Wide as the waters. The story of the English bible and the revolution it inspired. (Book Review).

Benson Bobrick, Wide as the Waters. The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. New York; Simon & Schuster. 379 pp., $38.50 Can.

Bobrick's first chapter, entitled "Morning Star" deals with John Wycliffe, a 14th-century English priest who thought that the Church had been corrupted by worldly possessions and urged that it return to its primitive simplicity. But he also attacked Church doctrines, such as that on transubstantiation, and not surprisingly he was brought before Church courts on charges of heresy. Considering Scripture as the source of all morality and truth, he downplayed tradition. He was a strong advocate of turning the Bible into English, and by 1380 was involved in the preparation of the first English Bible. It is associated with his name, though it is not certain how much of the work of translation he did himself. It was never approved by the Church, so the English Bible began in controversy and continued in controversy for several centuries. Right from the beginning, unfortunately, English translations of the Bible were mixed up with heresy.

Wycliffe died in 1384, but the itinerant preachers (called Lollards) who were his followers carried on his message. He was posthumously declared a heretic, and his bones removed from consecrated ground and burned; the ashes were cast into a tributary of the Avon River, which gave rise to a prophecy (and this book's title): The Avon to the Severn runs,/ The Severn to the sea, And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad,/Wide as the waters be. Later reformers like Milton thought that he had struck the spark which was to flame Out in the Reformation.

In the next century the invention of movable type by Johannnes Gutenberg revolutionized printing. The first complete book to be typeset was the Gutenberg Latin Bible of 1455 at Mainz. Initially the Church welcomed the new technology; the Archbishop of Mainz called printing "a divine art." That attitude changed when printing began to disseminate ideas associated with dissent. Luther embraced the new technology as "God's highest and extremest act of grace," and John Foxe would later say in his Book of Martyrs, "God hath opened the press to preach, whose voice the pope is unable to stop with all the puissance of his triple crown." The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 resulted in a flood of manuscripts coming to the West and a revival of classical learning there. Before long, polyglot Bibles began appearing, with the Latin of the Vulgate in the middle, the Hebrew on one side and the Greek on the other. William Tyndale, called by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs the father of the English Bible, was a b rilliant scholar with an exceptional gift for languages. After receiving an M.A. from Oxford in 1515, he moved to Cambridge, where Greek studies were flourishing. He was ordained a Catholic priest, but before he left Cambridge in 1521 he had imbibed some of the Protestant ideas circulating there. He knew what his life's work was going to be: "I perceived that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text."

Perceiving that he would not be able to do in England the work he wanted to do, he sailed for Hamburg in May 1524, never to see his native land again. By the spring of 1525 his translation of the Greek New Testament was done, and copies of it came to England concealed in bales of dry goods: his name and his translation were associated in the minds of the English authorities with heresy and schism. By 1528 at least 18,000 copies of his work had reached English ports. Church authorities confiscated and burned as many copies as they could find; ordering the book to be confiscated, Cuthbert Trunstall, Bishop of London, issued a decree saying that "maintainer of Luther's sect" had translated the new Testament into the English tongue. But still the Tyndale New Testament was disseminated throughout England.

Bobrick says that it would be hard to overpraise the literary merits of what Tyndale had done: "Much of his rendering would later be incorporated in the Authorized or King James Version, and the rhythmical 'beauty of his prose .... and 'magical simplicity of phrase' imposed itself on all later versions down to the present day." He was responsible for such familiar expressions as "a man after his own heart," "the Lord's anointed," and "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." Ultimately his diction became 'the consecrated dialect of English speech.'"

Bishop Tunstall turned to his friend Thomas More to produce a reply to Tyndale, and More produced a Dialogue Concerning Heresies--which brought an Answer to Sir Thomas More by Tyndale--which brought from More a sometimes hysterical work, Confutation of Tyndale, accusing his antagonist of discharging a "filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth." Bobrick calls More's "book review" of the New Testament translation perhaps the most wrongheaded ever penned. One critic wrote, "we can only be surprised that a scholar like More should go to such lengths in denouncing so good an achievement." In later polemical works, Tyndale set forth the two main principles of the English Reformation, the authority of scripture and the supremacy of the king in the state. As we know, More was beheaded in 1535, saying that he died the King's good servant, but God's first. Tyndale was hunted down in one continental city after another, brought to trial for heresy in August 1536, and executed in a nastier way than Mor e--strangled first by the hangman, and then "with fire consumed." Before he lost consciousness, he cried out, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes."

When Henry broke with papal authority, he argued for his right to a divorce from Queen Catherine on the basis of a text in Leviticus; in effect, he was putting Scriptural authority ahead of the Pope's. So he began to intimate that under certain circumstances he was not opposed to letting the English have a Bible in their own language. Cromwell, the new viceregent, took the matter up, and soon selected Miles Coverdale, a Cambridge scholar who had joined Tyndale in exile, as the person to see the work through. In 1535 Coverdale's became the first complete Bible ever to be printed in English. He was a Latinist who knew little Hebrew or Greek, so his Bible was largely based on translations, including that of Tyndale. He admitted his own inadequacies, but said that he had taken the work in hand for the sake of the English nation. When King Henry asked his bishops to review it, they replied that it had many faults; but the king answered, "If there be no heresies, then in God's name let it go abroad among our peopl e."

Meanwhile John Rogers, an Oxford scholar, brought the whole of Tyndale's contribution under one roof, together with Coverdale's version of what else was needed. It was published in 1537 under the name of "Thomas Matthew" (a pseudonym for John Rogers). It too received Henry's approval, so that there were now two English Bibles authorized by royal decree. The following year Cromwell sent Coverdale to Paris to have still another edition published by a well-known French printer, basing his text on the Matthew Bible plus several other scholarly sources. When it appeared in 1539, it became known as the Great Bible, from it lavish size and adornments. A copy went into every parish church in England, and so the Scripture had finally achieved official status. Was Henry delighted ? Not at all; he was filled with dismay. In his famous last speech to Parliament, he complained that the Bible was "being disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern."

Under Calvin, Geneva had become a city humming with biblical scholarship--"the storehouse of heavenly learning and judgment," one Puritan put it, "where God hath appointed us to dwell." During the brief reign of Queen Mary, English exiles there produced a new English Bible, based in part on the Great Bible for the Old Testament and Tyndale for the New. It was undoubtedly the most scholarly edition of the Scriptures yet; between 1560 and 1644, it went through 140 editions, and it became the household Bible of English-speaking Protestants.

Soon after he came to the throne in 1603, King James was asked to consider a new translation of the Bible, "because those that were allowed in the reigns of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the Original." It was true that a great deal of progress had been made in Greek and Hebrew studies during the previous century. At any rate, James greeted the proposal for a new Bible enthusiastically.

Before the end of July 1604, he had approved a list of 54 translators arranged in six companies, two in Westminster, two in Oxford, and two in Cambridge. Three scholars had overall supervision of the work, the best known of them being Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, famous as a teacher and preacher... Bobrick is able to provide brief biographical sketches of nearly all the contributors. Making good use of editions of Scripture already in existence, they sifted what Tyndale and others had written "for their own grains of gold." Published by royal authority, Bobrick writes, the King James Version "swept forward with a majestic stream of editions" which eventually left all its rivals behind.

One historian wrote that its victory was so complete that its text acquired a sanctity properly ascribable only to the unmediated voice of God. "Even to this day," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "the common Britisher or citizen of the United States of North Americas accepts and worships it as a single book by a single author, the book being the Book of Books and the author being God." And yet it was the work of a number of committees.

Bobrick is at pains to emphasize that this important religious document had far-reaching political implications. The growth of independent thought in the interpretation of the Bible was symptomatic of a spirit of questioning which marked the seventeenth century. The Stuart kings believed firmly in the divine right of kings; but people who had been reading such texts as "Where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty," might very well have a different view of royal authority. "The mother of modern democracy," Bobrick quotes someone as saying, "was the Reformation, with its evolving principles of free inquiry and the priesthood and equality of all believers." It was in Protestant England, Bobrick claims, that democratic theory was first put to the test, and in time the results of that experiment went around the world. By the early seventeenth century, over a million Bibles or New Testaments had been printed in England.

Charles I, who succeeded his father James, was convinced that unrestrained Bible reading had fuelled the popular discontent; one English bishop declared "Either we must root out printing, or printing will root out us." So this very interesting account of how the King James Version came to be concludes by saying that the Bible was political dynamite.