WIDE AS THE WATERS BE

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and

the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick.

Benson Bobrick (an accomplished independent scholar and the author of a history of stuttering, among other books) begins this admirably clear and abundantly informative history of the Bible in English by telling us that the first question you were asked when you had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition was, Do you know any part of Scripture in your own language? If your answer was yes, there were no further questions: the stake is through that door. As the flames crawled upward, a cross was held before your eyes, to inspire last-second repentance, while angelic choirboys sang the dread “Dies Irae.” William Tyndale, the translator who, more than anyone, gave us the King James Version of the Bible, was burned at the stake on October 6, 1536, though legend has it that he was strangled before the kindling was lit.

Tyndale’s translation, the first into English from the original Hebrew and Greek, was the basis for the Authorized Version of 1611 that is still the Bible for most English-speaking Christians today and was the official Bible of the Church of England for 350 years. The task of the fifty-four translators chosen by King James lay mostly in tidying up Tyndale’s work, the beauty and power of which they accepted as what the Bible in English ought to be. “Suffer the children to come unto me,” Tyndale wrote. The committee added “little.” (Bobrick gives us an appendix of comparative passages, like Dr. Johnson in his preface to the dictionary.) It was not until the 1960s that a New English Bible was introduced, making room for contemporary idiom and the evidence of more ancient Greek manuscripts (though there had been various revisions, called “Revised Standard Versions,” from Victorian times onward, to bring up to date Tudor locutions that had changed their meaning in spoken English: “prevent,” for instance, meant to precede or to anticipate; and “let” meant its opposite, to hinder).

English is not so much a language as a family of languages. Once the tongue of Bronze Age tribes called Angles and Saxons, it early began to swap words and phrases with the Vikings, who were also colonizing the British Isles. The Saxon fought with an “edge,” the Dane with a “sword.” “Edge” became merely a detail of “sword.” The evolutionary tactic was always to keep both words. In 1066, Normans invaded, and the same process went on: the “pig” in the sty became “pork” on the table; “cow” became “beef.” It is as if English were an impressionable husband who had a Danish wife and talked like her; and then a French wife and talked like her. And when the King James translators took up their task, English had begun to add two rich vocabularies from Latin and Greek. Anglo-Saxon “dog” sported the Latin adjective “canine,” and people who snarled like dogs were cynics (a Greek word).

Tyndale and his revisers were keenly aware that an authentic, archaic English to which they ought always to defer was the bedrock of the language available to them. They used only 8,000 words, 90 percent of which are Anglo-Saxon-Danish. From this word hoard they could invent words for practically all of the Bible. The Old Testament is inordinately concerned with praeputii, for which Tyndale invented “foreskynne.” He combined a Norman and a Saxon word and gave us “beautyfull.”

The very first English Bible was that of John Wycliffe (1328–84), from the Latin of Jerome, whose “Vulgate” translation from Hebrew and Greek was completed in 405. Wycliffe died before he could be tied to the stake. So the Church dug up his remains and burned his bones. (They got his disciple Jan Hus, however, and burned him as one infected by Wycliffe.) Wycliffe’s postmortem burning in 1428 took place on a bridge over the River Swift, a tributary of the Avon. Bobrick takes his title from an anonymous hymn (taken in turn from a paragraph in Thomas Fuller’s Church History of 1655):

The Avon to the Severn runs,

The Severn to the sea,

And Wickliffe’s dust shall spread abroad,

Wide as the waters be.

Wycliffe’s Bible was dispersed by itinerant preachers called Lollards. They were first-wave Protestants, outlawed and persecuted (Sir John Oldcastle, the model for Falstaff, led a Lollard uprising against his friend Henry V in 1414, and was simultaneously hanged and burned for it). The Reformation bloomed from many such seeds, broadcast all over Western Europe. Erasmus published his Greek New Testament in 1516, a scholarly rectification of age-old copyists’ errors and variant readings, and one year later the German monk Martin Luther demanded that the Church quit selling time off from purgatory.

The Reformation in full spate depended on printing. The first book to be printed with movable type, by Johannes Gutenberg, was the Bible, in Latin. The way was then open for Bibles in German, Danish, and English. Bobrick gives a lucid and orderly account of the many translations (so many they’re hard to keep straight), providing us a sense of how they were genetically born from one another: Miles Coverdale’s following hard on Tyndale’s (and completing Tyndale’s work on the Old Testament), a Geneva Bible (the one Shakespeare read), a “Bishop’s Bible,” on up to the one commissioned by James I and achieved by a committee of Hebrew and Greek scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. These worthies were anonymous until 1958, when thirty-nine pages of their working notes were found in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Bobrick tells us as much as can be known about them at this late date.

Their average age was fifty. They were all clergymen except for Sir Henry Savile. Revealed after 350 years from their self-effacing, “deliberately cultivated” anonymity, they are a wonderfully interesting group of very human beings, and Bobrick gives us charming portraits of them all. Here he is on Lancelot Andrewes, head of the committee that revised Tyndale’s translation of Genesis through 2 Kings (and the only reviser with a recognizable name, thanks to T.S. Eliot):

[He was] an immensely learned man who, it was said, “might have been interpreter general at Babel … the world wanted … learning to know how learned he was.” The son of a master mariner, Andrewes had studied at the Merchant Taylors’ School under Richard Mulcaster, a classical and Hebrew scholar of note, and as “a great long lad of 16,” went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge on scholarship, where one of his companions was Edmund Spenser.… From a very tender age, Andrewes was “addicted to the study of good letters,” avoided “games of ordinary recreation” such as cards, dice, chess, or croquet, and preferred long solitary walks in the company of earnest students like himself.

Bobrick’s description of the long-lost notes offers a glimpse of scholars who were working to forge, in a very real sense, the language that we call our own. “[I]t is intriguing to see what might have been,” Bobrick writes. Indeed. Anyone who has been to a Christian wedding in the last twenty years is roughly familiar with the King James version of I Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” The notes record that the scholar John Bois, a former child prodigy who was reading the Old Testament in Hebrew by the age of six, offered the following variant: “I understood, I cared as a child, I had a child’s mind, I imagined as a child, I was affected as a child.”

Translation is a metaphysical act: an incomprehensible set of words becomes comprehensible, or nearly so. In Sunday school I thought John the Baptist ate the succulent pods of Robinia pseudoacacia (black locust), which I and my friends fancied. What he ate was grasshoppers. My one contribution to biblical scholarship is to have convinced Reynolds Price to translate akridas as “grasshoppers” in his A Palpable God (the New English Bible still has “locusts”). But translation is also, strictly speaking, impossible. Ancient Hebrew is rich in untranslatable puns on the order of Homer’s—Helen in the Odyssey refuses to say Troy (Ilion, in Greek); she calls it that kakoilion city, “dreadful.” T.E. Lawrence managed to get around this by having Helen say “that destroyed city.” The Prophets were similarly skillful with this kind of pun, as was Jesus when he changed Simon’s name to Peter—“Rock” in Greek—and told the assembled that “upon this rock” He would build His church (the pun also works in Aramaic, which Jesus may have been speaking).

There are other difficulties. In its original text as well as in translations, the Bible is the most evolved of books. Scholars tell us that the Hebrew text is basically two texts intertwined, giving us, in the final result, two variant Ten Commandments handed down on two different mountains, two deaths of King Saul. Moses gets two fathers, and stories repeat themselves in “doublets.” David gets to re-kill a giant who isn’t Goliath. Scholars have teased these interwoven texts apart. In one, God is called Yahweh; in the other, El. Scholars have further identified two other strands woven into the fabric: a priestly addition of rituals and a “deuteronomical” one of laws. Even if every one of these theories is wrong, the Bible remains a collection of books, rather than a book. The word “bible” is from the Greek biblia, plural of biblion, “a little book.” It is an archive of a thousand years of writing.

For most American Christians, however, the Bible is a book written by God, in English. The text is prophetic, instructional, and devotional. Baptists believe that it is “inerrant” (a nice tit-for-tat response by Protestants to papal infallibility). A logical mind can find itself in a bog. Why are we not told about the other creation of humankind (the one that Cain married into)? If Noah sacrificed two of all the animals, and had taken on two of each (Genesis 6:19), how were there any left? But in the very next chapter, God specifies that Noah take with him seven pairs, male and female, of the clean animals, with the unclean ones (non-cud-chewers) still two. So Mr. and Mrs. Pig were on board but escaped the holocaust on Mount Ararat. Still, how do you slaughter and burn two elephants? Two Tyrannosaurus rex?

King James’s translators were working at a time when unicorns were believable. They understood allegory, fable, and myth. The text they were translating was from a different epoch. Only John Layfield had traveled (to Puerto Rico); beyond the mullioned windows of their Oxford and Cambridge rooms the Nile and Jordan, Jericho and Jerusalem, lay in an unimaginably distant past in which shepherd kings talked with God, the shadows of sundials moved backward at a prophet’s command, and Solomon sat between golden walls with a thousand wives.

Seven hundred years before, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had dutifully recorded dragons swimming through the air in Northumbria. The Renaissance in England was as superstitious as it was religious: the Irish had tails, Jews poisoned wells, the king’s touch cured scrofula. Miracles and impossibilities in the English Bible enhanced its credibility.

Tyndale was burned alive for translating ekklesia as “congregation” (rather than “church”) and presbyteros as “elder” (rather than “priest”)—throwing open the way for Baptists to worship God in cellars and for Presbyterians to sing hymns in darkest Scotland. The hierarchy in Rome feared that placing the Bible in the hands of weavers and grocers would fragment the Church into a chaos of amateur theologians, wild enthusiasts, and illiterate exegetes. They were right: Protestant sects have chosen a menu of virtues, vices, and fixations from the Bible. (I know of a congregation in South Carolina that does not wear neckties, citing Isaiah’s putdown of gaudy apparel that the King James Version calls “tyres,” archaic English for “attire.” “Tyre” and “tie” sound the same on a South Carolina tongue.)

What Bobrick shows in his careful narrative of the Bible’s slow and turbulent translation into English is the heroic, bloody, and awesome progress of the Reformation that ironically begot even more terribly oppressive societies (Calvin burned heretics, Puritans hanged witches, Anglicans drowned Baptists) while leading to deism and republican government. “One could almost say,” he writes, “that the modern democratic state owed its origins in part to a defiance of Catholic dogma, but ended by adopting one of its fundamental tenets in the secular sphere”—that is, we have given to law, with its traditions and precedents, the authority once enjoyed by the Church. A cynic can remark that we have returned to the Old Testament, with its proscriptions and prescriptions, its judges and councils of elders.

What we know is that, at the beginning of the third millennium after the birth of a baby named Joshua (“Yeshua” in Hebrew, spelled “Iesous” in Greek, “Jesus” in Latin), the Bible continues to be printed in millions of copies. An article in the February 2001 issue of Bible Review cites a recent Gallup poll: 65 percent of American readers believe that the Bible answers “all or most of the basic questions of life” (though a third of this 65 percent admit that they’ve never read it). This article also revealed that a number of Bible readers consider “the Book of Joseph” to be their favorite, and that 12 percent think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

Walt Whitman and Henry Mencken, agnostics both, wore out several copies. English and American literature from Chaucer onward assumes that its readers know the Bible. We all quote it, constantly, unknowingly. It is like the flag: a sacred totem. There are many accounts by Civil War and First World War veterans of “lucky” pocket copies stopping bullets. It occupies a strangely awkward place in our culture: an unread book that many pious people believe is too hard to understand, an oracle (the belief that passages chosen at random have prophetic power lasts into our time), a text necessary for getting into heaven. Our presidents are sworn into office by placing their left hand on it, though it forbids oath-taking. George Washington, at his inauguration, kissed it, and it was noted that the pages he happened to kiss are those in which Joseph reminds the Israelites that God will bring them “unto the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Parts of it may be older than the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which it rivals in narrative.