Book of Fire (11 page)
In a key chapter, Matthew 7, which has many famous sayings – ‘beware of false prophettes … nether cast ye youre pearles before swynne’ – King James’s men change very little, but then rarely to advantage. Tyndale has: ‘Iudge not that ye be not iudged. For as ye iudge so shall ye be iudged …’ King James alters and obscures the second sentence: ‘For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged …’ The individual voice is not always clearer or the committee clumsy. In the tale of the foolish man who built his house on sand, Tyndale wrote: ‘And aboundance of rayne descended, and the fluddes cam …’ The
abundance
of rain is implicit in the flooding, and the King James rightly does without it: ‘And the rain descended, and the floods came.’ But Tyndale’s usual edge returns at the end of the verse. He has: ‘and the wynddes blew, and beet uppon that house, and it was overthrowen, and great was the fall of it’. The committee uses
smote
for
beat
, and ‘the fall
of it
’ is replaced by the laboured ‘the fall
thereof
’. In Romans, Tyndale’s readers are urged ‘fassion not yourselves to the worlde’, where the King James abstractly bids them ‘be not conformed’.
It is the plainness of Tyndale that startles and that made the Word of God seem so raw and fresh to his readers. Esau sold his birthright ‘for one morsel of meat’ to the King James men; to Tyndale, he had sold it ‘for one breakfast’. Only a few of Tyndale’s New Testament words have disappeared: ‘arede’ for prophecy, ‘unghostly’ for profane, ‘appose’ for question. Most have been preserved simply by being in his Bible.
Expressions can be traced from the earliest Gothic translation of the gospels, in about 360, through Anglo-Saxon translations of the eighth century, and the Wycliffe Bibles of the end of the
fourteenth century, to Tyndale and on to the present day. The Gothic has survived in the Codex Argenteus, a manuscript written on mulberry-stained vellum in silvered letters of such perfection that it was long believed that they were printed in the Chinese style with an individual stamp for each character, although minute differences in width and height, too subtle for the naked eye, show it to be the work of a copyist of rare talent.
The Anglo-Saxon translation, possibly the work of the Venerable Bede, has a charming habit of literal translation from the Latin. For the Latin
centurio
, or centurion, it has
hundredman
. Disciple is
leorning eniht
, or learning-youth. A man swollen with the dropsy is said to be a
waeter-seoc-man
, a water sack man. The Sabbath is the
reste-daeg
, the rest day. A scribe is a
boc-ere
, a book fellow. Treasury is the self-explanatory
gold-hord
. The Anglo-Saxons had a lovely word for heaven:
heofunum
– ‘
Fader ure de eart on heofunum
… Our father that art in heaven …’.
The door in ‘I am thata
daur
’ in Gothic changes to gate in the Anglo-Saxon’s ‘Ic eom
geat
’ before reverting to Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s ‘I am the
dore’
. The Gothic
leiticia wheila
becomes the Anglo-Saxon
sume hwile
and Wycliffe’s
litel tyme
before settling into Tyndale’s
lytell whyle
. The Goths’
yuka auhsne
is close to Wycliffe’s
yokis of oxen
and Tyndale’s
yooke of oxen
; the Anglo-Saxon
getyme oxena
seems the odd man out, until
getyme
is seen as a
team. Hardu hairtai
, the Gothic hard-hearted, progresses through Anglo-Saxon
heortan heardness
and Wycliffe’s
hardnesse of herte
before becoming Tyndale’s
harde herttes
. The
sibun brothruys
of the Goths change into the Anglo-Saxon
seofon gebrotho
and Wycliffe’s
sevene britheren
before becoming Tyndale’s
seven brethren.
At the Transfiguration, Jesus’s rayment was
wheitus swe snaiws
to the Goths,
hwite swa snaw
to the Anglo-Saxons,
white ful moche as snow
to Wycliffe’s Lollards, and ‘
very whyte even as snowe
’ to Tyndale. The question Jesus asked the man tormented by evil spirits in Luke 8: 30 has changed scarcely at all since Uphilus, bishop
of the Goths, wrote in 360: ‘
Wha ist namo thein?
’ Bede wrote: ‘
Hwaet is thin nama?
’, the Lollards ‘
What name is to thee?
’ and Tyndale: ‘
What is thy name?
’
For all that, a great gulf opens up even in the 140-odd years between Wycliffe and Tyndale. ‘Ioye zee swith yn forth, and gladre zee with out forth,’ the Lollard Bible goes, ‘for zoure meede is plenteuouse in heunes; forsothe so thei han pursued and prophetis that weren before zou.’ It is almost unintelligible now. Tyndale is modern: ‘Rejoice, and be glad, for greate is your rewarde in heven, so persecuted they the prophets which were before youre dayes.’
His New Testament was entirely new, too, in the sense that it was meant to be read through as a whole. For a thousand years, the Bible had been more pored over than read. Tyndale complained that orthodox theologians ‘devide ye scriptures into iiii senses, ye literall, tropologicall, allegoricall, anagogicall’. Jerusalem was the classic example of the way in which varying depths of meaning were extracted from a single word. Literally Jerusalem meant the biblical city of the Jews. As an allegory, Jerusalem signified the Church of Christ. The tropological sense involved tropes, or figures of morality; here, Jerusalem stood for the human soul. The anagogical involved the elevation to future glory; anagogically Jerusalem was the heavenly city.
To Tyndale, the decay of the faith sprang from Origen and the early scholars who had obsessively searched for allegory ‘till they at last forgot the order and process of the text, supposing that the Scripture served but to feign allegories upon’. As a result, ‘twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song’. And when the sophisters came with their ‘anagogical and chopologicall sense’, they took a text half an inch long and ‘drew a thread nine days long’. Tyndale did not simply translate the Bible. In the sense of restoring its sweep and drama, he recreated it.
T
yndale and Roye arrived at Cologne in the high summer of 1525. The city was, on the face of it, an unlikely place to find a printer for the banned Testament.
It lay within the jurisdiction of the Catholic archbishop-elector of Cologne, a ruler with fresh and raw reason to persecute Lutherans. The peasants’ war had swept through the Rhineland in the late spring, accompanied by a bloody rising against the archbishop. The lords had ridden to the archbishop’s aid, peppering the countryside with gibbets of hanged peasants, and he had regained control of his territory by the end of June. An edge of tension persisted as the two Englishmen quietly entered Cologne some time in August.
The city abounded with the vanities and superstitions that Tyndale so mocked in the old religion. Its jewelled prince-prelate, whose claim to temporal and spiritual dominion made him a papal Antichrist in miniature to Tyndale, presided over a motley of relics, shrines, chantries, monasteries, pilgrims, mendicant friars and indulgence salesmen. The cathedral was a prodigy of Gothic intensity and a measure of the majesty of the Church that Tyndale presumed to challenge. Building had begun 277 years before.
Masons were still decorating its great shoulders with slender pinnacles and gargoyles of laughing demons; its spires were not finally to be completed until 1880, but the chief glories were already in place, and it hung high above the Rhine in brilliant stonebursts. The exquisite tracery of the chancel gave delicacy and air to the vast five-aisled basilica. Above oak choir stalls carved with dancers, musicians and lovers, the Adoration of the Magi was portrayed in a lustrous series of stained glass windows, suspending sunbeams of colour in midair, and hinting at the treasures behind the high altar. Here was the
Dreikönigenschrein
, the shrine of the Three Kings. The dim light of offertory candles reflected on solid gold sculptures of kings, prophets and scenes from the Nativity, masterpieces of the goldsmiths’ art that had been forty years in the making. The supposed bones of the Magi, looted from Milan by Barbarossa’s chancellor 350 years before, rested in the largest gold sarcophagus in Europe, with a frieze of kneeling and muttering pilgrims. The cathedral fulfilled Pope Nicholas’s dictum. It was a place of awe, among the largest structures on earth; it seemed planted by the hand of God himself, a witness to the imperishable power and tradition of the Church, and from its heights the troublesome Englishman appeared no larger than an insect.
A means to snuff out Tyndale’s Bible was in place. Theologians at the large university of Cologne were early to grasp the scale and speed with which printing could spread heresy. In 1475, at their request, the pope had granted them a licence, the first of its kind, allowing them to punish the printers, publishers, authors and readers of ‘pernicious’ books. A decade later, Archbishop Berthold of Mainz pioneered precensorship, in which a board of cathedral priests and learned doctors examined manuscripts before they went to press. For good measure, Berthold forbade laity and clergy alike to translate any book on any subject from Latin, Greek or other foreign tongue into German. He had a particular dislike of vernacular Bibles, fearing that the ‘uneducated and inquisitive
laymen’ who read them would ‘hold themselves to be cleverer than the clergy’. Since 1501, the papal bull
Inter Multiplices
had forbidden the printing of any book in Germany without Church authorisation. The three archbishop-electors and archbishop of Magdeburg were appointed to control publications. The archbishop of Cologne was a member of this quartet and, although the bull was widely ignored, he imposed it as rigorously as he could in his territory. In 1520 he had organised a great public burning of Lutheran books and pamphlets and cartoons in front of the cathedral.
Tyndale gambled that Cologne’s advantages outweighed its obvious perils. It was a great trading city – the Neumarkt was the largest market square in Germany – and the appearance of a pair of Englishmen would excite little comment. Its membership of the Hanseatic League, and its links with the Steelyard, made it easy to transfer the funds needed for the print run from London. Ease of access to English ports was a priority and here the city scored high. Printing in Wittenberg would have involved the expense and difficulty of moving a large consignment of illegal books by land. Wagons were crude, roads mere channels of dust and mud, and books were heavy and vulnerable to inspection at frontiers; Paris printers paid more for paper brought cross-country from Angoulême in southwestern France than rivals in Antwerp who shipped it from Bordeaux. So many ships and barges used the Cologne quays that the church of St Maria, though hundreds of miles inland, had a Sailors’ Madonna. The print works were set among gold and ivory workshops close to the cathedral, on the site of the old Jewish ghetto, destroyed in pogroms during the Black Death. Cargoes were regularly loaded for England on wharves a few yards away.
Almost a score of printers had presses in Cologne. William Caxton had learnt his skills here, before leaving to set up the first press in backward England at Westminster in 1476. A major local
publisher, Hittorp, kept several printers busy with textbooks for students at the university; he also had presses in Leipzig, Paris and Prague. The Cologne bookseller Birkmann was one of the grandest in the business, with agents throughout Europe and a branch in London.
Though it was an offence for a printer to accept Tyndale’s commission without first clearing it with the archbishop’s censors, the fact that the text was in English made this a largely technical breach of the law. Trading cities were tolerant. Cologne left foreigners to their own devices, provided they did not disturb the peace, and Tyndale had every reason to remain anonymous. Some printers were men of deep faith who dealt only with texts that mirrored their beliefs. Nuremberg’s Hans Hergot was shortly to become the first of a dozen and more printer-martyrs, executed at Leipzig in 1527 for publishing Luther. But others in Catholic cities, notably in Cologne and Antwerp, were willing to print evangelical texts, taking the precaution of either not identifying their work, or using a false colophon. Albrecht Dürer had passed through Cologne five years before Tyndale’s arrival, returning home after attending the imperial coronation of Charles V in Aachen. ‘I have bought a tract of Luther’s for 5 weisspfennigs,’ he wrote. ‘And I spent another weisspfennig for the condemnation on Luther, that pious man.’ Dürer also bought a pair of shoes for six weisspfennigs. Banned Lutheran work might be sharply marked up in price, but a reader in Cologne could keep up with both camps in the great drama for the cost of some footwear.
Tyndale struck his bargain with Peter Quentell, a second-generation printer who worked both sides of the fence. In 1522, John Fisher, wishing to take his battle against heresy into Luther’s German heartland, had chosen Quentell to print his diatribe,
Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio
, in Cologne. Thus, by a not unusual irony, Tyndale was to share his printer with the peppery
bishop of Rochester, whose violent attacks on his Testament were to be exceeded only by Thomas More.
