Bible

Bible. The Bible is a library of different literary types rather than a single book (Greek biblia—books (plural) ). The larger part, the Old Testament (OT), is a collection of Jewish sacred writings, originally in Hebrew and consisting of teaching (or Law—Torah), history, prophecy, and poetry, all expressing the Jewish experience of God—a literature of faith rather than of scientific or historical observation. The ‘canon’ of the Hebrew OT was not endorsed by Jewish authority until c. ad 100 by which time the Septuagint, its Greek translation (Alexandria, 3rd cent. bc) combined with other Greek writings (the Apocrypha), was prevalent amongst Hellenistic Jews. Though the western church accepted ‘old Latin’ versions of the Septuagint, Jerome made a new Latin translation from the original Hebrew (390–410). Known as the Vulgate, this, with the Apocrypha, was authorized by the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the first Vatican Council (1870). Protestant churches never gave the Apocrypha similar authorization. The New Testament (NT), originally in Greek, also includes diverse literary forms from early Christian experience—letters of Paul and other apostles, historical narrative (Acts), apocalyptic writing (Revelation), and four gospels which are not history but arrangements of remembered acts and sayings of Jesus, retold with the eyes of faith specifically to promote faith. The New Testament ‘canon’ gradually emerged and was not fixed until c.382.

The first English translations were patchy and spasmodic—paraphrases attributed to Cædmon (c.680), Bede's translation of part of John's Gospel (673–735), 9th–10th-cent. glosses, free translations of Genesis 1–12, Psalms 1–50, the gospels (10th cent.), and Middle English metrical versions. The first full versions were 14th-cent. NT translations from the Vulgate, made under lollard influence. Illicit MS translations continued to appear, until a powerful impetus was provided by printing of the Vulgate (1456), the Hebrew text (1488), and Erasmus' Greek NT (1516), which inspired Tyndale to make the first English NT translation from the original Greek in Worms (1526) and of the Pentateuch from the original Hebrew (1529–30). Coverdale, whose first complete English Bible (1535) was partly based on Tyndale, superintended publication of the Great Bible (1539–40), which Thomas Cromwell ordered to be placed in churches. A new version (1557), issued in Geneva—the first with verse-divisions—formed the basis of the so-called Geneva Bible, dedicated to Elizabeth (1560) and widely read at all levels in her reign. Parker, however, authorized yet another, this time more Latinate, revision of the Great Bible, the Bishops' Bible (1568)—also with verse-divisions, but ‘incompetent, both in its scholarship and verbosity’. Meanwhile exiled English catholics in Rheims translated their own NT from the Vulgate (1582), followed by the OT at Douai (1609–10). At the Hampton Court conference (1604) James I commissioned a panel of 54 to produce the King James (or so-called Authorized) Version of 1611, a comprehensive revision of previous translations, using the Latinate Bishops' Bible as the basis. In fact, the translators wisely relied heavily on the Geneva version and therefore Tyndale (without attribution), though with some unfortunate Latinized-English amendments. Its superb quality enabled it to supplant all previous versions, and for 250 years it was the only one used. It supplied the epistles and gospels for the 1662 Prayer Book, though Coverdale was retained for the psalms. The next two centuries saw little new, except for slight revisions in John Wesley's Explanatory Notes on the New Testament (1755) and in the catholic Rheims–Douai version (1749–50). Though new scholarship led to a conservative Revised Version (1881–5), translations proliferated in the 20th cent.: James Moffatt (1922, 1924), Ronald Knox (1945, 1949), followed by the Revised Standard Version (1952)—embodying modern scholarship and meaning, but retaining the Tyndale–King James style—the New English Bible (1961, 1970), Jerusalem Bible (catholic) (1966), and others. The influence of the Bible, especially of the 1611 version and thus Tyndale, on English culture and language has been incalculable, not only in literature, but in daily aphorisms and forms of thought. This version spread to America and round the growing British empire. It has been admired for ‘its simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy turns of expression … the music of its cadences, and the felicities of its rhythm’. For Victor Hugo England had ‘two books, the Bible and Shakespeare; England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.’ The emphasis placed on Bible reading was a great incentive to book publication. Though protestant fundamentalists regard it as literally inspired, most Christians, catholic, evangelical, or liberal, for whom Christianity is a religion of a person not a book, use it as a basic source. Politically too it has been rummaged for causes both revolutionary and reactionary. It can be all things to all men. As William Blake put it, ‘Both read the bible day and night, but thou read'st black where I read white.’ For Macaulay, ‘if everything else in our language should perish, [the Bible] would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power’.

Revd Dr William M. Marshall