Providence and Preservation The different methods and modes of divine providence help us better understand God’s role in the Bible’s preservation. Richard BrashChristians believe that all Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). But what has God done to preserve his written word? In particular, what is the relationship between God’s work of preservation and the work of sometimes sleepy scribes, whose pens might slip, and whose parchments might disintegrate? The concept of “providence” can help us here. What does it mean to say that God has preserved the text of Scripture “providentially”? And what degree of textual preservation does a biblical assessment of the work of providence give us reason to expect? What is providence and how does it work? “Providence” is not itself a word found in the Bible. But it is a theological term that sums up Scripture’s teaching about one particular work of God. This work includes the biblical concepts of God’s purpose (prothesis, πρόθεσις), foreknowledge (prognōsis, πρόγνωσις), and predestination (proorismos, προορισμός). The word “providence” itself (which has the etymology of pre-seeing) is sometimes linked to the introduction of God as “Jehovah Jireh” or “the Lord who sees/provides” in Genesis 22:14. The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas defined providence as God’s ordering of all things towards their end. He further distinguished two parts to this “ordering”: (1) God’s eternal arrangement of all things, and (2) his temporal execution of that order by means of his government of the universe (Summa Theologica, I.22.1). After the Reformation, many Protestant theologians basically accepted Aquinas’s definition, commonly discerning three elements of God’s work of providence in the world: preservation, concurrence (i.e., co-operation with secondary causes), and government. It’s important to notice that providence encompasses all things: in the most basic sense, if something is (or happens), it is (or happens) providentially. Two methods of providence Can we be any more specific? Here we may introduce two useful distinctions, which are frequently misunderstood or confused. Theologians distinguish first between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” providence. This distinction is about the method of providence. “Ordinary” providence perhaps sounds boring, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate something humdrum: the term comes from the Latin ordinarius, which means “according to rule.” In this case the “rule” is God’s own, which we find established in the divinely given laws of nature. In his ordinary providence God works through and according to creaturely means. For example, your birth was hardly a boring or everyday event, but it was very much part of ordinary providence. Your birth was hardly a boring or everyday event, but it was very much part of ordinary providence. Extraordinary providence, on the other hand, is outside, above, or against regular, creaturely means. We see this in the biblical miracles. When Jesus walks on water, that is outside or beyond God’s normal way of ruling over the physics of water. The really key thing to remember is that, whether God’s providence is ordinary or extraordinary, it does not change the fact that God is always working, and his work is always praiseworthy. All God’s works praise him, and should lead us to bless his name (Ps. 145:10). Two modes of providence A second distinction (found, for example, in the Westminster Confession of Faith, 5:7) is sometimes made between “general” and “special” providence. This distinction is about the mode or object of providence. General providence is about God’s work with respect to all things. Special providence, on the other hand, is particularly applied to God’s care for his church. By extension, it could reasonably apply to God’s particular plan and purposes for the lives of individual believers. When Christians say, “That was providential!” we are often referring to God’s special providence. Two important points need to be made about these distinctions before we consider how they might apply to the text of Scripture. First, we must be careful not to confuse these categories, as the mode does not in itself determine whether or not God makes use of means. “Ordinary” providence is not necessarily “general” providence, just as “extraordinary” providence is not necessarily “special” providence. One way to see this is to closely compare Psalm 104 with Psalm 105. If Psalm 104 is a psalm about general providence (“preservation” of the world), Psalm 105 focuses on special providence (“preservation” of God’s people). Yet both psalms are full of examples of both ordinary and extraordinary providence. Whether by miracle or by various “means,” both psalms celebrate the wonderful works of God! Second, the Bible gives us cause to be cautious about determining exactly where special providence is operative and what it should look like. It is often a good deal messier than we might prefer: look at the history of God’s people! Believers are encouraged to acquiesce—and even to rejoice—in God’s loving working of all things for our good (Rom. 8:28), rather than to presume access to the divine counsel in respect of the details, many of which are hidden from us (Deut. 29:29). This explains why our judgments about precisely how God is at work can be quite wrong. We simply don’t share God’s view of all things to know how he is working in the midst of so many details. What has all this got to do with the preservation of the Bible? I suggest that there are indications in Scripture itself that God has preserved the text of the Bible according to his ordinary providence, in a combination of special and general modes. This indicates a more complex picture of providential preservation than is sometimes allowed. Providence and preservation The Bible’s own teaching about God’s written revelation leads us to expect, at the very least, adequate or sufficient preservation of the autographic or original texts. Adequate to what? Here the answer depends on stated ends and purposes. Scripture is principally for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15–17). It is inconceivable, on biblical presuppositions, that God would allow his written word to be so lost or corrupted that his saving purposes might fail. God’s providence ensures this. But this is only a minimum. Other biblical evidence indicates that we should expect extremely accurate preservation of the text. (Etymologically, “accuracy” refers to the property of having been taken care of, in this case primarily by God himself.) The biblical writers, along with Jesus himself, cite copies of Scripture with the authority of the divine voice. Both testaments, in claiming the relevance of past written revelation for new generations, acknowledge the ongoing authority of Scripture as it is mediated through copies (Isa. 8:16; Rom. 15:4). Since God’s word “stands forever” (Isa. 40:8; 1 Pet. 1:25) we should expect his canonical, written word also to be preserved for us. In a famous passage, Jesus teaches that “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). This likely points to the work of special providence. However, the verse does not tell us exactly where the words of the Law are to be found, nor does it promise perfect and immediate access to those words for every believer. How, then, is providential preservation achieved? Dr. Brash’s book on preservation First, let’s consider the category of extraordinary providence, or miracle. At various times in church history, it has been popular to apply this category to the preservation of the biblical text, as I describe in chapter two of my book on preservation. It is not a priori impossible that God should have used miracles to preserve his written word. But the Bible does not give us any examples of miraculous preservation or copying of texts, except perhaps Exodus 34:1. Rather, the few biblical references to making copies of texts (such as Deut. 17:18 and Jer. 36:32) seem to indicate the meticulous but still mundane process of transcribing by ordinary means. Preservation as a work of ordinary providence implies that scribal error or willful corruption of the text are realities. The real possibility of deliberate changes to the text explains the need for biblical warnings not to add to or subtract from the word (Deut. 4:2; Rev. 22:18–19), just as reference to “the lying pen of the scribes” (Jer. 8:8) indicates that some copyists felt free to corrupt the written word to their own advantage, even during the Old Testament period. Jesus’ correction of the faulty assumptions contained in the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch is another biblical example of deliberate textual changes being implicitly recognized and criticized (John 4:20–22). It is likely that one reason why the Levitical priests were to be on hand while Israel’s kings copied the law was to prevent either deliberate changes or errors in copying. The biblical evidence thus suggests that accurate copies of Scripture are to be distinguished from inaccurate ones. Recognizing providence But how is this identification to be made, and by whom? At this point, the distinction between general and special providence becomes helpful. From Scripture itself, we can acknowledge clear examples of special (albeit ordinary) providence at work in the preservation of the biblical text. The involvement of the priests in approving copies (mentioned above) is one. Another is the divinely ordained requirement to keep the Book of the Law by the ark of the covenant in the tabernacle (Deut. 31:26). In much of the Old Testament period, then, we find providential preservation of Scripture closely tied to God’s providential preservation and government of his people and their ordained leadership. This is akin to special providence. It is unwise to tether our doctrine of providential preservation to a particular “approved” manuscript or manuscript tradition. In the New Testament era, the picture is more complicated. The church is called to be “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15) and part of this calling is surely to take care of the text of the Bible. God’s providential preservation of his people is still tied closely to the providential preservation of his written word. It is therefore reasonable to identify the process of canonization as an instance of special providence. But just as it can be spiritually dangerous to attempt to define the precise contours of special providence in our own lives, or even with respect to the preservation of the church, it is unwise to tether our doctrine of providential preservation to a particular “approved” manuscript or manuscript tradition. The Bible does not give the church today the authority to do this. We cannot always tell where general providence ends and special providence begins, and this is all the more true outside the church. Unbelieving Jewish scholars helped preserve the Old Testament text for some centuries after Christ, and God certainly used their work. We therefore have no reason to exclude the work of general providence in the copying of, preservation of, and even discernment between, the manuscripts that lie behind our translated Bibles today. Conclusion In conclusion, God has preserved his written word by his singular care and providence, with great accuracy and in great purity. Despite its complexities, preservation by ordinary providence in both special and general modes (though we cannot always discern the difference between these two) seems to be the best theological account of providential preservation based on the biblical data.
The Extraordinary Hebrew Text behind Your English Bible The Masoretic Text is the fruit of the genius of Jewish textual scholars who codified the pronunciation of the Hebrew text. Kim PhillipsMost of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew (with a little Aramaic, mainly in Ezra and Daniel). The New Testament, on the other hand, was written in Greek. When you read your Bible in one of the modern English translations, that translation will have been made directly from editions based on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament. These Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament are usually referred to (slightly confusingly) as “Hebrew Bible” manuscripts. In this article we are talking about one very special type of Hebrew Bible manuscript: Masoretic Bible manuscripts (which contain the Masoretic Text). But before we zoom in and focus on those, let’s get a rough idea of the spread (throughout time) of all the various kinds of Hebrew Bible manuscripts. Bible Manuscripts through the Ages The absolute earliest little bit of Hebrew Bible currently known comes all the way back from the 7th–6th century BC. In a graveyard in Jerusalem, at a place called Ketef Hinnom, two amulets were found, made from tiny rolls of silver. On one of those rolls was part of the prayer from Numbers 6 referred to as the Priestly Blessing. The amulets from Ketef Hinnom are the earliest portion of the Hebrew Bible. Source The Ketef Hinnom amulets are (according to the current state of our knowledge) quite exceptionally early, but they only preserve a few sentences of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The earliest substantial collection of Hebrew Bible manuscripts currently available is of course the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to many other texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain thousands of fragments from over 200 biblical scrolls, written mainly in Hebrew. These date from roughly the mid-third century BC, through to the end of the first century AD. Many of these fragments are tiny, containing only a few letters, while others are far more complete—the famous Great Isaiah Scroll figuring prominently as the most complete biblical scroll from Qumran. Related Solomon Schechter studying the thousands of manuscripts discovered in the Cairo Geniza around 1898. Image reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Source Four Ways Scholars Date Early Hebrew Bible ManuscriptsScholars use multiple methods to date the earliest copies of the Old Testament. At their best, they yield a range of fifty years. Drew Longacre So, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with our earliest large-scale collection of Hebrew Bible manuscripts—an explosion of textual data, from the centuries immediately before and after the death and resurrection of Jesus. They are a resource of unimaginable significance, though not without their limitations. Most obviously: the great majority of the scrolls are highly fragmentary. Of the 915 verses in the book of Proverbs, for example, the Scrolls preserve only fragments from 48 verses—many of which are represented by only a few extant letters. Sadly, after the Dead Sea Scrolls, the trail goes cold in our hunt for Hebrew Bible manuscripts. Sadly, after the Dead Sea Scrolls, the trail goes cold in our hunt for Hebrew Bible manuscripts (though manuscripts containing translations of the Bible into Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, and other languages, have survived in relative profusion). For the next seven or eight hundred years we have only a handful of Hebrew Bible manuscript remains. Scrolls of the Hebrew Bible must have continued to be produced and used, but very few traces of them survive. The few scroll fragments we do have from towards the end of this dark period have only survived by dint of the fact that they were stored away for burial (according to Jewish practice then and now), but, by happy providence, never received that burial. This dark period comes to an end around the year 900. Many fragments of Hebrew Bible manuscripts have survived from between AD 900 and AD 1000, as well as a handful of larger, more complete manuscripts. A great many Hebrew Bible manuscripts—some very complete and beautifully produced—survive from the eleventh century onwards. Many of these are currently housed in libraries in Cambridge, Oxford, London, St. Petersburg, and other European cities. According to our current state of knowledge, the earliest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript (containing all the books of the Old Testament in one volume) still fully preserved today, dates from the year 1008. It is called the Leningrad Codex. We will come back to it later. From our earliest evidence onwards, the text of the Hebrew Bible was copied onto scrolls (hence Dead Sea Scrolls). From antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and right up to the present day, Jewish ritual requires that the biblical text read in the synagogue must be read from a scroll, rather than any other format of book (remember Jesus reads from a scroll in Luke 4:16–20). Nonetheless, from about AD 900 onwards, a new—and immensely significant—type of Hebrew Bible manuscript appears on the scene, quite different to these scrolls: the Masoretic manuscript. Masoretic Bible Manuscripts Let’s compare (just at the visual level for now) this new type of Hebrew Bible manuscript—the Masoretic manuscript—with the more traditional Hebrew Bible scroll. The contribution of the Masoretes can be seen by comparing Codex Leningrad (left) with Taylor-Schechter NS 1.3 (middle) and the Great Isaiah Scroll (right). Images from Sefaria, Cambridge University Library, and Wikipedia. Taylor-Schechter image reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. On the left is a typical page from a masoretic manuscript (the Leningrad Codex, written in AD 1008). The middle images show part of a scroll of Genesis, from around AD 900, while the images on the right are part of the Great Isaiah Scroll, from about 100 BC. The Genesis scroll and the Isaiah scroll are thus separated in time by about 1000 years, but apart from the parchment color and script style they are quite similar—certainly when compared with the masoretic manuscript. The masoretic manuscript, unlike the scrolls, contains long notes in the top and bottom margins, and little notes squeezed between the columns of the biblical text. Looking more closely at the text itself: the masoretic text appears to have all sorts of dots, lines and circles above, below, and within the main letters, which are totally absent from the text in the two scrolls. Another dramatic difference between the masoretic manuscripts and the scrolls, which is harder to see from the images above, is that the masoretic manuscripts are not scrolls; they are codices (i.e., they look and work like the books we are used to). What is the meaning of all this innovation in the masoretic manuscripts, after well over 1000 years of conservatism? What are the dots, lines and circles all about, and what are those marginal notes? To answer all these questions, we need to take a sidestep and consider the nature of the Hebrew language, and think more carefully about how the text of the Hebrew Bible was transmitted from well before the time of Jesus, to the “masoretic era.” Hebrew as a Consonantal Language Ancient Hebrew, like many Semitic Languages, was a consonantal language. This just means that when it was written down, only the consonants of any given word were recorded; most of the vowels were unwritten (though, over time, four particular consonants began to be introduced to indicate some of the vowels). In addition, there was little to no punctuation in the earliest written forms of the language. So, for example, the phrase “the king’s word” would be written with the following consonants: דבר המלך. Or, in English transliteration: dbr hmlk. This aspect of the written form of the language means that, frequently, a given word or phrase can be interpreted in multiple ways. So, for example, the phrase above could be read as intended: “the king’s word,” but it could also be read as: “the king spoke,” “speak, O king!,” “speak! Appoint a king!,” or even: “Plague was enthroned as king”! Of course, context is almost always sufficient to clarify such ambiguities. Imagine if my wife gave me a heart-shaped card on Valentine’s Day, with the following text: “wll lv y fr vr”. The context would justify my reading this as “I will love you forever!” rather than the theoretically possible alternative: “I will leave you for Ivor!” Context is a wonderful thing: I feel loved and appreciated, and Ivor gets to keep his front teeth. Nonetheless, even in context, some ambiguities remain—occasionally theologically significant ambiguities. For an example, we need look no further than the very opening words of the Hebrew Bible: בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך על־פני תהוםBr’shyt br’ ’lhym ’t hshmym v’t h’rts vh’rts hyth thv vbhv vkhshkh ‘l pny thvm. By applying one set of vowels and pauses to this consonantal, unpunctuated text, this sentence could be read as: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. But by applying a different set of vowels and pauses, the same string of consonants could be read rather differently: When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void, and there was darkness over the face of the deep. Even in cases like this, however, the threat of ambiguity is more theoretical than actual. From the earliest stages of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible, the text was read out loud, not just stared at mutely (remember Nehemiah 8 and Acts 15:21: “For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath”). Reading the text out loud obviously required the proper vowels, and the proper pauses, to be added in the correct places, thereby annulling the great majority of these potential ambiguities. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: There is a great deal of evidence that from a very early stage, a traditional way of reading the bald consonantal text was developed: a Reading Tradition. The reading tradition clothed the consonantal text in all the vowels and pauses necessary for the correct understanding of the written consonants. This reading tradition was then passed on, orally, from generation to generation, just as the written, consonantal, text, was copied from generation to generation. In other words, when we conceptualize how the text of the Hebrew Bible was handed down from well before the time of Jesus, to the Middle Ages, we must envision two simultaneous strands to that transmission: one written (the consonantal text), and one oral (the correct reading of the consonantal text). The reading tradition clothed the consonantal text in all the vowels and pauses necessary for the correct understanding. The Masoretes and the Masoretic Text Now we are ready to return to those innovative Masoretic manuscripts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century AD, and the concomitant increase in written documentation in the following centuries, there was a general cultural tendency in the Middle East towards increasing “textualization.” During this period, traditions that had previously been preserved orally, were increasingly written down. This move towards textualization was, naturally, felt by the Jewish communities living in the Middle East. In 7th century Tiberias, in the north of the land of Israel, there arose a group of scholars whose particular expertise lay in the accurate preservation of both the written and the oral strands of the Hebrew biblical text. These scholars—The Masoretes (“transmitters of tradition”)—had themselves received the oral tradition regarding the accurate recitation of the consonantal biblical text. The great innovative genius of these scholars was that they found a way to write down (“textualize”) this recitation tradition which had previously been purely oral. They crafted two sets of symbols, each consisting of dots and lines. One set represented vowels, and the other represented the pauses and linkages required to divide the text into the correct sense-units (these latter signs are usually called “accents”). These vowels and accents were then written in and around the consonantal text itself. Thus, for the first time ever, the written and the oral strands of the Hebrew Bible were brought together in written form on the page. Let’s see an example: Masoretic vowels and accents in Genesis 1:1 in Codex Leningrad clarify the interpretation. Sefaria Above, we saw that the Masoretic Text, unlike the biblical text preserved in Hebrew Bible scrolls, seems to have all sorts of dots and lines around the consonants. Now we understand that these represent the vowels and accents of the oral reading tradition, made “visible” for the first time on the page, together with the consonantal text. Thus, almost all of the ambiguity of the pure consonantal text evaporates. The image above shows the Masoretic Text from our earlier example from Genesis 1. The two vowels in the upper red box, and the accent in the lower box, point rather clearly towards the interpretation that translates as: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void…” Innovation and Preservation To sum up: the Masoretic Text is the particular form of the Hebrew Bible found in Masoretic manuscripts from the 9th–10th centuries onwards, and is the fruit of the genius of the Masoretes—the Jewish textual scholars active in Tiberias from the 7th to the 9th centuries AD. The Masoretic Text differs from previous forms of the Hebrew Bible; previously only the consonantal text was written down (in scrolls), while the ancient tradition of how those consonants should be read out loud was preserved orally. In the Masoretic Text, for the first time ever, the oral recitation tradition was made visible on the page, together with the consonantal text, thanks to the Masoretes’ creation of vowel and accent signs. What we have done in this article is to explore, from a historical point of view, what the Masoretic Text is, where it came from, and what makes it different to the previous forms of the Hebrew Bible. We have thought of the Masoretic Text as a kind of medieval innovation. But we cannot claim to have begun to understand the Masoretic Text until we have thought about it from the opposite perspective: as an act of extraordinary—almost miraculous—preservation.
The Bible and Slavery in Colonial America The Bible was used by both critics and defenders of slavery in the American colonies. What explains their conflicting use? Mark A. Noll As difficult as it is now to imagine, widespread debate over the morality of Black-only chattel slavery—including consideration of the subject from Scripture—arose only late in Western history. While popes and a few others insisted on the humanity of enslaved peoples, European territorial expansion presupposed a racial hierarchy that slid easily into enslavement of the peoples encountered in that expansion. Early Protests The first recorded protest against slavery in colonial America, and also the first to enlist the Bible for that purpose, came from Quakers and Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania, who in 1688 published a broadside featuring the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12): “There is a saying, that we should doe to all men, licke as we will be done ourselves: macking no difference of what generation, descent, or Colour they are.”1“Gerret Hendricks, Derick op de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graef,” in American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, ed. James G. Basker (2012), 1. Several other Quakers would make the same argument based on the same text. These appeals also added Jesus’ words from the Second Commandment: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12:31 and parallels)—and most of the other scriptures that would fill the biblical quiver of later abolitionists. Thus, only five years after the Germantown protest (1688), George Keith published An Exhortation & Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes that emphasized the Mosaic prohibition against manstealing (Exod. 21:16—“he that stealeth a Man and selleth him, if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death”). At mid-century, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet published the most thorough of such works. Although Wollman’s Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination (1754) and Benezet’s Observations on the Enslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes (1759) appealed to liberty of conscience, humanitarian sentiment, and Enlightenment ideals as they attacked the system, the New Testament remained their foundation. One non-Quaker biblical protest did come from Puritan New England when in 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall published a pamphlet entitled The Selling of Joseph. Sewall too cited the Golden Rule and the Mosaic prohibition against man-stealing, while he also explained that “the curse of Canaan” from Genesis 9:25 had nothing to do with contemporary Africa or modern slavery. Initial Responses Responding to Judge Sewall, John Saffin replied with a text that soon became standard for biblical defenses of slavery. It was the Mosaic legislation from Leviticus 25 that allowed the Hebrews to enslave “the heathen that are round about you” (25:44), including the children born to these non-Israelites. Saffin’s effort in replying to Sewall was unusual. Except for the Quakers, who were always suspect for their radical pacifism and standoffish customs, white Americans relied much more on inertia than on argument in maintaining the system that by the eighteenth century had become thoroughly established in the northern as well as southern colonies. A diagram of the British slave ship Brooks published by an abolitionist group in Plymouth in 1788. Source Widespread contention over the morality of slavery, including the moral witness of Scripture, arose only in the 1770s when American patriots claimed the British Parliament was threatening them with “slavery.” Significantly, however, even as agitation increased, few in the colonies considered what the Bible had to say about the racially specific character of the American system. Controversy flared in 1772 when Thomas Thompson, an Anglican missionary with experience in West Africa, the West Indies, and New Jersey, published The African Trade for Negro Slaves, Shewn to be Consistent with Principles of Humanity, and with the Laws of Revealed Religion. Thompson ranged widely with reference to the Pauline injunction that slaves remain in that calling (1 Cor. 7:20–21) and the Apostle’s return of the slave Onesimus to his master Philemon. But his main argument was a categorical assertion based on Leviticus 25:44–46: “This conclusion may be drawn, that the buying and selling of slaves is not contrary to the law of nature.”2Thomas Thompson, The African slave trade for Negro slaves, shewn to be consistent with principles of humanity, and with the laws of revealed religion (1772), 15. The ability to quote chapter and verse gave Thompson assurance that slavery could not be a violation of God’s law. The ability to quote chapter and verse gave Thompson assurance that slavery could not be a violation of God’s law. American and British Rebuttals Immediate rebuttals from Americans and from British works published in the colonies showed that others were reading Scripture differently. The first came from Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician who would later sign the Declaration of Independence. Although Rush’s Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping (1773) relied more on general reasoning than direct biblical argument, he vigorously contested the scriptural basis for slavery. Thus, the Old Testament permission that allowed Israel to enslave surrounding nations reflected only God’s desire to preserve the purity of the Jewish people as a vehicle for the coming Messiah. In Rush’s reading, the Old Testament contained many other hints about the illegitimate character of the institution, like the Jubilee liberation promised every seven years to Hebrews in bonds, which pointed directly to “the Gospel, the Design of which was to abolish all distinctions of name and country.”3Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping (1773), 12. Americans discovered more thorough biblical arguments when they read two works published in the colonies by the leading British abolitionist, Granville Sharp, in 1773 and 1776. The first of these pamphlets opened with Psalm 9:9 on its title page: “The Lord also will be a Refuge for the Oppressed—a Refuge in Time of Trouble.” It proceeded with appeals to British common law, universal moral principles, and natural equality, but never wandered far from Scripture. In particular, Sharp contended that Leviticus 25 applied only locally and had nothing to do with Africans. With greatest urgency, Sharp claimed that the Old Testament provision for slavery had been “certainly annulled, or rather superseded … by the more perfect doctrines of universal benevolence taught by Christ himself, who “came not to destroy, but to fulfil the law,” including the law as outlined in Leviticus itself, chapter 19 verse 18: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”4Granville Sharp, An Essay on Slavery, Proving From Scripture its Inconsistency with Humanity and Religion (1773), 20. Buttressed by a hail of supporting quotations (from Prov. 14:34, Hab. 1:13, Matt. 7:12, Luke 4:18, Acts 8:27, Acts 10:34, the book of Philemon, 1 Cor. 7:22, and more), Sharp rested his case firmly on Scripture. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: When Richard Nisbet replied to Benjamin Rush’s work, this Englishman who had lived in Nevis and St. Kitts before moving to Philadelphia, defended the reputation of British planters by countering Rush’s use of the Bible. In his account, “the scriptures, instead of forbidding it [slavery], declare it lawful.” As proof, he again quoted Leviticus 25:44–46 and many other Old Testament passages (Exod. 21:4–6, 20, 22; Deut. 15:16–17; Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7). For the New Testament, Nisbet turned the tables on Rush by implying, as many proslavery advocates would do in later decades, that if Jesus said nothing about slavery, those who twisted the New Testament against the system revealed their own drift toward infidelity: “the Addresser [i.e., Rush] is so wicked as to accuse our Saviour of the meanest dissimulation” by failing to mention slavery simply because it was allowed under Roman law. Rather than an argument against slavery, such misreadings of Scripture revealed that “this Gentleman, attempting to be religious, becomes blasphemous.”5Richard Nisbet, Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture: or a Defense of the West-India Planters, from the Aspersions Thrown Out Against Them, by the Author of a Pamphlet, Entitled “An Address . . .” (1773), 3, 8. Explaining the Conflicting Use of the Bible John Newton. Source On why constant appeal to Scripture could lead to such conflicting results, John Newton, the hymn writer (“Amazing Grace”) and former slave trader offered a succinct explanation. According to Newton, “The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived.”6John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1788), 6. In other words, the weight of convention and the allure of profit overcame whatever biblical imperatives might have been alert to the humanity of enslaved Africans. It is also possible, however, that the way bibles appeared on the page played a role. The printing format that divided Scripture into verses (usually with each verse set as the beginning of a new paragraph) began in English only with the Geneva Bible (1557, 1560). Versification of Scripture, even if only a recent innovation, proved a godsend, especially for Protestants eager to heed biblical truths and ponder difficulties of biblical interpretation. But it was a gain with a cost, including the notion that individual verses (prooftexts) taken by themselves, or assembled as discrete facts from throughout the Scriptures, simply equaled biblical revelation. Versification of Scripture proved a godsend, especially for Protestants eager to heed biblical truths and ponder difficulties of biblical interpretation. To be sure, biblical abolitionists could also quote chapter and verse, but their scriptural appeals also treated scriptural revelation as developing from the Old Testament into the New—what may have been appropriate for Old Israel might no longer be appropriate for the New Israel. They regularly appealed to historical context for correct biblical application—Paul’s instructions that slaves obey masters needed to be understood as prudent instructions saving infant churches from attack by Roman authorities. They often asked Bible believers not simply to prooftext, but to reason—if believers were to love their neighbors as themselves, could it possibly be scriptural to deny any human the respect due to those made in the image of God? Especially African American believers would soon be pointing out that, whatever the Bible may say about slavery in general, all of the slaves referenced in Scripture were white. White colonial Americans, like all humans in all circumstances, had difficulty seeing the forces that shaped how they were seeing. Those forces included colonization of what Europeans called a “new world”; Africans treated as commodities for trade; personal fortunes and family security resting directly or indirectly on sugar, cotton, tobacco, or trade in these commodities; and the production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton dependent on an enslaved work force. An additional factor may have been the nearly universal reliance on bibles divided into chapters and verses that made prooftexting seem more authoritative than any other way of appealing to the Sacred Text. More of Dr. Noll’s work on the Bible and slavery in America is found in the books mentioned in his bio below. Notes1“Gerret Hendricks, Derick op de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graef,” in American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, ed. James G. Basker (2012), 1.2Thomas Thompson, The African slave trade for Negro slaves, shewn to be consistent with principles of humanity, and with the laws of revealed religion (1772), 15.3Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping (1773), 12.4Granville Sharp, An Essay on Slavery, Proving From Scripture its Inconsistency with Humanity and Religion (1773), 20.5Richard Nisbet, Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture: or a Defense of the West-India Planters, from the Aspersions Thrown Out Against Them, by the Author of a Pamphlet, Entitled “An Address . . .” (1773), 3, 8.6John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1788), 6.
The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels reveals important facets of the famous founder’s faith and the Bible’s role in American history. Thomas S. Kidd The “Jefferson Bible” is arguably the most controversial religious text in American history. Perhaps the other most obvious contender is Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. But while the Book of Mormon has become one of the most printed and widely distributed books in world history, Thomas Jefferson never published his Bible in his lifetime. Indeed, the Jefferson Bible never got published at all during the 1800s, despite publishers’ offers to do so. Congress finally produced an edition of it in 1904, after the Smithsonian obtained the compilation from a Jefferson descendant. In 2011, the National Museum of American History restored the fragile text, allowing for its long-term preservation and the production of a new, beautiful facsimile edition. The Origins of Jefferson’s Bible What we call the Jefferson Bible is Jefferson’s cut-and-paste edition of extracts from the Gospels. Partisans cannot agree what Jefferson’s intentions for the Bible were, however. Secular devotees of Jefferson see the Jefferson Bible as the epitome of his skeptical religious views. Some Christian admirers of Jefferson have argued, conversely, that the text reveals Jefferson as a Christian, albeit an enigmatic one. Such Christians say that the text was actually a simplified version of the Gospels, one intended for education or evangelism of people unfamiliar with the Bible, especially the “Indians.” The four-columned, cut-and-paste Jefferson Bible after recent preservation work. Image credit The “Indians” were explicitly named as the audience for the first version of the Jefferson Bible, which the president produced in 1804. Unfortunately, the text of that first edition was lost, but the title page survived. He called this “wee little book” The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth … Being an abridgement of the New Testament for the use of the Indians. Scholars have debated whether “Indians” literally referred to Native Americans, or perhaps to Jefferson’s Christian enemies in the Federalist Party, who reviled him as a heretic and closet atheist. Whatever Jefferson meant, he explained later to John Adams that he composed the first Bible for his “own use.” Like the second edition, the first apparently contained a distillation of Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings. Unlike the second version, however, the first run at his Gospels compilation was only in English. The second was a polyglot edition, with side-by-side passages in English, French, Greek, and Latin. The fact that Jefferson was capable of compiling the Gospels in four languages testifies to the man’s enormous intellectual accomplishments. The fact that Jefferson was capable of compiling the Gospels in four languages testifies to the man’s enormous intellectual accomplishments, including in his studies of the Bible and biblical languages. Jefferson seems to have read the Bible regularly, including the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint, or the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Other prominent founders, including James Madison and John Adams, could also read Hebrew, but Jefferson never learned that biblical language. Indeed, Jefferson got irritated at Adams for suggesting that a truly educated man needed to be able to read both the Old and New Testaments in the original languages. In any case, Jefferson’s deep perusal of the Scriptures and his large collection of Bibles (some of which he dismantled to use in the compilations) could easily give a Christian observer the idea that the man was a devout Christian. Diamonds in a Dunghill Over his life, Jefferson did develop increasing reverence for Jesus’ ethical teachings. A close look at the Jefferson Bible reveals that it was a fundamentally skeptical project, however, when viewed from a traditional Christian perspective. Most notoriously, Jefferson literally used scissors to cut out sections of the Gospels that he pasted into his compilation. Thus, it was not so much that Jefferson cut out miracles in the Gospels, but that he left them behind, as tattered remnants in the New Testaments he mined for Jesus’ ethical principles. Why would Jefferson do this? Because, as an early advocate of what became known as “higher criticism” of the Bible, Jefferson regarded much of the New Testament as mythology. The stories of Jesus’ wonder-working powers were largely crafted and imposed on the man by misguided followers after his death. Jefferson saw Jesus’ ethics as the philosophical treasure of the Bible. But getting at that treasure was like picking out “diamonds in a dunghill,” he wrote. Jesus’ morals were the diamonds; the rest of the Bible was a veritable dunghill. One of two English source copies used by Jefferson to make his Bible. Image source Jefferson called the second volume, which he completed in 1820, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” The 84-page book focused primarily on Jesus’ teachings, parables, and some episodes from his life and ministry. It is tempting to characterize the Jefferson Bible as the Gospels without miracles. Most notably, Jefferson’s Gospel narrative ends with Jesus’ burial, and includes no resurrection. To traditional Christians of any denomination, it would be impossible to accept a version of the Gospels that does not include the empty tomb. Christians therefore should be hesitant to go along with some evangelical popularizers’ efforts to cast the Jefferson Bible as being within the bounds of historic orthodoxy. Neither is the Jefferson Bible as naturalistic as some secular observers would suggest, however. There are miracles in the Jefferson Bible, or at least references to supernatural events. There are also suggestions that Jesus operated under divine inspiration. Jefferson’s Jesus has foreknowledge of the future, and the Jefferson Bible includes references to hell, the end times, the Second Coming, and the general resurrection of mankind. So Jefferson was not as rigorous about excising all supernatural content from the Gospels as a casual observer might assume. Why Jefferson left such supernatural references in the compilation is uncertain. He never exactly explained his rationale for what got included, and what got cut. Principles of Production The beginning pages of the Jefferson Bible suggest how he proceeded, however. Jefferson skipped over the account of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary in Luke 1, and went straight to Luke 2:1: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” Jefferson included historical material about Jesus’ life, but he tended not to include passages where supernatural beings or miracles were driving the narrative. Thus, he stopped at Luke 2:7, with the baby Jesus being laid in a manger, and skipped the angels appearing to the shepherds and declaring “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” He picked up again at Luke 2:21a, Jesus’ circumcision, but he excised the note in 2:21b that the child was called Jesus, “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” But Jefferson didn’t always follow his angel’s rule, either. He included Jesus’ remarkable prediction in Matthew 13:41–42 that “the Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Here we have references both to angels and to a fiery judgment in hell. This is exactly the sort of stuff you would think Jefferson wouldn’t put in his Bible. But this passage apparently “made the cut” (pun intended) because it was part of Jesus’ interpretation of a parable. Jefferson liked the parables, so he sometimes included supernatural references if they were part of those teachings. Jefferson perhaps did not obsess over the exclusion of supernatural happenings as much as we might expect. The biblical text is obviously interwoven with miraculous claims and accounts, so he may not have found it easy to be entirely naturalistic in his selections. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: Whatever his rationale for the selections, Jefferson was an early example of a long tradition in elite studies of the Bible: judging Scripture’s authenticity by one’s own standards of reason. Most of the secular and liberal academic study of the Scriptures assumes that the Bible contains some content that was added by later authors or transcribers. Some of the Bible’s contents could be historically reliable, such critics reckon, but other parts were tacked on for ideological or polemical purposes or to enhance Jesus’ messianic claims. To discover the “historical Jesus,” one must dispense with the accretions and identify the more “authentic” content. This type of higher critical approach reached its apex in the oft-lampooned “Jesus Seminar” of the 1980s and ’90s. This meeting of prestigious higher critical scholars famously voted on the authenticity of Gospel passages by using colored beads to indicate their confidence in the authenticity of individual verses. A Sect unto Himself The problem with such approaches is that the Jesus who emerges after the requisite excisions tends to look like the critic’s “Personal Jesus,” as a 1989 Depeche Mode song put it. If you want a hippie Jesus, you get one. If you want a non-divine Jesus (as Jefferson wished), you get one. Once you assume that parts of Scripture are erroneous, unreliable, or ahistorical, your decisions about what should “stay in” tend to become fatally subjective. Once you assume that parts of Scripture are erroneous, unreliable, or ahistorical, your decisions about what should “stay in” tend to become fatally subjective. Of course, even biblical inerrantists are tempted to emphasize certain parts of Scripture over others. But while lots of people have implicitly cut out sections of Scripture they don’t like, Jefferson literally did so. Doing this could not produce anything but a radically individualized, cut-and-paste version of Christianity. Jefferson admitted as much in 1819, while he was beginning to compose the Jefferson Bible. He told a correspondent that year “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” To Jefferson, being a sect by yourself was a good thing. But such radical individual judgment of the text certainly doesn’t foster confidence in the Bible’s plenary inspiration. No matter how you “cut it,” there’s no doubt that the Jefferson Bible was an attack on the reliability of Scripture.
Recovering an Erased Gospel How the earliest Greek New Testament commentary manuscript has been restored by modern imaging techniques H. A. G. HoughtonTwo hundred years ago, a nobleman on the Greek island of Zakynthos presented a visiting British soldier with a handwritten copy of the readings from the Greek gospels used in church services. On his return to London, General Colin Macaulay gave this manuscript, Codex Zacynthius, to the British and Foreign Bible Society. Although the text of this lectionary appeared to have been copied in the thirteenth century, scholars soon realized that the manuscript was a palimpsest: the gospel extracts had been written on the pages of a much older document whose text had been erased in order to re-use the parchment for another book. Pages where the remains of the earlier text could be made out with the naked eye enabled it to be identified as a copy of the Gospel according to Luke. Based on the style of the handwriting, it was estimated that it had originally been copied between the sixth and eighth century, at least five hundred years before its rewriting as a lectionary. A source for early commentary The text of Luke, however, only occupied the middle part of each page. In wide margins, another text had been added by the copyist in a smaller version of the same script. This showed that the original manuscript was a type of commentary known as a catena, in which extracts from early Christian authors had been joined together to form a chain of comments explaining each passage in the gospel text. Codex Zacynthius appeared to be the earliest surviving example of a New Testament catena by at least a century. In many cases, the original writings from which these extracts were taken have been lost, and these commentaries are the only surviving source. As the only known manuscript in which both biblical text and commentary were written in majuscule script, Codex Zacynthius appeared to be the earliest surviving example of a New Testament catena by at least a century. Recovering the text Around the end of the nineteenth century, scholars began to experiment with using chemicals to make the underwriting stand out on palimpsest manuscripts. Although initial results were promising, subsequent deterioration made these pages even less legible than before. Fortunately, this was not attempted on Codex Zacynthius. Instead, after the manuscript was acquired by Cambridge University Library in 2014 following a public campaign which raised £1.1 million, it was examined through a non-invasive process known as multispectral imaging. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Codex Zacynthius Project engaged a specialist team which took fifty-one high resolution images of each page using different wavelengths of light, from infrared to ultraviolet. Using advanced processing techniques, different sets of images were combined in order to produce a single composite photograph on which the undertext was as visible as possible. The final result was remarkable: on the majority of pages, the erased undertext could be clearly made out thanks to an artificial coloring of this type of ink in a dark blue color, while text written in red ink appeared in a different hue. The black writing of the overtext was transformed into a light cyan color in order to enable readers to make sense of the obscured portions of the letters below. A digital edition The new images were then used by scholars at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham to make a full transcription of every word of the manuscript. The only previous attempt to do this had been in 1950, when the American scholar J. Harold Greenlee spent a year working with the manuscript on a windowsill in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, trying to read the manuscript in direct sunlight. The multispectral images made it possible for the Birmingham team to improve significantly on Greenlee’s unpublished results, including reading large passages which he had left blank. Once the transcription had been completed, the whole text was translated into English, preserving the same layout as the catena manuscript, to make this early form of commentary available to readers without Greek. The multispectral images, the transcription and the translation have all been made openly available on the Cambridge Digital Library. This digital edition also includes a complete set of photographs of the lectionary overtext, along with a transcription of these gospel passages, showing the current appearance of the manuscript and the evidence it provides for Byzantine liturgical practices. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: The struggles of a twelfth-century scribe While examining the lectionary, members of the project team noticed an unusual feature. At the foot of many of the pages, there are a series of notes written by the copyist which have nothing to do with the biblical text. Several of these are appeals to God and to later users, such as “God be merciful to me, the sinner Neilos” or “Priests, remember Neilos in the all-night vigil.” Notes like this found in other manuscripts featuring the same handwriting have enabled us to identify the scribe Neilos as a monk active on the island of Rhodes between 1170 and 1181, providing for the first time a precise date and location where the pages of Codex Zacynthius were reused. In fact, the copyist might even be the Neilos who became Abbot of the Monastery of St John in 1174. Scribal notes in the margin allowed researchers to connect Codex Zacynthius to the island of Rhodes in the 12th century. Some of the notes, however, refer to the problems faced when copying the manuscript. After a page with many crossed-out words and erasures, the scribe has written at the bottom: “Very drowsy and foolish.” Elsewhere, he observes that “The one who writes tends towards errors,” and that a particular mistake is “The error of Theodore the squinter.” Most striking of all, at the foot of one page he exclaims “I am very tired, with a heavy head, and what I write I do not know!” These marginal asides offer an unexpectedly vivid portrait of the scribe struggling to copy a lengthy liturgical manuscript some 850 years ago. New discoveries in the ancient text The multispectral images have led to new discoveries in the original text of the manuscript. Codex Zacynthius has already been recognised as an important witness to the text of the Gospel of Luke. It preserves a series of chapter divisions which are only otherwise attested in the famous fourth-century Greek Bible known as Codex Vaticanus. At the beginning of the book, Codex Zacynthius features the earliest example of a table of capitula parallela, a means of cross-referencing the contents of the four canonical gospels. The project has identified three previously unknown places in which the manuscript attests the reading of the earliest form of the text of Luke, demonstrating the value of its biblical text. The transcription of the catena has made this commentary available for the first time. Of the 343 extracts, no fewer than 300 preserve passages from early Christian writings which are not found in Greek outside this tradition. Half of these come from the Commentary on Luke by the fifth-century Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria. Almost fifty come from Titus, bishop of the town of Bostra in southern Syria which is now a World Heritage Site. His sermons on Luke, originally preached in the middle of the fourth century, are only preserved in catenae. Most remarkable are passages from the Christian writer Severus of Antioch. In the year 536, just before his death, Severus was excommunicated and his books were banned by the Emperor Justinian: none survive in Greek. Codex Zacynthius, however, preserves thirty-eight extracts attributed to Severus, several of them quite extensive. Many of them give details of the sermon or the letter from which they were taken, and even describe the author as “Saint Severus,” suggesting that the compiler of this commentary did not subscribe to the condemnation of Severus. Nevertheless, in a later manuscript based on this catena, the extracts from Severus were omitted or ascribed to a different author. Codex Zacynthius therefore provides the only Greek text known to survive of certain writings by Severus. This discovery will enable scholars to look for other passages by Severus in catenae and examine portions of his works in their original form. A screenshot of the digital edition, showing how the electronic transcription assists users in reading the manuscript. A study of the handwriting as revealed on the new images suggests that Codex Zacynthius was originally copied during the eighth century, confirming it as the oldest surviving catena manuscript. However, the project has also identified features which indicate that this is not the first instance of this compilation, but a copy of an even earlier catena manuscript. The research team published a volume of studies giving a full account of the manuscript and their findings. In addition, a printed edition of the catena with facing English translation has also been made available in open access. The University of Birmingham is now home to a major European-funded project which will undertake the first systematic examination of New Testament catena manuscripts and shed new light on the significance of this tradition of commentary.
The Life and Legacy of William Tyndale Tyndale’s work to translate the Bible into English reminds us that the Bible has a history written in blood. Peter J. GurryIt’s fair to say that no single individual has left a more indelible mark on the language of the English Bible than William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536). He was the first to translate the Bible into English from the original languages (the Wycliffe Bible was from Latin). He completed two editions of the New Testament and got as far as 2 Chronicles (and Jonah) in the Old Testament. By one estimate, as much as 80 percent of the wording of the King James Version is Tyndale’s. He was, by all accounts, a superb translator and his concern was always to give the Bible to the people. As one biographer says, “One key to Tyndale’s genius is that his ear for how people spoke was so good. The English he was using was not the language of the scribe or lawyer or schoolmaster; it really was, at base, the spoken language of the people.”1David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 356. But he was also not afraid to innovate. He coined many English words including “anathema,” “godly,” “Passover,” and “fisherman.” He is also responsible for such famous biblical lines as “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) and “fight the good fight” (1 Tim. 6:12) and he gave us “Jehovah” for the personal name of God in the Old Testament. Preparation Not much is known about Tyndale’s youth. Our first real record of him comes from his time at Oxford, where he began his training at age fourteen. This was on the younger side, but also not especially unusual for the time. The university was still small by today’s standards with only several thousand students, but it was growing in influence. The printing press was still new and printed textbooks were available but rare. Students typically borrowed, bought, or had a new copy made of their textbooks. Importantly, the memory of John Wycliffe still loomed large at Oxford. More than that, the tide of the Reformation was just beginning to hit the English shores. A German monk named Martin Luther would soon make a deep impression on Tyndale’s theology. Painting of William Tyndale. Wikimedia It was said of Tyndale’s time in Oxford that he was “brought up from a child in the university of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts as especially in the knowledge of the scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted.” Along with this devotion, he was intellectually gifted. He would later be praised by another scholar for mastering eight languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and, of course, English. A series of events that would shape his future occurred just as the young Tyndale finished his master’s degree. The first was the publication of Erasmus’s Greek-Latin New Testament that came off the press in 1516. This new edition met a growing interest in the Bible in its original languages. Nowhere would that interest be more significant than in Germany where, a year later, Luther nailed his 95 theses in a challenge to the Catholic church’s teaching on indulgences (1517). Five years after that, in 1522, Luther published his German New Testament—the first translated from the Greek and an edition that would become Tyndale’s model for an English counterpart. After finishing school, Tyndale returned to his home in Gloucestershire, England to become a tutor. It was during this time that he was ordained as a priest and began to preach in the surrounding churches. What marked his preaching was his emphasis on the Scriptures. But the people were not used to this, nor were they well acquainted with the Bible. His preaching was so unusual that he was warned that, if he kept it up, it would eventually cost him his life—a prescient warning in hindsight. But Tyndale persisted for, as he wrote later, he “perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to [es]stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text … which thing only moved me to translate the New Testament.” Already, he began to see the need for the Bible in the language of the people. It was also during this time that he had his most famous encounter. He met a “learned man” who told him that “we were better without God’s law than the pope’s” to which he famously replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws” and “If God spare my life ere many year, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Rejection in London As predicted, not everyone liked Tyndale’s preaching and he soon found himself with enemies who began to threaten his patron. So, he left Gloucestershire for London with hopes of securing the support and necessary license-to-print from the Bishop of London to publish a Bible in English from the original languages. By this time, he had already produced several translations of Greek classical works as a sort of proof-of-concept and he probably began his New Testament while in London. But it was to no avail. After a year of failed attempts to secure a meeting with the bishop, Tyndale came to see that England was not welcome to his ideas. As he would say later, he came to see “not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.” He left for Europe in 1524. The time in London was not a waste, however. While there, he established crucial connections with a group of merchants who supported him and would continue to do so.2David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. They would prove key to his success. As one writer says of them, The merchants of London, mainly in the cloth and tailoring industries, were firmly entrenched in the Lollard movement first set in motion by John Wycliffe 150 years earlier, a movement which now was in touch with the German Lutherans and which, in defiance of English Church law, was crying out for a new translation of the Scriptures. Such men as these were to provide the finance and shipping that were crucial to the success of the enterprise, and that is how, in 1525, Tyndale found himself in Cologne and in the printing house of Peter Quentell.3W. R. Cooper, “Introduction,” The New Testament: 1526 Tyndale Bible, Original Spelling Edition (London: British Library, 2020), ix. It is in Cologne that he first begins to print his New Testament. The First Print Run Printing began in 1525, but was interrupted when the printshop was raided by authorities. He seems to have reached only to Mark and, today, only part of Matthew survives in a single copy. But the door had cracked. For the first time in English, Matthew 7:7 read, “Ask and it shall be given you: Seek and ye shall find: Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Tyndale did not give up. He fled up the Rhine River to Worms—the same city where Luther had defended his own theology just five years before. There Tyndale started again, and this time succeeded. His second edition stands as the first complete English New Testament translated from Greek. Besides this, several features helped make it a success: it was small, attractive, and affordable. It was half the size of his first attempt and a bound copy might cost just five days’ wages for a skilled laborer.4At 3s. 4d. using the the National Archives currency converter Contrast that with a few centuries before, when a complete Latin Bible might cost fifteen years’ salary for the same man. A century before Tyndale, a copy of Wycliffe’s English Bible might still cost around two year’s wages.5For these prices, see Cooper, “Introduction,” xiv–xv. For the first time, the ordinary Englishman had a Bible he could understand—and afford. Matthew 1 in Tyndale’s 1525 (left) and 1526 (right) editions. The color was added by the owner. Images are not to scale. British Library G.12179 and C.188.a.17. Thousands were smuggled to England and sold and it was immediately condemned by the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall—the same bishop who had previously refused to host him. In October, Tunstall sent out a prohibition of the book, calling it “that pestiferous and most pernicious poison dispersed throughout all our dioceses of London in great number.” He had it burned at St. Paul’s Cathedral, an occasion at which he preached the sermon. Today, only three copies survive. Capture Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible. In 1531 he spoke to a friend of his poverty, his exile, his hunger, thirst, cold, danger, and absence from friends—all which he did with the hope to “do honour to God, true service to my prince, and pleasure to his command.”6Daniell, Tyndale, 213. Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible. But he remained undeterred. During this time, he published several theological works and finished his translation of the Pentateuch, published in 1530. But the opposition only grew. His most famous critic was Sir Thomas More who wrote no less than nine volumes against Tyndale, totaling nearly half a million words!7Daniell, Bible, 149. By November 1534, Tyndale had finished a second edition of his New Testament in Antwerp where he was then living—still in exile from England. Like most Bible translators, especially in this new era of vernacular translations, revision started almost before finishing. Work on his Old Testament continued as well. He was, by this point, very Lutheran in his theology and is on record attacking the Catholic church’s theology, which he saw as nullifying the role of grace in salvation. But his work would soon be interrupted for good. In 1535, a young man named Henry Phillips, who had left England in disgrace after gambling away his father’s money, feigned friendship and interest in Tyndale and his work. In a turn eerily reminiscent of Judas’s betrayal, he turned him over to the authorities for money. On May 21, 1531 Phillips tricked Tyndale into leaving his house and Tyndale was seized in an alleyway. He was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels. The charge was being a Lutheran. The sentence was death. During his year in prison, Tyndale was interrogated by the local Catholic theological experts, the goal being to solicit a confession to save his soul from hell. Vilvoorde Castle from an early engraving. Image source As winter approached, he wrote what is his last and only surviving letter. Today, it is all that remains in his own handwriting. He writes, I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh [nasal inflammation], which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen As he prepares for death, Tyndale’s chief desire was still to get the Bible into English. What is especially remarkable about this letter is that, at the time he wrote it, he had no reason from the circumstances to be hopeful about his life’s work. His books were being burned, his house had been raided, the new Bishop of London was harsher than Tunstall. David Daniell says of this time that a “heavy curtain hung before him, through which he could see little or nothing.”8Daniell, Bible, 156. One can’t help but think of the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews of whom it is said, in Tyndale’s own version, “They all died in faith, and received not the promises: but saw them afar off, and believed them, and saluted them: and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). Early in October, he was brought out, a chain placed on his neck. He was strangled first and then burned, but not before crying out his final prayer, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.” The depiction of Tyndale’s death from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Wikimedia Legacy His legacy was immense. We have already noted his contribution to the English language and to subsequent English translations. But perhaps most remarkably, it was within months of is death that his friend John Rogers printed, for the first time, a complete English Bible with all of Tyndale’s translation work: not only his New Testament and Pentateuch, but also his work through 2 Chronicles that many thought was lost during his arrest. The initials “W.T.” at the end of the Old Testament in the “Matthew Bible” (1537). Image source More remarkable still is that a copy of Rogers’s Bible, printed under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew,” was sent to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer sent it on to King Henry VIII’s viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, with an endorsement saying, “I like it better than any other translation heretofore made.” From there, it was shown to the king and, amazingly, approved for use in England. Cromwell wanted a copy in every English parish. In less than a year after his death, Tyndale’s dying words were answered. His own translation would be in the hands of the people in a Bible with his own initials stamped in large letters at the end of the Old Testament. The Lord had indeed opened the king’s eyes. Conclusion Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible. Even listening to a copy being read could be punished by death in the flames. Today, our easy access to dozens of English translations can lead us to take the English Bible for granted. We can argue so much about the “best” translation that we fail to appreciate the fact that we have any at all. But, if the lesson of Tyndale’s life needs to be learned today, it is not the first time. Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible. In 1570, John Foxe made the same point. He wrote in his Book of Martyrs about how the zeal for the Bible in the time before Tyndale should be a spur to Christians in his. “The fervent zeal of those Christian days seemed much superior to these our days and times, as manifestly may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing; also by their expenses and charges in buying of books in English … some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul in English.” The lesson then is the same as today: “To see their travails, their earnest seekings, their burning zeal, their readings, their watching, their sweet assemblies … may make us now in these days of free possession, to blush for shame.” If the “free possession” of the Scriptures was a reason to appreciate the Bible in Foxe’s day, how much more should it be one in ours? The content of this article is also available as a video lecture. King Henry’s viceregent was Thomas Cromwell not Oliver Cromwell as an earlier version of this article said.Notes1David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 356.2David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143.3W. R. Cooper, “Introduction,” The New Testament: 1526 Tyndale Bible, Original Spelling Edition (London: British Library, 2020), ix.4At 3s. 4d. using the the National Archives currency converter5For these prices, see Cooper, “Introduction,” xiv–xv.6Daniell, Tyndale, 213.7Daniell, Bible, 149.8Daniell, Bible, 156.