style he is rivalled by his great enemy, the Chancellor.[1] Never were two English writers better matched in fight than More and Tyndale; loud was the wrangling over the Reformer's rendering of the Greek Scriptural words charis, ecclesia, presbyteros, metanoia. All Greek scholars must see what an advantage Tyndale had over Wickliffe, when we read an absurd version of Wickliffe's in the parable of the son, who at first refused to work in his father's vineyard, but afterwards ‘stirid by penaunce’ went.[2] The men that loved not the Reformation had a rooted mistrust of Tyndale's Bible. Long after the Martyr's death, Bishop Gardiner in 1542 brought forward a list of 102 Latin words (so he called them), which ought to be retained in any English version ‘for the majesty of the matter in them contained.’ Among these majestic words were olacausta (sic), simulacrum, panis, peccator, zizania, hostia, and others of the like kind.[3] It was a happy thing that the Bishop was
- ↑ King Alfred and Tyndale are alike in this, that three-fourths of their ‘weighty words’ are Teutonic, such as can be now understood; but as to the other fourth, Alfred's Teutonic has been replaced by the French and Latin that Tyndale was driven to use, owing to the heedlessness of the Thirteenth Century.
- ↑ A corrupt religion will corrupt its technical terms. One of the most curious instances of the degradation of a word is St. Jerome's pœnitentia, an act of the mind, which he uses of God Himself; this word in Italy (penitenza) now means no more than some bodily act of atonement for sin. This is as great a drop as when we find virtus and virtu expressing widely different things; the one suits Camillus, the other Cellini. Coverdale, who translated the New Testament ten years after Tyndale had done it, sometimes turns metanoia into penance, one of the many faults of his version. Words, like coins, get worn away by the wear and tear of ages.
- ↑ Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, ii. 151.
