The ESV and the English Bible Legacy

Leland Ryken

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781433530692
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Modern Bible translations are at a crossroads as multiple translation philosophies argue that Bible translations ought to be done a certain way. So who's right? And what has been the historic view of English Bible translators?

Leland Ryken, an expert on the literature of the Bible, brings clarity to questions of how modern Bible translations should be viewed in their historical context. He begins by tracing the history of English Bible translation from William Tyndale to the King James Bible, outlining important distinctions. In the view of these historic translators, there is a right way and a wrong way to translate the Bible.

Ryken concludes that essentially literal Bible translations best adhere to the legacy of classic English Bible translation. He contends that the English Standard Version is a true heir of this classical stream and concludes with an argument on why the ESV can serve as the translation of choice for Christians in all walks of life. This book will be a great resource for Christians who have questions about why we have different Bible translations and how to choose between them.

PART ONE

The Classic Mainstream of
English Bible Translation

1

THE TRANSLATIONS THAT MAKE UP THE TRADITION

When the translation committee of the Revised Standard Version (1952) composed its preface, it spoke of “the great Tyndale–King James tradition.” The preface to the New Revised Standard Version (1989) likewise identifies something called “the great tradition of the King James Bible and its predecessors.” And the preface to the English Standard Version (ESV; 2001) speaks of “the Tyndale–King James legacy.” The purpose of this chapter is to flesh out what these phrases mean.

Four things are worthy of note at the outset: (1) The tradition consists of multiple English translations of the Bible. (2) These individual translations have so much in common that they constitute a single tradition, distinct from alternatives that emerged along the way, beginning with the Revised Version (1885) and accelerating with the rise of dynamic equivalent translations in the middle of the twentieth century. (3) This family of translations was dominant from Wycliffite beginnings (ca. 1380) right through the middle of the twentieth century. (4) The King James Version (KJV; 1611) was the final codification of preceding translations, and it became the channel through which the tradition maintained its dominance, explaining why the tradition is always identified with the KJV.

THE HEADWATERS

The great tradition begins not with William Tyndale but a century and a half earlier with John Wycliffe (“morning star of the Reformation,” as he is called). Wycliffe’s translation is more accurately called the Wycliffite translation, because it was chiefly the work of Wycliffe’s associates rather than Wycliffe himself. Additionally, it is important to know that the Wycliffite translators actually produced two versions of the Bible: one a literal translation from the Latin Vulgate and a second translation that had more of an eye on the English receptor language than on Latin, which in this case was the donor language. The complete Bible appeared around 1380.

It might seem unnecessary to push the great tradition back to Wycliffe. For one thing, Wycliffe’s language was Middle English—the language of Chaucer but not what is called modern language (the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare, despite its archaisms by the standard of modern usage). Second, there were no printed versions of the Wycliffite Bible until the middle of the nineteenth century. This means that all versions in Wycliffe’s lifetime were handwritten manuscript copies, disseminated partly by oral readings conducted by traveling preachers known as Lollards.

But there are other factors that make it necessary to trace the great tradition back to Wycliffe. The foundation of the tradition was simply the demonstration that the Bible could be translated into English. To cite a parallel, modern jet travel would never have happened if the Wright brothers had not flown a rudimentary aircraft at Kitty Hawk in 1903. A historian of English Bible translation correctly asserts that “the Wycliffe Bible was . . . not merely a book but an event, . . . [marking] a momentous epoch in our religious development.”¹

Additionally, once the Wycliffite Bibles began to make the rounds, they created a grassroots thirst among Englishmen to have access to the Bible in the vernacular. Even today, the Wycliffite translation survives in a staggering total of 250 manuscripts, more than any other medieval English text.² Only the wealthy could hope to afford a manuscript copy of the Wycliffite Bible, but farmers were willing to give a load of hay in exchange for a day’s use of a copy.³ A Bible-hungry readership did not suddenly appear in William Tyndale’s time; ferment for an English Bible had been around for a long time.

HOW THE HEADWATERS BECOME A RIVER

John Wycliffe can be considered the pioneer of English Bible translation, but in terms of direct influence on the English Bibles that we hold in our hands today, William Tyndale’s printed work is the place where foreshadowings became a mighty stream. Educated at Oxford University, Tyndale (1494–1536) was a linguistic genius who was conversant in at least seven languages. His doctrinal convictions made him an early Reformer. His particular zeal as a Reformer was translating the Bible from the original languages into English, a passion that he came to view as his life calling.

Because Tyndale’s religious views were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church, Tyndale carried out his work of translation on the Continent under threat to his life. He worked in a largely solitary manner. The specific qualities of Tyndale’s translation that he bequeathed to the tradition that followed will be noted in later chapters. The important point here is the revolution that the English Bible effected in English life. Copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were published in 1525 and reached England in the following year. Because the Bible was a banned book, it had to be smuggled into England in sacks of flour and bales of cloth. Book burnings by Catholic bishops did not stem the flood.

There are two dimensions to the revolution that the Tyndale New Testament started in England. One is that it created a religious change in which people read the Bible voraciously as the very Word of God and therefore based their doctrine and lifestyle on what the Bible said. David Daniell paints the following picture of the appetite for the vernacular Bible that Tyndale helped to create: “There is no shortage of evidence of the gatherings of people of all ages, all over the country, to read and hear these English Scriptures—and reading meant, so often, reading aloud. . . . The corner that English readers turned in the 1530s . . . did not lead to one or two curious Bible effects. . . . On the contrary: turning that corner was suddenly to be faced with a vast, rich, sunlit territory.”⁴ No publishing venture succeeds without a readership. Tyndale’s New Testament created a Bible-reading public in England.

There is also a linguistic dimension to the revolution created by Tyndale. Before Tyndale’s time, most of the important religious and intellectual business in England and in Europe had been conducted in Latin. Tyndale’s work of translation struck a blow for the English vernacular. Tyndale’s English, moreover, although it is today so archaic that many refer to it as “old English,” is technically modern English. David Daniell claims that Tyndale bequeathed a plain style to the English language, with plain meaning “clear,” not low or colloquial.⁵

TWO FALLACIES ABOUT TYNDALE THE TRANSLATOR

The debt that the classic mainstream of English Bible translation owes to Tyndale is obvious and well established by scholars. We can agree with the verdict that “the work of William Tyndale should be valued as the greatest influence on English translations and its language.”⁶ Yet some glibness in this regard will obscure the nature of the great tradition if left unchallenged.

Fallacy 1: Tyndale aimed his translation at an illiterate or nonreading public. The source of this misconception is a famous incident that has been extravagantly misinterpreted. The incident is as follows, as recounted in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs:

There dwelt not far off a certain doctor, that had been chancellor to a bishop, who had been of old, familiar acquaintance with Master Tyndale . . . unto whom Master Tyndale went and opened his mind upon diverse questions of the Scripture: for to him he durst be bold to disclose his heart. Unto whom the doctor said, “Do you not know that the pope is very Antichrist, whom the Scripture speaketh of? But beware what you say; for if you shall be perceived to be of that opinion, it will cost you your life.”
Not long after, Master Tyndale happened to be in the company of a certain divine, recounted for a learned man, and, in communing and disputing with him, he drove him to that issue, that the said great doctor burst out into these blasphemous words, “We were better to be without God’s laws than the pope’s.” Master Tyndale, hearing this, full of godly zeal, and not bearing that blasphemous saying, replied, “I defy the pope, and all his laws;” and added, “If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than he did.”⁷

We should note first what is not going on here. The statement about the plowboy is not a comment about Tyndale’s preferred style for an English Bible. It is not a designation of teenage farm boys as a target audience for a niche Bible. Those misconceptions are the projections of modern partisans for a colloquial and simplified English Bible.

Foxe’s account makes it clear that the subject of debate at this early stage of Tyndale’s career (before he had even begun to translate the Bible) was the question of papal authority versus scriptural authority. When the priest asserted a strong view of papal authority and denigrated the authority of the Bible, Tyndale responded by making an implied case for the Bible as the authority for Christian belief and conduct. The background is Tyndale’s growing agitation at the prevailing Catholic ignorance of the Bible. This explains the specific thing that Tyndale said to the priest, namely, that he wanted English Christians to know “more of the Scripture” than a Catholic knew. A Catholic would have known only as much Scripture as appeared in church rituals (chiefly the Mass), and he would have known it in Latin rather than English.

Second, the reference to the plowboy is not a comment about a social class toward which Tyndale slanted his translation. It is instead a comment about how widely Tyndale wanted the English Bible to be disseminated in English society. Tyndale was not making a bow to farm boys. He was using a particular example to make the general point that he wanted the whole cross section of the English population to have access to the Bible.

Fallacy 2: Tyndale was in favor of a colloquial English style for Bible translations. The culprit here is a few famous colloquialisms in Tyndale’s translation that have (again) been seized upon by modern readers who prefer a colloquial English Bible to a dignified one. The two most famous instances of Tyndale’s daring are the following: When the Serpent replies to Eve’s protest that she cannot eat the forbidden fruit because if she does she will die, Tyndale has the Serpent reply, “Tush, ye shall not die” (Gen. 3:4). And instead of saying that Joseph was successful in Potiphar’s house, Tyndale said that he “was a lucky fellow” (Gen. 39:2).

In later chapters I will explore Tyndale’s style in greater detail. For now it is enough to say that Tyndale’s prevailing style is not accurately represented by occasional flourishes such as the ones noted. Enthusiasts for Tyndale’s translation regularly make a contradictory claim. On the one hand, they want the world to know that in the parts of the Bible that Tyndale translated, upwards of 80 percent of his renderings made their way into the KJV. Most of these same partisans then set up Tyndale and the King James translators as opponents on the question of style, claiming that Tyndale was colloquial and racy, while the KJV is formal.

It cannot be both ways. Tyndale cannot be both the predecessor that the King James translators scrupulously followed and their great opponent in regard to style. The fact is that Tyndale, while less formal than the KJV, nonetheless is in the same lexical and syntactic range. Here is Tyndale’s translation of the opening lines of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “When he saw the people he went up into a mountain, and when he was set, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth, and taught them saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matt. 5:1–6). Anyone familiar with the King James rendition can see at once that the two are nearly the same. It is equally evident that Tyndale did not lower the style to match the way the local plowboy talked.

THE RIVER WIDENS: BETWEEN TYNDALE AND THE KJV

It is customary to name the mainstream tradition “the Tyndale–King James” tradition. This is not a wholly happy situation, for two reasons. First, it is an ambiguous designation. Does it name (1) the two translations that constitute the tradition or (2) the first and last translations of a sixteenth-century tradition that included five major translations between those two translations? Additionally, the Tyndale–King James label arbitrarily elevates Tyndale over other sixteenth-century translations. Virtually all scholarly sources claim that the Geneva Bible contributed more to the King James Version than did Tyndale (and we should note in this regard that Tyndale translated less than two-thirds of the Bible).

Five translations constitute the “middle” of the story of sixteenth-century English Bible translations of which Tyndale and the KJV form the first and last chapters. Later I will explore their contributions in more detail; the external facts are as follows:

Coverdale’s Bible (1535)

Miles Coverdale had been an associate of Tyndale on the Continent. Unlike Tyndale, he did not read Hebrew and Greek. Nonetheless, he had a more diplomatic temperament than Tyndale, living to the age of eighty-one and working on a total of three English translations. Additional...