The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
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and the navigational compass had changed the world. Without print, Tyndale’s work would most likely have followed that of Wycliffe along untrodden ways to remote safe houses, the contraband of faith smuggled through the lines for a minority. Print meant mass. Battalions replaced the single spies.
People fell in love with Tyndale’s translation because of its beauty, the sense of certainty, the way in which it seemed to be at the heart of this newly emerging, exotic, vivacious and proud language, his own language. Perhaps above all else it was loved because it was written to be spoken. Tyndale knew the limitations of literacy in the country which had now exiled him and it was on those people that his mind was fixed as his scholarship and great artistry unrolled the scrolls of ancient time.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; And without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life and the life was the light of men.
New words and phrases were planted in the English language, words that have flourished ever since. ‘Let there be light’, ‘fell flat on his face’, ‘filthy lucre’, ‘let my people go’, ‘the apple of his eye’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘signs of the times’, ‘ye of little faith’, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, ‘fisherman’, ‘under the sun’, ‘to rise and shine’, ‘the land of the living’, ‘sour grapes’, ‘landlady’, ‘sea-shore’, ‘two-edged’, ‘it came to pass’, ‘from time to time’ and hundreds more. He is bitten into our tongue.
And he gave us, in English, the Beatitudes, the most radical and compelling affirmation of morality, and one of the most sublime poems in the language, which begins:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Which Tyndale’s words have done.
The movement for a Bible in English, which had gathered for so long, now had its champion. Tyndale’s version of the New Testament was the fuse. God’s English could no longer be silenced. The English ruling classes panicked.
The Bishop of London, Tunstall, had a plan. He would arrange to buy up all the books at source, ship them to London and burn them on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.
‘Well, I am the gladder,’ said Tyndale, ‘for these two benefits will come thereof: I shall get money of him for those books to bring myself out of debt and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God’s word.’ Which is what happened and Tyndale continued rewriting and refining his work. Yet it hurt. Especially when he was accused of deliberate deceit and profanation of the Scriptures. He knew that his only aim was to educate. There was no heresy in him. He was damned out of fear and politics and not for anything he wrote or said.
The campaign to stop Tyndale intensified. In the 1520s, Sir Thomas More was called up for service. Thomas More, a renowned scholar, was an admired friend of other liberal humanist scholars across Europe, especially of Erasmus, who wrote of him in the highest terms. He said that being in More’s company ‘you would say that Plato’s Academy was renewed again’. He wrote of More’s ‘gentleness and amiable manners’. There was More’s Utopia, a classic. And he had at one stage, like Erasmus, approved of vernacular translations of the Bible and attempted a few passages himself. He seemed, given the hardness of the age, a kindly man.
Yet once licensed by Bishop Tunstall in 1528 to read all heretical works and refute them, he bared his fangs in swiftly written dialogues. Tyndale became his chief prey. Tyndale wanted a ploughboy to be able to read the Bible? More, who abhorred free speech, was alarmed that the Bible might be available ‘for every lewd lad’.
In this he differed from his friend Erasmus, who found himself twice snared in these disputes. Luther claimed him for a master although Erasmus opposed Luther’s violent expression of their joint position and disassociated himself from the bloody consequences of the German wars. Now Thomas More saw Erasmus as an ally. Yet Erasmus wanted the Bible to be translated into every language and read as widely as possible. More’s frenzy against Tyndale was nourished by his concern for the future of the ancient position of the Church and monarchy. He saw it threatened and his liberal humanism was thrown overboard.
More savaged Tyndale’s translation. He even claimed it was not the New Testament but a forgery. He brought no proof and nor could he substantiate in any but the most minor way ‘its faults . . . wherein there were noted wrong above a thousand texts’.
Tyndale’s reply, Answer Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, carefully refuted the false claims of Henry VIII’s bulldog. More’s counter-response, Confutation of Tyndale’s answer, included descriptions of Tyndale as ‘a beast’ discharging ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth’, a ‘hellhound’ fit for ‘the dogs of hell to feed on’. He called him the son of the devil himself.
Whenever Tyndale challenged him on detail, More’s method was to bluster. And he descended into a sort of madness. In his defence of Roman Catholicism, he claimed, for instance, that, as some miracles had it, the heads of saints could be buried in two places.
More was fighting for the rights of the Roman Catholic position to be infallible and to be whatever it decided it wanted to be. He saw it as sanctified by time and service. Any change, he thought, would inevitably destroy the sacrament of Holy Truth, the papacy and the monarchy. Everything must be accepted as it had been. To dislodge one pebble would be to set off the avalanche.
The vitriol against Tyndale’s translation and the burning and murdering of anyone offering the slightest disagreement to the Old Church’s view show what was at stake. Power was to be taken from those who had held it for so long that they believed that it belonged to them by right. Their authority had been exercised for so many centuries that the prospect of its being diminished in any way was felt to be fatal. They wanted the populace to be subservient, silent and grateful. Anything else was unacceptable. Tyndale’s print-popular New Testament had breached the fortifications of a privilege so deeply founded in the past that it seemed God-given and unchallengeable. It was not to be tolerated.
While this battle of the pamphlets was going on and Tyndale was being harried from town to town in Europe, evading both the King’s spies and the agents of the Holy Roman Emperor, he began to translate the Old Testament. To do this he found a way to learn Hebrew, a language in which he rejoiced. ‘Where did Tyndale learn Hebrew?’ asks David Daniell in his biography. ‘The straightforward answer is that we do not know. Because so little Hebrew was known in England in the 1520s, he must have learnt it somewhere on the Continent, where Hebrew studies were gathering pace.’
He would have had access to a Hebrew grammar and a dictionary and ‘a printed Hebrew text of scripture would not have been too hard to come by from a German bookseller.’ And we know he was ‘unusually skilled with languages’. Tyndale saw a close affinity between Hebrew and the English form. ‘The manner of speaking in both is one,’ he wrote, ‘so that in a thousand places there needs not but to translate it into the English, word for word.’ He found similarities with Anglo-Saxon and used Hebraic contractions and words so boldly they are now embedded in English.
To the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the Pentateuch or the Torah, he gave provocative marginal notes when he shipped them to England. Many of them directly criticised the Pope. Despite a shipwreck on the way from Antwerp to Hamburg in which he lost his whole manuscript and his reference books, he reconstructed the work in a few months, assisted by Miles Coverdale, a biblical scholar. His work rate was as prodigious as his erudition. References are made again and again to his working day and night. The project was always urgent, time always pressing him on.
In 1533, Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn, who was six months’ pregnant. Thomas Cranmer, who arranged the marriage, became Archbishop of Canterbury and soon afterwards Thomas Cromwell became Chancellor. Wolsey, having failed to secure the divorce, was discarded. The King, now Supreme Ruler,