What do you know about the Bible and its influence on English

What do you know about the Bible and its influence on English Prose?

Write a historical and critical note no ‘the Authorized Version of the Bible’ and its influence on English literature.

Ans.

The Bible, known as the word of God, is the sacred book of the Christians. It is divided into two parts-the Old Testament and the New Testament. Originally the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. With the rise of the Christian communities in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, the Bible was translated into Latin and the most popular translation is known as the Vulgate by St. Jerome.(340-470). This version be came the official scripture of the Roman Catholic Church. The great protestant versions of the Bible came into being with the Reformation and the word was begun by Wycliffe in England and Luther in Germany. The Protestant version culminated in King James’s Authorized Version of 1611. About after three centuries, in 1881, the Authorized Version itself came to be revised in consequence of a resolution passed by both the House of the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury.

English Translations of the Bible from Wycliffe Onwards

A great literary achievement of the seventeenth century was the Authorized Version of the Bible published in 1611. It exercised ‘tremendous effect on modern prose style. The English Bible in the Authorized Version does not read like a translation at all but like a literary work of original composition. The universality and grandeur of the matter, wedded to the simplicity of style, has resulted in what is known as the grand style and is possessed by rare authors like Homen Never before nor since has a work in translation acquired that status. But this translation was the culmination of efforts in translating the Bible from 1527 onwards. The work was being repaired and in a measure, re edified during the whole of the 16th century, and the coping-stone was finally put to the edifice by the authorized Version issued in 1611. The English version of the Bible first came from the pen of Wycliffe and his followers. It was produced in eight years from about 1380 to 1388. Wycliffe’s Bible was a translation of the Latin Vulgate issued by St. Jerome in the fifth century. Though supple Wycliffe’s translation was exceedingly hard and wearisome without ness of form, it was one of the earliest remarkable prose monuments in English. He made the Bible accessible to every common reader.

William Tyndale

Wycliffe’s model was the Latin Vulgate but William Tyndale translated the Bible straight from the Hebrew and the Greek originals. “The history of the English Bible begins with the work of Tyndale and not with that of Wycliffe”, says Dr. Westcott in his History of the English Bible, because not only Tyndale based his translation on the original sources, he made the study of the Bible with its human element, exceedingly popular among the people who stayed up all night to peruse it, and relinquished in its favour of their old chapbooks and tales of the Round Table and of Robin Hood.” Tyndale’s translation may be described as a truly noble work, faithful and scholarly, though couched in simple and faithful language. After Tyndale, Attempts were made at a number of translations of the Bible, the chief of them being Miles Coverdale’s Bible 1535, Cranmer’s Great Bible 1539, the Geneva Bible 1560, and the Bishop’s Bible 1568.

The Authorized Version of the Bible

The Authorized Version of the Bible, also known as King James’ Bible, has a place in the classic of the world Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, a distinction which cannot be claimed for any other work in translation. In 1604, one year after his succession to the throne of England. James I summoned a conference of fifty-seven learned men representing both the High and the Low church, with Lancelot Andrews at their head, for the purpose of preparing a final translation which took about three years in its preparation and was finally issued in 1611. The forty-seven recognized Biblical scholars used not only the Hebrew and the Greek texts and the Latin Vulgate but all English translations preceding to it. They succeeded in blending the peculiar excellences of all of these. with the result that in King James’s Bible we possess a monument of English prose holding of no particular age, but gathering up into itself the strength and sweetness of all ages. Its influence pervades almost the whole English literature. It became a model for future translations and solace for every pious Christian. Except the Koran it is doubtful any book has been more read. It has become part of the national mind, and has permanently impressed upon the mind some of its simplicity and directness. Its noble figures, happy turns, and pithy sentiments are upon every lip.

Influence of the Bible on English Literature

The influence to the Bible is two-fold. There is the rhetorical influence of the Old Testament, and the conservational influence of the New Testament. The influence of the Bible spread all over English literature, particularly the thought and style of great English prose writers, as the language of the Authorized Version became familiar to generations of English speaking people being daily read and perused in their churches and their homes. The language of the Bible is marked by dignity and elevation, direct austere simplicity and poetic fervour, proverbial nature and classical restraint. As Saintsbury remarks, “There is no better English anywhere than the English of the Bible.”

This sweeping statement of Saintsbury is not approved by modern critics like J. Middleton Murry who warn us to be on our guard against the above-quoted popular view regarding the style of the Bible. No doubt, so of ten the style of the English Bible is highly poetical proverbial, simple, dramatic and splendid, but as a whole it is not infallible. J. Middleton Murry remarks, “The style of one half of the English Bible is atrocious. A great part of the historical books of the Old Testament, the gospels in the New, are examples of all that writing should not be; and nothing the translators might have done would have altered this.” But we should not forget that the Bible is a very heterogeneous book and contains not less than four styles. There is high poetry; there is dramatic narrative in its simplest and crudest form’ there is religious legend deriving its emotional intensity from a passionate monotheism shared by the audience. The literary beauty of the Bible lies in the actual words of Christ reported and the poetical and dramatic effects of such lines as ‘He went out and wept bitterly’, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and “Then all the disciples left Him, and fled.”

The style of the Bible has affected many of he greatest of writers and Edmund Gosse went to the extent of saying. “Not a native author but owes something of his melody and his charm to the echo of those Biblical accents, which were the first fragments of purely classical English to attract his admiration in childhood.” With the exception of Bacon every great English prose writer is indebted to the Bible. It was the Bible. It was the Bible and a few fairy tales which made a wandering tinker like Bunyan, a great English prose writer. One fine morning Bunyan woke up and found that the influence of the Bible on The Pilgrim’s Progress made him one of the greatest prose writers of all ages. Bacon owed little to the Bible; his style was framed on classical models; but Milton’s debt is a considerable one, in as much as whenever he achieves distinction in prose, it is by means of the Hebraic cadences. The historians, Clarendon and Fuller, catch some measures of the stately rhetoric of the Old Testament, while Sir Thomas Browne in his quaint Religion Medici, Robert Burton with his discursive Anatomy of Melancholy, and Jeremy Taylor, in varying ways, testify to its influence. Nor is the Old Testament the only literary force. Mention has been made of the conversational element in the New Testament. Both Old and New Testaments are seen in John Bunyan, whose style owes more to the Bible, probably more than does any other man of letters. The simple, flowing narrative of the Evangelists, the colloquial ease and force of the parabolic teaching, meet us in almost every page of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Addison’s conversational essay is certainly influenced by them just as Swift reflects the sterner qualities of the prophetic books. While in the Victorian age, it is sufficient to recall the stormy vigour of Carlyle, and ironic eloquence of Ruskin, to realize the spell of Hebridean over the master to prose. Among other writers Cromwell, Wesley, Richard Baxter, George Fox, Browning, Tennyson, John Bright, Emerson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi had the Bible behind them which shaped their outlook and style.

It may be said further that there in no other book, no other ten books, that have left so deep effect on English literature. There are no literary works that are so often cited or alluded to; none which have supplied so much matter for apt illustration, or been so often resorted to for vivid imagery and energetic diction. The remark is applicable to modern literature generally, on which the traces of the influence of this book are incomparably deeper and more legible than those left by any other single volume. None but those who have been in the habit of inspection the best portions of modem literature with the express view of tracing the influence of the Bible upon it, can have an adequate idea of the extent to which it has moulded thought and sentiment, or given strength or grace to ex pression. Its literary excellences in general have insensibly exhorted the homage and tinged the style of the great masters of eloquence 2 poetry. Its apothegms, its examples, its lessons of conduct, its vivid and intense imagery come spontaneously to the lips, as more exactly or forcibly expressing thought and feeling than anything found elsewhere. How often Milton, Cowper, Macaulay, when struggling to give emphasis to their thought or to intensity a feeble expression of have laid hold unconsciously, as it were, of scripture phrase or metaphor. As to Shakespeare, no less than three works have expressly written to trace the influence of the Bible on his genius and writings. The matchless energy of Milton’s diction in many parts of his prose writings is in no slight degree due to the use he made of the scripture.

Conclusion

It appears that the influence of the Bible on English prose was all for the good, but the Bible had some banal influence too. Probably assiduous reading of the Bible is largely responsible for the troubled and confused eloquence, interrupted by images violently subversive of logic, of which some English writers have been guilty. In spite of this the Bible did the greatest service in keeping poetry alive in an age of Reason, the Royal Society, and Good Sense. To sum up, the Bible was the greatest force which perpetuated in English, even in English prose, elements of poetry and quaintness and a certain Chiaroscuro, and which also maintained in thought a mysticism and an imaginative ferment increasingly threatened by strict rationalism.