Battles over The Bible (in English) Quiz

Answer: An explanatory note in the margin

A gloss is a margin note in English, translating the Latin text for those priests whose grasp of Latin was somewhat shaky. One of the more famous glosses is found in the Lindisfarne Gospels, added by one Aldred, some time between 950 and 970. One can only hope that any priest with lousy Latin reading this gloss had a decent understanding of the Northumbrian dialect in which it was written.

Here's an example (it's Matthew 6:9-13, which is Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer, by the way): "Suae oonne iuih gie bidde fader urer ou aro ou bist in heofnum + in heofnas; sie gehalgad noma oin; to-cymeo ric oin, si willo oin suae is in heofne J in eoroo. Hlaf userne oferwistlic sel us to daeg. J forgef us scylda usra suae uoe forgefon scyldgum usum. J ne inloed usih in costunge ah gefrig usich from yfle." (I'm not able to put in all the diacritical marks and the diphthongs, but you get the picture.) I'd rather learn Latin!

Answer: Alfred

Alfred the Great (the man who burned the cakes) had passages from the Ten Commandments and the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) translated, and had them prefixed with a code of laws which he devised around the same time. Alfred is also said to have had the Book of Psalms translated into Old English.

The other three kings lived between 875 and 950, but I don't know if they had anything to do with translations of the Bible.

Answer: 1380s

Wycliffe's translation preceded the invention of the printing press, so it was entirely handwritten. Poor Wycliffe must have suffered from a terminal case of writer's cramp. His translation is a word-for-word Latin-into-English, using the Vulgate, which was the only Bible authorized by the Roman Catholic Church. Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384) is considered to be one of the early igniters of the fires of the movement for reform in the Roman Catholic Church.

He was a priest, an Oxford professor, and well-known as a theologian in his day.

He was involved with a group called the Lollards, who were denounced as heretics by the Church of Rome. Indeed, the Church was so infuriated by Wycliffe's teachings and writings, and his translation of the Bible into English, that in 1424, 44 years after Wycliffe's death, the Pope ordered that his bones be dug up, crushed, and scattered in the River Isis. Jan Hus (aka John Hus, or John Huss) was a Bohemian cleric who was one of Wycliffe's followers and who promoted Wycliffe's ideas for reform and the belief that the scriptures should be available for people to read in their own language. Hus was convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical court and burned at the stake in 1415 in flagrant violation of a solemn promise of safe conduct.

His last words were, "In 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed." Hus' words proved to be prophetic, for it was a mere 102 years later that Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg.

Answer: Thomas Linacre

Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) was not only an Oxford professor but also the personal physician to both King Henry VII and King Henry VIII. During his study of the gospels in the original Greek he noticed some passages he did not recognize, and after comparing the Greek with the Vulgate, he noted in his diary, "Either this (meaning the original Greek) is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians." He determined that the Latin of the Vulgate was so inaccurate that it no longer even preserved the message of the Gospels. Even so, the Church stuck to its guns and insisted that only the Vulgate be used, and went so far as to threaten death for anyone who read the scriptures in any other language. One wonders why the powers-that-be were so adamant, when Greek and Hebrew, not Latin, are the languages in which the originals were written. (Power play, anyone?) John Colet (yet another Oxford professor - busy boys, these Oxford profs!) also read the New Testament in the original Greek, and went so far as to translate it into English for his students.

When he became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, he used his translation there. Within six months, we're told, Colet was preaching to crowds of thousands, who were delighted to hear the scriptures in their own language. Colet was lucky in that he had connections in high places, so he escaped the fate of his contemporaries who were executed for having the temerity to translate the scriptures. I doubt if Wolsey, given his lifestyle, worried overmuch about scripture, and Thomas More, while he was a scholar and a writer, was not a Bible translator.

Answer: Desiderius Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus was born Gerrit Gerritszoon, in 1466 or thereabouts. Despite the fact that he was almost certainly illegitimate, Erasmus was cared for by both his parents until they died of plague in 1483, when he was probably about 17. He was well-educated, having attended monastic or semi-monastic schools.

In 1492 he was admitted to Holy Orders, although he seems never to have worked as a priest. His first job after his ordination was to serve as secretary to the Bishop of Cambray. Over the years,he developed a very high profile as a gifted theologian and scholar and author.

He served as the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and it was during this time that he began a systematic study of the original Greek texts to produce his parallel Greek-Latin version of the New Testament. Rather than using the Vulgate, he first translated the Greek into Latin, so that his was the first non-Vulgate Latin translation.

In later years, the translators of the King James Version used Ersasmus' Parallel New Testament as one of the sources for their work. Erasmus died in 1536, in Basel, Switzerland. John Colet was a friend of Erasmus, as was Thomas More. John Froben was the Swiss printer who produced Erasmus' Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament.

Answer: William Tyndale

Often referred to as the 'Captain of the Army of Reformers', and in many ways, the Spiritual Director of reform in the Church, Tyndale was an elegant writer and he's the man we can thank for coining such words as 'atonement' and 'Jehovah', 'Passover' and 'scapegoat'.

He also introduced into the English language such phrases as 'the powers that be', 'my brother's keeper', 'the salt of the earth', and 'a law unto themselves'. Using original Greek and Hebrew texts (he learned Hebrew in order to be able work on tranlations of Old Testament texts), Tyndale worked not in England, where the translating business was getting to be pretty unsafe, but in Germany. First came his New Testament, followed by the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, the Book of Ruth, and the Book of Jonah. All of this unauthorized activity aroused the anger of Henry VIII, and in 1536, at the instigation of Henry's agents, Tyndale was burned at the stake in Vilvoorde, near Brussels in Belgium. Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was a close friend of Tyndale's at Cambridge, Thomas More may have known him, but we don't know for sure, and Thomas Cromwell was probably too busy destroying monasteries in order to fill Henry VIII's coffers to concern himself overmuch about translators of scriptures (although, given his deviousness, he might have had a hand in Tyndale's demise).

Answer: Miles Coverdale

Known as The Great Bible (because of its size), Cromwell's Bible (because Thomas Cromwell, as the King's secretary, commissioned it), the Cranmer Bible (Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer wrote the preface), and even the Chained Bible (because it was chained in place in churches), the new English translation made its appearance in 1539.

The first 2,500 copies were printed in Paris, but the French authorities confiscated many of the printed sheets on grounds of heresy (and, more likely, because the kings of France and England were on the outs at the time), so the final printing was completed in England. Coverdale included all of Tyndale's tranlations, and used the Vulgate and Martin Luther's German translation as sources for the remaining books. (Maybe Coverdale couldn't read the original Greek and Hebrew, despite being the Bishop of Exeter). Anglicans taking this quiz will be interested to know that the Psalms in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer are taken from the Great Bible, not the King James Version.

The fact that Coverdale used the Vulgate as a source evidently made the Great Bible more acceptable to the more conservative clergy. The Great Bible remained as the authorized version of the Church of England until 1568 when it was replaced by the Bishop's Bible (with Cranmer's preface for the Great Bible reprinted). William Tyndale had been dead for three years when the Great Bible came into use, and Thomas Wyatt the Elder is known as 'The Father of the English Sonnet' and not as a Bible translator. (Thomas Wyatt the Younger was executed in 1554 for treason, for his part in the uprising in reaction to Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II of Spain. He was against it!)

Answer: The Breeches Bible

According to the Geneva Bible (its official name), Adam and Eve made breeches (pronounced britches) out of leaves to cover their nakedness. Quite the fashion statement! Why was the Breeches (Britches) Bible put together in Geneva, you ask? Queen Mary Tudor was on the throne in England, and there's no way she would brook any Bible but the Vulgate, the authorized version of the Roman Catholic Church! The Geneva Bible, by the way, was the first version to number the verses in each chapter, and it's also considered the first-ever study bible because of the extensive marginal notes, footnotes and references throughout.

The Geneva Bible became the most popular English version, in constant use between 1560 and 1644. It is the version that the Pilgrim fathers brought to America, and was much preferred over the King James Version, even though the translators of the latter were greatly influenced by it.

Answer: France

The New Testament translation was produced at the Roman Catholic College in the city of Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament followed in 1609, having been translated at the College in the city of Douai, near Lille. The combined Old/New Testament was known as the Douai/Rheims Version.

It is unfortunate, perhaps, that the source for both the translators at Rheims and at Douai is the Latin Vulgate (complete with the inaccuracies and bad Latin that Erasmus had red-flagged 75 years earlier), rather than the original Greek and Hebrew texts.

Indeed, in 1589, Dr. William Fulke of Cambridge published a book called 'Fulke's Refutation' in which he printed the English of the Bishop's Bible alongside that of the Rheims New Testament, in order to show the errors of the Rheims translation.

Answer: Six different committees

The story of the translation of the King James Version is told most entertainingly in 'God's Secretaries' by Adam Nicolson. It is odd that the KJV is nowadays considered by some Protestants to be the only true translation of the Bible, and strictly speaking, it isn't even a Protestant translation but an Anglican one! It was James' desire to produce a thorough-going Anglican bible, for use in the Church of England. Maybe he also hoped to knock the Protestant Geneva Bible off the best seller lists, and the fact that it was almost 40 years after it was first published in 1611 that it achieved that goal couldn't be foreseen by James, of course.

The 54 translators (only 51 are known by name) worked in committees (called Companies), and they were drawn from the ranks of clergy and laity - all of them Anglicans, most of them very orthodox, some with Puritan leanings. Each committee was charged with translating portions of the Old and New Testaments - the First Westminster Company translated all the books from Genesis to II Kings; the First Cambridge Company translated I Chronicles to the Song of Solomon; the First Oxford Company translated Isaiah through to Malachi; the Second Oxford Company translated the four gospels, the Book of Acts and The Revelation; the Second Westminster Company worked on the epistles; and the Second Cambridge Company translated the Apocrypha.

They used as their sources Tyndale's New Testament and the other books he translated, Erasmus' Greek-Latin Parallel, the Great Bible of Coverdale, the Bishops Bible, the Geneva Bible, and even the Rheims New Testament. At least 80% of the KJV is based on Tyndale's works. In 1609, the assembled work was presented to yet another group - the General Committee - for approval, and the first KJV rolled off the presses in 1611. The first editions were pulpit-sized bibles for use in churches, but the second edition included smaller-sized copies, so that people could buy them for their own use at home. With the publication of the KJV, the Battle of the Bibles was put to rest - at least until the 19th century, when it started all over again! Visit the religion department of a bookstore and see for yourself how many translations of the Bible are available. The mind boggles.