by Eliot Wilson, CityAM
As our new Education Secretary rethinks how we learn about language, Eliot Wilson on one of the most forgotten and seminal English texts
Five hundred years ago this year, the first copies of an English translation of the New Testament appeared in London. The brilliant young theologian and linguist William Tyndale, then studying in Germany, was the first scholar to translate the New Testament directly from the original Greek text into English, but his work had not been authorised by the Church and copies were only available clandestinely.
The Tyndale Bible was merely the beginning. Over the coming decades, three pioneering works in English were written which are some of the richest sources of the language we still speak today. And one of them deserves considerably more public renown than it receives in modern society.
It was Groucho Marx who joked, “Oh, that Shakespeare! What did he do? Nothing but string together a load of old clichés”. We cannot tell how many familiar idioms were invented or first recorded by William Shakespeare’s electrifying imagination and effusive hand, but it is hundreds, perhaps thousands.
While Shakespeare was writing his later plays—King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest—the second treasure-house of modern English was in production. In 1604, James VI and I, King of Scots for nearly 40 years but recently crowned King of England, commissioned a new translation of the Bible. It was a huge project: 47 scholars, arranged into six committees.
Language with power and beauty
Between them, in 1611, they produced the King James Bible, or the Authorised Version. Dignified and sonorous and described by even the militant atheist Christopher Hitchens as “a giant step in the maturing of English literature”, it gave the language a fresh injection of phrases and axioms which have endured.
There is a third rich seam of English idiom which looms less large in the public imagination. It was written earlier than the other two sources, and, unlike the King James Bible, it was largely the work of one overall hand and mind. It is still employed in some form for its original purpose; yet it is a text with which many are no longer familiar, as those who regularly attend Anglican services now number only half a million or so.