When the last of her Habsburg rulers died in 1700, Spain, in the words of José de Gálvez, was ‘hardly less defunct than its dead master’. ‘With dominions more extensive and more opulent than any European state’, the country lacked roads, industry and commerce. The population had declined by a million and a half in the last hundred years. Agriculture was in decay. The administrative system was chaotic, the currency in confusion, and the treasury bankrupt. And if, in the New World, it might almost be said that there was ‘no peaceful desart yet unclaimed by Spain’, the Spanish American empire seemed to survive more by the forces of habit and inertia, and by the mutual jealousies of the European powers, than by any internal strength of its own. If it was not, as was sometimes thought, ripe for plucking or on the brink of collapse, nevertheless there is abundant testimony to its political, social and economic ills. The devastating report written for the information of the crown in 1749 by the two young naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, though dealing, it is true, with but a part of the colonial world, is a classical example.

Yet in the years between the War of the Spanish Succession and the Napoleonic invasions of the Iberian peninsula Spain herself rose with remarkable resilience from the decrepitude into which she had fallen in the seventeenth century. Her economic decline was first arrested and then reversed. Her administrative system was overhauled, centralised and modernised, on French and absolutist lines.

These were years when the boundaries of British rule were extended while its impact was intensified. New territory was acquired, both in India and outside it, while the activities of government advanced beyond the maintenance of order and the collection of revenue to economic and social policies that accorded with European ideas of utility and morality. Exaggerated fears of a revival of French power in Asia were at first associated with this territorial expansion, and the desire for a strong ally against a resurgent France was the main reason why the British allowed the Dutch to return to South-East Asia after the Napoleonic Wars. But the major concern of the English East India Company was now the establishment of its authority as the paramount power in India. Mughal supremacy had been little more than nominal after the death of Aurangzib, the last of the great emperors, in 1707, and the Maratha confederacy lacked the unity of direction and the centralised administrative system necessary for dominance over the sub-continent. Widespread disorder and devastation in central India, spreading to the borders of British territory, indicated the need for some paramount authority. Indian considerations thus brought the English Company to grips with the Marathas. Apart from arousing occasional suspicions of Russian designs, European politics were henceforth of diminishing importance in the shaping of its external policies.

European ideas, on the other hand, were of increasing importance in the development of internal policy. True, the defects that had arisen in the administrative institutions established by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal suggested that he had paid too little attention to Indian ideas and circumstances, and the reforms that were in train elsewhere made more use of local experience by modifying the rigidity of his separation of powers, by giving more responsibility to native officials, and by settling the land revenue with villages and with individual cultivators instead of with great landholders.

For nearly two thousand years the missionary work of the Church has been essentially Bible-centred, and that in three senses: the Bible has been the source of inspiration and of spiritual nourishment for the missionary himself; it has also been the basis of the worship of the Church into which he sought to bring pagan or non-Christian tribes or individuals; and (to a larger extent than is commonly recognized) it has been a means of evangelism in itself.

From the end of the period of oral transmission the Church was dependent for authentic knowledge of Christ on the apostolic witness enshrined in the Epistles and Gospels. The final definition of the canon, followed by the provision of an authoritative version of the Latin Scriptures by St Jerome, was, therefore, an important step both for the inner life of the Christian community and for its expansion into the pagan world. The facts to which successive generations of Christian missionaries have borne witness are not merely matters of subjective experience: they are rooted in history, and in a history which is recorded uniquely in the documents which comprise the New Testament, read in the context of the Old Testament. Moreover, it has been the consistent witness of the Church in every age that these records contain not only an account of the coming of Jesus Christ and of his work for man's salvation, but also an authentic Word of God to the human soul. The missionary, therefore, has been bound to the Bible by a threefold cord: his own spiritual life and his authority as a messenger of the Gospel depended on his own knowledge of the Scriptures; the message he sought to proclaim and the Church into which he brought his converts was centred on the Bible; and the written Scriptures were a means by which the Gospel could lay hold of the minds and hearts of men and women, sometimes more effectively than by any word of his own.

Tyndale

The survival of some two hundred manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions, most of them written after the synods of Oxford and London, A.D. 1407–9, is sufficient evidence of a demand for the Scriptures in English which legislation could not stifle. With the invention of printing (even if that did not immediately bring cheap and plentiful copies of the Bible) the galling knowledge that vernacular versions were circulating, sometimes with the consent of the Church, in most European countries must have stiffened determination to get an English translation into print. Further stimulus came from the teaching of Colet at home and from the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. Simultaneously the quickening of scholarship manifest in the Complutensian Polyglot and Erasmus's Greek Testament meant that no mere rendering of the Vulgate would suffice, although one made from the original languages must provoke greater opposition from ecclesiastical authority. England was fortunate to have in William Tyndale the man who could do what was wanted, a man of sufficient scholarship to work from Hebrew and Greek, with genius to fashion a fitting English idiom and faith and courage to persist whatever it cost him.

Publication

With an Oxford education behind him (B.A. 1512, M.A. 1515), followed by a period of study at Cambridge, Tyndale went as tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where he not only found himself countering the arguments of Walsh's guests (abbots, deans, archdeacons and divers doctors, says Foxe) by open and manifest Scripture, but also translated Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani.

The Authority of the Bible

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein.”

The well-known introductory paragraph to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is itself an epitome of the place enjoyed by the vernacular Bible in the religious life of the seventeenth century. J. R. Green's statement that the English people became the people of a book, and that book the Bible, is justified by the evidence. But the vogue of the Bible was no peculiarly insular phenomenon, nor was its use confined to devotional reading. It became the source of doctrine and of worship, no less than of piety and hymnody, the object of close and continuous study on the part of scholars as well as the vade-mecum of ordinary Christian laymen. Nor was its influence restricted to religious issues. It became a proof-text for systems of government and ‘an outline of knowledge for boys and girls and their parents’ (to adopt a modern phrase) in various fields of human interest, historical, geographical and cosmographical.

Acceptance of the King James Version

The King James version of the Bible was a revision of prior English translations. In their preface, the scholars who were charged to make this revision show that they were fully aware that their work would encounter strong opposition:

“Zeale to promote the common good…findeth but cold intertainment in the world.…Many mens mouths have bene open a good while (and yet are not stopped) with speeches about the Translation so long in hand, or rather perusals of Translations made before: and aske what may be the reason, what the necessitie of the employment: Hath the Church bene deceived, say they, all this while?… Was their Translation good before? Why doe they now mend it? Was it not good? Why then was it obtruded to the people?”

For eighty years after its publication in 1611, the King James version endured bitter attacks. It was denounced as theologically unsound and ecclesiastically biased, as truckling to the king and unduly deferring to his belief in witchcraft, as untrue to the Hebrew text and relying too much on the Septuagint. The personal integrity of the translators was impugned. Among other things, they were accused of ‘blasphemy’, ‘most damnable corruptions’, ‘intolerable deceit’, and ‘vile imposture’, the critic who used these epithets being careful to say that they were not ‘the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind’.

German Versions

Luther

A German Bible printed by Sylvan Otmar at Augsburg did indeed appear during the year 1518—only a few months after Luther had published his theses. But it belonged to the series of editions of the German translation made in about 1350 and first printed in 1466 by Johann Mentelin at Strassburg. In the next fifty years or so there were thirteen further editions. This translation was not made from the original languages but only from the Vulgate, and was moreover—despite several revisions, especially in 1475 and 1483—clumsy in its linguistic form, and partly incomprehensible. Hence it answered neither of Luther's two requirements for such a translation, that it should be based on the original texts and should use a German comprehensible to all; and it is not surprising that this medieval version did not have Luther's approval. He had already used the Greek original in his lectures on Romans in 1515–16, and the Hebrew in his commentary on Hebrews in 1517–18. And since it was one of his cardinal principles that the Scriptures were the only true key to the faith, it is not surprising either that he decided to translate the Bible into German himself. It seems as if the idea of such a translation was already current in Wittenberg in 1520. Andreas Carlstadt's treatise on the canon (Welche bucher Biblisch seint), which was published at Wittenberg in November, said ‘Shortly, as I hear, new German Bibles are to be printed’. But it was a whole year before the plan was put into effect.

Grammar

Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac

Interest in Hebrew grammar was anticipated by the Massoretes, whose unremitting care for the preservation of the Hebrew text and of the most delicate shades of Hebrew pronunciation issued in serious grammatical work among Jewish scholars of the tenth century (mainly concerned with Arabic). The influence of Arabic grammar is to be seen in the work of Ben Asher, the Massorete of Tiberias. His contemporary, the Gaon of Saadia (892–942) may be credited with transforming Hebrew grammar into something like a scientific discipline, and Judah ben David Hayyug, in eleventh-century Spain, put Hebrew grammar on a permanent basis, particularly by the recognition of the tri-literal root. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092–1167) carried this grammatical knowledge from Spain to other European countries. Joseph Kimhi's grammar, Sefer Zihkaron (c. 1150), was the first exposition of Hebrew grammar in Hebrew. His son, David Kimhi (d. 1235), produced the Hebrew grammar which was to be the main source of the classical Jewish philology of the Middle Ages. Until the sixteenth century, grammatical aids to enable the Christian student to study the Hebrew text of the Old Testament hardly existed.

There is no extant Syriac grammar before the eleventh century, then that of Elias, Bishop of Tirhan (d. 049), ed. F. W. A. Baethgen (1880), and The Net of Points of Joseph bar Malkon, Bishop of Nisibis, and, most important of all, the K'taba Semhe of Barhebraeus (the Jacobite Syrian bishop bu-l-Farag, 1226–86).

German Versions

Protestant Versions

It is plain from the history of the Bible that every age has attempted to come to fresh terms with it, to form its own image of it. This is also true of Luther's version of the Bible, which has been the one most commonly printed and by far the most widely accepted in Germany during the period under review.

The linguistic superiority of Luther's Bible had moved Calvinists such as Tossanus and Pareus—especially in the Palatinate and Frankfurt am Main—to print the text and to add, instead of Luther's, prefaces and glosses of their own which had an entirely different spirit. Lutherans protested against this, particularly in Württemberg. But Johannes Piscator went even further, for he also dispensed with Luther's translation, and produced a most uneven one of his own in 1602–3. It was still being printed in Berne in the nineteenth century.

The Thirty Years War both hampered and helped the dissemination of the Bible. The losses were enormous, and the subsequent general poverty made it hard to replace them. The more handy and cheaper formats came into common use as well as the folios. Bible printing ceased entirely in Wittenberg, and the most important printing towns were now Lüneburg, Nürnberg and Frankfurt am Main. In the very middle of the war Sigismund Evenius promoted the production of one of the most important German bibles. The first printing of this ‘Weimar Bible’, with its many notes, accessories and pictures, was commissioned by Duke Ernst the Pious of Gotha in 1640 at Nürnberg. Though not cheap, it went through more than a dozen editions in 150 years.

The invention of printing was as important for the Bible as it was for all literature; but its significance has often been misinterpreted, largely because modern conceptions and preoccupations have been imported into the context of early printing. The earliest observers went to the heart of the matter, as they saw it. ‘He prints as much in a day as was formerly written in a year’ said Campano, bishop of Teramo, of the fifteenth-century printer Ulrich Han. Printing was a means of speedy, and soon of cheap production. Speaking of the Bible, a French translator added that there was now no excuse for the literate believer if he was not familiar with the Word of God.

Writers nearer our own time, but before modern bibliographers had made their systematic investigations, found a deeper significance, which is still advanced. The concept of the edition, a scholar's concept which has taken five hundred years to elaborate, is projected backwards into the first years of printing as if it were the perfect outcome of a sudden transformation. Where once the scribe had produced his single copy— perhaps inaccurately transcribed, interpolated or tendentiously altered, and taken from another single copy subject to the same vicissitudes, and so on back through innumerable stages—there was now supposed to be the modern succession of accurately printed editions, each an improvement on the last if not faithful to it. Within each edition all copies were supposed to be identical.

The Council of Trent

The first task of the Council of Trent was to delimit the spheres of Scripture and Tradition in the transmission of Catholic doctrine. For centuries the Church had been content with a rough-and-ready arrangement whereby Tradition (in the shape of the baptismal catechesis) introduced a believer to the doctrines of the faith, while Scripture was used at a later stage to test, to amplify and to collate those doctrines. Thus it was that St Thomas had said, in a much-abused phrase, sola canonica scriptura est regula fidei: only canonical Scripture—as distinct from apocryphal writings—is the (or a) rule of faith (lectio VI in John XXI). But doctrines which were accepted alone or mainly on the authority of Tradition were not unfamiliar. It was these doctrines which were the main objects of reforming attacks: purgatory, the invocation of saints, the conversion of the bread into the Body of Christ, infant baptism and the sacramental character of marriage. Hence the Council had to start by making its position clear on the value of Tradition as contrasted with Scripture.

After sharp discussion the Council came to the decision that it received and held in honour pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia, with equal devotion and veneration, the books of Scripture and the divine and apostolic traditions (that is, those coming from Christ or the apostles) which concerned faith or morals. It did not mean that each book of Scripture was inspired in exactly the same way, as some modern theologians have claimed, for the Council was not comparing book with book but the body of Scripture with the body of apostolic tradition.

The Circulation of the Bible

In A.D. 303 the emperor Diocletian decided to attack Christianity. Unwilling at first to have individual Christians put to death simply ‘for the name’, he devised means of sapping at the foundations of their corporate life in the Church; he forbade them to meet for worship and ordered that all church buildings should be destroyed, all church plate confiscated, and all liturgical books and copies of the Scriptures burned. Though the deacon Hermes of Heraclea might be confident that even if all copies of the Scriptures should disappear, Christians would be able to rewrite them from memory and to compose even more books to the honour of Christ, the more reflective must have been aware that the preservation of the authentic Bible text was necessary to the life and faith of the Church. Bibles were not quite like sacred vessels, which the generosity of the faithful could easily provide when peace came. Hence the moral problem of surrendering them was a difficult one, and in some parts of the Church, notably in Latin Africa, to hand over (tradere, betray) the Scriptures was regarded as an offence almost equivalent to the more obvious forms of apostasy. It is from Africa that we have a little—tantalizingly little—evidence about procedure. Magistrates were looking for corporate church property, not for private possessions. At Cirta, for example, when the Curator of the city went to the cathedral church and demanded the books, one very large codex was produced.

‘Sola Scriptura’

The reformers dethroned the pope and enthroned the Bible. This is the common assertion; but when so stated it is not valid, because a book cannot replace a man. A book has to be interpreted. This was the main reason why authority had come to be ascribed to the pope in faith and morals. Catholics argued that if there were no infallible interpreter, there could be no infallible revelation. Scripture at many points is not clear, and when a difference of opinion arises as to the meaning, unless there be some authoritative way of knowing which is right, the inevitable result will be uncertainty. If then God desired to make a revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, and the record of that revelation is a document in some respects obscure, God must have ensured the revealing quality of the revelation by establishing an inerrant interpreter, who is able to declare the truth partly because he is the custodian of the tradition and partly because he is guarded from error by the Holy Spirit. This role was assigned by God to the bishop of the church of Rome, founded by the two martyr apostles, Peter and Paul. Her bishop is the successor of Peter to whom were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Such claims Luther roundly denied. In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, in the summer of 1520, the reformer prayed that he might be given the trumpet of Joshua with which to tumble down the three walls of the modern Jericho.

The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship

During the century and a half in which modern methods of study have been applied to the task of biblical research the achievement of scholarship has been positive and immense. Inscriptions and documents contemporaneous with the biblical writings have been discovered; ancient languages can now be read whose existence was unknown or barely suspected by scholars a hundred years ago. It is today possible to compare biblical religious and social ideas and practices with those of other ancient peoples who lived alongside Israel and who influenced and were influenced by the development of Jewish and Christian thought and worship. Modern archaeological, philological and ‘history-of-religion’ methods have resulted in the accumulation of a mass of knowledge which illuminates every page of the Bible, while at the same time the development of the critical, literary and historical study of the biblical books themselves has brought about a complete revision of traditional notions about their relation to one another. It is impossible here to catalogue the results of these researches, but it is necessary to say something about their rise in the nineteenth century and their consequences both for biblical interpretation and for Christian theology in general in the twentieth. One thing has happened as a result of the rise of modern biblical research in the nineteenth century, and it affects every school of biblical interpretation in the western world today: it is no longer possible to ignore the discoveries of the scientific investigators, the archaeologists, philologists and workers in the sphere of the history of religion (loosely called ‘comparative religion’).

Biblical Humanism and its Resources

Near the time when Lefèvre issued his version of the Epistles of St Paul with commentaries from the press of Henri Estienne at Paris in 1512, he said to the young Guillaume Farel, ‘My son, God will renew the world and you will be a witness of it.’ Ten years later, he gave as one ground for this hope that, amid the discovery of new lands and the wider diffusion of the name of Christ, ‘the knowledge of languages and especially of Greek and Latin (for it was only later that the study of Hebrew letters was reanimated by Johann Reuchlin), began to return about the time when Constantinople was captured by the enemies of Christ…’. Here is confident enthusiasm for the potent renewal, spiritual and intellectual, to be found in a clearer understanding of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. This is something new and fundamental to the cultural world of the early sixteenth century: it cannot be set down as merely a further stage in the development of humanist studies which had begun in the fourteenth century or earlier. There was a preparatio evangelica in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, for it was then, and not before, that there appeared in combination the achievements of the humanist scholar-printers; the fruits of intensive study in the grammar and syntax of the three languages; and the energy provided by the economic development and regional patriotism of the cities where bonae litterae flourished—Basle, Wittenberg, Zurich, Paris, Strassburg, Geneva.

Criticism of the Traditional Use by Rationalists

It is not unjust to trace the origins of biblical criticism in the modern sense back to the Renaissance. The liberation of men's minds from the dead weight of authority and tradition made it inevitable that, sooner or later, the Bible would cease to be treated, as it had been throughout the Middle Ages, as a supernaturally guaranteed revelation beyond the scope of rational inquiry. The Reformation, in the sense that it was a by-product of the Renaissance, assisted rather than hindered the process, for in their critical approach to the Bible, as in other matters, Luther and Calvin ranged themselves on the side of those who upheld the right of private judgment against an externally imposed authority. ‘The Protestant writers against Rome were forging the weapons which were soon to be used against themselves.’

The attempt of their successors to invest the Bible with the authority that the Church had lost was therefore bound to be little more than an ineffective effort to turn back the clock. A new spirit had come into western life and thought which was prepared to challenge every assumption and question every assertion. Men were no longer prepared to limit their inquiries to the narrow confines prescribed by traditional orthodoxy and ecclesiastical protocol. Whether they accepted Reason or the Spirit as their guide they acknowledged as their ultimate criterion nothing but the establishment of the truth.