Battle for the Bible ~ Background | Secrets of the Dead | PBS (2024)

Today, speakers of English take for granted many phrases from the King James Bible — from “let there be light” to the word “scapegoat” — that were the work of an intrepid 16th-century translator who met not with acclaim but with years of exile, and eventually lost his life.

But this translator, William Tyndale — who was burned at the stake on October 6, 1536 — was no lone renegade. Rather, he was a pivotal transitional figure, his work a step toward bringing direct experience of the Bible to a reading public.

The film BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE explores the lives and lasting influence of three major figures in the translation and propagation of the English Bible: the 14th-century theologian, politician, and reformer John Wycliffe; Tyndale; and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and advisor to the king through the period that saw the split with Rome and the creation of the Anglican Church.

The translation of the Bible into the vulgar — the language of everyday people — was a key element in the series of reforms within the Catholic Church that eventually resulted in what we know as the Protestant Reformation.

In the 14th century, the Roman Catholic Church was Western Europe’s undisputed religious authority; and its central rituals — the Mass and Communion — the only legitimate pathway to salvation. The pope and the clergy held enormous power, and secular authorities looked to the Church for legitimation. Key to the Church’s power was the fact that its rituals were conducted in Latin, a language inaccessible to the uneducated faithful. The public was completely dependent on the priesthood for access to salvation — only through mysterious rituals conducted in an unfamiliar tongue could they conduct their spiritual lives.

John Wycliffe, born around 1320, was a prominent theologian at Oxford University and a leading ecclesiastical politician in the dark period of English history following the decimation of Europe’s population by the Black Plague. He became convinced through his own scholarship that Scripture itself, rather than the Mass, should be seen as the source of Christian authority.

Wycliffe’s notion that the Bible should be translated into the common tongue for the edification of all believers was a radical innovation, and one that spawned a movement. Working outside of the Church, translators eventually produced perhaps hundreds of so-called “Wycliffe Bibles,” translated and hand-copied from the Latin. It is not clear that Wycliffe himself produced any translations into English, so they are more properly known as “Wycliffite” Bibles.

With or without Wycliffe’s active involvement, the English Bible became part of an underground movement that became known as Lollardy and continued to spread after Wycliffe’s death in 1384. It worried Church authorities enough that by 1407 the English translation was denounced as unauthorized, and translating or using translated Bibles was defined as heresy — a crime for which the punishment was death by burning. In 1415 Wycliffe himself was denounced, posthumously, as a heretic. His body was exhumed and burned in 1428. Wycliffite Bibles, even after the ban, were produced in great numbers, and the 250 or so that now remain are the largest surviving body of medieval English texts. But the time was not yet right for the Bible to exist publicly in the common tongue.

Over the next century, however, life in England and in Europe would change radically. As the Renaissance got under way on the Continent, scholars began to rediscover Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of Scripture, and their work would spark a new series of translations even as the propagation of the printing press made possible the mass-production of books.

Perhaps the most influential publication of the early 16th century was the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus’s 1515 edition of the Greek New Testament, which included a new Latin translation. The translation — which was printed and circulated widely among educated Christians across Europe — made possible Martin Luther’s 1522 publication of a new translation into German, which became perhaps the key text in the Reformation.

In England, William Tyndale, who was Luther’s contemporary, set about creating an authoritative English translation of the Bible from the original texts. Tyndale worked in a harsher political environment than Luther faced on the Continent (the German authorities did not censure the reformers, while Tyndale clashed with and was reprimanded by English Catholic leaders) and eventually left England for Europe, most likely Germany, in 1524 in order to continue his work.

The version of the Bible that Tyndale completed in exile became one of the most influential works of literature in the English language, full of phrases that entered the popular lexicon and defined what we know as the voice of the scriptures. His translation was at once a major work of creative poetry and a radical reinterpretation of the sacred texts, challenging by interpretation the authority of the Catholic hierarchy, redefining “priests” as “elders” and the “Church” as a “congregation.”

In 1526 Tyndale published his New Testament in a portable edition. First published in Cologne and Worms, and eventually smuggled into England in large numbers from Antwerp (where Tyndale found refuge during the late 1520s), it became a best-seller, popularized by itinerant preachers who recited Tyndale’s words despite the fact that they risked burning at the stake.

In 1535, the authorities finally caught up with Tyndale; he was imprisoned for more than a year in Brussels before being burned at the stake (given his popularity, he was mercifully strangled before the flames were lit). His words had taken root in England, but it would take a political upheaval to bring the Bible to the English people.

Ironically enough, that transformation came even as Tyndale languished in prison. In 1534, Henry VIII, without male heirs and unable to obtain a divorce from the pope so as to marry again, finally resorted to the bold step of assuming control of the English Church. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, became the architect of the new church doctrine – and, heavily influenced by Luther, he envisioned a very different English Church, which would include some of the ideas pioneered by the German Reformation.

For Cranmer, distribution of an English Bible was key to establishing a reformist church in his country. He issued an English Bible, printed in Antwerp — though known popularly as the “Matthew Bible,” it combined Tyndale’s New Testament with elements of an Old Testament translation done by Myles Coverdale — and followed that with an official English Bible and, under Edward VI’s reign, an English liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer.

The birth of the English church was not easy. A period of religious conflict ensued, and the church that began to emerge, though it included English-language texts, preserved the hierarchy of the Catholic Church — it remained an episcopal church, administered by bishops.

In fact, Catholics came back to power under Edward’s sister Mary, and in 1556, Cranmer, like Tyndale before him, was burned at the stake. But as England swung between Catholicism and Anglicanism, the idea of a Bible in the common tongue had taken hold. It flourished in multiple versions. The Geneva Bible (the choice of the growing Puritan movement, which sought a return to a purist, poor church modeled after that of the time of Christ), the Doway Catholic English Bible, and the official Anglican Bishop’s Bible fought for the minds and spirits of English citizens.

King James of Scotland, who came to power in 1603, called the Hampton Court Conference in order to work out a compromise with English Puritans and to unite the feuding religious factions. The outcome was the commissioning of a new authorized version of the Bible (published in 1611) that would satisfy all parties; the version became known as the King James Bible. Much of the language used hearkens back to Tyndale’s translation. This new Bible made Tyndale’s words central to Protestantism in the English-speaking world thereafter.

Those Puritans who were not satisfied with the compromise (they accepted the new translation, but could not accept the structure of the Anglican Church) left England, settling in the American colonies but bringing with them the King James version of the Bible. Its language — and with it the words and ideas of Wycliffe, Tyndale, Cranmer, and the other pioneering translators of Scripture — would be woven into the fabric of the new nation.