Cain's Face, and Other Problems: The Legacy of the Earliest English Bible Translations

Abstract

Scripture was being put into English at least six hundred years before Tyndale's martyrdom and four hundred and fifty years before the making of the Wycliffite Bibles. The roll-call of great Englishmen involved in promoting Scripture in the vernacular must be expanded to include King Alfred, JElfric, the self-effacing abbot of Eynsham, and other, unnamed, Anglo-Saxons. The language of the earliest biblical translations, the most important of which were made in the two centuries preceding the Norman Conquest of 1066, was Old English. Although this form of our language is not easy to read for the uninitiated, the languages of Wyclif and Tyndale (Middle and early Modem English, respectively) were its direct descendants. The question I want to pose in this paper, therefore, is an obvious one: to what extent, if at all, were the later translations influenced by the earlier? Can a continuous biblical tradition be discovered, paralleling the linguistic evolution of English and linking the work of the Anglo-Saxon translators with that of their successors in the fourteenth century and beyond? The general question of the continuity of English literature between the arrival of the French-speaking Normans at the end of the eleventh century and the reassertion of the English language in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries has proved difficult and contentious. In his celebrated attempt to prove the existence of a continuous tradition of English prose, R. W. Chambers used the evidence of both homiletic writings and Old Testament translations from the Anglo-Saxon period, but his account contained much special pleading and was short on detail in crucial places: Charles Butterworth, as part of his classic study of the Bible in English, considered specifically (and uniquely, I believe) the possibility of a continuity of scriptural tradition and suggested two possible mechanisms: the building up of 'an accepted standard or a traditional style for biblical translation', which would then have persisted from generation to generation; or the direct influence of early manuscripts consulted by later scholars. He concluded, however, that 'no positive indication' exists that either process took place. I shall be displaying less caution than Butterworth in my own re-examination of the subject. This does not mean that I shall claim to have established the wholesale direct influence of the Old English on the Middle English translations, but I do want to suggest that there are specific examples of apparent influence which justify further research. There are indications, too, that other mechanisms of continuity may have been at work than those considered by Butterworth. However, I can begin my exploration of possible connections uncontroversially, with what I would call the 'politics' of continuity. These loomed large in the context of late medieval and Reformation Bible translation, when the existence of Old English scriptural translations was deliberately emphasized by scholars and ecclesiastics, even if the texts had not actually been read in most cases.] In 1539, only three years after Tyndale's