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Not Just the Tudors
The Bible
00:52:05
How did the Bible transform from a guarded manuscript read in secret to a book accessible to millions?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and.
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Bruce Gordon
Welcome to Not Just the Tudors From.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs from Holbein to the Huguenots, from.
- [02:27]
Bruce Gordon
Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors.
- [02:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But most definitely also the Tudors. The Bible may be the best selling text in history and the most influential book in the world, but it's not static. And in the 16th and 17th centuries, its role, its wording and its interpretations changed and varied dramatically. This was an age in which whole new denominations came into being on the basis of the contested definition of a single phrase. When the Bible came to be understood as a book with a history, and now was not only sacred, but commodified. A period in which the very power of the word was redefined. To talk about the changing nature of this seemingly unchanging book, I'm joined by Bruce Gordon, Titus street professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. He was formerly professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews and has honorary degrees from the Universities of Zurich and and King's College, Canada. He's the author of biographies of the reformers John Calvin and Heudrich Zwingli. And his latest book, the A Global History, explores the evolution of the Bible across 2000 years. In elegant and measured prose, he shares some of his insights with us today. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors. Professor Gordon, it is an absolute joy to welcome you to the podcast.
- [04:08]
Bruce Gordon
Thank you so much for inviting me. Great joy to be here.
- [04:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's going to be great fun. I was thinking about the absolute chutzpah of calling your book the Bible. You can point to sales figures, be like, I've sold loads of copies.
- [04:22]
Bruce Gordon
Yes. I'm trying to ride on that success.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we're picking up with the story of the Bible around the end of the 15th century, I guess. But obviously your book covers 2,000 years of history. But we're zeroing in here.
- [04:37]
Bruce Gordon
And.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I thought one of the places we could start was what you say is one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation, which is that the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages. And you argue instead that despite the fact that few people ever touched it, let alone read it, it was everywhere. How so? How do you square that circle?
- [04:59]
Bruce Gordon
It is, in fact, it's the world with which I was brought up in narratives that I had at university as an undergraduate, that the great achievement of the Reformation was precisely what Martin Luther said it was, which was the recovery of the word of God after this long period of darkness where priests and monks and bishops and Popes had kept the Bible from the people. And some, like John Calvin, will say, well, the light of the church never went out as long as people had access to the Bible. But of course, suggesting it the way they should have access to the Bible is what the Protestant Reformers said in the 16th century, beginning with their great inspiration, Erasmus, you know, the plowboy in the field should be reading his New Testament and all these. This language that gets picked up by Tyndale and many others. But of course, the polemical point is, as I say, that this benighted and even malign church of the Middle Ages had starved the people of the good news of Scripture, that they had kept Christ from them. And so what I mean, I was by training a medievalist as an undergraduate and spent a great deal of time with the Bible in the medieval period. And what became clear to me, and again, while thinking about it for this book and teaching on this over the years and talking to lay groups and all the rest of it, is that this simply wasn't the case. But you have to think about the Bible in rather different terms than the Bible. The Protestant notion of the book and of the text, and that the text itself is primary and that the text should be understood. And this is, I think, a distinctive element of Protestantism, one that very much holds sway still in the west, although much less so in the areas where Christianity is exploding in south and Central America, Africa, Asia, where we see, again, attitudes towards the Bible quite distinct from our Western notion of this book that you have in your hand, that you read and study. So in the medieval world, what I want to say is that it was a highly biblically literate culture that of course had very extremely low literacy rates. So how did people encounter Scriptures? How did they encounter the sacred text of Christianity? And you just have to think more expansively that the Bible suffused this world. It suffused the world through image. Images, through sound and through vision of its presence was everywhere, not in the sense of a text, but it was. People would know their Bible through preaching. They would know it through the images on church walls, even the most humble of parish churches. When I was in Sweden some time ago, I was astonished by even the smallest. And rural parishes had medieval wall paintings where people would encounter the stories of creation, of Noah, the life of Christ, all these things which were presented to them constantly. You think of the tradition of medieval biblical dramas, all sorts of ways in which people are encountering the Bible. They know the Bible, so it's by no means not present in this world, it's extremely present. But we have to think about it, I think, in a different way than the traditional Protestant sense of which people had the Bible. The Bible was everywhere, and this is what I want to convey a sense of. But further, that if you look at the medieval tradition of education and think about the educated elites, that the study of theology was very much the study of the Bible. Now, the approaches to the Bible were very different from how Protestant Reformers said it should be. But the Bible was at the heart of the medieval curriculum. It was being studied. Luther, before he ever thought of becoming a reformer, was a professor of Bible at Wittenberg, and he did that for many years. So it was present in universities, it was present in the much wider communities through the senses, through ways in which people had access to it, which completely informed the society in which they lived, through worship and through daily lives, through the presence of biblical themes and biblical images in the whole sacred landscape of the medieval world, whether it's a crossroads or paintings on public walls. And it's everywhere. And that's the point I really want to make, that this is no creation story where the Bible suddenly reappears, having not been there. It was very present. We just have to think about the different ways in which the Bible's present, which is a larger theme of the whole book. We have to think about how the Bible was present in all manner of communities where literacy was very low, primarily oral communities, but it's equally there.
- [10:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So perhaps we start to think about the change in this concept of the Bible with that pivotal moment in the mid 15th century when Johannes Gutenberg prints the Vulgate. And as I said in the introduction, as you say in your book, the Bible is now not only sacred, but a commodity. What difference did that make?
- [10:28]
Bruce Gordon
Printing, of course, Gutenberg begins with the Bible. He prints the Latin Bible, primarily the Paris text, but it's the Latin Bible of the medieval world. And one of the reasons he does that is that he knows that it is the most profitable book that he could possibly, possibly have. It would have, particularly in Latin. It would have a readership across Europe, not just in vernacular languages. Gutenberg was a businessman, although in the end, rather unsuccessful. But it was very much a business calculation that he was making in producing this Bible. And in that sense, it created the world of printing in the Renaissance. Very quickly, printing houses are spreading across Italy and then north across the Alps. Printers are engaging above all with the Bible, but they're having to do it with successful economic models, to use a slightly anachronistic term, because in order to survive, they had to know their markets, they had to know how to produce Bibles that could be not only paid for, but would sell well. And this is of course, not all that it is by any means, but it enters into a much wider market economy, following Gutenberg, and spreads exponentially in the 16th and 17th century. So the story of the Bible is not just as a sacred text, but as something that becomes part of the European economy. And any successful printer of the Renaissance has to be able to work with a successful mode of production and distribution and sales. So, you know, there are elements of this earlier in the medieval world, but printing does have that effect.
- [12:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned Erasmus a little bit earlier. How significant a departure was his 1516 publication of the New Testament in Greek opposite his own Latin translation? And what was the response to it?
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Bruce Gordon
Well, yes, he's of course the most famous, and there's without doubt the 1516 Greek Latin New Testament that he produces in Basel, which is entitled the Novum Instrumentum. And that title is important because he saw this not as a Bible that would go into churches primarily, but it was as a Bible that would help people to be able. Of course, learned people who had Latin and Greek would help them to be able to learn the languages and to understand the Bible. So that's why it's called an instrumentum. He afterward changes it to the Testamentum, the New Testament. But it is a truly revolutionary book where he produces the New Testament based on what he thought, which turns out not to be the case, the best possible manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, he draws from a Byzantine. So these are texts that are coming out of the east following the end of the Byzantine Empire. But he picking up from, in many ways, his teacher Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century, the great Italian scholar, he believes that the learning of languages such as Greek and then Hebrew, although Erasmus himself didn't have Hebrew, that these were going to be the ways of returning to the best possible version of the text. The Bible of the Middle Ages was the Latin Bible, but it was not a fixed or static text. Through centuries of transcription and distribution, the Latin Bible attributed to Rome actually existed in many, many different forms, many, many variations, and nobody knew which was the actual corre. How do we get back to Jerome? Well, the only way they had of doing this was by comparing one Latin translation with another. And of course, that in some ways was a losing game, because who knew which Latin version was the best one. So Erasmus, following Vala and others, comes along and says, well, the only way to get back to the best text, ideally Jerome, who Erasmus adored and emulated, was that you had to learn the languages. And he lays this out in the preface to his 1516 New Testament, where he says, you have to get back to the sources in order to produce a translation which is faithful, which is what he saw himself as doing. He did not see himself as a rebel. He believed that doing this would actually give the church a better version of the Bible, which would be the foundation for the renewal of Christianity. It's an extraordinary vision which proved intoxicating to a whole generation of people and set them on the path of returning to Greek and eventually Hebrew as the way of recovering the Bible, which was not just simply an academic exercise, because Erasmus advocated that, like the plowboy in the field, this correct text would then be the basis for translations into the languages of the people, which would then be the Bible reaching the people. So he had this entire vision of how this would happen, which, as we know, the Protestants would embrace wholly. Although Rasmus himself, of course, would never leave the church. So it's a pivotal moment. His ideas are not necessarily original. There were people before calling for what he did, but with his production in Basel 1516, he actually did it. And the results were extraordinary.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Sort of underpinning that, from what you're saying then, is this idea that the Bible is a book with a history. There are various translations, but it. It's not immutable.
- [16:06]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, well, and it never has been in the sense that there is no original. In a way I mentioned, the Bible was a book that never was, because there's the sense of getting back to the original, but we have no original. There's no. What are you referred to as autograph copies, that there's some pure text that we can recover. That's never, never been the case. The story of the Bible has always been of transmissions, of transmissions of variations. It's never existed in one form. But with the Renaissance and its culture of returning to the sources, of returning to antiquity, Christian scholars like Erasmus and others believe that the Bible does have a history. And it's possible to go back to that great optimism, that you could go back to recover as much as possible that original, although they understood that they would never get to the original, but you could go through the study of languages, through the study of manuscripts, that all these things that. Which are exploding in the Renaissance world, that these possibilities make available to those who have the skills, something that they've never had before. And so this period around Erasmus, of extraordinary wonderment of what might be possible? It's because the Bible is a historical book. It has a past, and you're trying to recover that past.
- [17:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Soon after this, after Erasmus, we get Luther's German translation of the New Testament, and it's not the first into a vernacular tongue. Why then was it so revolutionary?
- [17:45]
Bruce Gordon
Right. And this is a really important point. England is, of course, as you know, a particular case because following the Wycliffe Bible translations, with a decree that's made in the early 15th century, translations into English are forbidden because they're seen as subversive and heretical. But across the rest of Europe, the late medieval period saw a flourishing of vernacular translations into Dutch, French, into German, as you mentioned, and Italian and. And other languages. So the vernacular Bible is not a creation of the Reformation. The late medieval world knew the Bible in the vernacular. And I think it's about 16 versions of German translations before Luther makes his New Testament available in 1522. And we know that to some extent, he made use of those older translations. But on the whole, those translations, speaking of the German ones, tended to be very literal. They were not very engaging. Very few people had access to them. Why, then is Luther so successful? He, very early on, recognizes what the printing press offers, and in some ways, he becomes a real entrepreneur of the printing press and connects to it from its earliest stages, which means that his 1522 Bible is produced in staggering numbers to an extraordinarily expanding market. So that means that his translation reaches places where earlier translations could never go. He had that support network that could make it possible. But it's more than that. It's also Luther's extraordinary and remarkable ability to work with language. We have these stories that he would slip into the village to listen to how the people spoke, what sort of idioms did they use, what sort of expressions? And he says, the Bible, the word of God, should speak as a mother to a child, like the tradesman in the town. It should really be in the language that the people speak. And he was able to harness that. He was able to bring that into his 1522 translation. He really made the text speak as people do speak. And that was incredibly attractive. He was a great author. He had a great, as I say, great sense of language, its cadence. He produced something that hadn't existed before, a truly living Bible. And he tapped into a market where people were aware of the importance of the Bible, and it sold on the scale of a bestseller that could hardly be replicated today.
- [20:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I want to ask a couple of conceptual questions, I suppose, about the shift in how the Bible was seen or understood in the Reformation. And the first is, is it fair to say that it goes from being a kind of object of worship to being the subject of interpretation and debate?
- [20:51]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, very much so. One of the aspects of the medieval Bible that we were speaking about earlier is its physicality, its role in the liturgy process held up. And this is also very true in the Orthodox traditions to this day, if you watch an Orthodox or observe or present for an Orthodox liturgy, you see the Bible, usually in the form of the Gospels, being ritually processed around the altar, brought out, kissed, incensed. This is one of the stories of the Bible is indeed its physicality. It becomes a sacred object. The Reformers, of course, don't like that idea. They think it borders on forms of idolatry. Their emphasis is, as you say, very much on the written word, understanding what is being said. And for Luther and his Reformers, that was most clearly stated in Paul's letter to the Romans, which they regarded as the theological heart of the Bible. But you needed to understand it. It put enormous pressure on people, in a way, to say that this is now dep. Dependent on your relationship to the word of God, not mediated through the clergy. Well, suddenly this is giving people a sense of responsibility that they've never had before. So the relationship of people to the Bible itself is being refined. But the whole structure of Protestantism as it emerges is very much pedagogical. With their emphasis on schooling, on catechisms, it's instruction that becomes the key thing, which is not an idea foreign to the medieval world, but it becomes the focus, the written text and interpretation becomes the focus of Protestantism, much less so on the physicality of it. Although we may want to talk about Protestant Bibles, start to engage the visual through. You think of the Geneva Bible from 1560, with all its maps and wonderful illustrations. So the Bible doesn't lose its visual element, but the focus is very much on understanding it.
- [22:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in thinking about that, I was reminded of Inge Clandinnen's book Ambivalent Conquest, thinking about the Maya and the Spanish in Yucatan, the idea there that the power of the word, when spoken by Franciscan missionaries, over native peoples, rested in the efficacy of the sacred sounds, that God's grace could descend on those who couldn't understand the Latin. But that itself must be sort of being pushed aside by the Protestant Reformers, at least instead to focus on that idea of rational understanding and intellectual conviction.
- [23:34]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, although with the emphasis on preaching and instruction, there's still a very clear sense of the power of speaking the word. John Calvin, for instance, and he's not unusual in this, talks about what happens in preaching. It's not just a case of speaker and audience. The Spirit is working through this. Words are powerful. And this, of course, is why translations are so important, this search to have the best possible versions of Scripture, because those words contain power. They're not neutral vessels. The speaking act is. And this runs through, of course, through the Puritan tradition and others. We see it very powerfully now in the Pentecostal tradition, which is so widespread in the global church. Speaking with words have enormous power. Sure, it's also teaching and instruction. But there's a sense that hearing the word itself spoken, and of course, for the Protestants, spoken correctly, interpreted correctly, is transformative because it is the work of the Spirit.
- [24:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that makes sense. I mean, this is a faith that believes that God speaks and the world comes into being. So the spoken word is crucial. And I suppose we can pick that up with Protestants. And the role of singing in internalizing the Bible.
- [24:56]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, and in the Reformed tradition, of course, that's the primary focus is on the psalms and the belief that singing the metrical psalms as comes out of Geneva and is so important in the Reformed tradition, it's not just recitation. The idea is that in singing, you internalize the words. It's not seen as something that's entirely separate from the Bible, but it becomes a means by which the biblical language becomes your language. It shapes everything about you. And so going through the psalms is an act of having the Bible transform you. Luther and others from an early stage, of course, write hymns which they would say draw on biblical language and engages the people through singing, which is so important to the culture. There are different attitudes towards, you know, hymns or psalms. That debate goes on to today. But what holds this together, going back to the great hymn writers of the Byzantine tradition, is that singing is a sacred act and singing is transformative. This is why I talk quite a lot about singing in the book on the Bible, because singing is a way in which the Bible is expressed. And that goes back to your point earlier. How was the Bible present in. In medieval culture? Or singing was very central to that. People could sing things that they couldn't read.
- [26:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's also, of course, a period in which if you're focusing on intellectual conviction and understanding, then how you interpret it matters. And we have all these differing irreconcilable interpretations of the Bible, key phrases, what's in it, what's not in it, which explain some of the splits between the reflection reformers. Can you give us some examples?
- [26:51]
Bruce Gordon
Yes. Well, there's a kind of optimism, perhaps, coming out of Erasmus, but certainly picked up by the earliest Reformers, that if the people encountered the word by hearing it, or for the very few reading it, that the Spirit would act in such a way that there would be consensus. And the Catholics, of course, right from the beginnings, react with horror. If you simply put the Bible into the hands of people, you will create chaos. You will have the Tower of Babel, everybody interpreting the Bible for themselves. Early performers are very upbeat about what will happen. But we see, as the anniversary of the peasants war in 1525 comes up next year, that the peasants, embracing Scripture and carrying placards with scriptural verses and declaring the pure Evangelion, said to Luther, well, we're just doing what you said. We're following Scripture. And their interpretation of Scripture was that it condemned the oppressive feudal institutions in which they lived and suffered, everything from hunting and fishing to fields. And of course, the church itself was an enormous landowner, but they took it as not only spiritually revolutionary, but revolutionary of the world. And then Luther immediately says, you completely misunderstood me. This is not the Spirit. You've turned it into something fleshly. And as we know, he ultimately sides with the princes against. Having written some pretty horrific tracts. He sides with the princes against. So by 1525, in a sense, the Protestants are already at war with themselves on this very question of interpretation, which is so important to them. And that's going to put Protestantism on the path towards creating hierarchies that ensure proper interpretation. So having given it to the people to a certain extent, they pull it back again.
- [28:57]
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- [30:48]
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- [31:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What'S the Counter Reformation response to this Protestant challenge to the the.
- [31:43]
Bruce Gordon
Bible, to a certain extent it was shaped by the idea we told you so this would happen. And indeed it has happened. And this is just the sign of heresy. They took great delight in pointing out how the Reformers disagreed amongst themselves. But that does not mean that they didn't take the Bible very seriously. At the Great Council of Trent, which begins in the 1540s and meets in a series of sessions until the 1560s, the Bible is at the forefront of their concerns, and early on in the 1540s they issue a statement about the importance of the Bible. But of course what they do is affirm the Latin Bible, which by the 16th century is known as the Vulgate, as the Bible of the Church, because it for over a thousand years has been the Bible of the Church. This is not to say they don't accept vernacular translations. They do to a certain extent. But they establish the Latin Bible has been the traditional Bible of the Church and should remain so. But then they say that we must have the best possible version of the Latin Bible. And that's what Catholics will launch into doing. Try to clean up the Vulgate as much as possible. They don't reject the learning of Greek and Hebrew outright. They. But what they don't want people doing, which is what they accused Erasmus of. And many Catholics of the 16th century never forgave Erasmus for what he did. But they say that we cannot base Scripture on new translations all the time. That is undermining the authority of Scripture. Interestingly enough, the Catholics accused the Protestants of diminishing the Scripture by throwing it out in all these different versions. So they say that the Bible should be the center. But of course, what happens in the 16th century is that they take a different interpretation of the role of the Bible. Whereas Protestants say the Bible must be the sole standard by which Christianity should be judged by it should be the standard to which the Church should be held. Catholics say no, the Bible must be, as it always has been, interpreted within the structure of the Church, which is the body of Christ. And therefore it shouldn't be given to anybody to say what they want. It should all happen within the institutional church. And then ultimately they say the Bible is authoritative, but it must be along the other stream of authority, which is tradition, which is something the Protestants had railed against was tradition. So what emerges in the 16th century is not a case of one side has the Bible and the other doesn't. We're better off thinking about it is both prioritize the Bible but see it in very different terms.
- [34:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Given what you've just said about the Bible for Counter Reformation Catholics, why do we see the production of polyglot Bibles at this time as well? These are kind of audacious works of scholarship. Why are they thought important?
- [34:49]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, they're extraordinary in a way. Polyglots have existed to the earliest part of Christianity with the Church Father Origen producing what he calls the hexapla, which different versions of the Psalms are set side by side for comparative reasons and the belief that looking at multiple forms of the text will help you to understand more clearly the Scriptures. This is revived in, well, really the earliest part of the 16th century with what's known as the Complutentian Polyglot, which is produced in Alcala in Spain by Cardinal Ciceros. And it's this enormous undertaking and it's mind boggling to think that this is only just over 50 years after Gutenberg. Suddenly, the Complutentian Polyglot, which emerges in many volumes, places all these languages from Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek and Latin side by side in parallel columns, which is intended to do various things. One is, it's part of the spirit of the age that by the study of multiple languages we will be led to a clearer grasp of the truth. But it's also this enormous work is seen as an embodiment of Church authority because Cardinal Caesares sees this as very much a church act and that all this learning is brought together under the authority of the Church he speaks of. If you look at the text, the Latin of the medieval Bible is in the center, flanked by the Greek and the Hebrew. He sees this as pulling all learning of the east and the west and of the Jewish tradition together, but clearly states that it is the Catholic Church that holds this all together. The production of polyglots, but also is taken up through the 16th and 17th century as more and more languages are being encountered. You get Ethiopic, or geese as it's properly called. You get Syriac, starts to be learned a bit. They start to figure out what Aramaic actually is. So it's part the Bible is at the center of this explosion of knowledge in this period. And this desire to bring that knowledge together, if you could harness that knowledge, it will move forward. This search of the truth. It's this optimism that I spoke about before to produce these parallel columns of Scripture is just the most magnificent advancement of printing technology. To have these different languages with their different type, with the Semitic languages going in the different direction from the Western languages. They represent how Christianity is at the forefront of technology and learning. They're of course prohibitively expensive to produce. But you get Brian Walton's 17th century London Polyglot, which is this incredible assemblage of knowledge. But he too frames it in terms of this is a book that will bring harmony. It shows the inner harmony of learning and of the truth of Scripture. So these polyglots have many different dimensions to them, but they are truly one of the most remarkable achievements of Renaissance period.
- [38:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can we talk then about the story of the Bible in English? You mentioned that we have this 1408 prohibition of the Bible in English that's being enforced under Henry VIII in the beginning of the 16th century. So can we talk about William Tyndale, his New Testament and his successors? Before we get to the King James Bible particularly, I want to make sure we cover the bug and breeches Bibles and how they came to be published.
- [38:40]
Bruce Gordon
Yet as I mentioned before, England is a sort of outlier in this period because of the prohibition, as you say from Oxford, of English translations. That has a lot to do with the Lollards. That does not mean that Lollard Bibles are not still circulating in the 15th century. People do have access to scripture in English in various forms. They're not on the whole being printed. They're circulating in. In manuscript. So it's not like it's not there. But it's unlike other parts of Europe. These translations are not being printed in anything like the same way. Henry viii, as you know very, very well, was convinced as others that the vernacular Bible was dangerous and that it was not a good idea to put the Bible into the hands of the people. For him, William Tyndale, this learned figure, this of Oxford don, who makes his way to the continent and embraces very much the Erasmian ideal of translation, of putting the Scriptures in the hands of people. He travels through Germany, perhaps with meeting Luther. He's networked with a range of printers and sympathizers with the evangelical cause. In the 1520s, he makes use of Luther's translation into the German from 1522. There are multiple versions of that translation appear after 1522, but he's influenced. People do debate the extent of Luther's influence on Tyndale, but without doubt he's moving in circles on the continent where there is this lively culture of biblical translation. But of course, he faces the situation that in England this is forbidden. So when he begins his work on the translation into English, it has to be done in a clandestine way. It's smuggled back into his native land. But he becomes a hunted figure. He's the number one culprit in the eyes of Henry VIII and his court, that tindo represents a great threat to the kingdom. But at the same time, there are important people who are deeply sympathetic, and not least of which, of course, are Cromwell and Cranmer, these people who are increasingly holding significant positions at the English court, who the English historians will know this much better than I do, but are certainly advocating this. And they actually manage to bring Henry around to the idea of an English translation. And we get the appearance of the great Bible towards the end of Henry's reign, which is an enormous book that is to be made available in churches. So even Henry is brought to the idea that there could be an English Bible. But my sense is, like with many things with Henry, there's a reluctance to this. But in 1536, of course, Tyndale is hunted down. He is executed. But by that point, in a way, the genie is out of the bottle. And. And the English translations are widely circulated, and you get people like Coverdale and Rogers and others who are able to take Tyndale and to produce other translations, mostly drawn from Tyndale. There were varying degrees of knowledge of Greek and certainly very little of Hebrew. But despite Henry's certain ambivalence, by the 1530s and into the 1540s, Tyndale's work is beginning to spread quite widely in England.
- [42:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and if ever a prayer was answered, it's got to be Tyndale's prayer. O Lord, open the king of England's eyes on the stake. And then we go on to other translations, some of which are greatly contested because of, you know, phrases that are taken out and mocked. So hence the bug and the breaches.
- [42:45]
Bruce Gordon
And, you know, the wonderful stories of translations. This is not just in England. It happens in other places before we're entering into this culture where there's a great debate about how to bring the language of scripture into the language of the people. I spoke earlier about Luther and his concern to have idiomatic expressions in the translation of the Scriptures, because it should speak the language of the people. But this has a long history of producing sort of misfires or also printing mistakes, where you get the famous version which produces the commandment against adultery, which emits a rather crucial knot in it. And so you get the breaches, you get the bug. This is a part of translation that, in a way, it's very funny in the English context, but it's because we know it. And there's other examples of beware of loose livers, as if you're in danger of losing an organ reading the Bible. But it, of course, means people who live in a certain way. So you get these sometimes unfortunate things appearing. The story of the King James is endless re editing to take out what are seen as problematic words and problematic phrases. But it's all part of this. And it's the same thing in Luther's tradition, the misfires that happen when you're trying to work out how to bring the Bible into these terms, which are known in Latin, are known in Greek. How do you make them speak in the language? And that doesn't always go well. There's a wonderful book by Naomi Tatmore on the English of the bible in the 16th century, and she shows how translation isn't just some sort of word for word, as we might think of typing into Google or any of these, or ChatGPT or whatever we might use today that she shows how the Bible is really englished in the 16th century, with vocabulary that embraces the rural agricultural communities, everything from agricultural implements to things that people know, and even language for pastoral settings. So the translation is really the Bible moving into the English world. And being shaped by the culture of the 16th century. But translation continues to be a highly problematic thing, and we do get these very funny stories.
- [45:17]
Don Wildman
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- [46:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So why do we have the King James Bible? Why did they think a new Bible was needed at the beginning of the 17th century?
- [46:12]
Bruce Gordon
Well, I think to go there, we have to go back to probably the most influential bible of the 16th century, which was, as you know very well, the Bible of the Tudor, certainly of the Elizabethan age, which is the Geneva Bible, which is produced, as you might imagine, Geneva, by a group of English exiles deeply influenced by the biblical culture that was flourishing in Geneva under people like Theodore de Bez, who had produced Greek New Testament, the work of the printer Stephanus, one of the greatest printers of the Renaissance period. So they were in exile in Geneva, where there was a very lively. And of course, John Calvin was there. And they produce an English translation, which draws again on Tyndale, but also draws on the latest philological work, the study of languages. But what's extraordinary about the Geneva Bible is not just the translation, but that it is accompanied by a vast array of textual notes, maps, and illustrations. It's a whole biblical world that's designed for this vision of the layperson being able to not only have the Bible, but to be guided really through the text. Although it was the Bishop's Bible during the period of Elizabeth iii, slightly turgid translation that was on the lecterns in the world. As I think David Norton wonderfully says, it's the Geneva Bible that's in the hearts of the people. It's the language, in many ways, of Shakespeare, of the great poets, but it's also the language of the common people. But these notes, part of the story at least, is that these notes seem to represent sort of Calvinist, Reformed tradition in interpretation. And as you know very well, in the divided Elizabethan Church, that was problematic. There were people who were very uneasy about the theological doctrinal nature, because the Geneva Bible is not neutral, as no Bible is. It exists within an interpretive framework. James, who, when he comes to the throne, having been brought up in Calvinist Scotland, rather repudiates that tradition. And although the idea is put forward by a Puritan, James, is taken up with this idea that a new translation without notes, well, with very few notes in the King James, but the kingdom needed a less contentious Bible that could be for all of people, all of the inhabitants of the realm, and would move away. James was, for instance, very not unreasonably concerned about some of the notes in Geneva that suggested resistance to a tyrant. Well, those are words that would have made any early modern ruler uneasy. And James, of course, disliked that intensely. So there was this hope that the King James, in a way, could be a reset. It could be a new Bible for, in a way, a new age of James. And so it becomes the patron. His role in the production of it is unclear. It may have been rather distant. But he agrees to it and sets in motion, we have to be very careful when we say a new translation, but he wants a new or at least a different Bible for his kingdom. But that, again, as you know, proved easier to say than do, because the Geneva remained the Bible well into the 17th century, used by most people until its printing is suppressed in the 1640s. They finally had to kind of, in a way, forbid it in order to allow the King James to take over. So it's not a quick transition from one Bible to another. It takes place over a long period of time.
- [50:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that's so interesting because these days the King James Bible is thought of as the classic, and it is a classic of the highest order. The text is immensely beautiful. I want to ask you about the deliberate decision to use antiquated language. It feels quite a contrast to, you know, Luther, like the Bible speaking like a mother to its child. It's sort of deliberate decision. And whether, in using that language, whether this was designed to make this version of the Bible stand the test of time.
- [50:38]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, yes. This is really, really important. And one of the things I'd want to stress is the decisions made by the commissioners for the King James is one that's replicated not only across globally, really, but it represents an important part of the story of the Bible, and that is the relationship between the old and the new. To jump back to the 4th and 5th centuries, when the great translator of the Bible is Jerome, who produces the Latin Bible, his contemporary, St. Augustine in North Africa was by no means convinced that we needed a new, new translation. This is not a world in which newness is particularly valued as equality. In fact, quite the opposite. The Reformers spent all their time trying to persuade people they were not innovators. And this is something that we hold up as a great thing, as entrepreneurship. It's not how they viewed the Bible, but the decision with the King James was this belief that the language should represent the antiquity of the Bible, its heritage, going back to Tyndale, of which, depending on who you follow, his language is still very much part of the King James Bible. But by this point, Tyndale's language is almost 100 years old. The English language, like most languages in this period, is evolving. Vocabulary is changing. Thee and thou, which we so associate with the King James, was not actually spoken really by the time of the early 17. So as you say, there was a deliberate antiquity. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, of course, it's the power of tradition. It's the power that the Bible has always had for people to stay with what they know. But it's also the power of beautiful language to reflect its sacredness, its divinity. Many people today still prefer the King James precisely because of its cadence and tone and its sonorous qualities, because it seems to have a kind of sacred dignity to it. And this is a story that plays out in many other places where the older translations are preserved because they have this appeal of continuity with the past. This is the Bible of your grandparents and your ancestors, and this is the Bible we know and we want to hold to. And it's language evokes the blessedness and sacredness and holiness that a new translation doesn't have that appeal. But as you say, the King James intentionally has that quality to it of a very beautiful use of the English language to create, in a way, a kind of sacred language.
- [53:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so if we just finish perhaps where we started with the idea that in the Middle Ages we have the Bible suffusing vision and sound, that we're kind of shifting to the idea of the Bible as word, as text. Can we say that this has happened by the time we get to the King James Bible and over the course of the 17th century, as the Bible becomes part, say, of Puritan biblical culture, is that the point at which we can see that as a transition that's taken place?
- [54:04]
Bruce Gordon
Yes, in many ways, if you look at Puritan culture, you have a much wider range of women and men writing spiritual diaries, which are basically expressions of their daily lives. In the Bible, there is a much wider access to this again, as you know how that's at the root of the radicalism of, of the late 16th and 17th century. Certainly we can speak of the Bible being available in ways unimaginable. People are reading it or they're hearing it read to them and have access to it. In that sense, Erasmus vision is realized. But what we also have to remember that what Protestantism does in all its forms across Europe in the following the Reformation is increasingly rely on an educated clergy that is going to tell people how to understand the Bible. The idea that the ministers, in a way, are the sort of gatekeepers of the Bible. So having begun in one way, in some ways they move towards a Catholic view that the Bible should be read and interpreted within an acceptable framework. So again, the Protestants really want to try and capture the Bible so that they can present their interpretation of it. So you. I think my point is that both things are happening at the same time. Cranmer famously says that it is for the people to read the Bible but not to reason, which is, I think, a view that most of the Protestant hierarchies across Europe would agree with. So there's more access, certainly, but there's equally strong efforts to control how the people actually understand it. And that's true of Puritanism. We see this with the great Puritan preachers. They believe themselves in sort of prophetic ways to be able to tell the people how to understand the word of God.
- [56:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We could go on to think about the ways in which changing ideas about how ordinary people can interpret the Bible are in themselves creating new ways of thinking about what we call science. And your book becomes fascinating, particularly thinking about the idea that during the scientific revolution, during the Enlightenment, the concept that's often put forward that religion prevails over religion is false, and that most of the leading lights of the age are actually grappling with the Bible, whether it was relevant. But how. But we don't have time for that today. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for your wonderful, wonderful thoughts on this period of such development. And, you know, pick up a copy of the Bible, folks, in this case the Bible A Global History to understand more about the story of this incredible book. Professor Gordon, thank you so much.
- [57:03]
Bruce Gordon
Thank you so much for inviting me.
- [57:06]
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. And also thanks to my research, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg.
- [57:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe.
- [57:23]
Bruce Gordon
It's well worth it. And if you would be so good.
- [57:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
As to follow not just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [57:44]
Acast Representative
Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [57:52]
Jenna
Hi Jenna.
- [57:53]
Bruce Gordon
Hi Danny.
- [57:54]
Jenna
We are back for season six of a very merry, iconic podcast here in 2024. It's good to be here. I'm so excited. We're going to be covering holiday classes. We are diving back into the Halloweentown franchise for our annual Halloween episode. We're gonna be covering part two, Calabar's Revenge. Calabar's Revenge. We're also gonna be talking about miracle on 34th Street. I also have a Hallmark Christmas movie coming out this year, Deck the Walls Day After Thanksgiving. Maybe we'll cover that.
- [58:19]
Bruce Gordon
Yes.
- [58:20]
Jenna
As well as diving into some of these other seasonal films that we love so much and others that sometimes we don't love so much.
- [58:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah.
- [58:26]
Jenna
And we'll talk about it and how she out. So what do we always say? Pour yourself some eggnog and enjoy a very merry on a podcast. Coming holiday season 2024. Maybe even out now. So check your podcast feeds.
- [58:39]
Acast Representative
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.