translation that, ironically, helped to produce the particular literary qualities of the KJB.

The title page of the NT makes the point of understanding not once but three times. The arguments, annotations ‘and other necessary helps’ are ‘for the better understanding of the text, and specially for the discovery of the CORRUPTIONS of divers late translations, and for clearing the CONTROVERSIES in religion of these days’. Ps. 119 [118]: 34 is quoted, ‘give me understanding, and I will search thy law, and will keep it with my whole heart’, as is a passage from St Augustine arguing that Scripture is to be read ‘to our instruction and salvation’ (and adding a special commendation of texts ‘which make most against heretics’). A further text from Augustine also emphasising understanding appears on the next page.

The whole translation was largely the work of Gregory Martin (d. 1582), an Oxford Hebraist and Roman Catholic who was part of the college of exiles at Douai and later at Rheims from 1570 onwards. The preface to the NT is the central document. It gives more attention to literary issues than is to be found anywhere else at this time. Martin clearly recognises literary possibilities in translation and he explicitly rejects them. Yet his rejection allows for effects not too far different from literary effects. Three issues occupy him, translation into the vernacular, the use of the Vulgate as the basic text, and the manner of translating. He by no means concedes that vernacular translation is necessary. He stands at the opposite extreme from Tyndale's optimistic view of the openness of the text's meaning, and yet the two men probably would not have disagreed on this matter if it did not involve the whole status of the Church's teaching, and if the matter of allegory were not so contentious to Tyndale. Martin expresses Tyndale's belief exactly at one point: ‘none can understand the meaning of God in the Scriptures except Christ open their sense’,³³ and like Tyndale he uses the image of the shell and the kernel. However, he believes that the shell is much harder than Tyndale would have it be (fol. B1r), and he makes much of the difficulties and mysteries of the text. So, where Tyndale believes that the spirit of Jesus operating from within is the key to truth, Martin, the orthodox Roman Catholic, believes that this spirit is transmitted through the Church, which is therefore the guardian of understanding and so of greater importance than the text alone of the Scriptures.

Some of Martin's objections to the practice of Protestant translators lead to the formulation of his own principles of translation. He complains of the Protestants ‘most shamefully in all their versions, Latin, English and other tongues, corrupting both the letter and the sense by false translation, adding, detracting, altering, transposing, pointing and all other guileful means’ (fol. B1v). Such complaints inevitably force him towards greater literalness than they had practised. He complains further of what he sees as culpable license in changing accustomed names, and adds that they ‘frame and fine the phrases of Holy Scriptures after the form of profane writers, sticking not for the same to supply, add, alter or diminish as freely as if they translated Livy, Virgil or Terence’. ‘Fine’ here is used in the sense of ‘refine’, and implies ‘beautify’. He is moving towards a point from the creator of the Vulgate, Jerome, which he quotes on the next page, that, though other writings may be translated sense for sense, Scripture must be translated word for word.³⁴ But before he reaches Jerome he elaborates the point, demonstrating again how close he can be in principle to the Protestants.

He charges the Protestants with a ‘meretricious manner of writing’, but then adds:

of which sort Calvin himself and his pew-fellows³⁵ so much complain that they profess Satan to have gained more by these new interpreters, their number, levity of spirit, and audacity increasing daily, than he did before by keeping the word from the people. And for a pattern of this mischief, they give Castalion,³⁶ adjuring all their Churches and scholars to beware of his translation, as one that hath made a very sport and mockery of God's holy word.

(fol. B2r)

His conclusion is that Calvin and Beza are ‘as bad or worse’ (this is the marginal summary). Both sides, then, agree that anything like literary treatment of the text is inadmissible, and this agreement is reinforced by the example of Castellio.

Martin turns from this and other objections to describing his own practice. First, exactly as did Tyndale, he seeks pardon for any errors he may have committed, and he promises to correct them if he sees them himself or if they are pointed out to him, assuring his reader ‘it is truth that we seek for, and God's honour’. He then immediately tackles the question of his language, claiming to have used

no more license than is sufferable in translating of Holy Scriptures: continually keeping ourselves as near as is possible to our text and to the very words and phrases which by long use are made venerable, though to some profane or delicate ears they may seem more hard or barbarous, as the whole style of Scripture doth lightly to such at the beginning.

(fol. B2r)

This acknowledges that both the originals and his translation are unliterary from a profane point of view; nevertheless, it is a feature of the sacred writing which one should not be shocked by and which the translator has a duty to preserve.

Martin makes a virtue of this barbarousness in several ways. It differentiates the Bible from secular literature and connects with Jerome's advocation of literal translation. He continues:

We must, saith St Augustine, speak according to a set rule, lest license of words breed some wicked opinion concerning the things contained under the words … Whereof our holy forefathers and ancient doctors had such a religious care that they would not change the very barbarisms or incongruities of speech which by long use had prevailed in the old readings or recitings of Scriptures … And St Augustine, who is most religious in all these phrases, counteth it a special pride and infirmity in those that have a little learning in tongues and none in things, that they easily take offence of the simple speeches or solecisms in the Scriptures.

(fol. B2v)

This echoes the Geneva preface (see above) and leads to one of Martin's reasons for using the Vulgate rather than the Greek as his base text for the NT: ‘it is so exact and precise according to the Greek, both the phrase and the word, that delicate heretics therefore reprehend it of rudeness’ (fol. B3v). Such explicit recognition of difference from literary standards, even ordinary standards, of propriety is only matched by the Geneva preface. Its emergence at this time may reflect the growing sense that a prestigious form of English was being created elsewhere.

At the end of the preface Martin returns to his principles of translation. He repeats that his frequent literalism ‘may seem to the vulgar reader and to common English ears not yet acquainted therewith, rudeness or ignorance’, but appeals to the future: ‘all sorts of Catholic readers will in short time think that familiar, which at the first may seem strange, and will esteem it more when they shall otherwise be taught to understand it than if it were the common known English’ (fol. C3r). This reflects More's jibe that ‘all England list now to go to school with Tyndale to learn English’ (see above).³⁷ English words and phrases were of course being formed by the language of the translators.

Just as Tyndale had appended tables ‘expounding certain words’ to the books of the Pentateuch, so Martin here draws his reader's attention to a table at the end of his book for ‘the explication of certain words in this translation, not familiar to the vulgar reader, which might not conveniently be uttered otherwise’. By comparison with Bishop Gardiner's list, Martin's is a little disappointing. There are several reasons for this in addition to its shortness—it contains fifty-five words. The Rheims NT is a major source of vocabulary,³⁸ but only as it supplied words for the KJB, and of the six words on the list which are also found in the KJB, three are technical terms of religion found in earlier English Bibles. The other three are ‘allegory’ (which goes back to Wyclif), ‘anathema’ (which goes back to Tyndale in combination with ‘maranatha’ in 1 Cor. 16:22, the only place it is used in the KJB; Martin is the first to use it elsewhere), and ‘eunuchs’ (Martin is the first to use this in the NT, but the OED has several older examples).

At least twenty of the remaining forty-eight words are now familiar in the sense in which Martin uses them, but here the other reasons for the disappointing nature of the list appear. Only four of these appear to be original. They are ‘abstracted’, ‘adulterating’, ‘co-operate’ and ‘neophyte’, of which the OED notes that it did not come into general use before the nineteenth century. Also on the list is ‘victim’: it might well be added to these four since, although it finds an earlier example, the OED observes that ‘the Rhemish translators of the Bible were the first to make free use of the word as English, and its general currency dates only from the latter part of the seventeenth century’. Many others such as ‘meretricious’ could have been added. However, of none of these can one say with confidence that they owe their existence to Martin. All his nowfamiliar words are of Latin or Greek origin, three-quarters of them antedate his work, and two of his inventions seem not to owe their currency to his work: all this reflects the general tendency to borrow from these languages. The Rheims NT was not, on this partial evidence,³⁹ the necessary source of some of our present English vocabulary. Nevertheless, Martin emerges as a sensitive and informative figure, even as a man before his time, in matters of language. He was right: a good proportion of his strangeness has become familiar, but little of this is due to his work.

Important reasons lie behind Martin's use of strange words, reasons which distinguish him as a theoretician of Bible translation not only from Tyndale but also from More. First, he does not share their confidence in the expressive resources of English. So he uses words such as ‘exinanited’ and ‘exhaust’ (the first a notorious failure, the second familiar but not original) ‘because we cannot possibly attain to express these words fully in English’ (fol. C3v), and because they do not hinder but rather help his intention that the reader should study minutely the meaning of the text. So he continues, ‘we think much better that the reader staying at the difficulty of them, should take an occasion to look in the table following or otherwise to ask the full meaning of them, than by putting some usual English words that express them not, so to deceive the reader’ (fol. C3v). Readability is sacrificed not only to accuracy but to understanding.

Though this has, to profane ears, an anti-literary effect, it helps to preserve the professional vocabulary of theology, and it may have the effect of creating a distinct form of English capable of arousing religious awe. Language has other purposes besides meaning, and if Latin had lost all its meaning for the people, that is no reason for dismissing those other purposes in restoring meaning. Martin's attitude to the ploughman is not that of Erasmus or Tyndale. In his vision of the ideal days of the past, he writes that ‘the poor ploughman could then in labouring the ground sing the hymns and psalms either in known or unknown languages, as they heard them in the holy Church, though they could neither read nor know the sense, meaning and mysteries of the same’ (fol. A3r-v). Consequently he links his retention of Latin terms with solemnity, that is, with an effect of religious mystery rather than meaning: ‘we say, “the advent of our Lord”, and, “imposing of hands”, because one is a solemn time, the other a solemn action in the Catholic Church: to signify to the people that these and suchlike names come out of the very Latin text of the Scripture’ (fol. C3v). This goes beyond More's and Gardiner's arguments for the retention of the old ecclesiastical terms: it shows a desire to create language of the appropriate religious quality. If this is a religious rather than a literary desire, still the difference is not very great: words are used to create feeling. An extremity of literalness is used to ends that are almost literary.

Martin could do this in part because of his demand for close study. For him the meaning did not have to be defined and clear within the text. The resources of annotation were available, bringing in the developed understanding of the Church. He was presenting not just the text but the text and the Church: the margin is the primary reading.

Whereas the Wycliffites had wanted their version to be ‘as open or opener’ than their original (see above), Martin's presentation of text and Church produces a different idea of faithfulness to the original: ‘we presume not in hard places to mollify the speeches and phrases, but religiously keep them word for word and point for point, for fear of missing or restraining the sense of the Holy Ghost to our fantasy’.⁴⁰ Thus ambiguity is preserved, even if it is present in the Greek but resolved in the Latin (see fol. C4r). The same is done with alien idioms (again the theory of the Geneva translators is reflected). This is not through a sense of compatibility of languages such as Tyndale observed between Hebrew and English, but through a sense of the religious possibilities in incompatibility. He observes that sometimes he follows Hebrew phrases which the Greek and Latin have also followed because ‘there is a certain majesty and more signification in these speeches, and therefore both Greek and Latin keep them, although it is no more the Greek or Latin phrase than it is the English’ (fol. C4r).

Martin uses ‘majesty’ here as Tunstal had used it [see above]. His literalism, then, tends to preserve the vocabulary, form and ambiguity of the original. Though this runs directly counter to the Protestant ideal of revealing the truth within the text through native English clarity, Martin sees it not only as a better preservation of the truth but sometimes as a linguistic virtue. Here he departs from the Geneva translators. In his view such a method retains some of the true feeling of the text. The occult quality of biblical language is preserved. The purpose is religious but the effect is, in a sense, literary: genuine aspects of the literary nature of the originals—ambiguity and structure of language—are preserved.

Martin, it should be noted, is not consistent in his attitude to vocabulary. On the one hand he makes a virtue of strangeness, on the other he argues that his strangeness will become familiar. Though he himself does not resolve the contradiction it may be that the resolution lies in the idea of truth: the strange vocabulary is necessary because English does not always give the true sense of the original, but it will become familiar as the true sense is understood. This true sense is religious, not secular. Though the vocabulary becomes familiar, it need not become a part of the common, profane language.

Martin was working fifty years later than Tyndale. The distinction between a pure native English and Latin English was being eroded: not only were Ciceronian standards of writing reasserting themselves as the Renaissance gained strength, but there was, as we have seen mildly expressed by Pettie [see above], a real feeling of creative revelry in the possibilities writers were discovering in the use of Latin vocabulary in English. Martin was well aware of this situation, and he found in it a justification for his own new words, adding at the end of the argument we have been following this question: ‘and why should we be squeamish at new words or phrases in the Scripture, which are necessary, when we do easily admit and follow new words coined in court and in courtly and other secular writings?’ (fol. C4r). Though there is no real approval of the secular trend here, its precedent was clearly significant.

As with the Protestant translators, there can be no doubting the sincerity of Martin's work. Whatever each side in its bitterness might say about the other, each sought the clearest and most accurate presentation of the truth. Each sought the greatest practicable literalism, each was decidedly anti-literary. Could they have set aside their mutual hostility, they would have found themselves with a larger measure of agreement than disagreement. Martin differs from the Protestants most significantly in his attitude to the related questions of the expressive ability of English, the clarity of the bare text and the need to preserve some sense of religious quality in the language. He differs also, but much less significantly from a literary point of view, in his choice of basic text, though this choice is so hedged with qualifications that the difference is far from absolute. Lastly, and very importantly, he differs in the degree of attention he gives to literary questions in arguing about principles of translation. Though he is far more prepared to draw out unliterary qualities both in his own work and in the originals, he makes the problems of literariness and religious English into pressing issues. Consequently the KJB translators could not work as most of their Protestant predecessors had done, blithely ignoring these major issues.

THE MARTIN-FULKE CONTROVERSY

Prefaces to translations bring out the best in translators, especially the best in Martin, but the controversy between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants which surrounded the Rheims NT reflects little real credit on either side. It is an unseemly brawl, with no occasion lost to abuse and discredit the other side, and no concession given to any sincerity on the other side. Nevertheless, it is a brawl which adds to the understanding of the issues just summarised in useful ways, again ways that the KJB translators could not ignore.

On the one side is Martin's A Discovery of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretics of our Days, specially the English Sectaries, and of their foul dealing herein, by partial and false translations to the advantage of their heresies, in their English Bibles used and authorised since the time of schism (1582). On the other the main work is William Fulke's A Defence of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue against the manifold cavils, frivolous quarrels and impudent slanders of GREGORY MARTIN.⁴¹ Fulke (1538-89) was associated at college with Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), a leading Puritan who also wrote a refutation of Martin's work. Again the title is indicative: A Confutation of the Rhemists' Translation, Glosses and Annotations on the New Testament, so far as they contain manifest impieties, heresies, idolatries, superstitions, profaneness, treasons, slanders, absurdities, falsehoods and other evils. By occasionns whereof the true sense, scope and doctrine of the Scriptures, and human authors, by them abused, is now given. This work was begun in 1583, and part of ‘a letter written by sundry learned men [including Fulke] unto Mr Cartwright, to provoke and encourage him to the answering of the Rhemists', given at the beginning of the volume, helps to spell out the feeling of the time:

[the Papists] have of late enterprised a new course whereby they might persuade unskilful men that the divine Scriptures and heavenly oracles stand on their side. For what else do they project by the translation of the New Testament and their adjoined unsavoury silly annotations (where like runnagate jugglers they cast mists on most clear things) than that a conceit might stick in men's minds that the Holy Scriptures are foully by us stained and that whatsoever is in them truly and soundly expressed, the same most firmly strengtheneth their opinions and utterly teareth up ours.

However, this voluminous work (it runs to some 760 pages) was not published until 1618, so Fulke remains the influential spokesman of the time. Unlike Cartwright, he became a pillar of the Church of England, and his work had a currency throughout the time of the making of the KJB. New editions of the Defence were published in 1617 and 1633, and Fulke repeated his arguments in his parallel NT which set the Rheims NT against the Bishops' Bible NT and confuted all the Roman Catholic arguments, glosses and annotations. This was published in 1589 and went through three subsequent editions. One important point about these works is that they reprinted Martin's work in full, in the confidence that the impartial reader that Martin was so fond of would agree with their views. Thus Martin's work also remained current, but within the context of confutation.

One target of Fulke's attack is Martin's language. He adheres to More and Tyndale's principles of English, that translation ‘must observe the English phrase’ (p. 347), and that it must be current English (see, e.g., pp. 179, 219-20). However, he does not believe, as Martin does, in the translator's ability to mould speech:

We are not lords of the common speech of men; for if we were, we would teach them to use their terms more properly: but seeing we cannot change the use of speech, we follow Aristotle's counsel, which is to speak and use words as the common people useth, but to understand and conceive of things according to the nature and true property of them.⁴²

Further, he advocates common speech despite his admission of Martin's point that English is ‘not so fruitful of words’ (p. 588), that is, is more restricted in vocabulary, than Latin. This too is a real change from More and Tyndale. It reflects not only the changing sense of English but also the pressure that Martin's strange vocabulary placed on attitudes to English. Fulke is not in disagreement with Martin's attitude to English but with its consequence, and so he is forced back to disputing the translators' ability to mould language. On this point time has proved Martin right and Fulke wrong.

These views provide the basis for the attack. In the ‘epistle dedicatory’, Fulke describes the Rheims text as ‘obscured without any necessary or just cause with such a multitude of so strange and unusual terms as to the ignorant are no less difficult to understand than the Latin or Greek itself’.⁴³ Martin too disliked strange and unusual terms, though his idea of them was different: he objected, as had More, to the Protestant's avoidance of vocabulary associated with Roman Catholic doctrines. Unlike Fulke's, his dislike generally did not extend to the question of style, though he did object to ‘new strange words’ that are ‘rather Hebrew to [the people] than English’ (p. 588). However, this objection relates only to the presentation of Hebrew names. He observes that Castellio used profane terms ‘for foolish affectation of fineness and style’, but that the English Calvinists did so ‘for furthering their heresies’ (p. 256).

When Martin summed up his attack on the English translator's faults of vocabulary he made the mistake of concluding by quoting Demosthenes, ‘what are these? words or wonders?’ (p. 569). Fulke returns the charge with interest, placing Martin with the inkhorn writers Martin himself scorned:

As for the ‘wonders of words’ that Demosthenes spake of, I know not where more properly they shall be found than in your affected novelties of terms such as neither English nor Christian ears ever heard in the English tongue: scandal, prepuce, neophyte, depositum, gratis, parasceve, paraclete, exinanite, repropitiate and a hundred such like inkhorn terms. (p. 569)

Fulke goes on to charge him with inconsistency in this practice, but what is of most interest is that he recognises and reproves the desire to maintain religious language or, in Fulke's own words, ‘the ecclesiastical use of terms’ (p. 495). He charges Martin with seeking ‘holiness … in vain sound of words’ (p. 493), and adds later, punning on ‘sound’: ‘but it is the sound of an unknown word that you had rather play upon in the ears of the ignorant, than by any sound argument out of the Scripture to bring them to the knowledge of the truth’ (p. 494). Thus a choice is clearly set before the KJB translators: ecclesiastical sound or sound argument.

An interesting squabble about rhetoric and eloquence erupts over Fulke having, in a previous work, labelled what Martin takes to be a solecism a ‘soloecophanes’. This rare term from classical rhetoric means something which appears to be a solecism but is not. Martin begins the quarrel:

And as for the word ‘soloecophanes’, we understand him that he meaneth a plain solecism and fault in grammar … but Mr Fulke saith that he meaneth no such thing, but that it is an elegancy and figurative speech, used of most eloquent authors; and it is a world to see, and a Grecian must needs smile at his devices, striving to make St Luke's speech here [Luke 22:20], as he construeth the words, an elegancy in the Greek tongue. (p. 132)

Fulke hesitates to claim elegancy for the Greek. He produces his original passage where he had described ‘soloecophanes’ as ‘a figure used of the most eloquent writers that ever took pen in hand’ (p. 135), and then, even if in context it looks like quibbling, makes a very important point: ‘where find you that I affirm St Luke's speech here to be an elegancy in the Greek tongue? yea, or “soloecophanes” to be nothing else but an elegancy and figurative speech? A figure indeed I say that it is; but are all figures elegancies, or all figurative speeches elegancies of speech?’ (p. 136). It is impossible to tell if he takes this position because he cannot prove the Greek to be eloquent or because he does not want to. However, the general point that not all figures are elegancies qualifies the impression given by books of rhetoric based on the Bible that because it contains identifiable examples of the varieties of figurative speech the Bible is therefore eloquent. This will need to be kept in mind when the KJB translators are seen discussing figures in the text. Of course this whole period was a time when the study of rhetoric was a basic part of education. All the translators were trained in rhetoric. Tyndale's first translation, designed to show he was qualified to translate the Bible, was of the rhetorician Isocrates. But it is clearly wrong to make the simple jump from knowledge of rhetoric and awareness of figures in the Bible to the conclusion that the Bible was regarded as a literary work. This is by no means always so.

The debate between Fulke and Martin ranges far more widely than I have indicated, but the rest of it is mostly concerned with theological detail. What is of real importance is that the areas of debate surveyed here developed and focussed the main linguistic and literary issues involved in translation and kept them current during the time of the making of the KJB.

DOES THE VERBAL FORM MATTER?

In spite of all the discussions of the language of the Rheims NT, the Protestants were most concerned with its margin, and the bulk of their criticisms (represented particularly by Fulke's NT and Cartwright's Confutation) is directed against the arguments, glosses and annotations. If it was in these that the real issue lay—for they rather than the text represented the Roman Catholic understanding—then did the particular translation have any real importance in the end? One aspect of Protestant thinking held that it did not. This aspect first appears in English with Coverdale's advocation of a variety of translations [see above], and is later touched on by the Bishops' Bible [see above]. The existence of differing English translations, coupled with the need to discredit the Roman Catholics, brings it out again.

Anthony Marten (1583) refutes the Roman Catholic objection to the Protestant variety in this way: ‘we grant indeed that our translations differ in words, but very seldom in sense: if at any time in sense, yet never in matter of great importance … the difference of our translations is rather in sound of words than in sense or meaning’ (fol. Aiir). Having thus emphasised the distinction between form and content at the expense of form, he boldly challenges the Rhemists:

But what do ye of the seminary of Rheims think if we should receive into our Church the translation which ye yourselves lately made (simply I mean, and nakedly without any of your corrupt notes and blasphemous glosses), would not the very same confirm all our opinions in the chiefest matters, as much in a manner as our own translations? For it is not your fantastical and new-devised terms that can make Christ's true religion contrary to itself, that can alter the sense and meaning of the Holy Ghost, that can either enfeeble our true and grounded positions, or strengthen your false and forged objections. (fol Aiiv)

Explicitly, it is not the language that can alter the Bible's meaning. Cartwright makes the same argument—‘if you had given your people your translation alone, we doubt not but they should … have found relief in it against extreme famine which your unfaithfulness hath thrust them unto’ (Answer, p. 88)—and backs it with a declaration that the original Scriptures are incorruptible through verbal alteration (p. 93).

George Wither, Archdeacon of Colchester (1540-1605), in his View of the Marginal Notes of the Popish Testament, was content to work by quoting the Rhemish text and notes, and then giving his answer, because ‘it will well appear that when out of their most partial translation, which they of purpose have framed for their best advantage, the things which they gather will not follow nor be confirmed, that they are utterly destitute of all help of the Scriptures, howsoever they labour to wring them to their purpose’ (fol. A4v). This argument could be two-edged, and the Roman Catholic John Heigham (fl. 1639) was to claim that the KJB in fact supported Roman Catholic, not Protestant views,⁴⁴ and so he worked to refute the ‘errors of our time … by express texts of their own approved English Bible’ (from the title). He in turn was confuted by Richard Bernard (1568-1641), who claimed that the Rhemists had been disowned by their superiors because their work ‘laid open to the people the nakedness and deformity of their Romish doctrines’. He goes on: ‘and therefore have I the more willingly produced the same against themselves; the power and lustre of God's word, though clouded and disguised by their purposed obscurity and improprieties, yet competently shining forth for their conviction by this unwilling wounding of Rome by the outworks of Rheims’.⁴⁵

Bernard's fuller views on this issue are expressed in a book he wrote as a guide for ministers, and they sum up the complexities involved. He counsels ministers to read the Bible.

in the translation to vulgar people, and in that which is most commonly received and best approved, and even as it is there set down, without addition, detraction or change of any thing therein. It is not fit that everyone be a public controller of a public received translation. As it may argue some presumption and pride in the corrector, so it may breed contention and leave a great scruple and cast doubts into the hearers' minds what reckoning to make of a translation; and it gives great advantage to the Papists, who thereby labour to forestall many that they smally account of our translations; which we see can never be so well done and generally approved of, but some particular persons will be censuring the same, and that not only in private (a thing happily tolerable if the censure be true and wisely proceeded in) but also they must needs show their skill in pulpits … It is very necessary that the translation be most sound.⁴⁶

However, Bernard does not want the ministers to stick to one translation for themselves. He further advises, ‘for translations, bring them to the original text, and by that try them, and see the emphasis of the words, the manner of speaking and the grammatical constructions’ (p. 27). ‘Theologus’, he argues, ‘must be philologus’ (p. 35), and he gives a long list of texts of the Bible, concordances, annotations, commentaries, etc., that a minister should have and study (pp. 38-42).

In effect there is to be a fixed text for the people but not for the clergy. The willingness among the scholarly to discount the particular verbal form in their belief in the essential unchangeable truth of the text is inseparable from the general tendency of the time not to quote accurately from any particular translation of the Bible (see below). In a different way, it is also at one with the practice in the controversies of quoting one's opponent in full, so that his work is effectively republished in the confidence that all true believers will see its folly. The real consequence for literary attitudes to the Bible is that the form of words, that is, the literary form of the text, ceases to matter. Although this works, as already observed (p. 38), against literary appreciation of the translations, it may also accidentally work towards their appreciation: if the literary nature of the text, like the spiritual nature, is conceived of as belonging to the pith, not the husk, then that nature is appreciable even when the husk is an unappreciated English translation. This tendency of thought will be seen in the work of Thomas Becon (below).

THE KING JAMES BIBLE

THE EXCLUDED SCHOLAR: HUGH BROUGHTON

Other issues of importance were raised by one of the most eminent English Hebrew scholars of the time, the dogmatic and contentious Hugh Broughton (1549-1612). Although he was not included among the King James translators, he gave them the benefit of his advice; his arguments about translation were as familiar to the KJB translators as anyone's.

He believed in the divinely inspired infallibility and perfection of both Testaments (but not of the Apocrypha).⁴⁷ So, writing in connection with the work then being done on the KJB, he declares, ‘the Old Testament is all written in the Jew's tongue, and God's style passing all man's wit, and maketh up one body, having not one word idle or wanting’.⁴⁸ This premise, coupled with a refusal to admit any possibility of textual corruption,⁴⁹ leads to his entire scholarly effort, which is to ‘clear’ the Scriptures, that is, open their true meaning so that the consistency, the ‘one body, having not one word idle or wanting’, is revealed. Much of this involves reconciliation of apparent conflicts (there can be no real conflicts in a divinely inspired text) of chronology and genealogy. Broughton's first work, A Consent of Scripture (1588), tried to harmonise Scripture chronology, and he continued to hold forth on this subject to the end of his life. Literary questions are necessarily involved, and he is frequently at pains to distinguish literal and figurative language in the text. For instance, he propounds as a principle of interpretation that ‘the first penner of the matter and all writers of it must use all certain and sure plainness, until all doubts be removed’. He has in mind the problems of reconciliation between Kings and Chronicles: the story in Kings ‘is most exact’, but in Ezra's version in Chronicles, ‘the abridger's grace standeth in short speech, with close helps to call unto the larger declaration’ (Epistle, p. 22). So Ezra can use ‘terms in rare elegancy, and hard’ because he and the people knew the true facts of the story as given in Kings, and because the people ‘knew well that Ezra could not have from God any authority to check God's former authority’. ‘Matters of plain story’ are for him ‘the ground of all’ (pp. 18, 19, 20). He follows the Jewish saying ‘that to miss in one letter is a corruption of the whole world’.⁵⁰ Here he is at his most characteristic, reconciling 2 Chron. 22:2 with 2 Kgs 8:26, using ‘proper’ to mean literal:

scholars little thought that one syllable, ‘Ben’, being unproper in the two and forty years, but supposed proper, and contrariwise proper in Joas but supposed in our cursed table unproper, should disturb all the Bible. Yet, as the little spark of the tongue enflameth the whole wheel of creation, so one syllable being mistaken hath kindled a flame through all our Bible that must be quenched. (p. 25)

Faith depends on the infallible perfection of the Bible, and this perfection is only revealed through the most careful attention to the way the language is used.

Such an attitude, like the Fulke-Martin controversy, was for the KJB translators a pressure away from any kind of liberty for the sake of the quality of their English. Further, without necessarily implying literary quality, it involves consideration of stylistic questions and particularly of figurative language. But Broughton's premises, that the Scriptures are divinely inspired and perfect, and that they contain what we would call literary elements, lead him to the view that the Bible is the best literature. The title of one of his translations is indicative: ‘the Lamentations of Jeremy, translated with great care of his Hebrew elegancy and oratorious speeches; wherein his six-fold alphabet stirreth all to attention of God's ordered providence, in kingdoms' confusion’. The last part of this is all one with his concern to harmonise the Bible: the alphabetical ordering is to him one more example of ‘God's ordered providence’. Even so, unless ‘elegancy and oratorious speeches’ refers to no more than this alphabetical ordering, the title gives a rhetorical view of Lamentations. At the beginning of the preface he goes further: ‘Jeremy's Lamentation I have set over into our tongue with care to set forth, so near as our speech could, the oratorious bravery of his words. But all men, yea all Greeks, though their learning and eloquence were poured into one head, would come nothing near his heavenly gayness’ (Works, II: 314). ‘Gayness’ appears an odd term for Lamentations, but Broughton uses it because of the pleasure he takes in the writing which brings ‘more joy for learned style than sadness by speech of the nation's fall’ (II: 315).

This pleasure comes back to admiration of harmony in technical matters:

And Jeremy at the kingdom's ruin penneth his Lamentations with a watchful eye, very much for phrase, using from Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah and all former, terms uttered of the destruction which he saw and felt. But his alphabet is more wonderful, to show in man's confusion God's distinction …⁵¹ The chap. 3 hath thrice every letter in order, that by three witnesses God's looking to his letters might be seen. These being matters of elegancy more than bare necessity, show that no less watchfulness was over the words of sentences.

(Epistle, p. 5)

Characteristically, he adds: ‘which thing should move us to hold the text uncorrupt’. The effect of this kind of point is to emphasise that the Hebrew of the OT and the Greek of the NT are more than expressions of meaning: they are artful language, and translation must recognise this. As he writes in the preface to his translation of Daniel, ‘also the oratory for the members of the sentences, wherein the prophets are very sweet, must in all languages be tendered’ (Works, I: 167).

The airing Broughton gives to his ideas of the sweet oratoriousness of the Scriptures must have served to remind the KJB translators that there was more to translation than meaning. But he never advocates a rhetorical or poetical translation, and is absolutely clear that the duty of translators is to be as faithful to the meaning of the original as possible.

All he says of English style in the Epistle, which was published in 1597, is that a translation ‘should have a mild style, to win all to a good work’ (p. 43), which is exasperatingly vague. After the publication of the KJB he writes: ‘I blame not this, that they keep the usual style of the former translations in the Church, that the people should not be amazed. For the learned, the Geneva might be made exact, for which pains whole thirty years I have been called upon, and spent much time to my great loss, by wicked hindrance’ (Works, III: 663). English style is hardly even a minor matter for Broughton: the usual style will do because it is familiar, and he returns us squarely to the issue of exactness. He judges a translator's duty to be ‘to show the right meaning of old hid doings, which by mistaking blame the holy letters’ (Epistle, p. 17).

Some indication of how this duty was to be fulfilled comes from a letter of 1593. Broughton was to work on the Geneva Bible with five other scholars, making only necessary changes; ‘the principle of harmonising the Scripture was to prevail, and there were to be short notes’.⁵² In the Epistle he sets out principles for fulfilling this duty. The text is not to be amended but ‘honored, as found, holy, pure’, ambiguous prophecies must be cleared by study ‘and staid safety of ancient warrant’, and clever circumlocutions in the text must be studied to avoid ‘foolish and ridiculous senses’ (p. 3). Repetitions must be translated identically (the KJB translators specifically excused themselves from doing this, but it became a principle of the RV), the old Greek translation, the Septuagint, as used in the NT, should be given in the margin of the OT, and nothing in the translation should ‘disannul the text’, since ‘that fault is exceeding great, for a man to take upon him to be wiser than God’ (p. 4). Lastly, in some places strict literalness is too harsh and a degree of paraphrase is permitted (pp. 50-1). Only here is any freedom left for consideration of the demands of the English language. Otherwise Broughton could not be more insistent on literal accuracy.

Broughton addressed to the translators an ‘advertisement how to examine the translation now in hand, that the first edition be only for a trial, and that all learned may have their censure’. It was perhaps his last attempt to influence the KJB, if only by opening the way for post-publication criticism. It contains some new, if not very serious suggestions, such as that seventy-two translators should do the work in memory of the Septuagint, and that gardeners should help ‘for all the boughs and branches of Ezekiel's tree to match the variety of the Hebrew terms’, for there are sixteen kinds of thorns in the Hebrew. ‘We should’, he continues, ‘by common consent, for near tongues, express this variety, that the holy eloquence should not be transformed into barbarousness. By right dealing herein, great light and delight would be increased. The Hebrew would be in honour among all men when the inimitable style should be known how it expressed Adam's wit’ (Works, III: 702). At the back of this lies an equation between literal translation and eloquence in translation: the translation would be eloquent not as English but as Hebrew and Greek in English. Though he and Gregory Martin would have been horrified to be bracketed together, Broughton's argument here is essentially the same as Martin's on the desirability of preserving the occult quality of biblical language (see above). Neither thought that such fidelity to the original would produce English eloquence, yet their attitude, by encouraging un-English translation, helped to change English language and literature.

Much of Broughton's work was ignored. But however little the KJB translators responded to its detail, it contributed significantly to the intellectual atmosphere of the time by encouraging a reverence for the eloquence of the original without arguing for an equivalent eloquence in English, but above all by demanding the whole truth and arguing that it could only be revealed through the closest attention to the words and syllables of the perfect originals.

RULES TO MEET THE CHALLENGE

The challenge to the translators of the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611⁵³ was substantially different to that faced by Wyclif, Tyndale and Coverdale. They were not pioneers but revisers. They had as bases for their work not only a variety of translations but also explicit and detailed discussion of the issues they faced. They inherited a very substantial continuity of practice: their predecessors all aimed at the most accurate possible presentation of the truth, and all except Martin used simple native English as far as possible. None aimed at literary effect, all agreed in deploring any such aim. But Martin had introduced the possibility of ecclesiastical effect and had developed latinate English as a source of vocabulary. The sense that the Bible was not a literary work and did not stand up to the tests of literary and linguistic correctness had become much more explicit in the later translators. The advocation of literalness had grown stricter, and there had been an increasing recognition of the hardness of Scripture, even a recognition that Scripture was in many places ambiguous. Coupled with these recognitions was a greater emphasis on the importance of the margin as the location for the real meaning or meanings of the text.

The request for a new translation began with the puritan John Reynolds. At the conference at Hampton Court in January 1604 he moved ‘his Majesty, that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reigns of Henry the eighth and Edward the sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original’.⁵⁴ It is an odd petition. This was not one of the topics that Reynolds had said he would raise, and so appears almost as a casual interjection. Moreover, the argument for it appears to have been brief and weak: Reynolds instances three Great Bible readings, apparently ignoring the existence of the Bishops' Bible, which had corrected the sense in two of the readings. It may be that Reynolds' intention was to push the conference into accepting the Geneva Bible as the official Bible of the Church, for it corrects where he demands correction, and the two revisions he suggests are exactly those of the Geneva Bible.⁵⁵ Understandably, there was a scornful response: ‘to which motion, there was at the present no gainsaying, the objections being trivial and old, and already, in print, often answered; only, my Lord of London [Bishop Bancroft] well added, that if every man's humour should be followed, there would be no end of translating’ (pp. 45-6). James's response may have surprised Reynolds. If the suggestion was a covert attempt to promote Geneva, it failed instantly: James thought that the worst of the translations because of the anti-monarchist tendencies of some of the Geneva notes.⁵⁶ Yet he took up the idea, hoping for a uniform translation, by which he meant one the whole Church would be bound to. His other particular interest, following his dislike of Geneva, was ‘that no marginal notes should be added’ (pp. 46-7). Textual accuracy, theological neutrality and political acceptability were the qualities desired, and the aim a single, generally acceptable text. There follows an ambiguous passage which appears to suggest that the kind of objections instanced by Reynolds were minor matters. James comments, ‘rather a Church with some faults than an innovation’, and adds, ‘if these be the greatest matters you be grieved with, I need not have been troubled with such importunities and complaints’ (p. 47). Does one sense here a general satisfaction with the overall accuracy of the earlier Bibles, perhaps irrespective of particular versions?

Nevertheless, the task was the same that their predecessors had set themselves, to make their translation as answerable to the truth of the original as possible. To achieve this, the largest group of translators for any of the Bibles since the legendary seventy-two of the Septuagint was selected. They were clear in their recognition of the task and its purpose. The preface, commonly held to have been written by Myles Smith (d. 1612), speaks for them:

Truly, good Christian reader, we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavour, that our mark.⁵⁷

Thus the task, next the means and the ultimate purpose, truth: ‘to that purpose there were many chosen, that were greater in other men's eyes than in their own, and that sought truth rather than their own praise’.

Instructions for their work were drawn up. Some make interesting reading in the light of what has gone before. First, a basic text is specified, the Bishops' Bible. This is to be ‘as little altered as the truth of the original will permit’ (Pollard, p. 29). Crucially, this sets a limit: it specifies revision only where fidelity to the meaning of the originals is an issue. No more is said on general principles. The next three instructions show the influence of the Fulke-Martin controversy. First, following Martin's objection, names are to be given in their traditional form. Next, following More and Martin, ‘the old ecclesiastical words [are] to be kept, viz. the word “Church” not to be translated “Congregation” etc.’. Also, ‘when a word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most of the ancient Fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place and the analogy of the Faith’.

Chapter divisions are to be left unchanged if possible and Scriptural cross-references may be given in the margin, but, importantly, marginal notes are forbidden, except ‘for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words which cannot without some circumlocution so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text’ (p. 29). Principally this is to avoid schismatic tendentiousness. As with the earlier instructions, there is an element of moderation here: the aim of making a version ‘not justly to be excepted against’ is well visible. But it is the potential for literary effect that is most interesting here. Attention is taken away from the margin and restored to the text, which is to have a word-for-word accuracy if at all possible. Modification of the text through considerations for English is, in effect, forbidden, and Broughton's principle of preserving the alien qualities of the originals is enforced.

The remaining instructions concern the method of conducting the work, and are designed to ensure that the greatest care possible is taken at every stage. It is interesting, then, to note how little the instructions on principles deal with fundamentals. Certainly the controversies and the now substantial history of translation had thrown the emphasis onto even the smallest details, but what they had also done was to establish such agreement on fundamentals that it went without saying that the only method was to be as literal as possible and to make the language as clear as possible. The omissions from the instructions are as revealing as the inclusions.

THE PREFACE

The preface, entitled ‘The translators to the reader’, is of interest first for the manner in which it is written. Its vocabulary shows a much greater reliance on latinate words than the translation itself, often creating effects of alliteration, sonority and grandeur, and the structure of the writing is more rhetorical, especially in the early part, than anything from the earlier English translators or controversialists. The main characteristics are repetition and elaboration, but not in the simple manner of biblical parallelism. Sentence structures are generally elaborate, and every effort is made to give them variety. This looks like a deliberate attempt at fine writing, and is certainly in a higher style than that of the translation itself. It seems that revision and translation have forced on the translators something lower, possibly much lower, than their idea of good writing.

To begin with, here is a passage characteristic both of the attitudes and style of the preface. It follows the theme of Parker's preface to the Bishops' Bible:

But now what piety without truth? what truth, what saving truth, without the word of God? what word of God whereof we may be sure without the Scripture? The Scriptures we are commanded to search. John 5:39. Isa. 8:20. They are commended that searched and studied them. Acts 17:11 and 8:28-29. They are reproved that were unskilful in them or slow to believe them. Matt. 22:29, Luke 24:25. They can make us wise unto salvation. 2 Tim. 3:15. If we be ignorant, they will instruct us; if out of the way, they will bring us home; if out of order, they will reform us, if in heaviness, comfort us; if dull, quicken us; if cold, inflame us. ‘Tolle, lege; tolle, lege’, take up and read, take up and read the Scriptures, for unto them was the direction, it was said unto St Augustine by a supernatural voice. ‘Whatsoever is in the Scriptures, believe me,’ saith the same St Augustine, ‘is high and divine; there is verily truth and a doctrine most fit for the refreshing and renewing of men's minds, and truly so tempered that every one may draw from thence that which is sufficient for him, if he come to draw with a devout and pious mind as true religion requireth’.

(pp. 2-3)

The attitude to Scripture is thoroughly familiar: it is truth to be searched and studied. As for the language, it shows a real care for words and structure. There is for instance the play on ‘command’ and ‘commend’: ‘the Scriptures we are commanded to search. They are commended that searched and studied them’. Such word play brings out strikingly the manner in which the prose moves forward by the repetition of an element coupled with a new element.

What I have quoted so far is but a quarter of the paragraph. It builds inexorably to a massive sentence detailing the totally religious, unliterary effects of the Scriptures. In this last sentence, it is as if, to adapt a famous phrase from later in the preface, the writer has not used one word or phrase precisely when he could use another no less fit as commodiously. The Bible has just been described as ‘a fountain of most pure water springing up unto everlasting life’:

And what marvel? The original thereof being from heaven, not from earth; the author being God, not man; the enditer, the Holy Spirit, not the wit of the apostles or prophets; the pen-men such as were sanctified from the womb and endowed with a principal portion of God's spirit; the matter, verity, piety, purity, uprightness; the form, God's word, God's testimony, God's oracles, the word of truth, the word of salvation, etc., the effects, light of understanding, stableness of persuasion, repentance from dead works, newness of life, holiness, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost; lastly, the end and reward of the study thereof, fellowship with the saints, participation of the heavenly nature, fruition of an inheritance immortal, undefiled, and that never shall fade away: happy is the man that delighteth in Scripture, and thrice happy that meditateth in it day and night.

(p. 3)

Though this may not be prose one would unreservedly admire, it bespeaks an author highly aware of language, and suggests more than the major point, that the prose the translators used for the translation was not what they would have considered good prose: Myles Smith, for one, had sufficient sense of language, including a sense of something like parallelism (though the term was not then known), not only to translate in a literary manner if he so chose, but also to be aware of structural qualities in the Hebrew. Is it possible to add to the conclusion that the translators did not translate in a manner they would have considered literary, the suggestion that they had some awareness of what is now regarded as the central element in Hebrew poetic structure? Can one go as far as Gustavus S. Paine does when he asks who gave the KJB its literary polish? After referring to the literary output of the translators, he writes:

the difficulty is that, to a modern reader, the thought occurs that nothing in all their many volumes of sermons and other writings seems to march with the Bible cadence quite as does the prefatory address … On this similarity (which does not extend to his sermons), must rest any case for saying that Smith brought to the final editing its real inspiration.

(The Men, p. 133)

This is a product of the natural but unnecessary desire to find a creative genius behind what one takes to be a great creation. Many arguments work against it: so much of the quality of the KJB depends on an established tradition of literal translation of the originals, and so much depends on translations already made, that, even if there was strong evidence that the KJB translators (or even just Myles Smith) intended to make the language of the translation literary, they had little scope for doing so. Further, Smith's style in the preface, though it has elements vaguely in common with biblical parallelism, owes much more to the complexities of Latin sentence structures. Parallelism, also, is by no means exclusively a Hebrew device. Lastly, to be aware of characteristics is not necessarily to appreciate them. Smith's preface reminds us of what was abundantly clear in Tyndale, that the translators could be very able users of language. Unless one can demonstrate that its cumulative and repetitive structure was influenced by the language of the Bible, the style of the preface is not evidence of literary appreciation of the Bible.

The author is God, the enditer the Holy Spirit, Smith claims, but he does not go so far as claiming for the Septuagint, as some have done not only for that version but for the KJB, that the translators were inspired. This idea is glanced at and rejected. Jerome's view is adopted: the seventy were interpreters, not prophets. Smith's reasons for this begin to reveal ideals of translation: ‘they did many things well, as learned men; but yet as men they stumbled and fell, one while through oversight, another while through ignorance, yea, sometimes they may be noted to add to the original, and sometimes to take away from it’ (p. 4). The ideal is simple and familiar: to make the most accurate and scholarly translation possible. Paraphrase is precluded. Further concepts of translation appear as developments from the idea of the Bible as the word of God:

we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. As the King's speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the King's speech, though it be not interpreted by every translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere.

(p. 7)

This argument depends on the familiar distinction between content and form; implicitly, style is a mere extra, a decoration.⁵⁸ In this the translators differ most particularly from those who maintain that the Bible or the KJB is the word of God, but who blur the distinction between content and form, and so argue that the word of God, because it has literary form and the best author, must be the greatest literature.⁵⁹ The translators are not arguing that they themselves are the instruments whereby God speaks in English; rather, they are the means whereby God's meaning is rendered into English.

The example of the King's speech indicates three aspects to translation, grace, fitness of phrase and accuracy of sense. ‘Grace’ clearly refers to qualities of style, and this is one of the few clear indications of awareness of a literary dimension in the work of translation.⁶⁰ Fitness of phrase seems ambiguous. The modern reader would see in it a literary dimension, but this would be incorrect. ‘Fitly’ is used in the sixth of the instructions to the translators to mean ‘accurately’: ‘words which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text’. ‘Fit’ is used unambiguously elsewhere in the preface to mean ‘appropriate’, as in the observation that at one time the Greek language ‘was fittest to contain the Scriptures’ because of its widespread use (p. 4; ‘contain’ again shows the division between content and form). Similarly, ‘fit’ and its variations are used in the KJB without literary connotations. The closest to a literary use is in ‘a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver’ (Prov. 25:11). ‘So fitly for phrase, so expressly for sense’ must therefore be read as consisting of two roughly synonymous phrases.

A similar trio occurs later in the same paragraph. Smith observes that the Septuagint does not come near the original ‘for perspicuity, gravity, majesty’ (p. 7). The OED, taking its use here as an example, defines ‘perspicuity’ as ‘clearness of statement or exposition; freedom from obscurity or ambiguity; lucidity’. This would now be an aesthetic term, but for the translators it described a quality of meaning. ‘Gravity’ and ‘majesty’, however, are moving towards their present aesthetic overtones, particularly as differences in quality between the original and the Septuagint are being noted.⁶¹

It is clear, then, that the translators had some literary sense of the work of translation, but a careful reading of the rest of the preface leaves the reader with an overwhelming awareness of their quest for truth and clarity. This is summed up as the ‘desire that the Scripture may speak like itself, as in the language of Canaan, that it may be understood even of the very vulgar’ (p. 11), which is exactly the desire of Tyndale. Earlier their work is described as ‘the opening and clearing⁶² of the word of God’ (p. 2). Two aspects of this opening and clearing are given special attention: inconsistent translation and the use of the margin. Here is how the issue of the use of the margin is dealt with:

Some peradventure would have no variety of senses to be set in the margin lest the authority of the Scriptures for deciding of controversies by that show of uncertainty should somewhat be shaken. But we hold their judgement not to be so sound in this point. For though ‘whatsoever things are necessary are manifest’, as St Chrysostom saith, and as St Augustine, ‘in those things that are plainly set down in the Scriptures all such matters are found that concern faith, hope, and charity’. Yet for all that it cannot be dissembled that, partly to exercise and whet our wits, partly to wean the curious from loathing of them for their everywhere plainness … it hath pleased God in his divine providence here and there to scatter words and sentences of that difficulty and doubtfulness, not in doctrinal points that concern salvation (for in that it hath been vouched that the Scriptures are plain), but in matters of less moment, that fearfulness would better beseem us than confidence … Therefore, as St Augustine saith, that variety of translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures: so diversity of signification and sense in the margin, where the text is not so clear, must needs do good, yea, is necessary, as we are persuaded.

(p. 10)

The square emphasis on sense here works against a literary reading of the text; it again implies that the meaning is to be found between or behind the words, and it demands that the reader attend to a choice of words.

Much less is made here than in Geneva or Rheims of literary deficiencies in the Scriptures, but clearly the KJB translators were aware of such deficiencies. ‘Plainness’ is not necessarily a pejorative term, but the translators see it as arousing loathing among the curious.

Inconsistency has two main aspects: the same word, phrase or even passage in the original may be translated differently in different places, or different words may be represented by the same English word. The preface concentrates on the translators' use of various words for a single original word, and they may well be replying to Broughton:

An other thing we think good to admonish thee of, gentle reader, that we have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done … But that we should express the same notion in the same particular word, as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by ‘purpose’, never to call it ‘intent’, if one where ‘journeying’, never ‘travelling’ … we thought to savour more of curiosity than wisdom, and that rather it would breed scorn in the atheist than bring profit to the godly reader. For is the kingdom of God become words or syllables? why should we be in bondage to them, if we may be free? use one precisely when we may use another no less fit as commodiously? … niceness in words was always counted the next step to trifling.

(p. 11)

In this the translators were following the example of their predecessors and also reflecting a certain looseness in the spirit of the age. Variety of translation is at one with the tendency to inconsistent phrasing of quotations from the Bible evident in the preface itself and in a number of seventeenth-century writers (see below). However, a large number of scholars came to think, with Broughton, that inconsistency was a mistake. The preface to the RV NT calls it ‘one of the blemishes’ in the KJB, and the RV followed the opposite policy.

Such an even-handed attitude to English vocabulary is responsible for some of the quality of the language of the KJB. An example will help to demonstrate this. One of the KJB's most famous lines, ‘consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin’ (Matt. 6:28), is also rendered, ‘consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not’ (Luke 12:27). The second version is little known and inferior as English. As translations, they render different Greek verbs with the same English word, ‘consider’. The first variation (‘lilies of the field’, ‘lilies’) exactly reflects a difference in the Greek: the resonant phrase exists because of literal translation. The last part of the sentence is identical in the Greek of both gospels, ο[UNK] κοπι[UNK], ο[UNK]δ[UNK] ν[UNK]θει, but the KJB in one instance produces the memorable cadence of ‘they toil not, neither do they spin’ and in the other more accurately reflects the structure of the Greek in the staccato pair of parallel phrases, ‘they toil not, they spin not’. Thus three aspects of the KJB translators' work can be seen in this one example: failure to distinguish between different words in the original, literal translation happily producing a phrase of memorable quality, and varying translations in one case producing another such phrase. There is no way of knowing if the last variations were produced for literary reasons, or even, if they were, which version the translators actually considered the better: they could have argued for the parallelism of Luke's version.

The fact that the translators deliberately adopted this policy of inconsistency (even if only because of precedent) is the only evidence that shows a sense of reponsibility towards the English language. However, the passage from the preface does not show genuinely literary motives, even if it lays open the way for choice of vocabulary on literary grounds. The concern is still with precision. ‘Fit’, as has been shown, does not carry aesthetic connotations, and ‘commodiously’ is used in the sense of usefully or beneficially for conveying sense.⁶³ A similar point is made by Ward Allen about the final phrase quoted: ‘by niceness Dr Smith means the domination of thought by words rather than the domination of words by thought, or exactness’ (Translating for King James, p. 12).

The point has now been touched on several times that the preface, like writings of the other translators, shows less concern for literary questions than would appear from a casual reading. The vocabulary is potentially but not actually aesthetic. Since the point is important, several other phrases must be glanced at. Imagery of richness and perfection is frequent, beginning with the phrase, ‘not only … the riches, but also … the perfection of the Scripture’ (p. 3). Coming after a statement that ‘whatsoever is to be believed or practised or hoped for is contained in’ the Scripture, it clearly applies to the Bible's quality as truth. The same is true of another phrase that seems to denote aesthetic quality, ‘a treasury of most costly jewels’. Here it is in alliterative, sonorous context: Scripture is ‘a physician's shop … of preservatives against poisoned heresies; a pandect of profitable laws against rebellious spirits; a treasury of most costly jewels against beggarly rudiments’ (p. 3). And here is a similar image used in relation to the translators' job of revision: ‘whatsoever is sound already (and all is sound for substance in one or other of our editions …), the same will shine as gold more brightly being rubbed and polished; also if any thing be halting or superfluous or not so agreeable to the original, the same may be corrected and the truth set in place’ (p. 7). Rubbing and polishing would appear to imply revision of literary quality, but, in the light of the other examples, the tendency to repetition of ideas and the context, again, of ‘truth’, it must be read as only potentially aesthetic. Finally, the same applies to the statement, ‘neither did we disdain to revise that which we had done, and to bring back to the anvil that which we had hammered’ (p. 10). Throughout, the translators have in mind the truth of their work.

Their contemporaries would have understood them to have had this in mind. It is only when the connotations of vocabulary have shifted sufficiently from the religious to the aesthetic that the translators could have been understood to be writing of literary qualities in their work.

BOIS'S NOTES

So far the evidence has been of the same sort as is available for the earlier translations. But in the case of the KJB direct evidence exists of the way the work was carried out. There is a copy of the Bishops' Bible with interlinear revisions by the translators, and there is a manuscript draft of the Epistles from the second Westminster company which seems to have been prepared to enable further scholarly opinion on the revision to be sought, probably in obedience to instruction nine.⁶⁴ Neither gives any explanations for the changes, so one can do no more than infer the reasons for them, and such inferences are dangerous. They should not be made until a sound sense of the translators' purposes and preoccupations is established. A third source of evidence, still subject to varying interpretation, does record discussion. It is the notes made by one of the translators, John Bois, during the final revision of the Epistles and Revelation. They show the Greek text being criticised and analysed, both for the exact meaning of words and phrases, and the figures of speech and grammatical constructions used; they show word-for-word translations being made and set alongside more English renderings, synonyms being listed, alternative translations being compared, and, finally, they show signs of literary sensitivity in considering both the Greek and possible English renderings. Almost all the notes concern the truth of the text, as in the following, which includes the idea of truth. I give it first as it appears in Bois's notes, then in Allen's translation, which will be used for the subsequent notes. It concerns Col. 2:2, which reads in the KJB, ‘that their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding’. Bois writes:

being knit together in love, [and instructed] in all riches etc. τό sυμβιβ[UNK]zω utrumque significat, et compingo, et instruo, sive doceo: non abhorret itaque a vero, apostolum utriusque significationis rationem habuisse.

being knit together in love, [and instructed] in all riches etc. The word sυμβιβ[UNK]zω [knit together, compare] signifies both at once, join together, and instruct, or teach: it is not inconsistent with the truth therefore, that the apostle took account of both meanings.⁶⁵

This is characteristic. The care for the truth of the writing involves a careful examination of possible meanings to the extent of supposing a deliberate play on the meaning of a word. Scholarly examination of the text here necessitates a literary awareness. As is usually the case in these notes, the translation eventually adopted is not given.

Of the nearly 500 notes, only three give a clear sense of literary awareness in the choice of English (another four are at best ambiguous evidence). That there are so few shows that almost all of the translators' attention was devoted to scholarship, but the work was not absolutely bereft of literary considerations.

The note to Rom. 11:31 is the first to have a clear literary aspect:

Theophylact places a comma after [UNK]πείθηsαν [not believed] although commonly the comma is placed after [UNK]λ[UNK]ει [mercy]. A.D. thinks that the common punctuation ought to be retained, because otherwise the transposition will be extremely harsh, and that other punctuation rests upon the authority of no transcripts.

(p. 41)

‘A.D.’ is Andrew Downes, one of the translators. He appears to be reinforcing the conclusions of textual scholarship with appeal to the possible consequences on the literary quality of the English.

The next note concerns 2 Tim. 1:3 and is one of the clearest examples of care for the sound of the English:

[UNK]z [UNK]δι[UNK]λειπτον [UNK]Kω] [without ceasing I have] i.e. [UNK]Kων [UNK]δι[UNK]λειπτον etc. [without ceasing having] … For if the words are accepted as they sound at first hearing, it will make an ill-joint for this clause with the preceding. I therefore thus soften the harshness of the speech, I give God thanks whom I serve from mine Ancestors with a pure conscience, then the following words all the way to the beginning of verse five I enclose in parenthetical marks.

(p. 71)

Though this makes plain a care for English, it is perhaps no more than a care for clarity. But what is of equal interest is that this criticism and suggestion was not accepted. The phrase objected to survives unaltered from the Bishops' Bible.

Lastly, here is the one note which contains literary considerations only; it concerns Hebr. 13:8:

yesterday, and to day the same, and for ever] A.D. If the words be arranged in this manner, [UNK] λόγοs [the statement] will be sεπνότεροs [more majestic]. A.D.

(p. 87)

It is significant, however, that this too was not the version adopted, which was ‘Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever’. Since Downes follows the word order of the Greek, and the eventual version differs from preceding versions, one can only guess that it was adopted as being the most accurate interpretation of the Greek. The final version is arguably less majestic than Downes's suggestion. Thus even when there is clear evidence of the existence of care for English, there is further evidence that this was not allowed to affect the translation.

CONCLUSION

The combined evidence of the preface and Bois's notes makes the conclusion inescapable that while the translators had a literary sense of their work, it was totally subordinated to their quest for accuracy of scholarship and translation. Whatever one considers the positive literary qualities of the KJB to be, they do not exist through a deliberate attempt on the part of either the KJB translators or their predecessors to write good English.

It is reasonable to assume that had it been a major intention of the KJB translators to produce a fine English version of the Scriptures, the result would have been quite unlike the KJB; it would have lost its scholarly merit and very likely have had little esteem among the people. Much of the quality of the KJB as English exists because the translators and their predecessors strove for something other than writing stylish English. Their fidelity to the originals transmitted some, perhaps much, of their alien but real literary quality into English. The search for clarity and the ideal of simple comprehensibility inherited from Tyndale, though much older than him, were better ultimate criteria for literary quality than any the translators might have adopted as a deliberate literary principle.

EPILOGUE: BROUGHTON'S LAST WORD

The translators anticipated a hostile reception for their work:

Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising any thing ourselves or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation [disparagement] instead of thanks; and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one), it is sure to be misconstrued and in danger to be condemned. This will easily be granted by as many as know story or have any experience. For, was there ever anything projected, that savoured any way of newness or renewing, but the same endured many a storm of gainsaying or opposition? … For he that meddleth with men's religion in any part, meddleth with their custom, nay, with their freehold; and though they find no content in that which they have, yet they cannot abide to hear of altering.

(Preface, pp. 1, 2)

However, if there was a general storm such as they anticipated, almost all direct evidence of it has disappeared. While the work was going on, as the translators report, ‘many men's mouths have been open a good while (and yet are not stopped) with speeches about the translation, so long in hand, or rather, perusals of translations made before’ (p. 6). Presumably these mouths remained open—and not with wonder—yet, had not Hugh Broughton carried out his determination to censure the new translation, it might seem that the KJB fell into a vacuum.

The truth is probably this: for all the significance 1611 now has in the history of the English Bible, the publication of the KJB was not an event. Publication then was not the kind of occasion it is usually made into now. Moreover, there was no mechanism for the critical reception of new work. What discussion there was was verbal (though if the work was controversial it drew forth replies in the form of pamphlets or books). But there are more particular reasons why the publication of the KJB, if an event at all, was not much of one. First, it was left to make its way in competition with existing Bibles, especially the Geneva, which continued to be highly popular. Second, and perhaps more important, most people were not concerned with the precise verbal form of their Bible: one translation was as good as another. This, of course, presents a paradox: it appears to go against the abundance of evidence that the KJB translators were pressured to be, and indeed tried to be, as literally accurate as reasonably possible. But, as has been seen [above], the separation of pith and husk led to a downplaying of the husk, and the evidence of the way the Bible was quoted at this time shows a paraphrastic disregard for the literal word of whatever translation was being used. If translation was but a guide to the truth of the original for those unable to read the original, it is perhaps not surprising that the same kind of scholars who demanded accuracy in a translation for the people should be unconcerned with fidelity to a mere translation themselves. Lastly, the KJB did not appear intially in a popular form but as a large and expensive folio. This too muted the impact of its publication.

A consequence of this lack of reception for the KJB is that the year 1611 is hardly a truer historical dividing point than, say, the turn of a century. The same Bibles continued to be read. The Roman Catholic Bible and attitude to Bible translation continued to be a matter of controversy. The Psalms and other poetic parts of the original Scriptures continued to rise in reputation, and they continued to be translated. Nobody was interested in the merits of the new Bible as a piece of English writing.

It is therefore better to close the story of the literary and linguistic attitudes of the Bible translators with the only extant comment on the qualities of the new Bible, for Broughton's reaction, though perhaps owing much to his own disappointments, still reflects much of the spirit of the time. It also in significant ways begins the movement towards the RV, some of the early critics of which were mocked as Broughtons. His response, ‘a censure of the late translation for our Churches, sent unto a right worshipful knight, attendant upon the King’, was written in either 1611 or 1612 (when he died), and begins: ‘the late Bible, right worshipful, was sent me to censure, which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe. It is so ill done. Tell his Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor Churches’ (Works, III: 661). Broughton's objections, of which he lists ten, show, as one would expect, that the KJB did indeed receive the minute cavilling attention that Myles Smith had feared. The most colourful is the second objection, which is to Jesus being called the son of God in Luke 3: the translators, he writes,

in fifteen verses bring fifteen score idle words for accompts in the day of judgement, and bring Joseph to be the son of all men there, where thus Saint Luke meant: Jesus was called of the Father My Son, being son of Joseph, as men thought … A Jew of Amsterdam objected the Bishop's error to deny the New Testament, that omitted how Christ should come of David. Thereupon I cleared our Lord's family. Bancroft raved. I gave the anathema. Christ judged his own cause.⁶⁶

The argument is entirely about accuracy of translation and the removal of inconsistencies in matters such as chronology. Broughton has nothing to say of the English qualities of the translation. To judge from his remarks, such considerations are irrelevant.

Notes

1. ‘De Officio Pastorali’, ch. 21; F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted (London, 1880), p. 438. Here and in some of the other quotations in this chapter the English is modernised, with original words given in square brackets. Spelling is modernised throughout. ‘Divisions’ signifies rhetorical divisions in sermons, or possibly verse divisions, that is, metrical lines.

2. The Obedience of a Christian Man; Doctrinal Treatises, p. 161.

3. His version of Joshua to 2 Chronicles appeared in the Matthew Bible, 1537. Coverdale's complete Bible had appeared two years earlier, so in these books the two chief pioneers of English Bible translation each independently produced versions.

4. A General View of the History of the English Bible, 3rd ed., rev. William Aldis Wright (London Macmillan, 1905), p. 158.

5. Tyndale's OT, ed. Daniell, p. 7. Though such comment belongs to a different kind of study from the present, this is strong writing, showing Tyndale at his argumentative best. More, Tyndale's arch-critic, recognised a similar strength in another passage, commenting that ‘these words walk lo very goodly by the hearer's ear, and they make a man amazed in a manner and somewhat to study and muse’ (VIII: 725). This, referring to a passage from Tyndale's Answer, p. 49, is the only early example of praise of Tyndale as a writer.

6. Expositions, p. 141 (hereafter Ex). See also pp. 5-8, 35, 139, 142, and Doctrinal Treatises (hereafter DT), pp. 313, 343, 417, 471.

7. Roger Edgworth, in a sermon of 1541-2, approves of vernacular Scripture ‘if we could get it well and truly translated’, but doubts who is fit to read it. Everybody believes he understands the Scripture but ‘of the hardness of Scripture (in which our new divines find no hardness) riseth all heresies’ (Sermons (1557), fols. 31b-3a; as given in Mozley, Coverdale, pp. 306-7).

8. Coleridge, essay II of ‘The Landing-Place’, Collected Works 4, The Friend, I: 140. This delightful essay contains a fine imaginative rendering of Luther at work as a translator (I: 140-2).

9. A number of passages from Luther's Table Talk suggest literary appreciation. See especially pp. 1-27 (trans. William Hazlitt, new edition (London, 1875)).

10. Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, trans. Bertram Lee Woolf, 2 vols. (London: Lutterworth, 1956), II: 270.

11. 1523; 1545 revision; Selected Writings, IV: 376.

12. ‘On translating: an open letter’, Selected Writings, IV: 186. The remaining points are all from this letter.

13. Anne M. O'Donnell, ed., Enchiridion Militis Christiani. An English Version (Oxford University Press for EETS, 1981), p. 44.

14. Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 93.

15. As given by Mozley, Tyndale, p. 34. This is from Foxe's first edition. Later editions such as the one I have used turn this passage into reported speech (V: 117).

16. One other translator from roughly this period takes the same view, Ambrose Ussher, see below. All other comments from the period take a contrary view of the two languages.

17. ‘Elder’ seems to modern ears an obvious choice and a real improvement, but this is because it has become a part of standard English through Tyndale's use of it. More did not concede that ‘elder’ was any improvement in Tyndale's English. He jeers that here Tyndale has ‘done a great act, now that he hath at last found out “elder”. He hath of likelihood ridden many mile to find out that. For that word “elder” is ye wot well so strange and so little known that it is more than marvel how that ever he could find it out’ (Confutation, p. 182).

18. Richard Pace, De Fructu (1517), p. 80. Ed. and trans. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (N.Y.: Ungar for the Renaissance Society of America, 1967), p. 103.

19. A real issue here is Tyndale's use of a variety of renderings for single words, but it raises problems which cannot be solved definitively: does variety show a care for style or a sense that English vocabulary is unfixed, or merely the difficulties of consistency? Tyndale did not always provide variety where it might be thought possible and desirable, and, as Hammond points out, ‘he did take care to recreate the original's repetitiveness where it had either semantic or stylistic importance’ (The Making of the English Bible, p. 36). Mozley makes the case for seeing the variation as a deliberate literary device, (Tyndale, pp. 101-3), and Daniell frequently refers to the variation as evidence of literary sensibility.

20. Further examples of Tyndale's revisions can be found in Mozley, pp. 287-9, and Daniell, pp 330-1. The most substantial example of More as a translator of the Bible comes in The Answer to a Poisoned Book, where he translates and later paraphrases John 6:26-71 (11:21-3, 43-5).

21. John Strype, The Life of the Learned John Cheke, Kt (London, 1705), p. 213.

22. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, intro. James Goodwin (London and Cambridge, 1843).

23. The Civil Conversation of M. Stephen Guazzo (London, 1586), unfoliated.

24. A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London, 1623), fols. e3r, e3v.

25. Coverdale's practice is less liberal than his prologue. Mozley (Coverdale, p. 106) points out that he followed Tyndale closely in the rendering of contentious ecclesiastical words other than ‘penance’, and so did not really compromise with More's position.

26. This care is described in a letter by Coverdale and others to Cromwell in 1538 (Writings, pp. 493-4).

27. The best study of the text is Gerald Hammond's, and his verdict is unfavourable: ‘for the most part the Bishops' Bible is either a lazy and ill-informed collation of what had gone before, or, in its original parts, the work of third-rate scholars and second-rate writers' (The Making of the English Bible, p. 143).

28. John 5:39. Parker habitually quotes the Vulgate and then translates it without reference to the text in the Bishops' Bible itself.

29. Errata of the Protestant Bible (1688; Dublin, 1810), p. 19. He is not exaggerating. Sixteenth-century Geneva Bibles with eighteenth-century inscriptions are quite common. More extraordinary is a 1585 Geneva Bible in the Victoria University of Wellington library that belonged to a Norfolk village family; it contains signatures, comments and records that date from 1696 to 1877. Evidently it was still a valued family possession at the time of emigration to New Zealand. Such Bibles are ample evidence of the longevity of Bibles as books.

    Plate 7 shows some handwritten annotations in a 1551 Tyndale NT, and plate 8 is typical of the kind of inscriptions to be found at the beginnings or endings of Bibles, or at some of the major breaks such as the beginning of the NT. These inscriptions, in two different hands, show that this NT continued to be used long after it had been superseded.

30. A Defence of the Book of Psalms, pp. 13-14.

31. A Short View of the State of Ireland (written 1605), ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford and London, 1879), p. 14.

32. Although they talk of ‘the lively phrase of the Hebrew’ it is unlikely that they considered the qualities of the Hebrew as having literary merit. ‘Lively’ at this time was a synonym for ‘living’, as in the Injunctions of 1538 on the provision and reading of Bibles which describe the Bible as ‘the very lively word of God’ (Pollard, p. 112, n. 1).

33. Preface to the NT, fol. A4v. The source for this belief is the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). Martin refers to this in a note.

34. ‘I myself not only admit but freely claim that when I translate the Greeks, except for the Holy Scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery, I do so not word for word but sense for sense’ (Selected Letters of St Jerome, trans. F.A. Wright (London: Heinemann; N.Y., Putnam's, 1933), letter 57:5).

35. He spells this ‘pue-fellowes’: is one to see a derogatory pun here?

36. Sebastian Castellio, Castalio or Chateillon, a Protestant opposed to Calvin. In 1551 he published a Ciceronian Latin Bible which became a byword as an unsuccessful attempt at literary translation.

37. ‘Seniors’, which More objected to in Tyndale, is used by Martin. In the annotation to 1 Pet. 5:1, Martin writes, ‘because we follow the vulgar Latin translation, we say Seniors or Senior: whereas otherwise we might and should say according to the Greek, The Priests’. This conveniently reflects how far Martin's literalism takes him.

38. One thinks only of the latinate terms which the KJB took over, but occasionally Martin is the source of lively colloquialisms such as ‘to blaze abroad’ (Mark 1:45).

39. Fuller evidence is to be found in J.G. Carleton, The Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible (Oxford University Press, 1902). Several other writers from the period give lists of strange words in the Rheims NT. Among these words are ‘penance’, ‘precursor’, ‘propitiate’ (Marten, fol. Aiiir), ‘abstracted’, ‘acquisition’, ‘advent’, ‘adulterating’, ‘co-operate’, ‘prescience’ (Fulke NT), ‘resuscitate’ (Marten and Fulke) ‘evangelize’ (Wither of Colchester, fol. A3r, Marten and Fulke), ‘prepuce’ (Wither, Marten, Fulke and KJB preface, p. 11) ‘avarices’ (Edward Legh, Critica Sacra (London, 1639), fol. A5r), ‘prevaricated’ (Fulke and Legh), and ‘tunic’ (KJB preface). The KJB uses ‘propitiation’ and ‘evangelist’, but nothing else that comes close to the words given here.

40. Fol. C3v. Anthony Marten sums up Protestant reactions to the English Martin produced as a result of this practice: ‘and therefore have you left such unperfect sentences, and have given such absurd terms, as every good man doth pity and lament your great fruitless labour’ (fol. Aiiv). See also Wither, fol. A3r.

41. London, 1583. References in the following are to Hartshorne's edition, which contains both works.

42. Pp. 267-8. Though he writes as if he is a spokesman for the translators, this is license on his part. As he admits, he never had dealings with any of the English translators (p. 89).

43. P. 5. Cartwright was later to comment that the language remains ‘partly for the sottish superstition of keeping of words rather than sense, and partly for the unnecessary new-fangledness of foreign speech, as it were untranslated’ (Answer, p. 189).

44. The Gag of the Reformed Gospel, 2nd edn (1623), pp. 4-5.

45. Rheims Against Rome (London, 1626), fol. A2 r-v.

46. The Faithful Shepherd (London, 1607), p. 16.

47. ‘All who hold the Apocrypha part of the Holy Bible make God the author of lying fables and vain speech, whereby wisdom would they should not come side by side with the holy books, nor under the same roof’ (Works, III: 664; though this was published as one volume, it is made up of four ‘tomes’ with erratic pagination, so the tome is given before the page reference).

48. III: 696. For a similar statement on the NT, see III: 703.

49. He writes that the Papists would triumph ‘if we Protestants confess the [Hebrew] text to be corrupted: that I will never do, while breath standeth in my breast’ (Epistle, p. 9).

50. ‘A request to the Arch. of Cant.’, Epistle, p. 57.

51. The marginal summary reads, ‘Jeremy's distinct art, of a confused state, in a sixfold alphabet’.

52. The letter is not in Works. This is DNB's summary.

53. These titles are sometimes run together, but neither is the proper title of The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New: newly translated out of the original tongues: and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by his Majesty's special commandment. Appointed to be read in Churches. An abbreviated title has been a historical necessity, the Americans preferring ‘The King James Bible’ and the English ‘The Authorised Version’. Since the version was never officially authorised but is the Bible whose creation is associated with James I of England, I prefer ‘The King James Bible’.

54. William Barlow, The Sum and Substance of the Conference … at Hampton Court January 14 1603 (London, 1604; facsimile, intro. by William T. Costello and Charles Keenan, Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965), p. 45.

55. ‘Bordereth’ (Tyndale, Great Bible and Bishops' Bible) is objected to in Gal. 4:25; Ps. 105:28, ‘they were not obedient’ (Coverdale, Great Bible), should be ‘they were not disobedient’ (Geneva), and Ps. 106:30, ‘then stood up Phineas and prayed’ (Great), should be ‘executed judgement’ (Geneva, followed by 1611; Coverdale and Bishops' have ‘executed justice’).

56. James instanced Exod. 1:19, where the Hebrew women's disobedience is said to be lawful, and 2 Chron. 15:16, where Asa is criticised for deposing his mother: ‘he lacked zeal: for she ought to have died’.

57. P. 9. The foliation of the original preface is difficult to use (only one page has a foliation mark), so for convenience I have numbered the pages, beginning at 1, which is fol. A3v.

58. Many images in the preface confirm this, for instance: ‘translation it is that openeth the window to let in the light, that breaketh the shell that we may eat the kernel’ (p. 3). This last image was used by Tyndale [see above]

59. This argument is anticipated in the preface: ‘we cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God himself’ (p. 11). ‘Elocution’ here refers to choice of words, and particularly to the use of a variety of words for single things. It does not have the full sense of fine writing that later ages might read into it.

60. The sixteenth of Wilson's definitions of ‘grace’ in the second edition of his Christian Dictionary seems appropriate here: ‘elegance of speech, which made Christ gracious and amiable to all. Ps. 45:3. Full of grace are thy lips. Luke 4:22. Words full of grace’.

61. For ‘majesty’, see also above, and below.

62. ‘Clearing’ is used partially as a synonym of ‘opening’. It also has a sense of the removal of difficulties or apparent inconsistencies, perhaps of rectifying the text. Broughton (see below) uses it in this sense when he writes, ‘I cleared our Lord's family’.

63. Wilson paraphrases a use of ‘commodious’ as ‘convenient and fit for their purpose’. He writes of a particular reading of the NT Greek ‘bearing a more commodious sense by far’ (Christian Dictionary, 8th ed., p. 77).

64. The Bishops' Bible is in the Bodleian Library, Bib. Eng. 1602; Allen and Edward C. Jacobs, The Coming of the King James Gospels (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995) gives the NT annotations. The draft of the Epistles is in Lambeth Palace Library, MS 98, published in Ward Allen, ed., Translating the New Testament Epistles 1604-1611: A Manuscript from the King James's Westminster Company (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International for Vanderbilt University Press), 1977.

65. Translating for King James, pp. 62-3. Where Bois uses English, Allen italicises. Allen adds literal translations of the Greek words discussed in square brackets.

66. III: 661. ‘The Bishops’ are the translators of the Bishops' Bible. Bishop Bancroft was one of the KJB translators.

Abbreviations

AV: Authorised Version or King James Bible, 1611

CW: Collected or Complete Works or Writings

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

KJB: King James Bible or Authorised Version, 1611

NEB: The New English Bible, 1970

NT: New Testament

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

OT: Old Testament

PB: The Book of Common Prayer

Pollard: The Holy Bible (1911 facsimile of 1611 KJB with introduction and illustrative documents)

RV: Revised Version, 1885

Bibliography

Bibliographical information for works cited in one place only is given at that place.

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