1535 At the heart of the Protestant Reformation was the devout worshippers’ desire for direct access to God through Jesus Christ. People wanted to work out their own salvation, not have it decided by a parish priest working the gates of confession and absolution. So they needed to know God’s word directly, not filtered through someone’s loose paraphrase of the Latin scriptures.
Needless to say, the established Roman Catholic Church was strenuously opposed to translations. The Bible was so complexly figurative; ordinary people would just get confused if they tried to read it for themselves. Besides, they might discover that there was no scriptural authority for purgatory, let alone the profitable indulgences sold to curtail the loved one’s time there.
Only ten years earlier, the reformist English priest William Tyndale had published his English version of the New Testament, only to have it denounced by the Catholic Church and himself be charged with heresy, for which he was strangled at the stake in Vilvoorde castle near Brussels, after which his body was burned (see 6 September).
Thanks to a certain Ms Boleyn, Yorkshireman Myles Coverdale was luckier. Although he too had to have his Bible printed abroad, that’s because the funding and printing expertise were there, rather than for fear of persecution. Newly divorced and remarried, split from Rome, and in 1534 officially designated head of the Church of England, Henry VIII had plenty of use for English translations of the Bible.
He ordered a Coverdale Bible to be supplied to every church in England, chained to a lectern so that parishioners could read it for themselves. If they couldn’t read, here was an added incentive to learn. Over time, the Bible’s effect on literacy in English – not to mention its influence on the imaginative use of the language – has been incalculable.
Coverdale wasn’t a great Bible scholar. He had little Greek and less Hebrew, using (among others) Tyndale’s work and Martin Luther’s great German translation for cribs. But his translations of the Psalms lived on in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which means that to churchgoers of a certain age it’s they that are the Psalms, not those in the Authorised Version.
For Handel too, Coverdale was the proper psalmist. In The Messiah (1742), Psalm 22 is exploited for its prophetic bearing on Christ’s crucifixion:
All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out their
lips, and shake their heads, saying,
He trusted in God, that he would deliver him: let him deliver
him, if he will have him.
And a whole chorus is built around the lead line of Psalm 2: ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage together: and why do the people imagine a vain thing?’