In the early Middle Ages, the life of a scribe copying the Bible was tedious and uncomfortable. Scribes worked seated on the floor or on a mattress, with a board laid over their knees as a working surface. The text was either dictated or copied from a book. To avoid making mistakes, the scribes would pronounce the words aloud before writing them.
In some cases, the Bible was copied by letter instead of by word. Because some of the scribes were extremely careful, the reading scribe pronounced each letter, waited until it was repeated by the writing scribe, the scribe wrote it, and then proceeded to the next letter. This minutely detailed practice was more often done with the ancient scrolls of the Hebrew Bible.
The texts were copied onto parchment and later onto papyrus, using a stylus or quill dipped into ink. The process was indeed meticulous, but it was not dangerous. That changed as the fires of the (protestant) Reformation of the Catholic Church—in the very late Middle Ages—began to spread, consuming and martyring many whose passion was translating the Bible for the English-speaking world, a public hungry for God’s Word.
While philosopher, theologian and church reformer John Wycliffe, born around 1328, is perhaps the best-known Bible translator, his difficulties—accused of heresy and defying papal control and tried three times unsuccessfully— pale in comparison to Wycliffe’s successors who bravely defied not only the Catholic church but also the monarchs of England.
Wycliffe’s Bible, meticulously translated from the Latin Vulgate, was burned by the Catholic Church whenever discovered and Wycliffe’s bones were exhumed by the angry church, burned and scattered in the Avon. But the worst was yet to come.
William Tyndale and the Tyndale New Testament
Out of 311 priests surveyed by the bishop of Gloucester in the early 1500s, 168 priests could not repeat the Ten Commandments, only 31 knew where they came from, and 40 could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer or know who its author was. Many priests did not know any Bible verses in any language—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French or English.
While conversing with local clergy, William Tyndale was shocked to find their ignorance of the Bible. One minister said, “We were better before without God’s law, than the Pope’s.” Tyndale replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws, if God spare my life, ‘ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.”
He had a special linguistic talent and began studying languages as a young child. He could read Latin with ease at 10. At the age of 12, he entered the University of Oxford, Magdalen Hall (now Hertford College), where Foxe tells us, “By long continuance he grew and increased in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts.” Tyndale “was singularly addicted to the study of the Scriptures,” and Tyndale was drawn to protestant ideas.
Tyndale graduated from Oxford with his B.A. in 1512 and his M.A. in 1515 and moved to Cambridge to study the Bible and Greek. This school gave him a tremendous boost in Greek because Erasmus had taught Greek and divinity from 1511 to 1514 and the influence of Erasmus was still powerful. While there, he joined the Bible study at the White Horse Inn with Bilney, Clark, Lambert, Barnes, Frith, Ridley, and Latimer—a veritable Who’s Who of the English Reformation. He also studied the works of the reformers such as Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli before he left Cambridge in 1521, and soon he was preaching reformer views at Saint Austen’s Green in front of the church.
In 1521, the University of Cambridge chancellor ordered a public bonfire of all Luther’s books before the door of the Great St. Mary’s Church and the proctor and his officer spent days searching the students’ rooms, using bribery and force to get an impressive pyre. This was a signal for all secret student reformers to flee Cambridge, and Tyndale left before graduating.
Already, Tyndale had been warned and reprimanded for preaching non-Catholic reformer views by John Bell, chancellor of the diocese of Worcester, and he found refuge and served a short time as tutor and chaplain for the John Walsh family, a wealthy cloth merchant living at Little Sodbury Manor near Gloucestershire.
Read full article here.
Posts