“So earnestly,” says Strype[26] in his Life of Archbishop Parker, “did the people of the nation thirst in those days after the knowledge of the Scriptures, that that first impression was soon sold off.” So earnestly also did the translators seek to perfect their work, that about the beginning of March, 1565, they had finished a careful review and correction of their translation in preparing for a fresh issue.
Popular as was the Genevan Bible amongst the mass of the English people, the decidedly puritanic cast of its annotations stood in the way of its universal acceptance, while its manifest superiority as a translation to the Great Bible made it almost an impossibility that the latter could be maintained in its place of pre-eminence as the Bible appointed by authority to be read in churches. Steps were accordingly taken by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, to prepare a Bible, by the aid of “diverse learned fellow-bishops,” that would accord with the ecclesiastical sympathies of the party to which he belonged.[27] He distributed portions to twelve of his episcopal brethren, and to other Church dignitaries;[28] one portion he took under his own charge. The completed work was presented to Elizabeth within a few weeks of the completion of the tenth year of her reign, October 5th, 1568.
The rules laid down by Parker for the guidance of his colleagues were these: 1. “To follow the common English translation used in the churches, and not to recede from it but where it varieth manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek original. 2. To use sections and divisions in the texts as Pagnine[29] in his translation useth; and for the verity of the Hebrew, to follow the said Pagnine and Munster specially, and generally others learned in the tongues. 3. To make no bitter notes upon any text, or yet to set down any determination in places of controversy. 4. To note such chapters and places as contain matter of genealogies, or other such places not edifying, with some strike or note, that the reader may eschew them in his public reading. 5. That all such words as sound in the old translation to any offence of lightness or obscenity be expressed with more convenient terms and phrases.” From the first of these rules it is clear that the work then undertaken was intended to be a revision of the Great Bible. Some of the revisers seem to have observed this rule in a most rigid manner, and have followed the Great Bible so closely as to retain its words, even in places which had been more correctly rendered in the Genevan. There appears to have been no co-operative action on the part of the several revisers, and to this cause we may attribute much of the irregularity that attaches to the execution of their work. In many respects they laid themselves open to adverse criticism, and a paper was sent to Parker by Thomas Lawrence, Head Master of Shrewsbury School, and an eminent Greek scholar, entitled, Notes of Errors in the Translation of the New Testament out of the Greek.[30] He points out fifteen passages in which the words are not “aptlye translated,” eight in which “words and pieces of sentences” are “omytted,” two in which superfluous words are inserted, two in which, owing to mistranslation, an “error in doctrine” is involved, and two in which the moods and tenses of verbs are changed. These passages, except one from the Colossians, are all taken from the Gospels; and we may hence not unreasonably infer that the writer intended the passages named to be regarded, not as an exhaustive list, but as illustrations simply of the kind of defects which called for correction. Moved, as would seem, by these criticisms, Parker set on foot a revision of his former volume; and in 1572 this Bible was, as his biographer expresses it,[31] “a second time by his means” “printed with Corrections and Amendments and other improvements, more than the former Editions.”
Although this Bible received the sanction of Convocation, and every Archbishop and Bishop was ordered to have a copy in his hall or dining-room for the use of his servants and of strangers; and although some editions bear on their title-page the words, “Set forth by Aucthoritie” (meaning thereby the authority of Convocation), it never came into anything like general use, nor did it even establish itself as the Bible exclusively read in churches. The Genevan Bible was still used by many of the clergy in their sermons and in their published works; and in 1587, though nineteen years had then passed since its first publication, we find Archbishop Whitgift complaining that divers parish churches and chapels of ease had either no Bible at all, or those only which were not of the translation authorized by the Synods of Bishops. Between 1568, when this Bible was first published, and 1608, when the last New Testament of this version was issued, there were sent forth altogether twenty editions of the Bishops’ Bible and eleven of the New Testament. In the same period there were published seventy-nine editions of the Genevan Bible, and thirty of the Genevan New Testament.[32]
Besides the Genevan and the Bishops’, another Bible made its appearance (so far, at least, as the New Testament was concerned) in the reign of Elizabeth. In the year 1582 there was printed at Rheims a translation of the New Testament,[33] made by certain scholars connected with the English seminary for the training of Catholic priests, formerly established at Douai, in Flanders. The translators, in their preface, candidly confess that they did not publish from any conviction “that the Holy Scriptures should alwaies be in our mother tonge,” or that they ought “to be read indifferently of all,” but because they had compassion to see their “beloved countrie men with extreme danger of their soules, to use only such prophane translations;” viz., as the Protestant Bibles previously referred to, “and erroneous men’s mere phantasies, for the pure and beloved word of truth;” and because, also, they were “moved thereunto by the desires of many devout persons,” and whom they hoped to induce to lay aside the “impure versions” they had hitherto been compelled to employ. Quite apart from the polemical purpose thus distinctly avowed, this translation was a retrograde movement. It did not profess to translate the original texts, but only the “vulgar Latin;” and the translators justify their procedure by this plea, amongst others, that “the holy Council of Trent ... hath declared and defined this onely of al other Latin translations to be authentical, and so onely to be used and taken in publike lessons, disputations, preachings, and expositions, and that no man presume upon any pretence to reject or refuse the same.”
In the accomplishment of their work the Rhemish translators have very faithfully observed the rule which they laid down for themselves, to be “very precise and religious in folowing our copie, the old vulgar approved Latin; not only in sense ... but sometime in the very wordes also, and phrases;” that is to say, they have given a very literal and exact translation of the Vulgate, in many parts extremely Latinized in its diction. A considerable number of words they virtually left untranslated, boldly venturing to transfer the unfamiliar, and in many cases unintelligible, vocables into their English text. Some of these Latinized words have obtained a permanent place in our language, but the larger number have failed to commend themselves.[34]
Such then were the chief forms through which, at the close of the sixteenth century, the English Bible had passed. The devout and earnest scholars who from time to time sought to “open the Scriptures” to their fellow-countrymen were for the most part moved by a burning desire to give to God of their very best. They grudged no labour to render their work more complete. They allowed no spirit of self-satisfaction to blind them to a perception of defects. They were too humble and too well convinced of the greatness and manifoldness of their work to fancy that they had reached perfection, but were persevering and self-denying in their endeavours to attain unto it. And they have left behind them for us to follow a noble example of patient continuance in well doing.
How in their hands the English Bible has grown, from the first attempt to set it forth in the language of our country to the form in which we are most familiar with it, can be fully learnt only by a careful comparison of the successive revisions to which it has been subjected. To aid my readers in forming some approximate idea of it I append Psalm xxiii., as it appears in the principal Bibles which have been mentioned in this and the preceding lecture.
1. WYCLIFFE’S, 1382. (?)
The Lord gouerneth me, and no thing to me shal lacke; in the place of leswe[35] where he me ful sette. Ouer watir of fulfilling he nurshide me; my soule he conuertide. He broȝte doun me upon the sties of riȝtwisnesse; for his name. For whi and if I shal go in the myddel of the shadewe of deth; I shal not dreden euelis, for thou art with me. Thi ȝerde and thi staf; tho han confortid me. Thou hast maad redi in thi siȝte a bord; aȝen hem that trublyn me. Thou hast myche fattid in oile myn hed; and my chalis makende ful drunken, hou riȝt cler it is. And thi mercy shal vnderfolewe me; alle the daȝis of my lif. And that I dwelle in the hous of the Lord; in to the lengthe of daȝis.