The English Bible

Stanley Brice Frost McGill University The English Bible The custom that colleagues and former students of a teacher greatly beloved and highly esteemed should organize the production of a Festschrift to honor his name and t<;l signalize his contribution to their discipline and profession is one of the happiest traditions that attach to scholarship. In the age of the anti-hero, when the leading literary figures of the day draw men small and mean, and when the role of the humanities, from the theater of the absurd to the distortions of the visual arts, is ap parently to denigrate man and all his achievements, it is good to find the custom still healthily maintained among scholars of acknowledging the stature and contribution of one of their fellows and of proclaiming by a collection of essays on the subjects of their discipline their admiration and affection for him. Those of us who have known Jacob M. Myers chiefly by his writings recognize our indebtedness to him, and I as one of those am appreciative of the opportunity to join with his nearer colleagues and friends to salute a scholar for whom affection on his home, campus is worthily matched by the high regard which his contributions to Old Testament studies have won for him throughout the wider ecumene of the biblical dis ciplines. Since Professor Myers has recently made a notable contribution1 to a series which required of him that· he become in no small way a biblical translator, I offer some comments on the present position with regard to the Bible in English translation. Some of the paragraphs are taken, with the permission of the editor, more or less directly from an article on the same general subject but in a rather more popular style which recently appeared in the Queen's Quarlerly.2 205 206 Stanley Brice Frost The English Bible 207 It is a remarkable fact that the beginnings of the English Bible mark turies English was in a period of eclipse as a result of the Norman invasion. the beginnings of the English language itself, and that in all the develop there is naturally little direct evidence of fresh translations, but at least ments, ftom the heterogeneous dialects of the Nordic invaders of Britain some copying of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts continued. Margaret Deanesly,3 to the homogeneous world language of today, the English Bible has very who is concerned to stress the lack of a complete English Bible before the fairly kept pace, and indeed has often led the way. time of Wycliffe, nevertheless mentions the Psalterium Triplex of Eadwine, Beowulf is a truly splendid epic but, like the other few heroic poems of which was compiled about 1120 and included an Anglo-Saxon as well as its kind, it belongs to the old pagan world of the time before either the Norman-French and Latin versions. She also mentions that while the ear Nordic peoples or their dialects had been fused into the new dynamic unity. liest manuscripts of the verse paraphrases of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, Because of its typically oral character and the sparseness of the written re popularly attributed to Caedmon but more probably the product of a folk mains, we are left largely to guess at the range and versatility of the literary tradition, are to be assigned to the tenth century, the latest are to be assigned tradition from which the poems come. They are the last few evidences of a to the middle of the thirteenth.' The resurgence of English as a consequence culture which has passed away. But the nine precious lines of Caedmon's of the Hundred Years' War is first testified by the writings of Richard Creation Hymn, even if we now possess them only in the Latin translation, Rolle (1300-1349), whose Middle English Psalter achieved a considerable and the tradition of Bede's Gospel of John in the Northumbrian dialect, circulation. So also, though to a lesser degree. did the somewhat later point to the new literary tradition which was to grow and increase into the Psalter of William of Shoreham. But Richard's Psalter was in the Northern immensely rich repository of the English language in many centuries and dialect, and William's in the West Midland. The literary significance of the in many lands. The achievements of Shakespeare, Scott, and Yeats have Lollard Bible, which appeared in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, been enhanced by Longfellow and Eugene O'Neill, and are now being further was that for the first time a work in English was assiduously copied and enriched by West African songwriters, Maori poets, and Eskimo novelists actively promulgated in all parts of the country, so that the language of all in the one common speech. The Bible in English, which was there at London and the East Midlands had an opportunity to reach up into York the beginning of it all, has not only played a major role both in the diffusion shire and the North6 and as well as down into Somerset and the West. It is and in the development of the language but is even today making new and fair to say that while Chaucer and his peers gave Middle English its literary vigorous contributions to its strength and well-being in all parts of the world. standards and its self-confidence among the upper classes, the Lollard Bible The King James Version in the past and the Bible in Basic English in the did as much if not more for its coherence and unification in all strata of present have been major influences to ensure that the local versions of society. From the beginning through to the emergence of :'.10dern English pidgin English should remain simply what they are, and that Standard in the fifteenth century, in all the major developments such as the liberation English should maintain itself fairly well as one and the same the world from gender. the reduction of inflections, the evolution of the tenses, and over. "Poetry," said John Wesley, "is the handmaid of Piety." For the the great enrichment of vocabulary, the tradition of the Bible in English English language, the Bible has repaid that service many times over. marched with the linguistic progress. recording the- new developments. and The tradition that began with Caedmon and Bede and went on to Alfred sometimes pointing the way ahead. the Great and his laws can be documented from at least the end of the ninth William Tyndale. therefore, brilliantly fresh and original in the field of century. The translation known as the Vespasian Psalter, dating from about translation as we know him to have been, was nevertheless the heir to a that time, gives us an example of the Kentish dialect; North Merciah is tradit~on already rich, and in the choicest phrases of the Reformer, the at evidenced by the almost contemporary gloss to the Harewood Gospels. tentive ear can from time to time detect echoes of his Lollard predecessors, Northumbrian is supplied by another gloss, that to the Lindisfarne Gospels; Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey.6 Even so, the beginning of the story West Saxon is well represented by the half-dozen or more Gospel manuscripts of "The English Bible" proper clearly belongs to Tyndale, and from his time dating from the early tenth century through to the end of the twelfth. until our own the story is really the narrative of the successive revisions Indeed, the considerable West Saxon works of Abbot Aelfric (c. 955-1020), which his splendid version underwent. Coverdale's Bible, the Great Bible, both in the instance of his biblical translations and in his freer compositions the Geneva Version, the Bishops' Bible-they were all Tyndale revised, and such as the Homilies, illustrate the growing maturity of a language which the King James Version itself owed more to Tyndale than to any of the had become richly expressive. Since during the twelfth and thirteenth cen- revisers. It has been calculated that of the King James Version. at least 208 Stanley Brice· Frost The English Bible 209 two-thirds is clearly attributable to Tyndale.7 While Miles Smith was formally majority of the people will not readily admit that it can be easily mended; referring to the Bishops' Bible when he said that the aim of the revisers or that any attempt to do this can be wholly destitute of danger to the cause was to make not a bad version good but, rather, a good version better, it of Divine Revelation." As is well known, the King James never was "by was really of Tyndale's work that he was speaking. Thus it was basically law appointed." The familiar words "Appointed to be read in Churches," one and the same work, "The English Bible," that appeared in those succes which still appear on British printings and which have given the version sive editions from 1525, the date of Tyndale's first New Testament, through its other surrogate, the Authorized Version, were simply transferred from to 1611, when the King James Version finally appeared. the Bishops' Bible and its predecessors, notably the Great Bible of Thomas The influence of the King James Version upon the growth and develop Cromwell, and were never formally justified either by royal license or by ment of English language and culture, both at home and in the many distant an Act of the Convocations of the Church of England, This circumstance lands to which trade and empire dispersed the island speech, has been much reminds us that a version lives or dies by popular acceptance or neglect, observed and often commented upon.

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