FIRST ENGLISH BIBLE

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21906, 6 October 1936, Page 5

FIRST ENGLISH BIBLE

WILLIAM TINDALE’S WORK

ANNIVERSARY OP MARTYRDOM

The four hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of William Tindale, the pioneer of printed English scriptures, falls to-day. Miles Coverdale’s trans? lation of the Bible was published on October 4, 1535, and exactly one year and two days later Tindale, whose version of the New Testament, printed in 1525. led the way to the complete Bible, was led to execution at Vilvorde. Before he died, however, Tindale had the gratification of knowing that the work he had begun had been carried to r its conclusion, and that .even ”the boy who guideth the. plough had all the Bible in his mother tongue. Great as Coverdale’s achievement was, he would have been the first to admit that the foundation had been laid by his predecessor, whose version pi the New Testament, the Pentateuch and Jonah he had practically incorporated into his own book. ■ . ... The words that Tindale wrote 400 years ago are largely those read by the English-speaking people an over the world to-day. Even the English revisers of 1881 admitted that the new version was still, to all intents and purposes, Tindale’s work, and that 80 Ser cent of the words in the Revised few Testament stand as they stood in Tindale’s revised version of 1534, for they could not find in the English tongue more apt phrases than those used by him. It is probable that the first idea of making an English version of the Bible was suggested to Tindale by Erasmus, under whom he studied at Cambridge, and that the first beginnings were made while Tindale was engaged as a tutor. When he visited London when he was about 30 years old he found no ecclesiastical support for his project, and Weft for the Continent, where he met Martin Luther. > Once on the Continent, most of his work Was done at Cologne, where at least the first sheets were printed, and at Worms, where the first English New Testament was printed; His task was completed in a few years, and was solely the work of his own hand. Tindale’s life was not easy. He was excommunicated, hunted from country to country, shipwrecked, betrayed, imprisoned, tortured, and finally sentenced to a shameful death. At the fourth centenary of his New Testament in 1925 “The Times” paid him this tribute: “It was the mind of William Tindale who set upon it (the English Bible) the seal of its incomparable beauties . . . Our whole speech is soaked with it. We think it and speak it hourly without remembering whence the apt and homely phrases or the eloquence, loftier far than that of our common thought, is derived. It is the daily food of the wise and of the simple* of the sage and of the little child. To have endowed hundreds of millions with such a book, through centuries past and centuries to come, is a very wonderful achievement, and to William Tindale more than to any other man the chief glory of this achievement belongs.”