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Authors: Brian Moynahan
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blessing, and he left for London. The die was cast.
The ‘causes that moved me to translate’ the gospels, Tyndale wrote later, were so simple that he ‘supposed it superfluous’ to explain them. ‘For who is so blind to ask why light should be showed to them that walk in darkness, where they cannot but stumble,’ he wrote, ‘and to stumble is the danger of eternal damnation?’ Who could be ‘so despiteful that he would envy any man so necessary a thing’? The word of God was the light, he said, and ‘who is so bedlam mad to affirm that good is the natural cause of evil, and darkness to proceed out of light, and that lying should be grounded in truth and verity, and not rather clean contrary, that light destroyeth darkness, and verity reproveth all manner of lying?’
The months at Little Sodbury had given him a motive and a precedent for his task. He was convinced that the local clergy were too corrupt and foolish to lead their flocks to salvation; his dealings with them had shown him ‘how that it was impossible to stablysh the laye people in any truth, except ye scripture were playnly layde before their eyes in their mother tongue, and they might se the processe, ordre and meaninge of the text’.
Luther’s September Testament was a blueprint for him to follow. The book’s earthy and vigorous German made it an instant bestseller. Luther had made it as colloquial as possible, visiting an abattoir to get exact German terms from the slaughterers, and rummaging through jewel boxes for the same purpose. ‘I aimed to make Moses so German that no one would suspect that he was a Jew,’ his friend Albrecht Dürer said of the woodcuts used to illustrate the new bibles.
The first edition of four thousand copies had sold out before Christmas and printers were already cashing in on the demand byrunning off pirate editions. ‘Even the tailors and shoemakers, and indeed women and simple idiots … read it as eagerly as if it were the fountain of all truth,’ Johannes Cochlaeus, a Catholic loyalist, reported with distaste in Germany. ‘Some carried it in their bosoms and learnt it by heart.’ This was bad for the Church – Cochlaeus complained that Bible readers ‘without timidity … debated not only with Catholic laymen, but also with priests and monks’ – but it was precisely the readership and the effect that Tyndale hoped for.
He knew that the Church would condemn him, but he had already been exposed to the malice of his fellow clergy in Gloucestershire, and he had survived. If the Church thought his ideas to be heresy, lay people like the Walshes had found them sympathetic. He had, too, put his talent for translation to the test. The Enchiridion was proof in itself of the colossal impetus that the printing press was giving to the written word; it had been through twenty-three Latin editions in the six years before Tyndale translated it. He had scholarship, and Greek and Latin, and he could learn Hebrew. He wrote a plain and powerful English, soaked with the cadence and rhythm he had learnt in his Oxford rhetoric classes. He was brave. Above all, he was inspired by the love of Christ and the gospels.
Tyndale and his age came to the Bible, and to Christ, with a raw hunger and amazement, as if the astonishing story of the brief passage of the Son of God on earth was new to them, and as if it was only when they were released from the Latin that the words of Christ’s Passion struck home. ‘What are these new doctrines? The gospel?’ Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon had asked the year before. ‘Why, that is 1,522 years old.’ But it was old only in the technical sense that it had been written long before.
In Latin, it was the priestly text of a religion whose true substance was the Church and its liturgy and tradition. Translated into a living language, devoured from cover to cover, read secretly incorners or aloud with trusted friends, its impact was wholly new; troubling, a cause of spiritual
The ‘causes that moved me to translate’ the gospels, Tyndale wrote later, were so simple that he ‘supposed it superfluous’ to explain them. ‘For who is so blind to ask why light should be showed to them that walk in darkness, where they cannot but stumble,’ he wrote, ‘and to stumble is the danger of eternal damnation?’ Who could be ‘so despiteful that he would envy any man so necessary a thing’? The word of God was the light, he said, and ‘who is so bedlam mad to affirm that good is the natural cause of evil, and darkness to proceed out of light, and that lying should be grounded in truth and verity, and not rather clean contrary, that light destroyeth darkness, and verity reproveth all manner of lying?’
The months at Little Sodbury had given him a motive and a precedent for his task. He was convinced that the local clergy were too corrupt and foolish to lead their flocks to salvation; his dealings with them had shown him ‘how that it was impossible to stablysh the laye people in any truth, except ye scripture were playnly layde before their eyes in their mother tongue, and they might se the processe, ordre and meaninge of the text’.
Luther’s September Testament was a blueprint for him to follow. The book’s earthy and vigorous German made it an instant bestseller. Luther had made it as colloquial as possible, visiting an abattoir to get exact German terms from the slaughterers, and rummaging through jewel boxes for the same purpose. ‘I aimed to make Moses so German that no one would suspect that he was a Jew,’ his friend Albrecht Dürer said of the woodcuts used to illustrate the new bibles.
The first edition of four thousand copies had sold out before Christmas and printers were already cashing in on the demand byrunning off pirate editions. ‘Even the tailors and shoemakers, and indeed women and simple idiots … read it as eagerly as if it were the fountain of all truth,’ Johannes Cochlaeus, a Catholic loyalist, reported with distaste in Germany. ‘Some carried it in their bosoms and learnt it by heart.’ This was bad for the Church – Cochlaeus complained that Bible readers ‘without timidity … debated not only with Catholic laymen, but also with priests and monks’ – but it was precisely the readership and the effect that Tyndale hoped for.
He knew that the Church would condemn him, but he had already been exposed to the malice of his fellow clergy in Gloucestershire, and he had survived. If the Church thought his ideas to be heresy, lay people like the Walshes had found them sympathetic. He had, too, put his talent for translation to the test. The Enchiridion was proof in itself of the colossal impetus that the printing press was giving to the written word; it had been through twenty-three Latin editions in the six years before Tyndale translated it. He had scholarship, and Greek and Latin, and he could learn Hebrew. He wrote a plain and powerful English, soaked with the cadence and rhythm he had learnt in his Oxford rhetoric classes. He was brave. Above all, he was inspired by the love of Christ and the gospels.
Tyndale and his age came to the Bible, and to Christ, with a raw hunger and amazement, as if the astonishing story of the brief passage of the Son of God on earth was new to them, and as if it was only when they were released from the Latin that the words of Christ’s Passion struck home. ‘What are these new doctrines? The gospel?’ Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon had asked the year before. ‘Why, that is 1,522 years old.’ But it was old only in the technical sense that it had been written long before.
In Latin, it was the priestly text of a religion whose true substance was the Church and its liturgy and tradition. Translated into a living language, devoured from cover to cover, read secretly incorners or aloud with trusted friends, its impact was wholly new; troubling, a cause of spiritual
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