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Chapter IV - English Versions of the Bible, 1525–1611

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
S. L. Greenslade
Edited by
S. L. Greenslade
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Summary

Tyndale

The survival of some two hundred manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions, most of them written after the synods of Oxford and London, A.D. 1407–9, is sufficient evidence of a demand for the Scriptures in English which legislation could not stifle. With the invention of printing (even if that did not immediately bring cheap and plentiful copies of the Bible) the galling knowledge that vernacular versions were circulating, sometimes with the consent of the Church, in most European countries must have stiffened determination to get an English translation into print. Further stimulus came from the teaching of Colet at home and from the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. Simultaneously the quickening of scholarship manifest in the Complutensian Polyglot and Erasmus's Greek Testament meant that no mere rendering of the Vulgate would suffice, although one made from the original languages must provoke greater opposition from ecclesiastical authority. England was fortunate to have in William Tyndale the man who could do what was wanted, a man of sufficient scholarship to work from Hebrew and Greek, with genius to fashion a fitting English idiom and faith and courage to persist whatever it cost him.

Publication

With an Oxford education behind him (B.A. 1512, M.A. 1515), followed by a period of study at Cambridge, Tyndale went as tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where he not only found himself countering the arguments of Walsh's guests (abbots, deans, archdeacons and divers doctors, says Foxe) by open and manifest Scripture, but also translated Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Bible , pp. 141 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1963

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References

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