We must now follow Tyndale across the sea to that foreign land where, as he touchingly tells us, amid “poverty, exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and innumerable other hard and sharp fighting’s,” he was to accomplish the work which was so near his heart.
During the year 1524. he remained at Hamburg, in welcome obscurity, quietly laboring on at his task in some poor lodging. For awhile he had hope of a helper in one whom he calls his “faithful companion,” but this friend did not remain with him, “having taken another voyage upon him to preach Christ,” Tyndale writes, “where, I suppose, He never was yet preached”; and Tyndale worked on alone, while the pile of sheets ready for the printer grew day by day, until the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark, with marginal notes, were finished.
In making his translation, Tyndale had not the helps in grammars and dictionaries which translators in modern times have, nor had he the same difficulties to encounter. Three hundred years ago, books which would be helpful to the study of Hebrew and Greek were very scarce and dear, and the numerous manuscript copies of the Greek text which a modern scholar must carefully compare, were then undiscovered or unknown. Tyndale’s translation was made from the Greek Testament of Erasmus, which had now reached its third edition; this he no doubt compared with the Latin, and he may also have used Luther’s German translation, but he could not avail himself of that of Wycliffe, which, as we have seen, was not made from the original Greek, and therefore was faulty in many respects; besides, the English of Wycliffe’s day was fast becoming so old fashioned that it could even at that time hardly be called a tongue “understanded of the people.”
Some writers have thought that from Hamburg Tyndale went to Wittemburg, and passed some time with Luther; while others consider it unlikely that the two translators ever met; we know nothing with certainty of Tyndale’s movements until, in the following year, we find him at Cologne, a quaint old city upon the Rhine, whither he had probably gone for the sake of superintending the printing, not only of the two earliest gospels, but of the whole New Testament, the translation of which was now complete. The city was noted as containing the shrine of the “Three Kings,” for the wise men from the East who, led by the star, came to worship the holy Child at Bethlehem, were said to have been buried there, and pilgrims flocked to visit their sacred relics. A city so full of superstition did not seem a likely place for the printing of the first English New Testament, but there were printers at Cologne, whose names were well known in London, and communication with England was easy and cheap. It was true that in that very year 1525 there had been a stir made; men said the new doctrines were spreading even there, and the arch bishop had forbidden any meetings to be held except under the sanction of the Church. Still, in one of the quiet streets of the old city, the stranger who had taken refuge there might hope to work on unobserved, until his task was done.
Tyndale had lately received some money sent him by the good London merchant, so that he was able to pay for the printing of his New Testament, and the great anxiety of the English people to obtain books forbidden by the bishops was so well known that two printers, who had a large warehouse in St. Paul’s Churchyard, readily undertook the work, sure that they would not lose by it, and promised to print three thousand copies, which were to be produced with the greatest possible secrecy.
The work was quietly proceeding, and eighty pages had been already printed, when suddenly the printers received orders from the Senate of Cologne to stop their work immediately. All had been discovered then, but when or how? Who had betrayed the secret? Without waiting to unravel the mystery, Tyndale and Roye―a man sent by Monmouth to help him to write and compare the texts, but one who did not work for the love of the truth as Tyndale did―gathered together the precious sheets which were already printed and sailed away up the Rhine, in the hope of finding some other place where the work might be safely finished.
It was one John Cochlæus, of Nuremburg, who had written against Luther and Melancthon, who had discovered that “two English apostates” were lurking in Cologne, accomplishing, unknown to any, a design so vast and so destructive that he wrote at once to King Henry, to the great Cardinal, and to Fisher, bishop of Rochester, to warn them of it.
“Two Englishmen,” so ran his letter to the king, “like the two eunuchs who desired to lay hands on Ahasuerus, are plotting wickedly against the peace of your kingdom; but I, like the faithful Mordecai, will lay open their designs to you. They wish to send the New Testament in English to your people. Give orders at every seaport to prevent the introduction of this most baneful merchandise.”
It happened that Cochlæus was having a book of his own printed at this very time by the printers who were at work upon Tyndale’s translation. It was by means of some words let fall in his hearing by one of them that the secret was discovered. “Whether the king and the cardinal of York wish it or not,” he said, “All England will soon be Lutheran.” Suspicion once aroused, Cochlæus spared no pains to learn more, and by many artful devices at last became acquainted with the whole of the “wicked design,” information of which he hastened to send to England. He it was who had gone to the senate and procured an order forbidding the printers to proceed with their work; but when, accompanied by a strong guard, he went to the printing office, prepared to seize the finished sheets, he found that he was too late—they were all gone, and the “English apostates” were already on their way to a fresh place of refuge.
This was found at Worms, the city where four years before Luther had answered for himself before the emperor and the great assembly of the state’s general—where in reply to the question, “Will you or will you not retract?” he had uttered those words so full of faith and courage: “I cannot and will not retract; for it is unsafe for a christian to speak against his conscience. Here I take my stand; I cannot do otherwise; may God be my help Amen.” It was at this city, which now, in the opinion of Cochlæus was in a fair way to become wholly Lutheran, that Tyndale, undaunted and unwearied, once more set himself to the task of completing the work so often interrupted.
Probably aware that information as to the size and appearance of his New Testament would reach England before the book itself could find its way thither, he resolved to give it a new shape. The book of which 3,000 copies were to have been printed at Cologne was of a large size—a quarto volume—and it was to have contained beside the text of scripture many glosses, as notes at the side of a book were then called, from an old word meaning an interpretation.
The Testament which was now printed at Worms, by a grandson of one of the inventors of printing, was only half that size—an octavo volume—and contained no glosses, and no prologue or introduction. Of this volume 6,000 copies were printed. Thus were the enemies of the truth of God defeated.
Thus it came to pass that the first English printed New Testament contained only the text of sacred scripture.
It was doubtless a matter of regret to Tyndale that the notes which he had so carefully prepared should not find a place in this volume, which was to be the first fruits of his labors, for in a short epistle to the reader, with which the book closes, he bids him “count it as a thing not having his full shape, but, as it were, born before his time, even as a thing begun rather than finished.” Acknowledging the “rudeness of the work,” he looks forward to a time when, if God permit, he may “give it its full shape . . . and give light where it is required, and seek in certain places more proper English . . . and show how the Scripture useth many words which are otherwise understood of the common people, and help with a declaration where one tongue talketh not another.” The epistle ends by bidding the reader “pray for” the unknown translator.
The smaller volume completed, Tyndale at once proceeded with the larger, and the work interrupted at Cologne was finished at Worms with such dispatch, that in the spring of the year 1526, books, crossing the sea by way of Antwerp, in spite of all that the watchfulness of king, or bishop, or cardinal could do, safely reached England, where, “as might have been expected,” Dr. Westcott tells us in his “History of the English Bible,” “the quarto edition first attracted attention, while, for a short time, the undescribed octavo escaped notice.” C. P.