THE EARLIER VERSIONS

In order to understand the place which the Revised Version has in the history of our English Bible, it will be well to review that history briefly from the time of the original documents down to the present day.

1. The Original Documents and Jerome.

In the case of the Old Testament, these original documents consisted of a number of rolls, or books in roll-form, the time of whose composition extended over a period of several centuries. The rolls were written (with a few trifling exceptions) in the Hebrew language, and mainly, if not entirely, on skins. And it is characteristic of the conservatism that generally prevails in religious matters, that to this day the Jews still prefer the use of leather and the roll-form for Synagogue use. And though, as a matter of fact, the oldest dated Hebrew MS. we possess belongs to the close of the tenth century after Christ, there are many proofs known to scholars which show that the original text has on the whole been faithfully preserved.

Nor must we forget that it is not only in the original Hebrew that the books of the Old Covenant have been handed down to us. About two hundred years before Christ, the whole Old Testament was translated into Greek. And while this translation was intended primarily for the Jews of the Dispersion, it came to be largely used in Palestine itself by those to whom the original Hebrew was gradually becoming more and more unfamiliar, owing to Aramaic having taken its place in general use. The Septuagint indeed, as this Greek translation was called, may be said to have formed the Bible of our Lord and His Apostles, if we may judge from the fact that the majority of quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament approximate more closely to the Greek than to the Hebrew version.

As regards the New Testament, its books, in the form in which we have them now, were all written in the ordinary vernacular * Greek of the day, and, it can hardly be doubted, on papyrus, then the common writing material. Nor, at first, did any such authority or sanctity attach to them as was the case with the books of the Law and of the Prophets. Gradually, however, they won their way to canonical acceptance, until about the close of the second century the Christian Church virtually possessed what is now our Bible, with its two parts, the Old and the New Testaments, both of which are preserved for us in the great codices of the fourth century — the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus.

By the aid of these Greek MSS., and many others of varying degrees of value, critics are now engaged in the all-important work of reconstructing, as far as possible, the actual words of the sacred writers.

In this task a welcome aid is afforded by the different versions or translations into which from a very early date the books of the Bible were rendered. And amongst these there is one which has a very direct bearing on our present inquiry.

From the second century onwards parts of the Bible had appeared in a Latin dress; but, gradually, so many various readings and renderings had sprung up, that, towards the close of the fourth century, the need of an authoritative revision became apparent. This task was accordingly entrusted by Pope Damasus to Eusebius Hieronymus, or Jerome, as he is generally called. And the result of his labours was the Vulgate, or commonly - received Latin Text, which in the Sixtine -Clementine recension of 1592 is still the authoritative Scripture of the Roman Catholic Church.

It was this Latin Bible, then, that St. Augustine and his fellow - missionaries brought with them to England in the sixth century, and consequently it formed the basis of those Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman paraphrases which for nearly seven hundred years formed the only vernacular versions of Scripture which the people in this country possessed.

2. The Early Paraphrasts and Wyclif.

The story of the early paraphrasts is a very interesting one, embracing as it does the names of the Saxon cowherd Cædmon, who, in the third quarter of the seventh century, in obedience to a Divine vision, sang "the beginning of created things"; of the venerable Bede, the most famous scholar of his day in Western Europe, whose last work was a translation of the Gospel of St. John; and of the priest Aldred, who, about the middle of the tenth century, wrote an Anglo-Saxon word-for-word translation between the lines of the Latin Gospels written at Lindisfarne in honour of St. Cuthbert.

But important as the work of these and others was, it cannot be said to have done more than familiarize the minds of the people with the leading facts in Old and New Testament history, until such time as they should have the whole Bible in their own hands.

The man to whom this was principally due was John Wyclif, "the morning star of the Reformation." Struck by the evils and distresses of his times, Wyclif felt that what, above all, the people required was a wider acquaintance with the truths of the Gospel. "Christian men," so he wrote, "ought much to travail night and day about text of Holy Writ, and namely [especially] the Gospel in their mother-tongue, since Jesus Christ, very God and very man, taught this Gospel with His own blessed mouth and kept it in His life." Accordingly, with the assistance of his friend Nicholas de Hereford, he set to work so earnestly at the task of translation that by the middle of the year 1382 he had the joy of seeing the whole Scriptures in the hands of the people in a form they could understand. Six years later a revised edition appeared under the editorship of Wyclif's former assistant, John Purvey, introduced by a most interesting Prologue. "Since at the beginning of faith," so Purvey writes, "so many men translated into Latin, and to great profit of Latin men, let one simple creature of God translate into English, for profit of English men.... Therefore a translator hath great need to study well the sentence, both before and after, and look that such equivalent words accord with the sentence, and he hath need to live a clean life, and be full devout in prayers, and have not his wit occupied about worldly things, that the Holy Spirit, author of wisdom, and knowledge, and truth, direct him in his work, and suffer him not to err. . . . By this manner with good living and great travail, men may come to true and clear translating, and true understanding of Holy Writ, seem it never so hard at the beginning."

We might have expected that the publication of these versions would have pleased the Church, but instead it aroused the bitter hostility of the priests and others in authority, and for their reward the translators had to look to the eagerness with which their work was welcomed by all classes of the people.

The new versions were indeed admirably suited for popular use by the homeliness and direction of their diction, as may be seen in the following examples from Purvey's revision of St. Matthew : "Twey men metten hym, that hadden deuelis, and camen out of graues, ful woode [mad]" (viii. 28); "And loo! in a greet bire

[rush] al the droue wente heedlyng in to the see" (viii. 32); "A leche is not nedeful to men that faren wel, but to men that ben yuel at ese" (ix. 12); "Lo! my child, whom Y haue chosun, my derling" (xii. 18); "And he cometh, and fyndith it voide, and clensid with besyms [brooms], and maad faire" (xii. 44); "And the boot in the myddel of the see was schoggid with wawis" (xiv. 24). From the earlier version, it will be of interest to cite Wyclif's rendering of the Lord's Prayer :

"Oure fader that art in heuenes, halowide be thi name; thi kyngdom come to; be thi wille done as in heuene and in erthe; zif to vs this day oure brede ouer other substaunce; and forzyue to vs oure dettis, as we forzyuen to oure dottours; and leede vs not in to temptacōn, but delyuer vs fro al euyl. Amen" (Matt. vi. 9-13).

It will be noted that Wyclif rightly omits the doxology at the end in accordance with the Latin text from which he was translating, which in this particular is closer to the original, as our Revised Version shows, than many of the late Greek MSS. which subsequent translators used. On the other hand, both his and Purvey's versions undoubtedly suffered greatly from being only translations of a translation; while the fact that they were prepared entirely by hand necessarily made copies very expensive, as much as £30 or £40 of our money being sometimes paid for a complete copy.

3. The Invention of Printing and Tindale.

The publication in the first half of the fourteenth century of the Biblia Pauperum, a series of rough woodcuts with texts from Scripture attached, did something, no doubt, in the way of spreading a knowledge of Bible History amongst the people. But the instruction these books conveyed was small, and it is to two other events that we must principally look for the preparation by which the appearance of our next version was heralded.

One was the Invention of Printing. About the middle of the fifteenth century, Fust, a goldsmith of Mainz, perfecting Gutenberg's experiments, issued from the Press the first printed Latin Bible, generally known as the Mazarin Bible, from a copy found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin. The new discovery soon spread, and of the Latin Bible alone ninety-one editions were issued before the close of the century.

The other was the Revival of Learning. By the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greek scholars were driven westward, and a fresh era began in the study of Greek. The result was the appearance of Erasmus' Greek Testament at Basle in 1516, which in matter of publication, though not of actual printing, antedated by several years the New Testament in the Complutensian Polyglot edition of Cardinal Ximenes. New editions of the Hebrew Old Testament, along with Hebrew and Greek Grammars, also began to appear, offering invaluable aids for the work of translation. And with the hour came the man.

It is impossible to sketch even in outline the romantic story of William Tindale (1490-1536). It must be enough that from the hour when in controversy with a Roman Catholic opponent he exclaimed, "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou doest," until the day— 6th October 1536 — when he died a martyr at the stake at Vilvorde near Brussels, his whole energies were directed to his self-imposed task. It was in exile that that task was performed, for, as he pathetically remarks, "there was no place to do it in all England." Voluntarily, therefore, he left his native land, never to see it again; and after passing through various vicissitudes and dangers, at length at Worms, in the year 1525, produced the first complete printed New Testament in English. Copies, both in the original quarto and in a smaller octavo edition, were at once forwarded to England; but warning of their coming had already been sent, and thousands of copies were seized and burnt at the old Cross of St. Paul's.1 It was only what Tindale had expected. "In burning the New Testament," he wrote, two years later, "they did none other thing than that I looked for : no more shall they do if they burn me also, if it be God's will that it shall so be." Thanks, however, to the printing-press, the place of the burnt copies was soon supplied, and the new version was scattered broadcast over the land. Thus in 1528 one Robert Necton confessed to carrying on a regular work of colportage, selling the New Testaments at 2S. or 2s. 6d. bound, or, according to the present value of the money, £ 1, 10s. or £ 1, 17s. 6d. each. And there is further evidence that "divers merchants of Scotland bought many of such books, and took them to Scotland, a part to Edinburgh, and most part to the town of St. Andrews."

Meanwhile the translator was continuing his work abroad, and in 1530 there appeared a translation of the Pentateuch with characteristic Prologues to the several books,2 and four years later a revised edition of the New Testament was published at Antwerp with the title, "The Newe Testament dylygently corrected and compared with the Greek by Willyam Tindale." To this edition certain Old Testament lessons were attached and a Preface in which the translator called upon all men to read his translation "for that purpose I wrote it, even to bring them to the knowledge of the Scripture," adding, with characteristic humility, a request to all who found any fault in his work to show it to him that he might amend it. The result was that in the following year there appeared a fresh issue of the 1534 Testament, "yet once agayne corrected by Willyam Tindale," the very minuteness of many of the changes affording striking witness of the translator's desire for the most scrupulous accuracy. It was all in keeping with the inmost spirit of his whole work, as he himself had declared that spirit in writing to his friend Fryth two years before : "I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, to give a reckoning of our doings, that I never altered one syllable of God's word against my conscience, nor would this day, if all that is in the earth, whether it be pleasure, honour, or riches, might be given me."

But the heroic life was drawing to its close. Tindale had many enemies in England, and now when the Royal Envoy was instructed to decoy him to return, he would not venture. "If it would stand," so he pleaded in eloquent and pathetic terms, "with the King's most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the Scripture to be put forth among his people . . . I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write more, nor abide two days in these parts after the same; but immediately to repair into his realm, and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his Royal Majesty, offering my body to suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death his Grace will, so that this be obtained." The self-sacrificing plea was of no avail; and soon afterwards he was betrayed into the hands of his enemies by an unprincipled Englishman named Philipps, and, after suffering an imprisonment of nearly a year and a half, was first strangled and then burned. His last words were, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Of Tindale's worth as a man, and of his unwearied efforts in the cause of Bible translation and Bible diffusion, the little that we have been able to say is sufficient proof. On his place as a scholar it is impossible to enter. It must be enough that while his version undoubtedly bore traces of the influence of the Wyclifite versions at home and of Luther's Testament in Germany, he was too good a linguist to be slavishly dependent on any one, and can justly claim the credit of being the first in England at any rate (with the possible exception of Bede) to go straight to the Hebrew and Greek originals. While, as showing in turn the extent of his influence upon the future history of our Bible, it has been calculated that in the whole of his New Testament there are not more than 350 words which do not occur in the Authorized Version, and many of the latter's most happy phrases and sentences are directly traceable to the old translator. No doubt Tindale's version had its faults, chief among them perhaps his love, for the sake of variety, of rendering the same Greek word in different ways. But take his work all in all, and Fuller's eulogy is not exaggerated : "What he undertook was to be admired as glorious; what he performed, to be commended as profitable; wherein he failed, is to be excused as pardonable, and to be scored on the account rather of that age, than of the author himself."

1 Only three copies now survive: one a fragment of the quarto edition, containing the Prologue and St. Matt, i. i-xxii. 12 in the Grenville Room of the British Museum, and two copies of the octavo edition, one, wanting only the title-page, in the Library of the Baptist College at Bristol, and the other, more defective, in the Library of St. Paul's Cathedral, London.

2 Thus the opening Prologue begins : "Though a man had a precious iuell and a rich, yet if he wiste not the value thereof nor wherfore it served, he were nother the better nor rycher of a straw. Even so though we read the scripture and bable of it never so moch, yet if we know not the use of it, and wherfore it was geven, and what is therin to be sought, it profited) vs nothinge at all."