There were so many of these versions, and they were so unequal in value, that there was natural demand for a Latin translation that should be authoritative.So came into being what we call the Vulgate, whose very name indicates the desire to get the Bible into the vulgar or common tongue.Jerome began by revising the earlier Latin translations, but ended by going back of all translations to the original Greek, and back of the Septuagint to the original Hebrew wherever he could do so.Fourteen years he labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine, to do his work the better.Barely four hundred years (404 A.D.) after the birth of Christ his Latin version appeared.It met a storm of protest for its effort to go back of the Septuagint, so dominant had the translation become.Jerome fought for it, and his version won the day, and became the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible.
For seven or eight centuries it held its sway as the current version nearest to the tongue of the people.Latin had become the accepted tongue of the church.There was little general culture, there was little general acquaintance with the Bible except among the educated.During all that time there was no real room for a further translation.One of the writers[1] says: "Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible in the mother tongue; while the illiterate majority were in no condition to feel the want of such a book, the educated minority would be averse to so great and revolutionary a change." When a man cannot read any writing it really does not matter to him whether books are in current speech or not, and the majority of the people for those seven or eight centuries could read nothing at all.Those who could read anything were apt to be able to read the Latin.
[1] Hoare, Evolution of the English Bible, p.39.
These centuries added to the conviction of many that the Bible ought not to become too common, that it should not be read by everybody, that it required a certain amount of learning to make it safe reading.They came to feel that it is as important to have an authoritative interpretation of the Bible as to have the Bible itself.When the movement began to make it speak the new English tongue, it provoked the most violent opposition.Latin had been good enough for a millennium; why cheapen the Bible by a translation? There had grown up a feeling that Jerome himself had been inspired.He had been canonized, and half the references to him in that time speak of him as the inspired translator.Criticism of his version was counted as impious and profane as criticisms of the original text could possibly have been.It is one of the ironies of history that the version for which Jerome had to fight, and which was counted a piece of impiety itself, actually became the ground on which men stood when they fought against another version, counting anything else but this very version an impious intrusion!
How early the movement for an English Bible began, it is impossible now to say.Certainly just before 700 A.D., that first singer of the English tongue, Caedmon, had learned to paraphrase the Bible.We may recall the Venerable Bede's charming story of him, and how he came by his power of interpretation.Bede himself was a child when Caedmon died, and theromance of the story makes it one of the finest in our literature.Caedmon was a peasant, a farm laborer in Northumbria working on the lands of the great Abbey at Whitby.Already he had passed middle life, and no spark of genius had flashed in him.He loved to go to the festive gatherings and hear the others sing their improvised poems; but, when the harp came around to him in due course, he would leave the room, for be could not sing.One night when he had slipped away from the group in shame and had made his rounds of the horses and cattle under his care, he fell asleep in the stable building, and heard a voice in his sleep bidding him sing.When he declared he could not, the voice still bade him sing."What shall I sing?" he asked."Sing the first beginning of created things." And the words came to him; and, still dreaming, he sang his first hymn to the Creator.In the morning he told his story, and the Lady Abbess found that he had the divine gift.The monks had but to translate to him bits of the Bible out of the Latin, which he did not understand, into his familiar Anglo-Saxon tongue, and he would cast it into the rugged Saxon measures which could be sung by the common people.So far as we can tell, it was so, that the Bible story became current in Anglo-Saxon speech.Bede himself certainly put the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon.At the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, there is a manuscript of nearly twenty thousand lines, the metrical version of the Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an Augustinian monk named Orm, and so called the Ormulum.There were other metrical versions of various parts of the Bible.Midway between Bede and Orm came Langland's poem, "The Vision of Piers Plowman," which paraphrased so much of the Scripture.
Yet the fact is that until the last quarter of the fourteenth century there was no prose version of the Bible in the English language.Indeed, there was only coming to be an English language.It was gradually emerging, taking definite shape and form, so that it could be distinguished from the earlier Norman French, Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in which so much of it is rooted.
As soon as the language grew definite enough, it was inevitable that two things should come to pass.First, that some men would attempt to make a colloquial version of the Bible; and, secondly, that others wouldoppose it.One can count with all confidence on these two groups of men, marching through history like the animals into the ark, two and two.Some men propose, others oppose.They are built on those lines.
