Earlier this month the English-speaking world celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible. This is not, one might have thought, a matter of any particular consequence to the other great religions which share the anglophone universe with Christianity, except for one thing: there is no other single work which has had such an influence on the English language.
All the journals and newspapers which have written on the quatercentenary have pointed to the number of idioms we use that derive from the Authorised Version and whose source we are generally unaware of. How many politicians in this country have not at some point referred to someone as being the “salt of the earth,” for example? Or how many commentators have not used the term “two-edged sword,” sometimes in the format “double-edged sword” in their opinion pieces? Or how many of us in recounting a close shave have not described it as escaping by the “skin of our teeth”? According to the Telegraph, linguist Prof Crystal says that there are 257 idioms from the King James Bible embodied in the language.
But it is not just actual expressions which we have absorbed from the Authorised Version; it is also the cadence of its language – at least, up until recently, that is. Anyone who has listened to the great speeches of Martin Luther King, for example, cannot mistake in them the musicality and rhythm of seventeenth century English which he employed to such moving effect. In this country, Forbes Burnham was given to biblical turns of phrase in his speeches, although in his case it must be said, it was usually for the purpose of their religious references rather than because of the cadence of the language.
The 1611 version of the Bible made such an impact on the evolution of English because in a society where the inhabitants in the rural areas in particular were illiterate, it was intended to be listened to, not read. The priests were ordered to read it out loud in the pulpit every Sunday, and over time generation after generation absorbed not just its content, but also its linguistic structure. Its form of expression influenced writers too down the ages, and religion aside, it is not for nothing that the Authorised Version has come to be regarded as a great work of literature.
So who were these translators with a poetic flair who rendered the New Testament into English from the Greek, and the Old Testament from the Hebrew? The short answer is the bishops of King James I & VI – although that oversimplifies things. James, a pedantic man who fancied himself a scholar, had instructed a committee of bishops to undertake the work and among other things follow an earlier translation called the ‘Bishops Bible’ of 1568. Fortunately, the bishops cheerfully ignored this last injunction.
At this point it should be explained that for many centuries the Bible was not accessible to the ordinary man because it was in a Latin translation. There had been earlier efforts to translate portions of it into the vernacular, such as that by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, but it was with the coming of the Reformation and in particular, Luther’s great translation of the Bible into German that inspired English linguists to try again. Far and away the most important translation produced prior to 1611, was that by William Tyndale which found a wide readership.
James’s committee of bishops were honest men and acknowledged their debt to their predecessor. According to the Economist and others they did not translate everything from scratch, but relied in the first instance on Tyndale’s work as well as on the Geneva Bible, which itself was based on Tyndale’s translation. They built on these and made revisions. According to the Telegraph, the ‘Bishops Bible’ which James I wanted the bishops to follow was a Latinate translation, which would have done nothing for the poetry of the final text.
In addition to the article produced for the current anniversary, the Economist published another one in 2008 on Tyndale himself, entitled ‘A hero for the information age.’ In that it is said that Tyndale has been rightly regarded as one of the fathers of the English language, and that he was an “outstanding wordsmith whose prose decisively influenced the lovely cadences of the King James translation.”
But Tyndale was more than that it seems; he was also a martyr for freedom of expression, hence the caption of the 2008 piece. He lived in the time of Henry VIII (reigned 1509-47), who was hardly a freedom of speech advocate and was at pains to suppress any vernacular translations of the Bible. England was not as advanced in rapid printing on a large scale as the continent, so the various segments of the Bible which Tyndale brought out came off the presses in Germany and the Low Countries. The Economist says, however, that London had many booksellers who were anxious to find new material to sell to growing numbers of literate customers and who consequently operated as willing distribution agents for the new translations.
Tyndale, although a genius in linguistic terms, was not a worldly man, but was protected by a number of merchant friends and acquaintances who shipped him off to the continent, and tried to give him cover there. He moved from place to place, ending up in Antwerp, in modern-day Belgium. The fact that he was out of England did not guarantee his safety. Henry sent his agents all over the continent looking for him, and it was one of these who eventually located him, as a consequence of which he was arrested in Antwerp on the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor following a request from Henry. He was imprisoned in a Belgian fort, and was then executed by strangulation and burning in 1536.
One of the points that the Economist was making was that technology – in this case, the printing press – and contacts between the continent (particularly the more liberated German states) and England which facilitated trade and the flow of information, undermined Henry VIII’s attempts at maintaining absolutism and “the old power structure.” As the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought into focus recently, the ‘Henry VIIIs’ of this world are still around, and still seek to suppress information and prevent the dissemination of ideas with a view to maintaining ‘the old power structure.’ Modern technology, however, is making that increasingly difficult, as even President Assad of Syria with his ban on journalists is discovering.
As the English-speaking world celebrates the anniversary of a remarkable work of literature (as opposed to Christians, who will celebrate the anniversary of the translation of their foundational religious text), we should remember William Tyndale, whose contribution to it was so seminal. While he would have been called a humanist in the sixteenth century, he still speaks to us down the ages, because today we would recognize as was said above, that his sacrifice was made in the name of freedom of expression.
