![]() (Lordy, what he endured in life!)Ī century later, linguist William Tyndale translated scripture directly from Hebrew and Greek into English: a mammoth “do not.” Tyndale followed and imitated the scholar Erasmus, saying that he wished “the word to reach the eyes of all women, Scots and Irishmen, even Turks and Saracens, and especially the farm worker at the plow and the weaver at the loom.” Tyndale was roundly denounced. After his death, Wyclif’s manuscripts were twice as popular as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Even 40 years after his death, his bones were dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift. And yet, in some ways, he had the last laugh. His Oxford colleagues however were all burned alive. This pestilent and wretched John Wyclif, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent!” Wyclif only escaped prosecution by dying just in time. In 1401, Archbishop Arundel fumed at Wyclif: “The pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine. This blasphemous act - making the Bible heard and read in common English, not Latin - made him a criminal. Poor sap - to be so virtuous and courageous! Wyclif actually knew no Hebrew or Greek, so relied on Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate to make his way. Wyclif, known as the “flower of Oxford scholarship” ventured the first translation of the Bible into English. 1330–1384), master of Balliol College at Oxford. These scholars, however, even if they were professors at Oxford or Cambridge, were completely unprotected by their institutions. ![]() The clergy wished to maintain exclusive knowledge of the text while scholars sought to open the Bible to the common reader. Losses in the millions were not uncommon during those years: three million people died during the Crusades, the great war between Christianity and Islam.Īt the same time, clergy and scholars were waging a hot war over Bible translation. These civil and international wars annihilated national and daily being populations suffered and diminished. In Western Europe, from 1524 to 1648, religious wars continuously roared on between Roman Catholics and Protestants: we have the Eighty Years’ War in the Lowlands (1568–1648), the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and the English Civil War (1642–1651). War, of course, dominated the European continent for much of early modern history. Terrible because of the courageous translators’ torture and death and enthralling because in the history of the translator, as in war, we observe deadly battles over ideas. The history of Bible translation is as terrible as it is enthralling. For their iniquity, the brave decoders were often mortally punished, though today these vile scholars are celebrated. Likewise, these early translators lived and died according to prevailing doctrine. The history of these early Bible translators is like the history of religious wars: two sides in horrible conflict over religious choice. The heresy there was opening up the text to commoners, who would be able to read the Bible on their own for the first time. My heresy is, of course, quite different from what the early translators of the Bible went through - the men who did the pioneer dirty work of turning Hebrew and Greek scriptures into English rather than the authorized Latin. He makes into a woman and brings her to the man.Īnd Adam says, “She is the bone of my bones.” ![]() Then he takes one of his ribsĪnd the rib the lord God takes from the man So the lord God casts a deep sleep on the manĪnd he sleeps. Tip off the inquisitors, but a holy tree and poetry resides in Eden: ![]() I was thrilled to try to turn so much beauty, tale, and thought into English verse. My task, as I saw it, was to liberate hundreds of them from Genesis to the astounding Revelation. Poems abound in the Bible like spring blooms. There were many before him of course, including John Milton, and many after, like Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas. Poetry is often concealed in prose, as we know - think of Whitman, who found his paradigm for free verse in scripture. There are poems lurking everywhere in our two Testaments and yet, the iniquity is in collating the whole Bible into one concise poetry anthology. I recently published a book called Poets of the Bible: From Solomon’s Song of Songs to John’s Revelation.
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