Study of the King James Bible | Page 8

reading
of the Bible.[1] But Dr. Rashdall and Professor Pollard and others are
right when they insist that the English Reformation received less from
Luther than from the secret reading of the Scripture over the whole
country. What we call the English spirit of free inquiry was fostered
and developed by Wiclif and his Lollards with the English Scripture in
their hands. Out of it has grown as out of no other one root the freedom

of the English and American people.
[1] What Is the Bible?, p. 45.
This work of Wiclif deserves the time we have given it because it
asserted a principle for the English people. There was much yet to be
done before entire freedom was gained. At Oxford, in the Convocation
of 1408, it was solemnly voted: "We decree and ordain that no man
hereafter by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into
English, or any other tongue, by way of a book, pamphlet, or other
treatise; but that no man read any such book, pamphlet, or treatise now
lately composed in the time of John Wiclif ... until the said translation
be approved by the orderly of the place." But it was too late. It is
always too late to overtake a liberating idea once it gets free. Tolstoi
tells of Batenkoff, the Russian nihilist, that after he was seized and
confined in his cell he was heard to laugh loudly; and, when they asked
him the cause of his mirth, he said that he could not fail to be amused at
the absurdity of the situation. "They have caught me," he said, "and
shut me up here; but my ideas are out yonder in the streets and in the
fields, absolutely free. They cannot overtake them." It was already too
late, twenty years after Wiclif's version was available, to stop the
English people in their search for religious truth.
In the century just after the Wiclif translation, two great events
occurred which bore heavily on the spread of the Bible. One was the
revival of learning, which made popular again the study of the classics
and the classical languages. Critical and exact Greek scholarship
became again a possibility. Remember that Wiclif did not know Greek
nor Hebrew, did not need to know them to be the foremost scholar of
Oxford in the fourteenth century. Even as late as 1502 there was no
professor of Greek at the proud University of Erfurt when Luther was a
student there. It was after he became a doctor of divinity and a
university professor that he learned Greek in order to be a better Bible
student, and his young friend Philip Melancthon was the first to teach
Greek in the University.[1] But under the influence of Erasmus and his
kind, with their new insistence on classical learning, there came
necessarily a new appraisal of the Vulgate as a translation of the
original Bible. For a thousand years there had been no new study of the
original Bible languages in Europe. The Latin of the Vulgate had
become as sacred as the Book itself. But the revival of learning threw

scholarship back on the sources of the text. Erasmus and others
published versions of the Greek Testament which were disturbing to
the Vulgate as a final version.
[1] McGiffert, Martin Luther.
The other great event of that same century was the invention of printing
with movable type. It was in 1455 that Gutenberg printed his first book,
an edition of the Vulgate, now called the Mazarin Bible. The bearing of
the invention on the spread of common knowledge is beyond
description. It is rather late to be praising the art of printing, and we
need spend little time doing so; but one can see instantly how it
affected the use of the Bible. It made it worth while to learn to
read--there would be something to read. It made it worth while to
write--there would be some one to read what was written.
One hundred years exactly after the death of Wiclif, William Tindale
was born. He was eight years old when Columbus discovered America.
He had already taken a degree at Oxford, and was a student in
Cambridge when Luther posted his theses at Wittenburg. Erasmus
either was a teacher at Cambridge when Tindale was a student there, or
had just left. Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were close friends, and
More's Utopia and Erasmus's Greek New Testament appeared the same
year, probably while Tindale was a student at Cambridge.
But he came at a troubled time. The new learning had no power to
deepen or strengthen the moral life of the people. It could not make
religion a vital thing. Morality and religion were far separated. The
priests and curates were densely ignorant. We need