translations. In the first period we found the Bible translated from the
Greek into Latin, Syriac, Coptic; in the next period Gothic, Armenian,
Georgian, Libyan, and Ethiopic were added, not to mention the several
revisions of the former translations. About 600 A. D. the Bible was
known in eight languages; in each of them there had been several
attempts at translating. There were different dialects, too; in Coptic
no less than five. The spread of Christianity in the next period is
shown by the fact that the Bible is translated--and this again several
times--into Arabic and Slavonic from the Greek, and into German,
Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and French from the Latin--rather, I should say,
parts of the Bible, for it was only parts which people at this period
tried to translate. We hear of a Gospel, of a Psalter, of one or another
book translated into the vernacular. Only when stimulated by the popular
movements of the next period, as we have seen in the fifth chapter, was
the work of translating into the vernacular prosecuted on a larger
scale; from the thirteenth century on we may speak of Bibles in the
vernacular. Beginning in the southeast of France, the tendency spread
over Italy and Germany. We can still trace the influence of the French
Waldensian Bible in the earliest Italian translations and also in some
of the German ones. Another circle is defined by the northern French
translation, which influenced the Flemish and Dutch and possibly even
the Scandinavian. All these are based not so much upon the Bible itself
as on a rearrangement known as the Historical Bible, telling the stories
and omitting the doctrinal portions. A new start was made in England by
Wycliffe, and this caused the Bohemian translation into Czech, which was
again influenced by the Waldensian Bible. It is like a net thrown all
over Europe. We may count more than a dozen languages, many of them
represented by different dialects and by several separate renditions,
which were added to the eight languages of the former periods. The
culmination came in the fifteenth century, when everywhere fresh
translations were attempted. In Germany more than forty different types
of translation can be counted, and one of them, containing the whole
Bible, was printed fourteen times before the period of the Reformation
(Plate XVI). There was only one translation, however, with a value of
its own, and that was the Spanish, for this was made from the Hebrew Old
Testament by the help of some Spanish Jews. Both the king of Spain and
the high clergy showed at that time a remarkable breadth of view in
trying to get a trustworthy translation. All other versions in the West
were based upon the Latin Vulgate as the recognised Bible of the church,
and they were made with more devotion than knowledge. The translators
usually did not know Latin well nor were they masters of their own
language. They translated word for word, and the result was sometimes
strange. It is of no great importance that, not recognising in "Tertius"
and "Quartus" proper names, one of these translators said "the third"
and "the fourth." It was worse when another explained "encaenia" in
John 10 : 22, the feast of dedication, as meaning "wedding," or declared
the words in Matt. 27 : 46, "Eli, Eli," to be Greek. Sometimes the
translation resulted in pure nonsense, and even where it made sense, it
was difficult and often far from the true meaning. Now humanism
insisted upon going back to the original languages. Erasmus, in 1516,
published the first edition of the New Testament in Greek. We see how
Luther, at this time professor at the University of Wittenberg,
lecturing upon Romans when this edition came into his hands, was
impressed by this new source of information. He eagerly set himself to
learn Greek with the help of his friend Melanchthon, and so he was
prepared for the great task of translating the New Testament directly
out of the Greek into German. It was during his exile in the Wartburg
that he found the necessary time to make this translation. It appeared
in print in September, 1522, and it is astonishing in how short a time
this New Testament circulated all through Germany. It was reprinted
everywhere, and often very carelessly, so that Luther had to complain
against the printers as falsifying his translation. He himself did not
take any payment for his work; he wanted the publishers to sell it as
cheaply as possible. And it was a masterpiece, not only for the beauty
of the language, which was the best and most popular German that had
ever been written but also in the way Luther translated, giving not the
single words but the meaning of the sentences, not transferring from one
vocabulary to the other but transmuting (if one may say so) the whole
expression of thought from Greek into German. The Bible became a German
book; one hardly feels that he is reading a translation. Luther had more
trouble with the Old Testament. In order to master the Hebrew he had to
rely on friends; he even asked some Jewish rabbis to join their
meetings. He tells us that they often had to look for a single word
three or four weeks; that in particular Job was so difficult that they
scarcely finished three lines in four days. The Pentateuch was ready in
the year 1523; then year after year the work went on. The prophets were
not finished until 1532, and in 1534 the first complete Bible was
issued. The work was highly praised by Luther's friends and unduly
criticised by his antagonists. He himself replied sharply to such
criticism, and he had a right to do so because the attempts made by Eck
and Emser, the champions of Roman Catholicism, to translate the Bible
themselves were feeble and betrayed much dependence on Luther's
translation, which they had so severely criticised. Luther himself never
felt satisfied with his own work and always tried to improve it. At two
different periods he held meetings with his friends for the purpose of
revising the Bible. The records of these meetings of the committee for
the revision of the Bible (if one may call it so) have come down to us,
and it is highly interesting to see how carefully they discussed every
word and how it is always Luther himself who at last finds the most apt
expression.
[Illustration: PLATE XVI--FIRST GERMAN BIBLE
Printed at Strassburg by G. Mentell in 1466: the progress in
printing made in these ten years is remarkable.
Entnommen aus W. Walthers "Deutsche Bibeluebersetzung des
Mittelalters." Verlag von Hellmuth Wollermann in Braunschweig.]
It is a great privilege of the German nation that it received this
excellent Bible at the very beginning of the new era. The German
language is moulded by this Bible. In Luther's time the dialects still
prevailed. Luther's Bible had to be translated into the dialect of lower
Germany. The south of Germany and Switzerland had quite another dialect.
The Zuerich reformers, in 1529, published a Bible in this dialect,
translating from Luther's Bible as far as it existed at this time and
providing for the rest a translation of their own. It is unquestionably
due to Luther's Bible that the Germans have now one language for all
literary purposes. The German classic writers Herder, Wieland,
Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were all trained from their
childhood by the language of this Bible. Even now there is a remarkable
difference in style between authors of Protestant and of Roman Catholic
origin in Germany. In the easy and fluent language of the former we see
the influence of Luther and Goethe, whereas the latter often show a
certain stiffness and a greater number of provincialisms. The attempts
to translate the Bible independently of Luther have never succeeded in
gaining any large circulation, although there have been many such, not
only from the Roman Catholic side but also from Protestants. A famous
one is the so-called Berleburg Bible, by certain mystics, published in
1726-42 in eight volumes. In the nineteenth century scholars undertook
to give more scientific and more exact translations, but, valuable as
these may be for scholarly purposes, the German people will never
abandon its classic Bible. It is difficult even to introduce a revision.
There was a revision some twenty years ago, but in this Luther's text
was retouched and altered only at a very few points, most of the
corrections introduced by the revision committee being rather
restitutions of Luther's original renderings, which had been badly
"improved" by former printers. It is remarkable that even the printed
Bible never stands still, but is always changing, the printers acting as
the copyists did in former times. The copies of the revised text printed
at Stuttgart differ slightly from the copies printed at Halle and
Berlin, to mention three of the modern centres of German Bible printing.
Luther's translation was the signal for a general movement in this
direction. It is not so much translating the Bible into new
languages--only a few which had no Bible before were added to the list
given above--as rather the making of new translations in all languages
of the Christian world as far as this was influenced by the Reformation.
Of course some of these translations were inspired by humanism more than
by the spirit of the Reformation. The humanists abhorred the vulgarity
of the monkish Latin, and they extended their aversion to the official
Bible of the church, the Vulgate of Saint Jerome; therefore they tried
to translate the Bible into what they thought to be Ciceronian Latin,
and some of them translated this again into French or German. But most
of the translators were simply following Luther's model; nay, they used
Luther's translation even more than the original. King Christian III of
Denmark gave orders that the translators should follow Luther's version
as closely as possible. In this way the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedish,
the Finnish, the Lettish, and the Lithuanian Bibles were more or less
influenced by or even based upon Luther's.
It is different with the English and the French Bible. Wycliffe's
translation never had been printed. William Tindale, a pupil of Erasmus,
translated the New Testament and parts of the Old during his exile in
Germany and Holland, whither he had gone under Henry VIII because, as he
says, there was no place to translate the New Testament in all England.
Printed copies of them were brought to England, but most of them were
confiscated and destroyed. Once again the Bible was burned, but this
time by the Christian king in agreement with the bishops of the English
church; and with the Bible suffered many of its zealous readers. Tindale
himself died a martyr for his faith and his Bible in October, 1536, at
the hands of the imperial authorities in Flanders. But the work of Bible
translation went on, nevertheless, and Henry VIII was still on the
throne when the Bible gained the victory. Miles Coverdale, who had
undertaken another translation, issued the year before Tindale's death,
failed to get royal sanction for its publication, but the book was not
suppressed. John Rogers, a friend of Tindale's, the year after his
death, under the assumed name of Thomas Matthew, published a Bible,
chiefly made up from Tindale's and Coverdale's work. Through Crumwell's
mediation Cranmer secured the king's permission to sell this Bible in
the realm. But the convocation was not satisfied with it. It asked for
another translation, and therefore the so-called Great Bible was
published in 1539, Coverdale revising his former work under the
direction of Crumwell, Cranmer, and others. This Great Bible was ordered
by a royal warrant to be exhibited in all parish churches; copies were
fastened to the pulpits by means of chains, and the public was allowed
to read them "with discretion, honest intent, charity, reverence, quiet
behavior," as is said in the admonition published by Bishop Bonner. This
happened in the last years of Henry VIII. Under Queen Mary--bloody Mary,
as she was called--the printing of Bibles was stopped, but the exiles
who went to Geneva undertook a new revision, which was much more radical
and had the privilege of bearing an introductory letter by Calvin
himself. At the very moment of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, among other
prisoners (according to the expression of one of her courtiers) the four
evangelists and Saint Paul were released, having been long shut up in an
unknown tongue, as it were in prison. The Great Bible was revised by
some of the bishops under direction of Archbishop Parker, who did not
shrink from using improvements from the Geneva Bible. This Bishops'
Bible, published in 1568, was the official one, but the Geneva Bible was
far more popular, while the Roman Catholics made a translation of their
own, printed in France at Rheims and Douai. The rivalry between the
Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible was confusing. Therefore, in order
to overcome it, King James, in 1604, appointed a committee for the
revision of the Bible, consisting of about fifty members, and divided
into six groups, two of which met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge
respectively. They did excellent work, the result of which was published
in 1611 and is known as the Authorised Version. It is in this version
that the English translation attained its highest excellence. It is this
form which gained the largest circulation and the greatest popularity
among all English-speaking peoples. It still survives the recent attempt
at revision, which was made by an English and an American committee,
both working on the same principles and in constant communication with
one another. It is a well-known fact that the final corrections were
cabled from England to America in order to procure a simultaneous
publication on both sides of the Atlantic. Here again, as in the German
revision, the two issues are not identical. It marks, however, a clear
distinction between the German and the English Bible that the former
reached its final form at its very beginning, whereas the latter did not
achieve this result until a hundred years later. The Bible of Luther was
creative of the German language, as we have seen, while the English
Bible is rather a product of the period of highest literary culture in
England. Luther produced Goethe. Shakespeare (d. April 23, 1616) is
practically contemporaneous with the Authorised Version.
The development of the French Bible is still more slow and varied. There
was a pre-Reformation translation, printed several times, at Lyons and
at Paris; but it was of a purely mediaeval character. Then a humanist,
Jacques Lefevres d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis, d. 1536), undertook a new
French translation from the Vulgate. The first French Bible translated
from the original Hebrew and Greek was published in 1535 by Peter Robert
Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin. The author himself, and Calvin, and others
corrected and improved it from time to time, and nearly every twenty or
thirty years a new editor would try to revise it. In this series of
revisions one of the most successful was that of Frederic Ostervald of
Neuchatel, in 1744. But the process is still going on, French and Swiss
theologians vying one with another in fair competition. Moreover, the
Protestant translation found many rivals in the work of Roman Catholics,
especially in the great period of French literature in the reign of
Louis XIV. Some of these translators, for example Bossuet, aimed at
making the style of their translation as elegant as possible, while
others, under the influence of Port Royal, paraphrased the text with a
view rather to clearness. None of these versions had real success; none
has become final. France still suffers from the lack of a classic form
for its Bible.
The attitude of a nation toward its Bible is largely determined by the
development of the translation. It is obvious that the Germans hold to
Luther's Bible even more insistently than the English do to their
Authorised Version, and that in France there is an open field for every
fresh attempt at revising and translating. The nation has not become
united with its Bible, and, as regards language, the famous
"Dictionnaire de l'Academie," aiming at a standard of literary
uniformity, is but a poor and artificial substitute for the influence
exercised in a living and natural way by the Bible.
It is not our task here to trace the history of translations in Italy,
Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and elsewhere. It is to a large extent a
history of enthusiasm, devotion, and martyrdom, and at the same time of
failure and oppression. Wherever the so-called Counter-Reformation,
started by the Jesuits, gained hold of the people, the vernacular was
suppressed and the Bible kept from the laity. So eager were the Jesuits
to destroy the authority of the Bible--the paper pope of the
Protestants, as they contemptuously called it--that they even did not
refrain from criticising its genuineness and historical value.
To sum up: it was the Bible which trained printers and translators and
thereby made a noble contribution to modern civilisation and literature;
on the other hand, it was printing and translating which made it
possible for the Bible to become the popular book that ruled daily
life.
VII
THE BIBLE RULES DAILY LIFE (1550-1850)
The Reformation gave the Bible a new position--not that there had been
no Bible before, nor that the Bible had had no influence. We have seen
that there were numbers of Bibles, in Latin as well as in the
vernacular, and that the Bible had been one of the foundations of
mediaeval civilisation, yet it was only by Luther's translation and the
other versions made on his model that the Bible became a really popular
book, and it was only by the Reformation that the Bible was established
as the authority for daily life in a modern, that is, non-ascetic,
sense.
The two points insisted on by all the reformers were, first, that the
Bible is perspicuous, that is, that every reader can by himself find out
in his Bible what is essential for salvation; and, secondly, that the
Bible is sufficient. The Christian does not need anything else; the
Bible tells him everything which he requires--of course in its own
domain, religion, or, to use the language of that time, the "doctrine of
salvation." By the Reformation the Bible got rid of all its rivals,
such as tradition, Apocrypha, legend, canon law, and so on. It is
wonderful to see--and I doubt if modern Christianity has realised the
fact in all its importance--how by the preaching of the reformers all
these things, which hitherto had been thought of as integral parts of
Christianity, simply fell away. No cult of the saints, no adoration of
their images, no legends, no fancy, no merriment connected with
religion, but the pure Bible and the stern doctrine of it and the
austere attitude of Puritanism corresponding to it were now uppermost.
Nay, the letter of the Bible was binding in a stricter sense than it had
ever been before. Catholicism made it possible to mitigate the
strictness by allegorical interpretation; Protestantism insisted upon
taking the Bible in its literal sense. There was now no way of escape; a
man had to take whatever the Bible said or refuse the Bible altogether.
In principle the mystery had gone; the Bible was plain and made itself
understood.
It was the literal sense, as established by lexicon and grammar, which
was to be followed. This caused the reformers to encourage and
facilitate the study of the original languages of the Bible. When they
tried to improve the grammar-schools and to found as many new ones as
possible, it was not so much the humanistic delight in the classical
languages as the desire to secure a sure knowledge of Greek and Hebrew
which might enable a boy to read and to interpret the Bible. It is
evident from many utterances both of Luther and Calvin that their aim in
all their school work was to provide good preachers of the true gospel,
or good teachers of the genuine doctrine of the Bible.
To be sure, there are differences of character, both personal and
national, between the two great reformers, which account for a somewhat
different development of their churches. In Luther's piety the joyful
experience of salvation brings in a happy note; the children of God
praise his love and grace. In Calvin's devotion the feeling prevails
that God's majesty is above all creatures and that his holy will is the
supreme rule for our life. Religion with Luther is bright and cheerful,
whereas with Calvin it has a darker tinge. But both are building on the
same foundation and with the same end in view: from salvation to
salvation, from grace to grace. The difference is but one of attitude
toward the present life.
The difference finds its best expression in a varying use of the phrase
Word of God. Both, of course, believed in an historical revelation of
God to mankind, and they were convinced that this revelation was to be
found in the holy Scriptures. God had spoken through his prophets; he
had given his promises to his people; he had sent his Son and had
fulfilled his promises through him. All this was to be found in the
Bible and only in the Bible. The reformers refused the authority of
tradition, just as they declined to acknowledge the present individual
inspiration of enthusiasts, or "Schwarmgeister," as Luther
contemptuously called them. It was in the Bible that Christianity had to
look for all necessary information about God and salvation. And yet
Luther, when using the expression Word of God, scarcely thinks of the
written book. It is the living word as represented by the preaching of
the prophets and the apostles, and perpetuated by the preaching of the
ministers of the church. It is to him not a formal authority but an
energising inspiration. Not everything in the Bible is authoritative,
merely by the fact that it stands in the Bible; only what witnesses to
Christ is authoritative and is to be taken as the Word of God. On the
other hand, Zwingli and Calvin frequently use the term Word of God when
speaking of the holy Scriptures themselves. It is characteristic that
the reformed churches of Switzerland felt it their duty to fix the exact
number of writings included in this Word of God, just as the Roman
Catholic church did at the Council of Trent, while no Lutheran creed
ever defines the exact content of the Bible. To the former it was a book
of law, to the latter a book of inspiration.
Luther, owing to his familiarity with Saint Paul, understood that
Christianity had nothing to do with the Law; the whole notion of the Law
had to be dropped out from the field of religion. Law there must be in
the government of the state--it would not be necessary even there, if
all people were true Christians--but for the wicked there must be a law
and there must be punishment. The Christian's life, however, is not a
slave's obedience to injunctions but a child's glad doing of his
father's will; he knows what his father wants him to do and he does it
joyfully. Luther is especially interested in proving that Jesus'
teaching, in particular the Sermon on the Mount, does not exhibit an
ascetic law, but gives principles for the moral life of every Christian.
One need not enter a monastery in order to fulfil Christ's commandments.
It is in the tasks of the daily life that a Christian has to prove
himself a true disciple of Jesus. The Bible is to rule the daily life of
the Christian, but not in the sense of a law. When, in 1523, a preacher
at Weimar aimed to introduce the Mosaic law instead of the common law,
Luther treated him as a "Schwarmgeist," and, in fact, it was that
proposal which lay at the basis of all the "Schwarmgeisterei." Such
experiments, aiming to constitute a kingdom of the Saints on earth, as
the Anabaptists made at Muenster and elsewhere, always failed, and made
Luther and his friends suspicious of any such attempt.
It is different with Calvin. He is interested in realising the kingdom
of God in the Christian congregation, or, to put it more accurately, in
the commonwealth of Geneva, which is to him identical with the Christian
congregation of that place. So it is the commonwealth which is to be
ruled by the Bible, and the Bible in this role acts as a law to which
the whole community as well as the individual has to submit. And again
it is characteristic that Calvin takes the Bible as a unit. It is the
Old Testament law as well as the gospel which is to be regarded as the
indispensable rule both of public and private life. With the Calvinists
the ten commandments become an integral part of the regular Sunday
service.
Of course there are many gradations between these two positions.
Zwingli, the Zuerich reformer, was of a different type from Calvin, while
he was even more opposed to Luther than was the Genevan. Luther's rule
was to abolish whatsoever was contrary to the Bible. Zwingli would
permit only what was based upon or commanded by the Bible; he objected
to the use of an organ, to the keeping of festival days except Sunday,
and so on. Luther even tolerated pictures in the church. He was sure
that no one would adore them if pervaded by the true spirit of the
gospel, and he was convinced that this spirit could be successfully
inculcated by means of preaching. Zwingli and Calvin both did away with
all pictures in the churches. They had the walls whitewashed and the ten
commandments and other passages from the Bible painted on them. Nothing
is so characteristic of this difference between the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic feeling as the history of an epitaph in an East Prussian
church, the monument of the noble family of the earls of Dohna. At the
time of the Reformation they joined the Grand Master, later Duke,
Albrecht of Brandenburg in taking Luther's part. The epitaph, which was
erected in the church of Mohrungen on the death of Earl Peter in 1553,
was decorated with a picture showing the holy Trinity adored by the
family of the donor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the
family went over to Calvinism, and the painting was altered by covering
the image of the holy Trinity with black varnish and putting over it
some Bible verses in gold letters.
The different attitude toward the Bible finds its expression also in the
fact that the Lutherans used hymns, whereas the Calvinists adhered to
the Biblical Psalter. Of course the vigorous songs composed by Luther
are most of them based upon Psalms and other Biblical passages, and so
were the greater number of hymns in the Lutheran church. On the other
hand, the Calvinists did not agree with the English church in taking
over the alternative recitation of the Psalter from the mediaeval
exercises of the monasteries and large cathedral choirs. They used the
Psalter in a rhythmical paraphrase adapted to modern singing, but
keeping so near to the wording of the Psalms that they even called it
the Psalm-book. The difference was, in fact, slight, but they felt it to
be essential. The Lutherans followed the usage of the church, the
Calvinists the very word of the Bible. It is remarkable, however, that
hymns gradually gained more importance among the Calvinists, especially
since the time of the eighteenth-century revivals, and that nowadays the
hymn-book, enriched by the contributions of recent time from poets of
all denominations, is in favour with all Protestants and in some circles
is even in danger of becoming a substitute for the Bible.