History Book: An overlooked legacy

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, July 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. 450 years ago today, a renowned Greek scholar and Bible translator dies of old age. His most well-known work is an English translation of the Bible…but few have heard of it today…because it was quickly replaced the same year by the Church of England’s first authorized version.

PAUL BUTLER: The list of well-known Bible translators is pretty short. You’ve likely heard of John Wycliffe and William Tyndale. Perhaps you’re familiar with Myles Coverdale and John Rogers, but have you heard of Richard Taverner?

Until a week ago, I hadn’t, so I reached out to an expert.

VINER: When you emailed about this Bible, it was the first time anyone had ever asked me about a Taverner Bible. But I don't think that's insignificant…

Wesley Viner is an Early Modern Curator at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.

The museum has a first edition of the Taverner Bible in its collection…though it’s not on display.

VINER: It's like all of the other Bibles during that time, it's a revision of the English translations that came before it. So it's a revision of the Matthew Bible, which is a self-revision of Coverdale, which is a revision of Tyndale.

From the 1530s to 1611, there are quite a few English Bible projects. Each translator building on the work of others, updating certain passages to better reflect the meaning of the original languages. Many also insert their own translator notes or Biblical commentary.

VINER: Bible translations kind of explode in the 16th century. They really take off. And beginning with the Tyndale Bible through the King James Bible in 1611, you have this series of very, very famous English Bibles. So you go from Tyndale in 1525-26, to the Coverdale Bible, the Matthew Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, on and on and on. And eventually you get to the King James Bible…The Taverner Bible fits in that time period but it's not really mentioned or talked about a whole lot.

Richard Taverner was a Greek scholar who worked privately for Thomas Cromwell and was appointed to the King’s service. Taverner promoted the reformation in England and produced many religious texts before his 1539 Bible translation, including catechisms, commentaries, and observations from the scriptures.

VINER: These Biblical scholars and linguists are experimenting with the English language trying to figure out how best to express the ideas that they see in Greek and Hebrew in English. Sometimes they're inventing new words, they're inventing new phrases, new idioms, they're adopting words from other languages when they can't find words that make sense to them in English.

It takes a lot of time, work, and resources to publish a Bible in the 16th century, and Taverner’s large pulpit Bible might have had a longer lasting legacy in the English speaking world, if it weren’t for King Henry VIII and his Great Bible that came out the same year.

VINER: The Church of England’s attempt to have a single authorized authoritative Bible translation which will exist throughout the Church in England. Everyone will be using the same thing.

The Great Bible has the crown and the Church of England behind it, and its use becomes mandatory, meaning guaranteed distribution.

Plus, King Henry VIII’s Bible was overseen by the well known Biblical scholar Myles Coverdale. He had published the first complete English translation of the Bible a few years earlier based on Tyndale’s work.

So it’s easy to see why Taverner’s Bible doesn’t have much of a chance, it’s kind of like an independent film trying to find screens the same weekend as a blockbuster.

VINER: And so, the ill fate of poor Richard Taverner, his edition is sort of blotted out from the history books. And in fact, if you read sort of bibliographic censuses of English Bibles, they'll usually have some line about the Taverner Bible that says something like, it exerted zero influence on subsequent English Bible translations. … It's not true that it just disappeared into a dustbin somewhere. It was still there. People were still using it.

Even with the wide-spread use of the Great Bible, Taverner’s Bible is revised and republished in 1551, or at least his New Testament work:

VINER: It does pop up…after Edward takes the English throne. There's sort of a renewed interest in English Bibles in the late 1540s and early 1550s.

The Museum of the Bible has digitized a handful of pages of the 1551 Taverner Bible. The Old Style bold printing is striking with a lot of text on every page. There are chapter headings, but no verse markings. There is very little artwork. The wording is foreign to modern ears, yet familiar:

VINER: In the beginning created God, heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty and darkness was upon the deep and the spirit of God was born upon the waters. And God said, let there be light and there was light and God saw the light that it was good …

Richard Taverner and his Bible fall out of favor during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary, but Taverner remerges when Queen Elizabeth ascends the throne in 1558. He preaches regularly at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford, even becoming High Sheriff for Oxfordshire before his death on July 14th, 1575.

In every field there are hall-of-famers and headliners who get most of the attention…but there are countless others diligently doing their part in the shadows, off the beaten path, in obscurity. People like Richard Taverner.

VINER: Each of them plays their own unique role in this sort of millennia-long story of the Christian church and the Bible and its transmission over time and its translation and its spread around the world. that sequence of Bibles, that shaped the church's theology, its ecclesiology, its relationship with the world, its understanding of politics.

Seeing how different copies, different manuscripts, different editions, different translations affect that narrative, that progress in unexpected ways is, I think, very interesting.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Paul Butler with assistance from Emma Eicher.

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