quote a passage from his Obedience of a Christian Man, put forth in 1527; this will show the scholarship of
Ille Dei vates sacer, Esdras ille Britannus,
Fida manus sacri fidaque mens codicis.[1]
‘Saint Jerom translated the bible into his mother tongue: why may not we also? They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth[2] a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.’
The Reformer lived to English most of the Bible; the little he left undone at his death in 1536 was finished by his friend Rogers, Queen Mary's first victim. This was the Bible set up in every English parish church by Henry VIII., though he had long plotted against the Translator's life.
I must glance at another of Tyndale's helpers. William Roy, a runaway Franciscan, was employed by Tyndale in 1525 to compare the texts of the New Testament and to write. The two men had not much in common.
