thee ’. Read aloud, Tyndale almost always beats all comers, King James or more modern, and the Bible, of course, is God’s blank verse, andintended 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.
In a key chapter, Matthew 7, which has many famous sayings – ‘beware of false prophettes … nether cast ye youre pearles before swynne’ – King James’s men change very little, but then rarely to advantage. Tyndale has: ‘Iudge not that ye be not iudged. For as ye iudge so shall ye be iudged …’ King James alters and obscures the second sentence: ‘For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged …’ The individual voice is not always clearer or the committee clumsy. In the tale of the foolish man who built his house on sand, Tyndale wrote: ‘And aboundance of rayne descended, and the fluddes cam …’ The abundance of rain is implicit in the flooding, and the King James rightly does without it: ‘And the rain descended, and the floods came.’ But Tyndale’s usual edge returns at the end of the verse. He has: ‘and the wynddes blew, and beet uppon that house, and it was overthrowen, and great was the fall of it’. The committee uses smote for beat , and ‘the fall of it ’ is replaced by the laboured ‘the fall thereof ’. In Romans, Tyndale’s readers are urged ‘fassion not yourselves to the worlde’, where the King James abstractly bids them ‘be not conformed’.
It is the plainness of Tyndale that startles and that made the Word of God seem so raw and fresh to his readers. Esau sold his birthright ‘for one morsel of meat’ to the King James men; to Tyndale, he had sold it ‘for one breakfast’. Only a few of Tyndale’s New Testament words have disappeared: ‘arede’ for prophecy, ‘unghostly’ for profane, ‘appose’ for question. Most have been preserved simply by being in his Bible.
Expressions can be traced from the earliest Gothic translation of the gospels, in about 360, through Anglo-Saxon translations of the eighth century, and the Wycliffe Bibles of the end of thefourteenth century, to Tyndale and on to the present day. The Gothic has survived in the Codex Argenteus, a manuscript written on mulberry-stained vellum in silvered letters of such perfection that it was long believed that they were printed in the Chinese style with an individual stamp for each character, although minute differences in width and height, too subtle for the naked eye, show it to be the work of a copyist of rare talent.
The Anglo-Saxon translation, possibly the work of the Venerable Bede, has a charming habit of literal translation from the Latin. For the Latin centurio , or centurion, it has hundredman . Disciple is leorning eniht , or learning-youth. A man swollen with the dropsy is said to be a waeter-seoc-man , a water sack man. The Sabbath is the reste-daeg , the rest day. A scribe is a boc-ere , a book fellow. Treasury is the self-explanatory gold-hord . The Anglo-Saxons had a lovely word for heaven: heofunum – ‘ Fader ure de eart on heofunum … Our father that art in heaven …’.
The door in ‘I am thata daur ’ in Gothic changes to gate in the Anglo-Saxon’s ‘Ic eom geat ’ before reverting to Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s ‘I am the dore’ . The Gothic leiticia wheila becomes the Anglo-Saxon sume hwile and Wycliffe’s litel tyme before settling into Tyndale’s lytell whyle . The Goths’ yuka auhsne is close to Wycliffe’s yokis of oxen and Tyndale’s yooke of oxen ; the Anglo-Saxon getyme oxena seems the odd man out, until getyme is seen as a team. Hardu hairtai , the Gothic hard-hearted, progresses through Anglo-Saxon heortan heardness and Wycliffe’s hardnesse of herte before becoming Tyndale’s harde herttes . The sibun brothruys of the Goths change
In a key chapter, Matthew 7, which has many famous sayings – ‘beware of false prophettes … nether cast ye youre pearles before swynne’ – King James’s men change very little, but then rarely to advantage. Tyndale has: ‘Iudge not that ye be not iudged. For as ye iudge so shall ye be iudged …’ King James alters and obscures the second sentence: ‘For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged …’ The individual voice is not always clearer or the committee clumsy. In the tale of the foolish man who built his house on sand, Tyndale wrote: ‘And aboundance of rayne descended, and the fluddes cam …’ The abundance of rain is implicit in the flooding, and the King James rightly does without it: ‘And the rain descended, and the floods came.’ But Tyndale’s usual edge returns at the end of the verse. He has: ‘and the wynddes blew, and beet uppon that house, and it was overthrowen, and great was the fall of it’. The committee uses smote for beat , and ‘the fall of it ’ is replaced by the laboured ‘the fall thereof ’. In Romans, Tyndale’s readers are urged ‘fassion not yourselves to the worlde’, where the King James abstractly bids them ‘be not conformed’.
It is the plainness of Tyndale that startles and that made the Word of God seem so raw and fresh to his readers. Esau sold his birthright ‘for one morsel of meat’ to the King James men; to Tyndale, he had sold it ‘for one breakfast’. Only a few of Tyndale’s New Testament words have disappeared: ‘arede’ for prophecy, ‘unghostly’ for profane, ‘appose’ for question. Most have been preserved simply by being in his Bible.
Expressions can be traced from the earliest Gothic translation of the gospels, in about 360, through Anglo-Saxon translations of the eighth century, and the Wycliffe Bibles of the end of thefourteenth century, to Tyndale and on to the present day. The Gothic has survived in the Codex Argenteus, a manuscript written on mulberry-stained vellum in silvered letters of such perfection that it was long believed that they were printed in the Chinese style with an individual stamp for each character, although minute differences in width and height, too subtle for the naked eye, show it to be the work of a copyist of rare talent.
The Anglo-Saxon translation, possibly the work of the Venerable Bede, has a charming habit of literal translation from the Latin. For the Latin centurio , or centurion, it has hundredman . Disciple is leorning eniht , or learning-youth. A man swollen with the dropsy is said to be a waeter-seoc-man , a water sack man. The Sabbath is the reste-daeg , the rest day. A scribe is a boc-ere , a book fellow. Treasury is the self-explanatory gold-hord . The Anglo-Saxons had a lovely word for heaven: heofunum – ‘ Fader ure de eart on heofunum … Our father that art in heaven …’.
The door in ‘I am thata daur ’ in Gothic changes to gate in the Anglo-Saxon’s ‘Ic eom geat ’ before reverting to Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s ‘I am the dore’ . The Gothic leiticia wheila becomes the Anglo-Saxon sume hwile and Wycliffe’s litel tyme before settling into Tyndale’s lytell whyle . The Goths’ yuka auhsne is close to Wycliffe’s yokis of oxen and Tyndale’s yooke of oxen ; the Anglo-Saxon getyme oxena seems the odd man out, until getyme is seen as a team. Hardu hairtai , the Gothic hard-hearted, progresses through Anglo-Saxon heortan heardness and Wycliffe’s hardnesse of herte before becoming Tyndale’s harde herttes . The sibun brothruys of the Goths change
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