The Strange Protestant Bible of Henry VIII

Just a note again that the book is out. Affiliate links are below. And there's a funny story actually about the book. It was... Today we're looking at the question of the strange Bible that was simultaneously a Protestant Bible and part of Henry VIII's piecemeal reformation. And the strange thing about this reformation is that it calls into question some of our stories about the wider Protestant movement as a whole. You see, you and I are used to describing the Reformation as an explosion. But as I often say about the English Reformation, it is more of a mustard seed. It starts small. It starts very small in fact. And it starts on rocky soil, at least for the Protestant Reformation to flower. Henry VIII was the furthest thing you might say from a Protestant. He actually wrote a book against Luther during the early days of the Reformation and he instructed his people to attack the Reformation in print. There was a crackdown on things like the Tyndale Bible. Henry was not going to let Lutheranism come into his lands. But then Henry and his wife Catherine could not produce a male heir. Henry blamed himself, then his wife, and finally the Pope for allowing him to marry Catherine in the first place. She had been his sister-in-law, married to his brother Arthur, but when he had died the Pope had granted a dispensation. And now that Henry could not get an annulment for that marriage, he was white with rage. And he threw the Pope out. Now Henry blew hot and cold on the Reformation for almost the entirety of his life. There were times where he seemed to budge and give in to the Reformation's call for certain things. For example, he dissolved the monasteries and attacked them, particularly those that were opposed to the Reformation. But Henry was no Protestant. And we see this in his engagement with the person of William Tyndale. Tyndale had arrived in London about 1522, only a matter of months after Luther and Lutheranism were declared a heresy and fully illegal in the Holy Roman Empire. And Tyndale actually forms a bit of a microcosm of the challenge in England. You see, England had actually embraced humanism. It had not embraced the Reformation, but it had embraced these ideas of the new learning. And so Tyndale tries to leverage that fact when he comes to London in 1522. He appeals to the London bishop at the time, Cuthbert Tunstall, and asks if he might be allowed to translate the Bible into English. He tries to leverage this idea of the new learning and of the love of languages. And Tunstall is not dumb and he realizes what this is, which is a Protestant instinct to overturn the Vulgate. And so he denies that request. And Tyndale eventually flees to Europe, to the wider continent, where he would spend the rest of his life until his martyrdom. Now, this is important because Tyndale's Bible will be covered in another lecture later. But we have to understand that it's interesting to think that Tyndale's Bible was rejected. And it's not a complete Bible, of course. It's only the New Testament and roughly a third or so of the Old Testament. But we call it Tyndale's Bible, what he had finished by the time of his martyrdom. But that Bible was always rejected in England. Henry had hated it. Now, Henry hated Tyndale mostly because Tyndale had spoken in opposition to the divorce of Catherine. Tyndale's position was that divorce is a worse result than making the foolish decision to begin with to marry her. And he said so in print. And so to the day that he died, Tyndale was an enemy of the crown. But we often hear of how Tyndale's Bible was so influential in the context of England, that it was the bedrock of later translations, including the King James Bible. And some stats today have noticed that as much as 80 or 90% of, say, the New Testament, even in modern versions, bears a direct resemblance of Tyndale's Bible. That says something, by the way, of modern translations. They're not full revisions, full new translations, but usually a ratcheting down of some of the language. So how did Tyndale's Bible come into England? Where did it come from? Well, the short answer is it comes in by some of Tyndale's colleagues. One of the main men to do this was Miles Coverdale. He had been a student at Cambridge, and he had actually shared Tyndale's love of humanism and the biblical languages. He had set off to the University of Louvain in modern-day Belgium, where he had actually studied for a time with Erasmus himself. And so in 1527, Coverdale had actually embraced the Reformation. But unlike Tyndale, Coverdale had kept a low profile, had kept his head down. And so he was not sought by the crown or by any of the authorities. He was just considered to be a humanist scholar at large. Now, around the time that Tyndale is executed, Coverdale makes his way back to London, where he is embraced by those who are part of the quiet Reformation, you might say, back in England, people like Thomas Cranmer. You see, in the 1530s, particularly right in the middle, the Protestants were making headway with the king. One of the main places they made headway was on the subject of a new English translation of the Bible. They came to the point where they convinced Henry that a Bible in English actually would be the bedrock of his own authority, having now declared himself head of church and state. They realized that they could leverage the king's desire for obedience to get one of their, frankly, very Protestant ideas off the ground, the publication of a new Bible. You see, English Bibles had been outlawed since the time of Wycliffe back in the Middle Ages. And so in 1535 or so, Henry began to acquiesce to this idea of an English Bible. And now that Coverdale was back, a man who we think worked in part with Tyndale on his translation, it seems to be that Coverdale brought that translation with him back to England, or at least he had access to these things. And so in 1535, Coverdale actually produced the first complete Protestant English Bible of the Reformation. It is today known as the Coverdale Bible. Sometimes it's called the Trekle Bible, which is a sort of lampoon of the fact that Jeremiah 8.22 asks, is there not a trekle in Gilead? But it's the Coverdale Bible, largely forgotten. And what it really is, is a cobbling together of Tyndale's Bible with Coverdale's other work using the Zurich Bible from Zwingli's Reformation, the Luther Bible, the Vulgate, and some others, and translating the rest of the Old Testament into English. And so in many ways, Coverdale's Bible is smuggling in Tyndale's Bible under the king's nose. Now the main feature of Coverdale's Bible that is remembered today would be amongst those who are Anglican. The Book of Common Prayer, at least in the 1549 version and 1552 version, actually have the Psalter from Coverdale's Bible as its foundation. Now that Psalter is not used in other Bibles exactly word for word, but those in the Anglican tradition who use the historic Book of Common Prayer actually pray when they pray the Psalms, the Coverdale Bible. Now the reason Coverdale's Bible is largely forgotten is because it was actually a rushed job. Meaning the Protestants in leadership, especially Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, had not officially received written permission or authorization from Henry to do this work. So technically it was illegal. And so rather than ask the king's permission after the fact, they decided to redo the work, relatively the same, but still just a tweaking of the Coverdale Bible. And what was produced in 1537 is known today as the Matthew Bible or the Thomas Matthew Bible. This is a bit of a strange translation as well because there actually is no one by the name of Thomas Matthew. The work is by a John Rogers who had actually, again, been one of the assistants to William Tyndale when he was working on his Bible. So two Bibles now worked on by Tyndale's folks, Tyndale's colleagues, only now semi-officially for the English church. The problem with the Matthew Bible is it was quickly discovered when it was sent off to be published. It was sent to the continent and it was discovered by the Inquisition and therefore work was stopped. So all of that complex story, the first Tyndale's Bible, then later the Coverdale and the Matthew Bible, lead eventually in 1539 to the work of the Great Bible. You see, once the Inquisition had discovered the Matthew Bible, those copies had been lost. So they essentially redid the work again. Now we don't quite know all the details here in terms of little ways that the translation is ratcheted down or altered, but the Great Bible in 1539 is a landmark in the history of the English Reformation. You see, it actually symbolizes the tension under Henry VIII. Henry was in many ways the last man who could call himself Catholic without a Pope for a long, long time. As one person said in his own day, it's like Henry threw somebody off the top of a steeple and ordered him to stop halfway down. Henry had thrown out the Pope's authority, but he kept things like the sacraments and he rejected still justification by faith alone and many of the hallmark Protestant doctrines. Those to his right and his left though, namely Cranmer and Cromwell, were avowed evangelicals or avowed Protestants. So they wanted the Bible obviously for reasons that were Protestant in nature. Henry wanted a Bible though that would discuss and describe and buttress his own authority. And so the Great Bible is this very strange specimen. It's a Protestant Bible in a way, authorized by the king who himself was not Protestant, yet the work on it was done only by Protestants. And the tension here is symbolized in the fact that on the cover page you have this amazing picture where at the top you have Henry with his hat off, his crown off, praying to Christ. And people have always noticed how pinched it is up at the top. The artist didn't give himself enough room. But he prays to Christ and the idea here is that he receives inspiration from God himself to provide the word of God to the people. Come one step down, and this is typically how you read these pieces of art. They go chronologically from the top to the bottom. You come down, there is Henry enthroned, handing the Verbum Dei, the word of God. In his right hand he hands it to Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is therefore symbolic of the church. To his left he hands it to Thomas Cromwell, vice-gerent and spirituals as it was called, which is sort of the political right-hand man. You carry that down and then suddenly those folks, Cranmer now mitered and Cromwell now wearing the robes of state, hand the Verbum Dei, the word of God, to their constituents. And you follow it down all the way to the bottom and you get this kind of tableau of all kinds of folks. You have folks in prison, you have a woman with her children, you have folks dressed in all types of backgrounds of what was then 16th century England. And what is their cry? Long live the king. Not thanks be to God, not we embrace the Reformation, nothing that is suggestive of a deeper theological change per se. But you see, this bottom result, you might say, of the word of God is very much what Henry wanted. It was the basis upon which he allowed the Bible. Now, what the Protestants banked on, what they assumed would happen, is that when the word of God was in the language of the people, that they would begin to soften to the medieval ways of the Catholic church and that they would begin to become more fertile ground for hearing the seeds of the gospel. So, Henry VIII's Bible is a startling, striking, strange thing. A king himself, not Protestant, yet because he has opened the door to this translation, by that route, by that road, Tyndale's Bible makes its way into official English translation. You see, were it not for the Coverdale, the Matthew, and the Great Bible, Tyndale's Bible probably would have been more like the Wycliffe Bible in our modern imagination. Which is, it would have been something that was remembered, but it would not have been the foundation of so many English translations ever since. Because Coverdale brings it in, as well as John Rogers, what happens is, is Tyndale's Bible makes its way into the bloodstream, you might say. And so, when you get to the King James Bible in the 17th century, when the 1611 edition is published, as much as 90%, probably no less than 80% of the Tyndale translation, of those books that he had completed, are almost unanimously identified or used by the King James Bible. Why? Well, the King James Bible reached back to all of these translations and used them in the formation of their own translation. So, without intending it, Henry VIII paved the way for the English Protestant Bible.