Thus far.
PART 1: BEFORE PRINTING: (1) Bible in Britain to AD 850, (2) Anglo-Saxon Bibles, (3) Wycliff (“Lollard”) Bibles and (4) Anglo-Italian repressions—14th-15th centuries.
PART 2: AFTER PRINTING: (1) Erasmus’ Greek NT and those proliferating “pestiferous” and “poisonous” vernaculars that induce “heresy,” (2) the English Reformation (3) William Tyndale, the “arch-heretic,” (4) Continued Anglo-Italian opposition from Henry VIII, Parliament, Canterbury, London and elsewhere despite the growingly influential reformist movement, and (5) Coverdale’s Bible, 1535.
Here at Chapter 11: Coverdale’s Bible, 1535, pages 173-189, our notes on Prof. Daniell’s comments with interpolated musings.
1000s of copies of Tyndale’s NT had an “eager reception” and the “mood was changing.” The Anglo-Italian bishops were “seriously alarmed” (173). “Heresy was abroad and spreading” being conducted by a “gang of organized, professional malcontents…plotting outside England…using the latest technology” (173). Stephen Gardiner, Winchester, wrote in 1546, “…each man with an English Bible to be a church alone.” Or, Richard Nix of Norwich, complaining of the NT readers, “…if they continue any time I think they shall undo us all” (173). Vernacular Bibles—verboten.
Yet, Foxe reprinted a 1531 note by Tyndale that couldn’t be starker or more vivid in contrast to the Anglo-Italian policy:
“Of these foresaid authorities it is proved lawful, that both men and women lawfully may read and write God’s law in their mother-tongue, and they that forfend [= avert, keep away, prevent as cautionary measures] this…they show themselves…the very disciples of Antichrist…in stopping and perverting of God’s law…” (170).
Christ v. Antichrist? Both sides believed they were on Christ’s side and the other side, well, as for Tyndale, from the Anglo-Italian viewpoint, he was a “son of perdition” meriting the purgative flames. Rome won the battle but lost—big time—in the war. Before the funeral-pyres in 1536, however, Tyndale returns the attribution: the Anglo-Italian bishops are “disciples of Antichrist.” Strong stuff! GAME ON!
In Chapter 10, we noted Cranmer’s effort for the “Bishops’ Bishop,” 1534. He met with stonewalling and, in one instance (Stokesley of London), an outright and in-your-face rebuttal. They were busy, you know, with other things. It reminds us of Tunstall’s famed claim in 1524ish that there “was no room in the palace [=Lambeth] for a Bible translation.” No room at the Bethlehem Inn for Jesus.
By 1542, Richard Grafton wrote to Cromwell about the alleged promise by the bishops to produce a corrected version of Tyndale. (We also cited Cranmer’s letter of resignation in 1537 to Cromwell that he expected action from the Bishops a day after doomsday.) Grafton writes, “…it is now seven years, since the Bishops promised to translate and set forth the Bible, and as of yet they have no leisure” (173). The Anglo-Italian bishops were going nowhere fast and they liked it that way. If they had their way, they would put it in reverse. But the printing juggernaut was still rolling...hot and productive presses including Coverdale’s 1535 Bible, the first Bible in its entirety in English.
THE FIRST COMPLETE PRINTED BIBLE IN ENGLISH, 174.
Coverdale labored abroad. His Bible was the first complete Bible in English. It contained the OT, NT and, in between, the Apocrypha. It had 2 columns, light annotations, and 150 illustrations. It became the “head” of a stream—no, a flood—of versions to come in the 16th and 17th centuries…into the Great Bible of 1539, the Genevan versions, the Bishops’ Bible, and the KJV.
The second half of the OT was Coverdale’s, the books that Tyndale had not completed. Remember, Tyndale was arrested in spring 1535. He was in jail until his death by burning on 6 OCT 1536. Fortunately, the OT workups had been in John Roger’s hands while the Imperialists arrested Tyndale and confiscated Tyndale’s property, books and papers in Antwerp. The relationship between what Rogers held and what Coverdale produced is not entirely clear. But, Coverdale presses forward. While Tyndale was in jail, the first English Bible was rolling off the presses in 1535. So far as we know, he never saw a Coverdale Bible.
THE TITLE PAGE, 174-176
The Coverdale Bible was big, weighty, in folio-form and with black letters. Tyndale’s NTs as well as books had been pocket-size, handy and portable—and easy to smuggle into ports and hide in bales of hay. This volume, however, was big.
The title page carried an iconic picture by Hans Holbein. It featured Henry VIII as a “powerful Reformation monarch” (175), precisely what he was not. Henry was a 2.0 version of Anglicanism—Anglo-Italianism but without a Pope.
We have 5 versions for the 16th century Church of England:
• 1.0 version = Anglo-Italian with a Pope (Henrician),
• 2.0 version = Anglo-Italian without a Pope but undergoing changes that give rise to the 3.0 version (Henrician),
• 3.0 version = Anglo-Reformational and Reformed (Edwardian-Cranmerian),
• 4.0 version = Anglo-Italian with a Pope Again, a reiteration of 1.0 (Marian), and
• 5.0 = Anglo-Reformational (Elizabethan).
Henry may have tossed the Pope, but he was still an Anglo-Italian on other essentials of Rome like many neo-Anglo-Italian Tractarians of the 19th century.
But, this iconic title page may have represented some hopeful wishing. Or, perhaps flattery. Or, perhaps, an effort at persuasion. It would have played to Henry’s England-sized ego of about 58,000 square miles. And, later, similar appeals to Elizabeth’s and James’s egos and sense of royalist entitlement, features of Tudor and Stuart kings.
COVERDALE’S EARLIER LIFE, 176-178
He was born in York, c. 1488. He was Cranmer’s junior by five years and Tyndale’s senior by six years. He was ordained in Norwich. He became an Augustinian friar and went to the Augustinian house at Cambridge [obviously they didn’t teach the friars Greek and Hebrew, because Coverdale never learned them…he was no Tyndale].
Coverdale came under the influence of Robert Barnes (later burned). Barnes “read openly in the house Paul’s Epistles” (176). Coverdale was “converted wholly unto Christ.” (Also, of note, Coverdale did take a degree from Cambridge.) Barnes preached in London, Christmas Eve, 1525. He was arrested by Wolsey, an Anglo-Italian Cardinal. Coverdale heard the sermon and participated in Barnes’ defense.
Clearly, Coverdale was, without changes, headed for conflict with the Anglo-Italians.
As for the overview for Coverdale’s life, John Bale, the English historian, wrote 20 years after Coverdale’s life at Cambridge:
“Under the mastership of Robert Barnes he drank in good learning with a burning thirst. He was a young man of friendly and upright nature and a very gentle spirit, and when the church of England revived, he was one of the first to make a pure profession of Christ…; he gave himself wholly to propagating the truth of Jesus Christ’s gospel and manifesting his glory…the spirit [sic] of God…is in some a vehement wind, overturning mountains and rocks, but in him it is a still small voice comforting wavering hearts. His style is charming and gentle, flowing limpidly along: it moves and instructs and delights” (177).
In 1527, he appears to still be in England. He writes Cromwell that he wants more books oriented to Scriptures. New winds were blowing in the universities; as previously noted, the English Reformation was initially powered by university men along with the recovery of the Scriptures. Coverdale reflects that shift. Tyndale, 1528, writing from the Continent, Obedience of the Christian Man, gave his scathing remarks about the absence of Biblical studies in the theological curricula at Oxford “without even a glimpse of even a word of Scripture” (reflecting his experience 10 years before Coverdale’s).
1528 is not clear. He preached a sermon in Lent, 1528, “in the habit of a secular priest” (meaning he had left the Augustinian house), and preached against transubstantiation, image-worship and auricular confession. By 1528, he also fled overseas. He’s 40 years old at this point, a mature man; Cranmer is 45.
1528—1535. The events are not clear, but he was on the Continent, away from the persecutions of Anglo-Romanists. Foxe in his Acts and Monuments puts him in Hamburg, 1529, at Tyndale’s invitation to assist his work on the Pentateuch.
During this period, we get Foxe’s rehearsal of Tyndale’s shipwreck off the coast of Holland in transit from Hamburg to Antwerp. He lost all his academic work, but not his life. Tyndale had to start over with the Pentateuch.
COVERDALE IN ANTWERP, 179-181
Coverdale is in Antwerp in the first part of the 1530s. Tyndale had been in or around Antwerp from 1528ish to 1535. Martin de Keyser was his printer in a city full of successful printers. On 1 street, there were 60 printers. Fine Dutch and French Bibles were being produced. So was Tyndale’s NTs and books. After Tyndale’s demise, Coverdale’s 1535 Bible, Antwerp is the city whence John Roger’s made the “Thomas Matthew’s Bible” in 1537. The latter was a renaming of the Tyndale-Coverdale work—they were heretics, so an innocuous title, “Thomas Matthew’s Bible” (after two NT disciples) was picked.
Coverdale’s Bible, 1535, was definitely printed in Antwerp. Tyndale was arrested and in jail by spring 1535. Coverdale, apparently, was also doing work as a “proof-reader” as well.
The whole Bible was printed 4 OCT 1535 while Tyndale languished in the Vilvoorde prison, outside Brussels.
The whole Bible in English. This is what all the European reformers advocated. “All the reformers across Europe, insisted that the Scriptures should be taken whole, not in measured droplets” (180). They were not cherry-pickers.
While this went to press, one must not lose sight of the on-going prints of the English NT. It was dominating the markets. Between 1537 and 1540, notwithstanding all the opposition from the Anglo-Italians on the home turf, the NT was printed 9 times by 3 different printers. Henry and his bishops could stomp their feet as much as they liked. They were being purchased and read on the home turf.
The ethos and spirit of the entire movement was summarized by Coverdale in his dedicatory epistle:
“Go to now, most dear reader, and sit thee down at the Lord’s feet and read his words, and…take them into thine heart, and let thy talking and communication be of them when thou sittest in thy house, or goest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up…in whom [God] if thou put thy trust, and be an unfeigned reader or heart of his word with thy heart, thou shalt find sweetness therein and spy wondrous things to thy understanding, to the avoiding of all seditious sects, to the abhorring of thy old sinful life, and to the establishing of thy godly conversations” (188).
Martin Holt Dotterweich commented on Coverdale’s new annotations in the 1537 NT (again, printed abroad and imported to England):
“While Tyndale and Rogers [in Matthew’s Bible] especially have been accused of writing polemical notes, a reading of their margins displays few such annotations; rather, the notes consist primarily of lexical explanations or comparison of a difficult passage to others which explain it, albeit with an identifiably Protestant slant. The same is entirely true of Coverdale…[who] took about half his notes from Luther’s 1536 Bible, usually translating them straight into English…The other half are difficult to identify, and many probably come from Coverdale’s own hand as he attempted to anticipate the points over which his readers might stumble” (189).
It seems like Henry VIII was channeling the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s persistent obtuseness. The Babylonian king learned of God’s sovereignty amongst men and nations, to wit, that no one can stop or stay God’s hand. Nebster had to learn the hard way.
Daniel 4.34-35: “And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation: and all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?”
The Anglo-Italians had issued their views, books and proclamations, including old Henry.
God plans were different. God's, of course, prevailed.
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