TITLE: HISTORY OF THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH
AUTHOR: F.F. BRUCE
Frederick Fyvie Bruce (12 October 1910 – 11 September 1990) was a Bible scholar, and one of the founders of the modern evangelical understanding of the Bible. His work New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? is considered a classic in the discipline of Christian apologetics.
He was born in Elgin, Moray and was educated at the University of Aberdeen, Cambridge University and the University of Vienna. After teaching Greek for several years first at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Leeds he became head of the Department of Biblical History and Literature at the University of Sheffield in 1947. In 1959 he moved to the University of Manchester where he became professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis. In his career he wrote some thirty-three books and served as editor of The Evangelical Quarterly and the Palestine Exploration Quarterly. He retired from teaching in 1978.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. The Beginning of the English Bible
2. John Wycliffe and the English Bible
3. The English New Testament in Print
4. Tyndale’s Later Years
5. The Complete English Bible Printed and Licensed
6. The Great Bible
7. The Elizabethan Bible
8. The King James Bible
9. The English Bible for Roman Catholics
10. After King James
11. The Revised Version
12. Early Twentieth Century Versions
13. Moffat, Goodspeed and Others
14. The Revised Standard Version
15. Recent Roman Catholic Versions
16. Other Recent Versions
17. The New English Bible
18. The English Bible in the Seventies
BOOK SUMMARY:
The fascinating story of how we got the Bible in its present form actually starts thousands of years ago. In this book, the author discussed how the English Bible came to be. The first hand-written English language Bible manuscripts were produced in the 1380’s AD by John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor, scholar, and theologian. Wycliffe was well-known throughout Europe for his opposition to the teaching of the organized Church, which he believed to be contrary to the Bible. Wycliffe produced dozens of English language manuscript copies of the scriptures. They were translated out of the Latin Vulgate, which was the only source text available to Wycliffe which made the Pope so infuriated by his teachings and his translation of the Bible into English.
The first book to ever be printed was a Latin language Bible. Gutenberg’s Bibles were surprisingly beautiful, as each leaf Gutenberg printed was later colorfully hand-illuminated. The invention of the movable-type printing press meant that Bibles and books could finally be effectively produced in large quantities in a short period of time. This was essential to the success of the Reformation. Tyndale though holds the distinction of being the first man to ever print the New Testament in the English language. Tyndale was a true scholar and a genius, so fluent in eight languages that it was said one would think any one of them to be his native tongue. English Bibles were burned as soon as the Bishop could confiscate them, but the more the King and Bishop resisted its distribution, the more fascinated the public at large became. The church declared it contained thousands of errors as they torched hundreds of New Testaments confiscated by the clergy, while in fact, they burned them because they could find no errors at all. One risked death by burning if caught in mere possession of Tyndale’s forbidden books.
The author emphasized that we as Christians, must be very careful to make intelligent and informed decisions about what translations of the Bible we choose to read. On the liberal extreme, we have people who would give us heretical new translations that attempt to change God’s Word to make it politically correct. One example of this, is the Today’s New International Version (T.N.I.V.) which seeks to remove all gender-specific references in the Bible whenever possible! Not all new translations are good… and some are very bad.
But equally dangerous, is the other extreme… of blindly rejecting ANY English translation that was produced in the four centuries that have come after the 1611 King James. We must remember that the main purpose of the Protestant Reformation was to get the Bible out of the chains of being trapped in an ancient language that few could understand, and into the modern, spoken, conversational language of the present day. William Tyndale fought and died for the right to print the Bible in the common, spoken, modern English tongue of his day… as he boldly told one official who criticized his efforts, “If God spare my life, I will see to it that the boy who drives the plowshare knows more of the scripture than you, Sir!”
