Book of Fire (28 page)

His love for his great Bible project is palpable. Why does he work, at this most dangerous of labours? ‘I answer that love compelleth me,’ he says. ‘For as long as my soul feeleth what love God hath shewed me in Christ, I cannot but love God again and his will and commandments and of love work them.’ He does not think himself better for it, nor seek a higher place in heaven. He has ‘prayed, sorrowed, longed, sighed and sought’ to be of God, ‘that which I have this day found, and therefore rejoice with all my might and praise God for his grace and mercy’.

From this devotion came phrases that still roll around the English-speaking world: ‘an eye for an eye, a tothe for a tothe’, ‘the spirite ys willynge, but the flesshe is weeke’, and the eternal blessing, ‘The Lorde blesse the and keep the. The Lorde make his face shyne upon the and be mercyfull unto the. The Lord lift up his countenance uponne the, and give the peace.’ So, too, a reminder of the savagery that some readers mined from the Old Testament, were the eight terrible words from Exodus 22 used in witch trials to justify the burning, hanging and drowning of more than a hundred thousand pitiful souls in Europe, and a handful at Salem in Massachusetts: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

Tyndale’s Ten Commandments have travelled the centuries almost unchanged. ‘Thou shalt have none other gods in my sight … Thou shalt make thee no graven image … Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain … Remember the sabbath day that thou sanctify it … Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may be long … Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not break wedlock. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt bear no
false witness against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house: neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s wife …’ King James’s men, and the revisers almost four hundred years after them, tweaked a phrase or two. They replaced ‘
in my sight
’ in the First Commandment with the less concrete ‘no other gods
before me
’. The sabbath day was to be ‘
kept holy
’; the unmistakable command not to ‘
break wedlock
’ was replaced by the more genteel and lawyerly ‘
commit adultery’.
But the essence is Tyndale’s.

English was gelling while he was writing. He was, of course, a prime factor in how it set. His Pentateuch was critical to the language. Hebrew narrative strings phrases together by the simple insertion of ‘and’, where Latin and Greek use intricate clauses. Tyndale’s translation helped to set up the same flow of English narrative; the Hebrew use of the
noun
of a
noun
– ‘the
fat
of the
land
’, ‘the
beast
of the
field
’ – was also confirmed in English. The Old Testament struck readers with storm force; they might know something of the New Testament, and the outline of Christ’s life, but the dramas, betrayals, murders, seductions, wars, plagues and catastrophes of the Old were new and compelling. Evangelicals combed it for the biblical forenames that became popular among the English – Aaron, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezra, Joshua; its epic tales of treks and wandering peoples soon inspired them to follow their patriarchs across the Atlantic to the ‘wildernesse among savages and wild beasts’ in America, a place so desperate that an English pamphleteer said that ‘divers malefactors have chosen to be hanged than go to Virginia’. The settler Edward Johnson saw Massachusetts in terms of Tyndale’s Genesis, a place where ‘the Lord will create a new Heaven, and a new Earth’.

Tyndale very often had a choice between words of Anglo-Saxon origins, and those derived from Latin and French. Had he stuck with Latinisms – always virtue and never goodness, fidelity and not faith, adoration and not worship – the existing Tudor appetite for Latin neologisms would have grown. The Old Testament
would have a different ring, and so would English. ‘The Lord is a
man of war
’ he wrote in Exodus 15, but the Lord could have been a ‘
legionary
’ or a ‘
martial man
’.

Or he might have rejected all Latin expressions and favoured or coined English words. The first Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, Sir John Cheke, was a linguistic patriot of this sort in the 1540s. He held 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’. Cheke tried hard. He used ‘mooned’ for lunatic, ‘hundreder’ for centurion, ‘bywords’ for parables and ‘crossed’ for crucified. Some of his uses stuck, such as ‘freshman’ for proselyte. The overall effect was strained. Tyndale’s ‘O ye of
lyttle fayth
’ becomes Cheke’s ‘Ye
small faythed
men’. When he translated an anglicised version – no doubt he would have used ‘Englished’ – of Matthew, Cheke described the tax gatherer or publican as a ‘toller’, and, rejecting the Franco-Latin expression of a house being ‘founded’ on a rock, was reduced to it being ‘groundwrought’.

Those who bought the Pentateuch, either as separate books or as a set, were not used to reading anything so complex in English. English expressions could be as baffling as imports. Thomas Wilson recognised this more than eighty years later when he wrote a concordance of the Bible, an index of its words. He said that even English words so important that they carried with them the ‘marrow and pith of our holy religion’ strained the limits of understanding; the vulgar reader jibbed at them ‘as at an unknown language’.

A traditionalist, Stephen Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, drew up a list of Latin words in 1542 that he wanted to be retained in the Bible because of their ‘germane and native meaning and for the majesty of their matter’. Almost all of them were, in fact, well on their way to becoming anglicised. They included Baptizare,
Persevare, Apocalypsis, Pietas, Idololatria, Sacrificium, Gloria, Hospitalitas, Conscientia. Words ending in-‘io’ ‘Religio, Satisfactio, Communio, Contentio, Confessio – needed no more than an ‘n’ to be added to pass muster as English; a ‘y’ in place of ‘ium’, ‘ia’ or ‘as’ did for Mysterium and Ceremonia and Pietas.

Tyndale’s prose was not dominated by these so-called ‘inkhorn’ words, taken from the Latin. It was a natural process to avoid their overuse because he was not translating from the Latin Vulgate but directly from Greek and Hebrew. The temptation to translate ‘
scrutamini scripturas
’ from the Latin as ‘scrutinise the scriptures’ is overwhelming; but coming from the Greek, ‘search the scriptures’ is more natural. He used inkhorn words when it suited, however. As in the New Testament, he varied the words he used in the Old as much as possible, so that the same Hebrew word was rendered by English word and Latin neologism, ‘kindred’ and ‘relation’, ‘house’ and ‘habitation’, ‘acts’ and ‘deeds’, ‘aid’ and ‘help’. He also coined words: passover, scapegoat, mercy seat.

Accuracy was the only constraint on his language. Luther said that, in trying to produce a pure and clear German in translation, it often happened that ‘for two or three weeks we have searched and inquired for a single word and sometimes not found it even then’. Tyndale had greater problems, for he was not in his homeland with university libraries and helpers at his beck and call. His translation of Hebrew was not as pinpoint as his rendering of Greek – in places he seems to have worked from Luther’s German Bible and the Vulgate – but it was remarkable for the time.

Hebrew studies were transformed when the King James was published in 1611. The universities had professors of Hebrew, and the king’s divines had the wisdom of two generations of Hebrew scholars to draw upon. Yet they made few changes to Tyndale’s work, and when they did the original was often happier. In the Garden of Eden, Tyndale’s serpent introduces himself with a cheery ‘Ah, sir!’ and reassures Eve: ‘Tush, ye shall not die.’ The
King James serpent says flatly: ‘Ye shall not surely die.’ Tyndale writes in Genesis 29: ‘Then Jacob lifted up his feet and went toward the east country.’ The king’s committee added five words, and suppressed the wonderful image of Jacob’s feet, all for no profit in meaning: ‘Then Jacob went on his journey, and came into the land of the people of the East.’ Tyndale’s simple ‘And when even was come’ is made into the pompous ‘And it came to pass in the evening.’ Tyndale’s cadence is clear when he is read aloud: ‘And as he looked about, behold there was a well in the field, and iii flocks of sheep lay thereby, for at that well were the flocks watered …’ The committee men destroy the lilt: ‘And he looked, and behold, a well in the field, and lo, there were three flocks of sheep lying by it: for out of that well they watered the flocks …’ For the most part, providentially, King James’s men left well alone. Nine tenths of their Genesis 29 is taken word for word from Tyndale.

Tyndale included explanatory lists of words in his Pentateuch. He was thus the pioneer of English lexicography. It was an idea that took time to develop. The Elizabethan reformer and schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster compiled the first complete list of English words, or rather the eight thousand words that he knew and could recollect, in 1582. His book
First Part of the Elementarie
was based on teaching children English in the same disciplined way that they learnt Latin. ‘I love Rome, but London better,’ he wrote. ‘I favour Italy, but England more. I know the Latin, but I worship the English.’

A more comprehensive book by a schoolmaster father and son, Robert and Thomas Cawdrey, was
A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French
of 1604. Progress was slow. The first dictionary for general use was
A New English Dictionary
of 1702. Its compiler, John Kersey the
Younger, was the first full-time English lexicographer. The process did not reach its first full flowering until Dr Johnson’s two volume
Dictionary
, published on 14 June 1755, finally established standard English through the power of the printed dictionary. ‘The English Dictionary,’ the irascible doctor explained in the preface, ‘was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.’ Yes; but Johnson did not write under the threat of the fire.

Tyndale, who did, included two ‘Tables expounding Certain Wordes’ between Genesis and Exodus. They were words that the reader might find difficult. He described them with simplicity in alphabetical order. Alb, he explained, is ‘a long garment of white linen’. Ark is ‘a ship made flat, as it were a chest or coffer’. Baptism ‘now signifieth on the one side, how all that repent and believe are washed in Christ’s blood: and on the other side, how the same must quench and drown the lusts of the flesh, to follow the steps of Christ’. Consecrate is ‘to appoint a thing to holy uses’; Eden means ‘pleasure’; firmament is ‘the skies’; sanctify is ‘to cleanse and purify’; reconcile is ‘to make at one and to bring in grace or favour’; tabernacle is ‘an house made tentwise, or as a pavilion’. Grace is ‘favour: as Noah found grace, that is to say favour and love’.

He brings a vivid clarity to his mundane task. Vapour is ‘a dewy mist, as the smoke of a seething pot’. Sacrament is ‘a sign representing such an appointment and promises as the rainbow representeth the promise made to Noe, that God will no more drown the world’. Not that the waters would
recede
, or the flood
subside
, or the crisis
abate
; no, that God
will no more drown
the world.

Tyndale, like all others at the time, cared little for spelling. Noah was also Noe; God was often god. He spelt his own name
variously Tyndale, Tindall, Tindal and Tindale. ‘Cain, so it is written in Hebrew,’ he noted. ‘Notwithstanding whether we call him Cain or Caim it maketh no matter, so we understand the meaning. Every land hath his manner, that we call John, the Welshmen call Even: the Dutch Hans.’

There was no mistaking that the lexicographer was a ‘newe man’. Under ‘tyrants’, he said that these had ‘through falsehood of hypocrisy subdued the world under them, as the successors of the apostles have played with us’. By the successors, of course, he meant the popes. Faith, he wrote, is ‘the believing of God’s promises and a sure trust in the goodness and truth of God. Which faith justifieth Abraham and was the mother of all his good works which he afterward did. For faith is the goodness of all works in the sight of God.’ This was the classic Lutheran dogma of the primacy of justification by faith.

A chilling ferocity then enters his definition. Faith, Tyndale said, justifies evil acts as long as these are done at God’s command. Murder can be divine. ‘Jacob robbed Laban his uncle,’ he continued. ‘Moses robbed the Egyptians: and Abraham is about to slay and burn his own son.’ All these, he claimed, ‘are holy works, because they were wrought in faith at God’s commandment’. He agreed that to steal, rob and murder are not holy works if they are carried out by ‘worldly people’. But crimes were transformed when they were committed by ‘them that have their trust in God’, for ‘they are holy when God commandeth them’. The ‘worldly people’ who had no heavenly licence to sin were the pope, the bishops and clergy, the chancellor, and all others with whom Tyndale was at odds; the faithful few for whom crime can become holy work were his fellow evangelicals. Slaying and burning were elevated into religious deeds, with the proviso that they must be ‘commanded’ by God, acting through those who pinned their faith in God.

*

Evangelicals’ fury matched that of the Catholics. In Zwinglian Zurich, heretics were being drowned. The great evangelical Theodore Beza was to argue in Calvinist Geneva that it was wrong to spare a heretic because Christ had turned the other cheek. He said that ‘true charity’ lay in defending the flock against the wolf. It was the duty of the magistrate to protect his people against crime. Beza described heresy as a crime worse than murder, for that destroyed bodies, where the heretic assassinated souls and God’s majesty. Calvin himself said wearily of heretics that ‘an end could be put to their machinations in no other way than cutting them off by an ignominious death’.