Erroneous Bible Versions

[Akalyte]

A Deluge of Erroneous Versions

Following Tyndale’s example, others continued the work of issuing English-printed Bibles, and so in the reign of Henry VIII we have to face quite a deluge of them. One by one they came forth, authorized and unauthorized, printed and published by irresponsible individuals, full of errors, with no proper supervision, and having no other effect (as we shall presently see) than that of drawing down contempt and disgrace upon the Sacred Scriptures.

(1) The English Church was now separated from Rome, and the English Bishops were mere puppets and slaves at the beck and call of the Royal Tyrant, Henry. They exercised no real independent jurisdiction over either clergy or people; the governor and ruler in Church and State was the King; and consequently no ecclesiastic could undertake responsibility in regard to the publication or suppression of Bibles without the will of his Imperial Master. So long as Henry made no objection, any printer or publisher or literary hack, who thought he saw a chance of making a little money out of a new version of the Bible. George Joye, for example, took this course in regard to Tyndale’s Bible, and in consequence (1535) brought down upon himself a volley of bitter and scurrilous language when thwarted or resisted. In reply to this tirade, George Joye published an ‘Apology’, in which he showed that the printer had paid him only 4 ½ d. for the correction of every 16 leaves, while Tyndale had netted £10 for his work; and besides, he exposed in fine style the departure from the truth of which Tyndale had been guilty in boasting his translation and exposition as if it were his own, whereas Joye shows it was really Luther’s all the time; that Tyndale did not know enough Greek to do it, and had only added ‘fantasies’ and glosses and notes of his own imagination to the work of others. However, we have no time to dwell on the quarrels of these amiable Bible translators, else we should never reach the end of our historical review. Let us enumerate briefly the versions that saw the light in rapid succession during the reign of Henry VIII.

(2) There was Myles Coverdale’s in 1535. Coverdale was a priest, who married abroad, and kept a school. In after years King Edward VI granted him and his wife (sic) Elizabeth a dispensation (!) to eat flesh and white meats in Lent and other fasting days. It is wonderful what power the Kings of England had in those days! In 537 appeared Matthew’s or Roger’s Bible (which was a mixture of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s), and this has the distinction of being the first that henry authorized to be used by the people at large. Matthew or Rogers (for he assumed different names for Bible-selling purposes) was, like Coverdale, a renegade priest, and had married, and we are not surprised to find that some of his notes on the Gospel were indecent, and others consisted of abuse of the Church, her clergy, and her doctrines. Two years later (1539) a man, Taverner, produced another version of the Bible. He was a layman, but a preacher notwithstanding, who had saved his skin by recanting his opinions. And the same year appeared a version that was to hold the field for popularity for the next twenty years viz., the Great Bible, sometimes called Cranmer’s, from the Preface written by that accommodating prelate. It was Cromwell (Thomas, not Oliver, of course) who engineered it, and Coverdale who supervised its progress. The printing of it was begun in France, but when the work was half finished, the Inquisitor-General very properly stepped in and confiscated the press and types. If England was going to the dogs through anti-Papal Bibles, he saw no reason why France should do the same. However, it was completed and published in London in 1539, and, like previous versions, contained fulsome flattery of Henry VIII, concerning whom Our Lord is represented as saying, ‘I have found a man after My Own heart, who shall fulfil all My will!’ This volume was by Royal Proclamation ordered to be put up in every church in England; and Bonner, Bishop of London (‘Bloody Bonner’,) who is held up as the most determined enemy of Bible reading, set up at his own expense six beautiful copies of this Book at various convenient places in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately, so much ill-feeling, disturbance, contention, and irreverence was the result of this unrestrained Scripture reading that he was compelled to threaten their removal. The license to read and judge, each one for himself, of the sense and meaning of the Word of God produced, as we said before, most lamentable effects, and led to the utter degradation of the Sacred Volume. Not that there was any eager desire or thirst for it, or any great or general use made of it: for the printers often complained of the large stock left, unbought, on their hands, and begged that persons should be compelled to purchase them, and besought that no fresh editions might be published; and we have seen that Acts had to be made to force people to buy them, under threat of fine and imprisonment. But yet those who did read the Bible made it only a matter of altercation and contention and argument, and brought it down to the depths of disrepute and contempt. The extent to which this evil had spread may best be judged from the public lament of Henry VIII himself in his last speech to Parliament: ‘I am extremely sorry to find how much the Word of God is abused: with how little reverence it is mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into wretched rhymes, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern; and all this in a false construction and counter-meaning to the inspired writers. I am sorry to perceive the readers of the Bible discover so little of it in their practice; for I am sure charity was never in a more languishing condition, virtue never at a lower ebb, nor God Himself less honored or worse served in Christendom.’ There is no ambiguity about these words, and when we remember that the same sentiments are expressed in the writings and speeches of many of the Reformers themselves, who complain of the licentiousness of the masses since the abolition of Popery, and remember too, how Henry VIII was constrained to seize and burn Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s and other versions of the Bible, and to forbid the reading of any version at all to large classes of his subjects – in the face of all this, who will fail to see the sinful folly of the policy of the English schismatics of that day? And who will deny that the Catholic Church showed consummate wisdom, holy prudence, and the truest reverence for God’s Word in withholding her version till a more convenient season?

(3) But are we finished with the erroneous versions yet? Far from it. Henry VIII certainly authorized no more, for the simple reason that he went to Judgment in 1547. No new edition came out in Edward the Sixth’s reign (1547-1553) but in 1557 one was published that owed its origin to William Whittingham, a layman, who had married a sister of John Calvin’s wife, and who was made Dean of Durham. Wittingham’s Bible, issued at Geneva, perpetuated the corruptions of Tyndale’s with an Epistle of Calvin added to the Epistles of St. Paul and the other Apostles. During the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary (1553-1558), who, of course, ought to have hated the Scriptures like poison (being a bigoted Papist and wife of a Spaniard), there were, strange to say, no proclamations against Scripture reading, nor is there to be found any trace of opposition on the part either of the Queen or of her Bishops to the Bible being read or printed in the vulgar tongue; so says Mr. Blunt, the Anglican historian. With the accession of the ‘Virgin Queen Bess’, however, a new Bible saw the light in 1560 at Geneva, which was the work of Nonconformists resident here, and is known as the Genevan Bible, though Bible collectors know it more familiarly by the title ‘Breeches Bible’, from its rendering of Genesis iii, 7: ‘They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves breeches’. It was certainly the most popular that had yet appeared among the sectaries, partly because of its undeniable scholarship and accuracy, and partly because of its notes on the margin, which were fiercely Calvinistic. Take an example: Rev. ix., 3. Here the note runs: ‘Locusts are false teachers, heretics and worldly subtil prelates, with monks, friars, cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, doctors, bachelors, masters, which forsake Christ to maintain false doctrine’. Nobody worth speaking about is missed out here.

The Puritan soldiers used to carry about with them a little book made up of quotations from the notes of this Calvinistic version. It seems also to have suited the Scottish taste of the period, for it was the first edition printed in Scotland. So little, however, did the great mass of the people in this country care for any Bible in English at all that the Privy Council passed a law compelling every householder possessed of a certain sum to purchase a copy under a penalty of £10. The Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh also did their best to force the sale of the volume; and searchers went from house to house throughout this unhappy land to see if it had been bought. But, in spite of all the pressure, we find from the Privy Council Records that many householders preferred to incur the pains and penalties to purchasing the Bible. The old dodge was then adopted in regard to the Genevan version that had done service with previous copies – the dodge, namely, of issuing the very same book, with the same errors and identical notes, but under a new title page, so as to deceive the unwary into believing it was a fresh edition. This trick had to be played, of course, by the unfortunate and impecunious printers and booksellers, who had large stocks of Bibles unsold on their shelves; and the perpetration of this fraud helped the Genevan editions considerably. But the Elizabethan Bishops soon found that this Bible, with its violent Calvinistic notes and teaching, was undermining the popularity of the Church of England; so Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, set himself the task of providing another version that would be less offensive to the High Church party and more favorable to Anglicanism. The result was the Bishops’ Bible, which appeared in 1568, and took the chief place in the public services of the Church, though it never displaced the Genevan in the favor of the people.

We are close now to the moment at which the first Catholic version (and up till today the only one ever sanctioned in English) appeared. But there was still one more Protestant version which, as it is yet the principal recognized Bible of the Protestants of the British Empire, must not be omitted. I mean, of course, King James’s version of 1611. It is the 300th anniversary of this, commonly called the Authorized Version, that English-speaking Protestants are everywhere celebrating this year (1911).

(4) Neither the Royal Pedant himself, nor anybody else, seems to have been satisfied with any of the Bibles then floating about. Dr. Reynolds, the Puritan leader, ‘moved his Majesty there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI were corrupt, and not answerable to the truths of the original’. James, great scholar as he thought himself to be professed ‘that he could never yet see a Bible well translated into English, but the worst of all his Majesty thought, the Geneva’ – a judgment we cannot be surprised at, considering that that version openly allowed disobedience to a king, and blamed Asa for only deposing his mother and not killing her. (2 Chron. xv. 16). Moreover, he declared that ‘some of its notes were very partial, untrue, seditious, and savored too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits’. Hence a large band of translators was appointed and in 1611 there was finished and published what has proved to be the best Protestant version that ever appeared – one which has exercised an enormous influence not only on the minds of its readers, but also on English literature throughout the world. In 1881-1885 this version of King James was revised, but whilst acceptable to students, the Revision has gained no hold upon the people at large.

(5) How long it will be before another Protestant version appears he would be a bold man who would venture to prophecy; but that others will spring up and add to the number of the wrecks that already strew the path we may confidently predict. I have given a goodly list of corrupt and erroneous versions; but please do not imagine for a moment that my catalogue is anything like complete. I have merely mentioned those that were more commonly used an d secured a certain amount of popularity and authorization from Protestant headquarters. But there are, I am safe in saying, hundreds of other editions that flooded this unhappy realm from the time of Tyndale, some from foreign countries, like Holland and Germany, and Switzerland, and some produced at home, but all of them swarming with blunders and perversions. On glancing over a bookseller’s catalogue the other day my eye happened to light on some of those that have attained notoriety for their absurd mistakes. There is, for example, the ‘He’ Bible and the ‘She’ Bible, so called from the hopeless mixing up of these pronouns in the Book of Ruth; the ‘He’ Bible has one set of errors and the ‘She’ Bible another. There is the ‘Wicked’ Bible from the word ‘not’ being omitted from the 7th Commandment. There is the ‘Vinegar’ Bible, from printing ‘vinegar’ instead of ‘vineyard’, and so producing ‘The Parable of the Vinegar’. This Bible was printed by a man called Baskett, and is now vainly sought for by collectors on account of its numberless errors; indeed, it was wittily called the ‘Basket-ful of Errors’. There is the ‘Murderer’s Bible’, from the words of Our Lord being thus printed: ‘But Jesus said unto her, let the children first be killed’ (instead of ‘fed’). Then we have the ‘Whig’ Bible and the ‘Unrighteous’ Bible and the ‘Bug’ Bible, and the ‘Treacle’ Bible, and no end of other kinds of Bibles, all crammed full of mistakes and corruptions. The Pearl Bible, for instance, published by Field, the Parliamentary printer, has 6,000 errors in it. A famous book was written by a man named Ward in the seventeenth century, entitled Errata of the Protestant Bible, containing a formidable list of, I should not like to say how many thousand errors in the various versions. No one has yet succeeded in refuting Ward’s Errata. It stands as a gruesome commentary on the history of heretical treatment of the inspired text. I came across a curious and rare book one day in Glasgow University Library, written in 1659, by a Protestant, one William Kilburn, entitled Dangerous Errors in Several Late Printed Bibles to the Great Scandal and Corruption of Sound and True Religion. He enumerates the errors, omissions, and specimens of nonsense that he discovered in these editions, many of them imported from Holland, and mentions that a gentleman had unearthed 6,000 mistakes in one copy alone.

(6) But time would fail to tell of all the corruptions and perversions of the original texts which are to be found in practically all the Protestant Bibles, down to the present time, and whose existence is proved by the fact that one after the other has been withdrawn, and its place taken by a fresh version, which in its turn was found to be no better than the rest.

Is this reverence for the Word of God? Which of all these corrupt partisan versions was ‘the Rule of Faith?’ The Bible, and the Bible only, we are told; but which Bible? I ask. Or had Protestants a different Rule of Faith according to the century in which they lived? According to a copy of the Bible they chanced to possess? What a mockery of Religion! What a degradation of God’s Holy Word, that it should have been knocked about like a shuttlecock, and made to serve the interests of now this sect, now of that, and loaded with notes that shrieked aloud party war-cries and bitter accusations and filthy insinuations! Is this zeal for the pure and incorrupt Gospel? Is this the grand and unspeakable blessing of the ‘open Bible’? It only remains now to show by contrast the calm, dignified, and reverent action taken by the Catholic Church, towards her own Book.

[Akalyte]

The Catholic Bible (Douai)

What was the Catholic Church doing all this time? Well, she was in a state of persecution in England, and could no do very much except suffer.

(1) Many of her best sons went abroad to more favorable lands. The circumstances had assuredly been most unsuitable from bringing out a Catholic version of the Scriptures. She was rather content, indeed compelled, to sit still and from her majestic height look down and watch the rise and fall, the publication and withdrawal, the appearance and disappearance of dozens of different versions, heretical and corrupt, grotesque in their blunders and bitter in their sectarianism, that had been issued by the various bodies. By the end of the sixteenth century no less than 270 new sects had been enumerated, and some that had been extinct for centuries, like Arianism, revived under the genial influence of Luther. Dr. Walton, Bishop of Chester, and author of the famous polyglot Bible that bears his name, laments this fact in his Preface about the end of the seventeenth century. ‘There is no fanatic or clown,’ says he, ‘from the lowest dregs of the people who does not give you his own dreams as the Word of God. For the bottomless pit seems to have been set open from whence a smoke has risen which has obscured the heavens and the stars, and locusts are come out with wings – a numerous race of sectaries and heretics, who have renewed all the old heresies, and invented monstrous opinions of their own. These have filled our cities, villages, camps, houses – nay, our churches and pulpits, too, and lead the poor deluded people with them to the pit of perdition.’ Doubtless the poor Bishop, being a self-complacent Anglican, failed to perceive that he himself was as much of a deluded sectary and heretic as any of them. It was not till 1582 that a Catholic New Testament appeared, and that was not in England, but in France, at Rheims, whence a colony of persecuted Catholics had fled, including Cardinal Allen, Gregory Martin, and Robert Bristow, who were mainly responsible for this new translation. William Allen, formerly Canon of York, later Archbishop of Mechlin, and lastly Cardinal, had founded a college at Douai for the training of priests for the English mission in 1568. He was compelled to remove it to Rheims in 1578 owing to Huguenot riots, and there, as I said, in 1582 they issued the New Testament in English for Catholics. It was a translation, of course, from the Latin Vulgate, which had been declared by the Council of Trent to be the authorized text of Scripture for the Church. Martin was the principal translator, whilst Bristow mainly contributed the notes, which are powerful and illuminative. The whole was intended to be of service both to priests and people, to give them a true and sound rendering of the original writings, to save them from the numberless false and incorrect versions in circulation, and to provide them with something wherewith to refute the heretics who then, as ever, approached with a text in their mouth.

(2) Needless to say, the appearance of this New Testament, with its annotations, at once aroused the fiercest opposition. Queen Elizabeth ordered the searches to seek out and confiscate every copy they could find. If a priest was found in possession of it, he was forthwith imprisoned. Torture by rack was applied to those who circulated it, and a scholar, Dr. Fulke, was appointed to refute it. All these measures, be it noted, kind reader, were taken by parties who advocated loudly the unlimited right of private judgment. In 1593 the College returned to Douai, and there in 1609 the Old Testament was added, and the Catholic Bible in English was complete, and is called the Douai Bible. Complete we may well call it; it was the only really complete Bible in English, for it contains those seven books of the Old Testament which I pointed out before were, and are, omitted by the Protestants in their editions. So that we can claim to have not only the pure, unadulterated Bible but the whole of it, without addition or subtraction: a translation of the Vulgate, which is itself the work of St. Jerome in the fourth century, which, again, is the most authoritative and correct of all the early copies of Holy Scripture. At a single leap we thus arrive at that great work, completed by the greatest scholar of his day, who had access to manuscripts and authorities that have now perished, and who, living so near the days of the Apostles, and, as it were, close to the very fountain-head, was able to produce a copy of the inspired writings which, for correctness, can never be equalled.

We may feel justly proud of our Douai Bible. We need not declare it to be perfect in all respects, either in regard to its English style or its employment of words from foreign languages; we need not feel the less affection or admiration for it though we should suggest the possibility of a revision and improvement in some particulars – it has, indeed, been re-edited and revised ere now especially by Bishop Challoner. But when all is said and done, it is a noble version with a noble history; true, honest, scholarly, faithful to the original. The Catholic Church has nothing to regret in her policy or her action towards English versions of the Scriptures. She has not issued one version one year and cancelled it the next because of its corruptions and errors, its partisan notes, or political doctrines. Nobly she has stood for reverence and caution in respect of translating God’s Holy Word in the vulgar tongue. She was slow in acting, I admit, if by slowness we mean deliberation and prudence, for she saw with unerring vision the evils that were certain to result from a hasty casting of pearls before swine. But when she did act, she acted decisively and once for all. Who is there that has followed the sad story of the non-Catholic treatment of the Sacred Scriptures but will be forced by contrast to admire the wisdom, the calm dignity, the consistent and deliberate policy of the Ecclesiastical authorities of the Catholic Church in England, which stands as a reproof to the violent, blundering, malicious methods of the sectaries and which, if it had been acquiesced in by others, would have saved the Word of God from infinite degradation and contempt?

(3) Hatred against her version of the Bible when it first appeared was so deep that an oath sworn on it was not deemed to be valid. It was on this sacred volume that Mary, Queen of Scots, laid her hand and swore her innocence the night before her execution. The Earl of Kent at once interposed with the remark that the Book was a Popish and false translation, and in consequence the oath was of no value. ‘Does your Lordship suppose,’ was the quiet answer of the noble Queen, ‘that my oath would be the better if I swore on your translation, which I do not believe?’ Thanks be to God, the Douai version has now so established its position, and hatred to it and to its authors has so diminished, that a Catholic may, even in these lands, swear upon it in conscience, and his word is believed as any other man’s in a Court of Law. Found in thousands of pious Catholic homes at the present hour, we may find comfort ourselves with the reflection that, in this kingdom, there has now for long existed the true version of the Gospel of our Blessed Lord and the inspired words of His holy Apostles and Evangelists, as they have been handed down and preserved by the Catholic Church from the beginning, unchangeable and unchanged; and we may feel the most absolute certainty that, as it is the true version, so, at a date not incalculably distant, it will prove to be the only one, for the others will have gone to join their predecessors, and been consigned to a happy oblivion, and only survive in the memory of him who glances at their musty covers and faded pages beneath the glass cases of library or museum.

[HS_Dad]

Akalyte,


Your zealousness is admirable. But these posts seems much more like straight out polemics. The situation in England from 1300 - 1600 was far more nuanced than Catholic polemics oftentimes makes it seem. If one has any true desire for Christian unity, one must understand the wonderful fruits which came from the events of England in these centuries.

Today active church attendance rates in America are far higher than most scholars believed they were in Europe in the middle ages. Also, a higher percentage of people globally have been actively evangelized instead of merely culturally evangelized as was often the case post Constantine. I currently have known many missionaries from Ecclessial communities and I can testify they are very wonderful people. Wonderfully active mission movements are occuring throughout the world from eclessial communities whose roots can be traced to these centuries in England. Mission studies now show that South Korea either has, or will soon, pass the U.S. as the world's number one missionary sending country. South Korea's missionaries are overwhelming Evangelical or Presbyterian with an Evangelical bent.

Remember we are in "real but imperfect union" with our separated brethren.