Dr. Ginsburg
March 27th, 1918.
Dear Friend,
When I was at Bath I read in the local paper a beautiful letter aptly alluding to the Mount Fiesole of Bath and quoting what has been termed that mysterious verse of David’s:
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills——.”
Well! the other day a great friend of that wonderful Hebrew scholar, Dr. Ginsburg—he died long since at Capri—told me that Ginsburg had said to him that all the Revisers and Translators had missed a peculiar Hebraism which quite alters the signification of this opening verse of the 121st Psalm: It should read:
“Shall I lift up mine eyes to those hills? DOTH my help come from thence?”
And this is the explanation:
Those hills alluded to were the hills in which were the Groves planted in honour of the idols towards which Israel had strayed. So in the second verse the inspired tongue says:
“No! My help cometh from the Lord! He who hath made Heaven and Earth! (not these idols).”
I have had an admiration for Ginsburg ever since he shut up the two Atheists in the Athenæum Club, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who were reviling Holy Writ in Ginsburg’s presence and flouting him. So he asked the two of them to produce anything anywhere in literature comparable to the 23rd Psalm as translated by Wyclif, Tyndale, and Coverdale. He gave them a week to examine, and at the end of it they confessed that they could not.
One of them (I could not find out which it was) wrote:
“I won’t argue about nor admit the Inspiration claimed, but I say this—that those saintly men whom Cromwell formed as the company to produce the Great Bible of 1539 were inspired, for never has the spirit of the original Hebrew been more beautifully transformed from the original harshness into such spiritual wealth.”
Those are not the exact words, I have not got them by me, but that was the sense.
The English language in A.D. 1539 was at its very maximum. Hence the beauty of the Psalms which come from the Great Bible as produced by that holy company of pious men, who one writer says: “Did not wish their names to be ever known.” I send you the title page.
Yours, etc.,
(Signed) Fisher.
27/3/18.
I enclosed with this letter the front page of the first edition of the Great Bible, A.D. 1539, often known as Cranmer’s Bible, but Archbishop Cranmer had nothing whatever to do with it except writing a preface to it; it was solely due to Cromwell, Secretary of State to Henry VIII., who cut off Cromwell’s head in July, 1540. Cranmer wrote a preface for the edition after April, 1540. Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Mary’s reign. Tyndale was strangled and burnt, Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, died of hunger. Coverdale headed the company that produced the Great Bible, and Tyndale’s translation was taken as the basis. (So those who had to do with the Bible had a rough time of it!)
John Wyclif, in A.D. 1380, began the translation of the Bible into English. This was before the age of printing, so it was in manuscript. Before he died, in A.D. 1384, he had the joy of seeing the Bible in the hands of his countrymen in their own tongue.
Wyclif’s translation was quaint and homely, and so idiomatic as to have become out of date when, more than one hundred years afterwards, John Tyndale, walking over the fields in Wiltshire, determined so to translate the Bible into English “that a boy that driveth the plough should know more of the Scriptures than the Pope,” and Tyndale gloriously succeeded! But for doing so, the Papists, under orders from the Pope of Rome, half strangled him and then burnt him at the stake. Like St. Paul, he was shipwrecked! (Just as he had finished the Book of Jonah, which is curious, but there was no whale handy, and so he was cast ashore in Holland, nearly dead!)
Our present Bible, of A.D. 1611, is almost word for word the Bible of Tyndale, of round A.D. 1530, but in A.D. 1534, Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, was authorised by Archbishop Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell (who was Secretary of State to Henry VIII.) to publish his fresh translation, and he certainly beautified in many places Tyndale’s original!
In 1539, “Diverse excellent learned men expert in the ‘foresaid tongues’” (Hebrew and Greek), under Cromwell’s orders made a true translation of the whole Bible, which was issued in 1539–40 in four editions, and remained supreme till A.D. 1568, when the Bishops tried to improve it, and made a heavenly mess of it! And then the present Authorised Version, issued in A.D. 1611, became the Bible of the Land, and still holds its own against the recent pedantic Revised Version of A.D. 1884. No one likes it. It is literal, but it is not spiritual!
In the opinion of Great and Holy men, Cranmer’s Bible (as it is called), or “the Great Bible”—the Bible of 1539 to 1568—holds the field for beauty of its English and its emotional rendering of the Holy Spirit!
Alas! we don’t know their names; we only know of them as “Diverse excellent learned men!” It is said they did not wish to go down to Fame!
“It is the greatest achievement in letters! The Beauty of the translation of these unknown men excels (far excels) the real and the so-called originals! All nations and tongues of Christendom have come to admit reluctantly that no other version of the Book in the English or any other tongue offers so noble a setting for the Divine Message. Read the Prayer Book Psalms! They are from this noble Version—English at its zenith! The English of the Great Bible is even more stately, sublime, and pure than the English of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.”