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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Building on Rowan Williams's claims about William Tyndale's importance for English Reformation theology, this paper outlines a theological matrix within which we can situate and interpret Tyndale's translation work. Focusing on Tyndale's translation of the fourth Gospel in his 1534 New Testament, the central claim is that in light of more recent developments in biblical interpretation, the very style of Tyndale's translation has evident theological implications with compelling resonances for contemporary Anglicanism. This analysis of the theology of Tyndale's literary style also attempts to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Tyndale's reputation. Tyndale's biographer, David Daniell, has lamented that ‘Tyndale as theologian… has been at best neglected and at worst twisted out of shape’, while ‘Tyndale as conscious [literary] craftsman has been… denied’. As a close reading of Tyndale's Gospel of John shows, Tyndale the theologian and Tyndale the craftsman can and should be approached as one and the same.
1. MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking Press, 2003), p. 80.Google Scholar
2. MacCulloch, , The Reformation, p. 80.Google Scholar
3. Williams, Rowan, ‘Introduction’, in Anglican Identities (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 2003), p. 3.Google Scholar
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5. Williams, , ‘William Tyndale’, p. 23 (emphasis mine).Google Scholar
6. Daniell, David, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 2.Google Scholar By quoting Daniell here I do not mean to imply a lack of work on Tyndale as translator since the publication of his biography. See, for example, Cummings, Brian, ‘The Theology of Translation: Tyndale's Grammar’, in Day, John T., Lund, Eric, and O'Donnell, Anne M. (eds.), Word, Church, and State: Tyndale Quincentenary Essays (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), pp. 36–59Google Scholar, and Hooker, Morna D., ‘Tyndale's “Heretical” Translation’, Reformation 2 (1997), pp. 127–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I greatly benefited from both articles in preparing this essay. Important earlier works on Tyndale's translations include (classically) Westcott, B.F., A General View of the History of the English Bible (London: MacMillan, 3rd edn, 1905)Google Scholar; Mozley, J.F., William Tyndale (London: Oxford University Press, 1937)Google Scholar; and Hammond, Gerald, The Making of the English Bible (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983).Google Scholar
7. Tyndale's Lutheranism, often overstated by critics, plays a large role in the ignoring of his theology, but David Daniell's biography does an exceptional job of tracing out Tyndale's frequent and significant departures from Luther's thinking (pp. 155–280). The leading study of Tyndale's theology is now Werrell, Ralph S.'s groundbreaking book, The Theology of William Tyndale (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2006)Google Scholar. Brief but interesting remarks on Tyndale the theologian are also to be found in Trueman, Carl R., ‘The Theology of the English Reformers’, in Bagchi, David and Steinmetz, David C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 163–65.Google Scholar See also Day, John T., Lund, Eric, and O'Donnell, Anne M. (eds.), Word, Church, and State: Tyndale Quincentenary Essays (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Moorman, J.R.H., A History of the Church of England (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 3rd edn, 1973), p. 172Google Scholar, provides a traditional (and not quite internally consistent) view, in which Tyndale's theology is ignored except insofar as it ‘unfortunately’ rears its ugly head in ‘glosses and notes of a strongly protestant flavour’ found in Tyndale's insufficiently ‘plain’ translation. One might also compare the entry for Tyndale in the glossary in Sykes, Stephen, Booty, John, and Knight, Jonathan (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, rev. edn, 1998), p. 506Google Scholar, wherein one learns mainly that Tyndale is ‘popularly known as “the English Luther”’, his translations were ‘printed on the continent in difficult and fugitive circumstances’, he ‘was given help by expatriate English sympathizers’, and his translation ‘was publicly burned in London’. Certainly a ‘seminal contributor to the English Reformation’ can be made to appear all but inconsequential.
8. Damrosch, David, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 288Google Scholar (emphasis mine). The literature on translation theory is vast. Valuable introductions to the field include Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2002)Google Scholar. For a relevant understanding of ‘translation’ in the broad sense, and in the context of the missionary movement, see Walls, Andrew F., ‘The Ephesian Moment: At a Crossroads in Christian History’, in The Cross-cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), pp. 72–81.Google Scholar
9. Damrosch, , What Is World Literature?, p. 292Google Scholar (emphasis mine).
10. It is worth noting the irony of how just as ‘a wave…of protestant fervour’ in the 1530s ‘led to the destruction of much that was ancient and beautiful’ in English churches (Moorman, , A History of the Church of England, p. 171)Google Scholar, a protestant William Tyndale was producing his final revisions of an English New Testament of great literary beauty.
11. Williams, Rowan, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Morehouse Publishing, 2005), p. 159.Google Scholar For the larger scholarly discourse on the relationship between theology and literature, see Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane (ed.), Art, Creativity and the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 2nd edn, 1996)Google Scholar, and Jasper, David, ‘The Study of Literature and Theology’, in Hass, Andrew W., Jasper, David and Jay, Elisabeth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15–32.Google Scholar
12. Williams is aware of how it might sound strange to speak of the love of the artist for her/his work of art, but, as he recognizes, ‘It would be very eccentric to see art as central to the distinctively human and at the same time as operating independently of love’ (p. 166).
13. Williams, , Grace and Necessity, p. 160.Google Scholar
14. Daniell states that ‘Nine-tenths of the Authorised Version's New Testament is Tyndale's’ (William Tyndale, p. 1).
15. Williams, , Grace and Necessity, p. 166.Google Scholar Tyndale, it seems, thought this true even more so of the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The ‘properties of the Hebrew tongue’, in Tyndale's estimation, ‘agreeth a thousand more with the English than with the Latin’ (Daniell, , William Tyndale, p. 290).Google Scholar
16. Williams, , Grace and Necessity, p. 167.Google Scholar
17. Hart, David Bentley, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 296.Google Scholar
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23. For just two of many recent and well-received examples, see Grieb, A. Katherine, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God's Righteousness (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Rhoads, David, Reading Mark, Engaging the Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Stibbe, Mark W.G., John as Storyteller: Narrative Criticism and the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a solid literary analysis of John's Gospel.
24. McIntosh, Mark A., Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2004), p. 10.Google Scholar Interestingly, William Countryman, viewing the sacramentalism of the fourth Gospel in less cosmological and more specifically ecclesial terms than does McIntosh, detects a ‘strongly ambivalent attitude toward the Christian sacraments of baptism and the eucharist’, and proposes that the evangelist saw ‘the sacramental rites as both essential and inadequate’ (The Mystical Way of the Fourth Gospel: Crossing Over into God [Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, rev. edn, 1994], p. 7).Google Scholar
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26. Biblical quotations are taken from Tyndale, William, Tyndale's New Testament (ed. and introd. Daniell, David; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. References are made to chapter numbers only, since there is no verse numbering in Tyndale's translation.
27. On the various arguments surrounding the possible interpolations of a redactor in John's Gospel, see Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), pp. 362–68.Google Scholar
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30. Daniell remarks on the profundity of Tyndale's ‘Let not your hearts be troubled’, contrasting it with an English version of Jesus' advice, in this case from the Good News Bible, outside the Tyndale tradition: ‘Do not be worried and upset’ — “as if the disciples were being told by Jesus', Daniell pithily comments, ‘to cheer up after having missed a bus’ (William Tyndale, p. 137).Google Scholar
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32. Rowan Williams offers a summary of earlier Anglican approaches to John's Gospel (by Westcott, Hoskyns, Temple, and Robinson, respectively) in ‘Anglican Approaches to the Fourth Gospel’, in Anglican Identities (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 2003), pp. 121–37Google Scholar, tentatively concluding that such an overview shows how ‘If historical mediation is essential to a distinctively Christian account of the knowledge of God, that history must be seen as always and irreducibly other to us. There is a dimension of the knowledge of God in Christ that is never capable of being absorbed into self-recognition only’ (p. 136).
33. Duraisingh, Christopher, ‘Toward a Postcolonial Re-visioning of the Church's Faith, Witness, and Communion’, in Douglas, Ian T. and Pui-Lan, Kwok (eds.), Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Church Publishing, 2001), pp. 337–67 (347).Google Scholar
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