Book of Fire (10 page)
In any event, Tyndale felt himself ready to set out from London in the early spring of 1524. ‘I understood at the last,’ he wrote, ‘not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s
palace to translate the new testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England, as experience doth now openly declare.’
He sailed for Hamburg in, or close to, April 1524.
F
rom the moment he arrived at Hamburg, Tyndale is elusive. For a controversialist who was recklessly brave in print, Tyndale had an extraordinary ability to fade into a background.
His writing was savage, taunting and awash with brilliant energy. He had wit and the Tudor love of puns. He wrote of bishops as ‘bishaps’, half-man, half-mishap, and of popery as ‘popetrie’, or puppetry; he invented the word ‘divininite’, half-divinity and half-ninny, to describe the bishop of Rochester. He had Tudor vulgarity, too, reminding bishops that ‘to preach is their duty only and not to offer their feet to be kissed or testicles to be groped’. He was no timid, shrinking scholar. We already know that he wrote of Wolsey as Wolfsee, the wolf among the flock, and he wrote too of his ‘shitten death’ – the cardinal was to die after his physician gave him a purgative – and gloried that ‘for al the worship of his hat and glories of his precious shoes when he was payned with the colicke of an evel conscience havynge no nother shifte bycause his soule could funde in nother issue toke hym selfe a medecine ut emitteret spiritum per posteriora’.
This is not the sort of prose – even if he dressed up ‘and farted
his spirit through his backside’ in Latin – expected from the translator of the Bible. But to Tyndale, the Bible was a living book, with all the crudeness and vigour of everyday life. It excited him; it was a page-turner. He poured the same enthusiasm into his dangerous and public duel with his enemy Thomas More.
He was preserved by a ruthlessly purposeful and practical streak rare in a man so proud and noisy in debate. He was in self-exile on the Continent for eleven years before his betrayal, and actively hunted for nine of them; for four of those years, it is not known what city or even what country he was in, and only once, for a period of a few months, do we have a definite address for him. This was a remarkable feat. Sixteenth-century cities were small and intimate – London had about forty thousand people in the 1520s – and strangers were easy to identify. Tyndale was particularly vulnerable. He had very little money and could not buy secrecy as Oldcastle had. He was constantly publishing his work and he had to negotiate with printers, who were notoriously hard drinkers and indiscreet. He was also obliged to raise funds, for the printing of banned books was expensive as well as dangerous.
No portrait or sketch was made of him during his lifetime, lest a likeness betray him. He had great business skills – some charity apart, books were his only source of income and every word he published was banned in its home market – and a natural instinct for the new art of publishing. He was his own publisher and distributor, copy-editing with the renegade friar William Roye, finding merchants and smugglers. He judged his print runs nicely; the Bible apart, he knew what other subjects would sell, playing brilliantly on the English loathing for priests and prelates in his original writing; and he had an eye for design and format. His New Testament was the first of its kind to be printed in modern pocket paperback size.
We cannot be sure where he translated it. Thomas More
thought that Tyndale went straight from the Hamburg docks to work with Luther at Luther’s base in Wittenberg. He based this on interrogations of Bible-men he had seized in England. ‘Tyndall, as soon as he gat him hence, got him to Luther straight,’ he wrote, ‘and the confederacy between Luther and him is a thing well known, and plainly confessed by such as have been taken and convicted here of heresy, coming from thence.’ The Catholic militant Cochlaeus, who was the first to be able definitively to place Tyndale on the Continent, at Cologne in the autumn of 1525, described Tyndale as an ‘apostate from England, who had learnt the German tongue at Wittenberg’. Tyndale denied it: ‘And when he sayth Tindale was confederrat with Luther that is not trueth.’
Tyndale had every reason to be sensitive of revealing his whereabouts to anyone, and particularly to a man who wished him harm as earnestly as Thomas More. If he was not ‘confederate’ with Luther in the sense of actively working with him, it is likely that he at least visited him in Wittenberg, and that he completed his translation there. A copy of the register of the university of Wittenberg records that Matthias von Emerson matriculated in May 1524. Matthias was the nephew of the widow Margaret von Emerson, an evangelical sympathiser with whom Tyndale may have stayed on his arrival in Hamburg – there is strong evidence that he stayed with her at later dates – on the recommendation of the merchants at the Steelyard. The register shows that
Gillelmus Daltici ex Anglia
matriculated at the same time as young von Emerson. Tyndale’s acute pre-war biographer, J. F. Mozley, suggests that reversing the syllables of
Tindal
makes
Daltin
, which an overworked copyist could render as
Daltici
; and that this
Gillelmus
is indeed our William. The amanuensis whom Tyndale somewhat tetchily used, William Roye, a Franciscan from Greenwich who had fled overseas, was certainly at Wittenberg – the register records
Guilhelmus Roy ex Londino
matriculating in June 1525 – and the
city was, as duke George of Saxony wearily complained, the ‘common asylum of all apostates’.
It had taken Luther just five months to complete his translation of the New Testament. Tyndale took perhaps twice that time. He had first to learn German, to make full use of Luther’s work and German scholarship; he understood it well enough to translate Luther’s glosses and prologues accurately within six months of arriving in Germany. He had no other Englishman – Roye arrived when the work was almost ready for the press – off whom to bounce phrases and idioms.
Unus vir nullus vir
, Luther said of the task of translation – one man is no man.
Tyndale’s primary source was Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, already in its third edition by 1524, together with the Latin translation and notes, which accompanied the Greek text. He also had the Latin Vulgate, and Luther’s 1521 September Testament. He had no Lollard Bible with him. He said that he had no man to ‘counterfeit’ or imitate; ‘neither,’ he added, ‘was help with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the scripture beforetime’.
His words seem timeless now – ‘eate, drynke and be mery … the salt of the earth … the powers that be … gretter love then this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his life for his frendes’ – but he wrote at the infancy of the written language. At this time it was common for people to read aloud, even when alone; and it is this habit, and Tyndale’s studies in rhetoric at Oxford, that accounts at least in part for the charm and thunder that soar from the English Bible when it is spoken from the lectern. Tyndale’s prose sounds as well as it reads.
The richness of his vocabulary, his use of verbs in place of nouns and adjectives, his free sentence constructions, his ear for vivid sayings – ‘as bare as Job and as bald as a coot’ – and his sense of rhythm profoundly affected the language of the English-speaking peoples – the global language, now – as his Testament,
incorporated almost whole into the King James or Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611, deeply influenced the religion of England and her colonies.
He said that English gave the sense of the original Greek of the Testament better than Latin, and he was right. Latin puts its verbs at the end of sentences: it is a subject–object–verb language. Greek, and particularly the
koine
, or the common Greek of the NT, is flexible in its word order. Its verbs can be placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or, as in English, in the middle. A subject–verb–object sentence is better balanced to the English ear, and Greek is easier and more natural than Latin to English speakers. Greek makes more use of verbs than Latin, which prefers nouns. Spoken English also chooses a verb instead of a noun where possible, making it simpler and more vigorous. Written English can follow the spoken word and use verbs, if it pleases; but more often – in business, the law, government and literature that strives to impress – it is heavy in nouns.
Tyndale used verbs where less flowing writers use nouns and adjectives. Thus in I Peter 1: 23, he writes of ‘the word of God, which liveth and lasteth for ever’. The King James Version remains with Tyndale’s verbs, although it drops the attractive alliteration of ‘
liveth
and
lasteth
’ by changing ‘
lasteth
’ to ‘
abideth
’. Modern committee translations replace the verbs with adjectives – ‘the living and enduring word of God’ in the New English Bible, ‘the live, permanent word of the living God’ in the Phillips Modern English, ‘the living and eternal word of God’ in Today’s English Version – and strip out the cadence and the sense of immediacy that verbs bring to Tyndale’s prose.
Three verbs create pace and urgency in a Tyndale passage in Mark’s gospel: ‘the uncleane spirite
tare
him,
cryed out
with a loud voice, and
cam out
of him …’. The New English Bible has two: ‘the unclean spirit
threw
the man into convulsions and with a
loud cry
left
him’ (Mark 1: 26). As Peter heals the lame man in Acts, Tyndale writes that the man ‘sprange, stode and also walked, and entered with them into the temple, walkynge and leapynge and laudynge god’ (Acts 3: 8). The lack of clutter in Tyndale’s prose is clear by contrast with the needless additions of a modern translation, Phillips Modern English: the man ‘sprang
to his feet
, stood and
then
walked.
Then
he went with them into the Temple,
where
he walked about, leaping and thanking God.’ How else could the man have sprung, but ‘to his feet’? He could not have walked without first standing, nor have entered the temple without first walking; the dual use of ‘then’ is ugly and pointless. As to the temple ‘where’ he walked about, since he was in the temple, where else could he have been?
Tyndale preferred short words and short sentences. He wrote in the parable of the good sower in Matthew 13: 8 – Tyndale used ‘similitude’ for parable, an accurate translation of the Greek parable, meaning to place alongside – that some seed ‘fell on goode grounde, and spronge up and bare frute, an hondred foolde’. These twelve words have perfect economy, and they entered the King James Version intact. The Phillips Modern English Bible needs seventeen words – the seed ‘fell on good soil and grew and produced a crop – a hundred times what had been sown’ – and achieves no better clarity. Tyndale used the shortest and most simple phrases to express the mysteries of the faith: ‘Axe and it shal be given you. Seke and ye shall fynd. Knocke and it shal be opened unto you.’ The cadence here is perfect: change ‘
unto
’ into ‘
to
’ – ‘knock and it shall be opened
to
you’ – and it is lost. King James runs this as a single sentence, its power diluted by commas and colons.
Where the King James strays away from him, Tyndale is often both more vivid and more plain. ‘Thou arte my dear Son in whom I delyghte’ is more intimate than the King James: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’
The language used by the authors of the few books then printed
in English had some bias towards words derived from French and Latin. A single meaning in English might be covered by words from three derivations: kingly from Anglo-Saxon, for example, royal from French, and regal from Latin. Tyndale reversed this to favour Anglo-Saxon words – ‘freedom’ in place of the Franco-Latin ‘liberty’, ‘hang’ for ‘suspend’, ‘brotherly’ for ‘fraternal’, ‘folk’ for ‘people’, ‘foe’ for ‘enemy’ – or to use both. Religion was itself a Franco-Latin word, of course, and so were many of its expressions – saint, miracle, pilgrimage, disciple, Trinity – though Bible was Greek and the Anglo-Saxon God had bettered the Latin Deity.
Where later translators of the New Testament stick slavishly to a single English word for a word from the original Greek, Tyndale used as many English expressions as he wished. Thus it ‘came to pass’ is followed by it ‘happened, ‘chanced’, ‘fortuned’ and ‘followed’. ‘Lo’ becomes ‘behold’, ‘mark’, ‘see’, ‘look’ and ‘take heed’. He sometimes, indeed, mixed his words in the same passage: ‘Give to every man therefore his duty; tribute to whom tribute
belongeth
, custom to whom custom
is due
, fear to whom fear
belongeth
; honour to whom honour
pertaineth
.’ The brilliance of his phrases is matched by a peerless rhythm: ‘take thine ese, eate, drynke and be mery’, or the wonderful ‘for we are made a gazing stock to the world’. The King James replaced ‘
gazing stock’
with the dull ‘we are made a
spectacle
’. As unhappily, for Tyndale’s: ‘And the devil took him up into an high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world, even in
the twinkling of an eye
’, the King James committee substituted ‘
a moment in time
’.
Tyndale often used a polysyllable as a sort of full stop to round off a string of monosyllables. This is an example: ‘lest they bid thee again, and make thee recompense’. The King James adds an unneeded ‘also’ and destroys the rhythm at the end of the sentence: ‘lest they
also
bid thee again, and a
recompense be made thee
’. Read aloud, Tyndale almost always beats all comers, King James or more modern, and the Bible, of course, is God’s blank verse, and
intended to be read aloud. ‘Blynded in their understondynge,’ Tyndale has in Ephesians 4, ‘beynge straungers from the lyfe which is in god.’ In the King James – ‘having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God’ – the pulse has gone.
