The Authority of the Translated Word of God: A Reading of the Preface to the 1611 Bible

Abstract

It is well known that the period from the Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century was one of intense debate about the authority and accessibility of the Bible. While Erasmus is remembered for wishing that, before long, every ploughboy should sing the psalms as he worked, he had great doubts about how open a book the Bible as a whole was and about how far the common people should have access to it. Luther's response was to assert that no part of the Bible was obscure, except insofar as there was ignorance of the original biblical languages, and that it was a church's responsibility to make it accessible to all.1 This meant translation into the vernacular. Luther's German Bible became the model for all European vernacular versions, including the numerous English translations which, beginning with Tyndale's 1525 New Testament, culminated in the 161 1 Authorized Version. In England, the Erasmus-Luther battle was fought out between Sir Thomas More and Tyndale and, significantly, it was fought out on the issue of translation. While it is one thing to debate the authority of the word of God in the abstract, as it were, it is quite another when one thinks of that word as a translated word. Translation of the Bible inevitably uncovers an actual or potential space between the translated and the original or primary word of God. Consider, for example, Calvin's statement that even the most learned disbeliever in the Bible's authority 'will be compelled to confess that the Scripture exhibits clear evidence of its being spoken by God, and, consequently, of its containing his heavenly doctrine'.2 This is obviously true, granted the premise that God is the Bible's author, so long as we have access to the actual words of God, in Hebrew and Greek. But if the vast majority only know German or English equivalents for these words, they may not find the evidence so conclusive; hence More's famous complaint that Tyndale, by preferring the dangerous and ambiguous world 'love', had profaned the purity of St Paul's ayccTCT].3 This was the familiar 'translation-as-betrayal' debate, but with a sharper edge, for the Bible is a text in which precise understanding of the words may be even more than a matter of life and death a matter of eternal life and death.