In 1408 a Convocation at Oxford enacted a law which forbade a translation of Scriptures into English, and warned all persons against reading such books under penalty of excommunication.
At this time a New Testament was worth £2, 16s. 8d., or about £45, 6s. 8d. of our money! At this period we are told that a decent, respectable man could live well upon £5 per year. Writing was tedious, slow, liable to error, and expensive, so that the number of copies were limited; but about 1440 A.D., or sixty years after Wycliffe, the printing-press was invented. One of the first books that were printed was a Latin Bible; one of this edition was sold some years ago for £3400; another realised £2000.
In 1477 William Caxton brought this new art to England, and in Westminster Abbey he printed books under the protection of King Edward IV.
We have thus sketched briefly the history of the previous versions, and have come in the order of time to Tyndale’s version of the Testament which Tyndale translated under so many difficulties. F. W. Faber (a Romanist) says:—“Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its phrases. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, but oh how intelligible! voice of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”
To which may be added the testimony of the present Bishop of Durham, who speaks of Tyndale’s work thus: “In rendering the sacred text, he remained throughout faithful to the instincts of a scholar. From first to last his style and his interpretation are his own; and in the originality of Tyndale is included in a large measure the originality of our English Version. For not only did Tyndale contribute to it directly the substantial basis of half the Old Testament (in all probability) and of the whole of the New, but he established a standard of Biblical translation which others followed. It is even of less moment that by far the greater part of his translation remains intact in our present Bibles, than that his spirit animates the whole. He toiled faithfully himself, and where he failed he left to those who should come after the secret of success.... His influence decided that our Bible should be popular, and not literary, speaking in a simple dialect, and that so, by its simplicity, it should be endowed with permanence.”
Mr. Froude’s testimony may perhaps be added here, not because it is requisite, but as the historian’s tribute to a noble man: “Of the translation itself, though since that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are all familiar. The peculiar genius—if such a word may be permitted—which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, unequalled, unapproached in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man—William Tyndale.”
As an example of this identity we take a passage from Tyndale’s version; the words in italics remain as Tyndale placed them in both the Authorised and Revised Versions. The passage that we select is Matt. xviii. 19-27:—
“Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree in earth in any manner thing whatsoever they shall desire, it shall be given them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
“Then came Peter to him, and said, Master, how oft shall my brother trespass against me and I shall forgive him? shall I forgive him seven times? Jesus said unto him, I say not unto thee seven times, but seventy times seven times. Therefore is the Kingdom of Heaven likened unto a certain King which would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him which owed him ten thousand talents: but when he had nought to pay, the lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and his children and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant fell down and besought him saying, Sir, give me respite, and I will pay it every whit. Then had the Lord pity on the servant and loosed him and forgave him the debt.”
It has been estimated that there are not more than 350 words in the whole book that are strange to us now, so that Tyndale may be justly regarded as one of the builders of our language.