Born In Blood

Some 20 million copies of the Bible were sold last year in America. Elsewhere in the world the figure rises to the hundreds of millions. These astonishing statistics make it easy to forget that at one time, in England itself, possession of a Bible in English was an offense punishable by death. Copies were printed abroad and smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth. Agents of the King and Church pursued translators, publishers, and booksellers. The clandestine copies they seized were committed to bonfires. Their translators often suffered the same fate.William Tyndale was the greatest of these, and when he was led to the stake in October of 1536, his last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”Tyndale had been on the run for years. One of his chief persecutors was none other than Sir Thomas More, who, for all his humanism, was fiercely opposed to making scripture available to the common man. More composed a two-thousand page attack on Tyndale, condemning him for heresy and calling him, among other choice insults, “a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil.” Knowledge of scripture was power, and more: It was privilege. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, put it bluntly on behalf of his fellow prelates; if laymen could read the words of the Bible, he said, “They will see what we do.”Tyndale’s New Testament was a revolutionary book. The Reformation in England is unimaginable without it. But it also shaped the English language forever, much as Luther’s earlier translations all but created modern German. The saying, “Without Tyndale, no Shakespeare” is, if anything, an understatement.Because his translations were taken over in the King James Bible of 1611 — 80% of which is pure Tyndale — his contributions have come to seem almost anonymous. Yet his prose is unmistakable. To read his version of the Nativity story is to hear an old tale in the first freshness of its telling. In the “The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale: The Text of the Worms Edition of 1526 in Original Spelling” (British Library, 558 pages, $25), he describes the shepherds racing to the stable:And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe laid in a manger. When they had seen it, they published abroad the saying, which was told them of that child. And all that heard it, wondered at those things which were told them of the shepherds. But Mary kept all those sayings, and pondered them in her heart.The strength of this comes not only from the sequence of one-syllable words and blunt verbs but from subtler sources. Read aloud, as was common practice, the words show a musical patterning. In his magisterial “The Bible in English” (Yale University Press, 900 pages, $40), Tyndale biographer David Daniell has brilliantly analyzed how Tyndale used a “Saxon style,” as well as sly effects, such as the echoes in “wondered” and “pondered” in the lines above, to enliven his prose. The robust Tyndale had a delicate ear, which caught the melody of common speech and made it unforgettable.But the strangeness as well as the charm of Tyndale’s version shows best when it’s read in the original spelling:And there were in the same region shepherdes abydinge in the feld, and watching their flocke by nyght. And loo: the angell of the lorde stode harde by them, and the brightnes of the lorde shone rounde aboute them, and they were sore afrayed.This seems quaint and a bit funny, but it tells us something important too. It is local English, not the universal Latin of Thomas More and other humanists. It is English with an accent. To a scholar who criticized his efforts, Tyndale replied, “If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture than you.” To hear the words of the Bible, so long muffled by Latin, in the familiar accents of the farm and marketplace must have been electrifying to Tyndale’s first readers.So thorough were Tyndale’s pursuers that today only three copies of the original 1526 New Testament survive, and only one of them is complete. But within a few years of Tyndale’s death, “the King of England’s eyes” were open and his translation could be found in every parish. It was now the Reformers’ turn to persecute their former tormentors. “The Child is born in blood,” Robert Lowell wrote of Christmas. So too was the English Bible.eormsby@nysun.com

Born In Blood

Born In Blood

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