by CCW | 7 October 2011 10:35
His martyrdom, it seems, holds sway over his scholarship, and yet, perhaps, the two are really one. Martyrdom is about a witness to truth; translation was his witness. Tonight we commemorate “William Tyndale, Translator of the Scriptures into English, Martyr, 1536,” as the Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer so concisely and simply puts it. It both reveals and conceals a whole story and an important concept. A translator of the Scriptures into English and a martyr? To be sure.
Some of the greatest achievements of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ are precisely about the connection between language and martyrdom. William Tyndale inaugurates a fateful tradition belonging to a fateful century. Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer – all of them great masters of the word in English; two of them as translators and one as a preacher – all of them martyrs. There are others, too, of course, who were martyred in that age when politics was religion and religion was politics; all of which is hard, if not impossible, for us to understand. Yet, there is this wonderful idea that we cannot ignore, I think, namely, the power of translation as a witness to truth.
In the second century BC, the only named author of one of the apocryphal books, Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, comments in the prologue the problem of translation.
“For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly
the same sense when translated into another language.”
Far from leading to a sense of despair or denial about the art of translation, this straightforward acknowledgement of the challenge of translation becomes a distinctive feature of the Jewish and Christian biblical traditions revealing a profoundly intellectual concept. What is it? Simply this, ideas expressed in one language can be conveyed into other languages, even if they don’t “have exactly the same sense” as the original. For the Greeks who saw all non-Greek speakers as barbarians; for the Hebrews who bequeathed the label of Philistines to all who are uncultured, this is an important spiritual and intellectual development. Ideas are not simply the property of any one language or culture however much there is the struggle and the challenge to find the right words to capture the fullest possible meaning in the transition from one language and culture to another. The point is that not all translation traduces or betrays the original; there is a kind of confidence in logos, both reason and word, we might say, that transcends the barriers of culture and language inherent in the idea of translation. Ideas matter. Words matter.
The year 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, a translation of the Scriptures into English. It is a remarkable achievement. No other literary work has exercised as much influence on the formation and shape of the English language as the King James Bible. What is equally amazing is that it is the product of several committees of learned scholars. The book of books translated into memorable English by a committee, even of academics. Now that’s a miracle!
Yet what we celebrate in this 400th anniversary of the King James Bible is really the largely unsung yet unmistakeable witness of William Tyndale. Over 80% of the New Testament and large and major portions of the Old Testament are from Tyndale. The committees of the King James Bible had the wisdom, for the most part, to keep many of Tyndale’s phrases and rhythms and words. On occasion there were improvements; on other occasions a kind of pedantry about scholarly meaning at the expense of his lively and memorable expression, sometimes reverting to more latinate words and phrases; but overall, there is a respectful acknowledgement of Tyndale’s genius. Yet not a word of credit or acknowledgement of Tyndale himself.
Tyndale is the unsung hero of the translation of the Scriptures into English which has shaped the English language, through the King James Bible, more than any other work. We forget this at our peril. We forget Tyndale to our shame.
David Crystal argues in his book “Begat”, one of the myriad of books produced to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, that it has quantitatively influenced the English language more than any other single source, to the tune of some 269 definitive examples, as he labours to show (mostly through Internet research). Much of that is Tyndale, of course, and much of it, too, is conveyed through the further association between the King James Version of the Bible and the Books of Common Prayer, that have somehow been the conduits of culture and spirituality in almost equal measure throughout the English-speaking world.
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, just past, presents us with Matthew’s wonderful Gospel about the Providence of God which is the counter to all our self-preoccupations, the antidote to all our anxieties. That Gospel, as printed in the Prayer Book, offers a kind of lesson about translation; its vagaries and its glories. The first two Books of Common Prayer of 1549 and 1552 use Tyndale’s phrase “be not carefull” – don’t be so full of cares – to render the Greek word (αεριμνατε) of Matthew’s text. The King James Bible, wanting to capture more of the intellectual aspects of the Greek word, translates it as “take no thought.” After the Interregnum, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer adopted the King James translation for the Epistles and Gospels contained in the Eucharistic lectionary of the Prayer Book, and so for over 300 years that was the translation used in the Prayer Books of the Anglican Communion until, in 1959, in Canada, in what became the 1962 Canadian BCP, the phrase “be not anxious” replaced the phrase “take no thought”; no doubt, anxiety captures something of the influence of the existentialist and psychological preoccupations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of Kierkegaard, Nietszche and Freud. Angst are us in the therapeutic culture. We all have ‘issues’.
And yet these changes are suggestive about the power and the importance of translation, about the words and forms of discourse that we use and that shape our understanding. Recently, Stefan Collini’s article “Dismantling the Universities” in The London Review of Books notes the shift in language in discussing education in Britain. Higher education which was previously understood to provide an indirect benefit to the social, economic and political life of nations has been taken captive to the language of management and business schools. An “economistic idiom” predicated upon “consumerist relativism” now prevails in educational policy whereby education is measured by its contribution to the nation’s economic growth. The value of education is seen only in economic terms at the expense of all other principles, concerns and interests. A reductionist logic that destroys any sense of intrinsic value, it is, I fear, not unique to England. The simple point is that the language of discourse either helps or hinders our understanding. Getting the words right really matters. Such is the task of the translator.
The Venetian painter, Vittore Carpaccio, was commissioned in 1502 to paint a series of paintings for the Scuola Di San Giorgio Degli Schiavoni, a school founded by Slavs from Dalmatia for their immigrant community in Venice. Among the series was a depiction of the Life of Jerome, the great translator of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. About his influence and significance there is no debate; the images and representations of Jerome in art are legion. The same, alas, cannot be said of Tyndale.
Carpaccio’s series of the Life of St. Jerome, the greatest translator of all time, we might say, whose Vulgate was the lingua franca of Europe for more than a thousand years, comprises three paintings; Jerome with his legendary lion as companion; Jerome’s death and funeral; and then, overshadowing all else, a depiction of St. Augustine pausing in the midst of writing to receive, it seems, a vision of Jerome’s death and ascension into heaven. They were contemporaries.
Two decades after Carpaccio’s painting, Tyndale, a gifted linguist, undertook to translate the Scriptures into English. It marks a kind of turning point: a move away from the Latin Vulgate of Jerome and a turn to the vernacular languages of early modern Europe. It is signalled by Luther’s 1534 Deutsche Bible and by William Tyndale’s translations into English of the New Testament in 1526 and again in 1534 along with translations of the Old Testament which ultimately found their way into Matthew’s Bible (1536), the Great Bible (1539), and seventy-two years later into the King James Bible (1611).
But Tyndale’s work of translation into English and for the English was not produced in England but on the continent. Translation was viewed with considerable suspicion, a threat to those in power, a challenge to the status quo because it calls into question the basis of authority about matters of custom and tradition. It was associated with the challenges to the authority of the Church, particularly the Papacy. And it was a challenge to the comfortable ignorance of many of the Clergy about the Scriptures. In the turbulence of the 1520s and 1530s, translation was heresy.
Tyndale was once taunted by a fellow cleric who said “We are better to be without God’s laws than the Pope’s”. To which he replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!” That commitment to Scriptural education and biblical literacy for everyone is part of the early modern turn. Reformers and Counter-Reformers, Protestants and Catholics alike would all become engaged in the projects of Scriptural translation. Translation is an integral feature of the witness to Christ. The only real question is about the quality of translation.
The real turning point is about language itself. Tyndale, in his Obedience of a Christian Man written in 1528 and admired by Ann Boleyn observes the following:
They will say it [the Bible] cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one, so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it in to the English word for word when thou must seek a compass in the Latin & yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.
Learned, like Jerome, in the languages of Hebrew and Greek and, unlike Jerome, learned in a host of other languages as well, namely, the languages of early modern Europe, Tyndale had an amazing gift. He had a sense for the strong rhythms and patterns of English speech and a sense for how it complemented and captured the qualities of the Hebrew language and the koiné Greek of the New Testament. He recognised that the directness and compact vigour of English complemented the Hebrew and the Greek, allowing one to come close to the sense of the original. Above all he understood the energy and power of the spoken word. It is those aural qualities that have remained in the King James Bible.
Tyndale is a kind of English Luther. He was strongly influenced by Luther; even some of his prefaces to the biblical books of the New Testament are taken directly from him; for instance, his preface to the Letter to the Romans. Tyndale constantly stresses and emphasises the reformed themes of justification by faith, the priority of faith over works, and the covenant theology which dances dialectically between law and grace. But it was translation that resulted in his martyrdom, having fallen afoul of the English ecclesiastical hierarchy for sending his translations of the Scriptures to England from Germany. Ultimately he was executed on October 6th, 1536, near Brussels.
From Genesis to Revelation, from “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light” to “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,” we owe so many memorable phrases to Tyndale. “The salt of the earth”, “the patience of Job”, “clothed and in his right mind”, “full of good works”, “a law unto themselves”, to mention but a few of a long and great litany of words and phrases that stick in our souls and shape us into the understanding of our life with God in Christ. For that was Tyndale’s overarching purpose. “Read God’s Word diligently and with a good heart and it shall teach thee all things,” he says. It is not too much to say that the King James Bible is his monument, his witness to Christ for which he suffered, glorifying God in the name of Christ even unto death. Translation is his witness.
Fr. David Curry
Commemoration of William Tyndale
October 6th, 2011
University of King’s College Chapel
(in the ‘Pit’ – theatre)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/10/07/sermon-for-the-commemoration-of-william-tyndale/
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