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By Root 1093 0

flowering of the Renaissance and the religious fervor of the Reformation united to produce a masterpiece. Like the Gothic cathedrals, it was a collective expression of a culture and, like them, it was not built all at once but grew slowly over a considerable period of time. The speed with which it was accomplished was possible only because it was not so much a new translation as a synthesis of earlier efforts, the final form given to a continuous process of creation, the climax to the great century of English Bible translation. “Truly, good Christian reader,” wrote Dr. Miles Smith in the preface, “we never thought from the beginning that we should neede 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 principall good one. That hath bene our indeavour, that our marke....So if we, building upon their foundation that went before us, and being holpen by their labours, doe endeavour to make that better which they left so good, no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us, and, they, we perswade our selves, if they were alive, would thanke us.” No man, surely, has cause to mislike the King James translators, and many men have cause to thank them.

The Englishing of the Bible—except for some earlier fragments—probably began with the Venerable Bede, who is thought to have completed a translation of the four Gospels just before he died, in 735. The first translation of the whole Bible into English was done under the supervision of John Wycliffe, “the morning star of the Reformation,” and appeared in 1382. The Lollards, or poor preachers, who walked through England teaching his doctrines, used his Bible, in which, for the first time, the common people could hear the complete word of God in their own language. Bede and Wycliffe translated not from the original Greek and Hebrew but from the Latin Vulgate. The first translation from an original tongue was William Tyndale’s New Testament, put out in 1525. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal toward the end of that century sent many Greek and Hebrew scholars into exile all over Europe, thus giving a tremendous impetus to the study of their languages. This providentially coincided with the beginning of the Reformation—providentially, because translating the Bible into living languages was one of the reformers’ chief ways of bringing the word of God directly to the people. Luther, whose German translation of the Bible has a quality and importance comparable to the King James Version, befriended Tyndale, whose New Testament was printed in the Lutheran stronghold of Worms. “If God spare my lyfe,” Tyndale defiantly wrote to a Catholic cleric, “ere many yeares I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou doest.” His life was spared just long enough; in 1536 he was burned at the stake in Belgium for heresy, but while he was in prison, in the last year of his life, he continued to work on his translation of the Old Testament, and managed to complete the bulk of it. Tyndale’s Bible was the first and by all odds the greatest of a spate of translations that poured forth during the century, and it was drawn on far more heavily by the King James translators than any other version. The other important translations were Miles Coverdale’s (1535); the Matthews Bible (1537), a combination of Coverdale and Tyndale done by a disciple of Tyndale, John Rogers, who was later martyred under Bloody Mary; the Great Bible (1539), the first Authorized Version, prepared by Coverdale at the request of Henry VIII. The Genevan Bible, also known as the Breeches Bible because Adam’s fig leaf was rendered “breeches,” was issued in 1560 in Calvinist Geneva by a group of English Protestant refugees from Bloody Mary’s persecution and went through a hundred and forty editions (being popular partly because of its literary quality and partly because of its legible Roman type and its handy quarto size, as against the cumbersome black-letter folios