LETTERS Authorised monotony
From Mr David S.M. Williams Sir: The cult of William Tyndale goes from strength to strength. Some months ago Sir Rowland Whitehead claimed, in the Salisbury Review, that the Tyndale New Testament was responsible 'for bringing the message of Christianity to the ordinary people of Eng- land for the first time'; now Peter Jones sees him as the man responsible for the global tri- umph of the English language (`The miracle of "and" ', 8 January). Big claims.
Peter Jones's argument depends on the value one gives to the Authorised Version: 90 per cent pure Tyndale, or so he claims. Is it, as is often claimed, a marvellous example of English prose style? The answer, I think, is no.
The AV was not written in the idiom of its day (compare Shakespeare); it is essen- tially a word-for-word translation, no less than the Septuagint or the Vulgate. It is good English because for a long time it has been treated as the standard of good English. Droned into the ears of youth for over three centuries, its cadences have come to be accepted as the right sort of cadences, and are what the ordinary Englishman means by good prose. Whether the effect of this bibliolatry on English style has been a gain is doubtful. It has certainly impover- ished the vocabulary; or why is Shakespeare such a mass of obsolete words?
As for the miraculous 'and', another translator of the Bible, the late Ronald Knox, pointed out that there were about 50 in the first chapter of St Matthew and 80 or so in the first chapter of St Luke, 'each leaving its trail not only of monotony, but of obscurity'. He gave enough examples to show that the charge is perfectly valid.
One's confidence in Peter Jones's judg- ment is not increased by the fact that he does not appear to know much about William Tyndale — he even thinks he was executed for translating the Bible. Tyndale, a renegade Franciscan, was in fact executed in Belgium as an obstinate heretic; and ver- nacular versions of the Bible in all the main languages had been in circulation for cen- turies before he came on the scene.
David S.M. Williams
Palmers Green, London N13
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