A History Of The English Bible As Literature (2000) (a History Of The Bible As Literature)

This page intentionally left blank A H IS TO RY OF TH E ENGL I SH BIBLE A S L I T E R AT U R E Revised and condensed from David Norton’s acclaimed History of the Bible as Literature, this book tells the story of English literary attitudes to the Bible. At first jeered at and mocked as English writing, then denigrated as having ‘all the disadvantages of an old prose translation’, the King James Bible somehow became ‘unsurpassed in the entire range of literature’. How so startling a change happened and how it affected the making of modern translations such as the Revised Version and the New English Bible is at the heart of this exploration of a vast range of religious, literary and cultural ideas. Translators, writers such as Donne, Milton, Bunyan and the Romantics, reactionary Bishops and radical students all help to show the changes in religious ideas and in standards of language and literature that created our sense of the most important book in English. is Reader in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, specializing in the Bible and literature, and the English novel. Author of A History of the Bible as Literature, vols. ( ), he is a member of the Tyndale Society Advisory Board and serves on the General Advisory Board of Reformation. Volumes published in the series A History of the Bible as Literature Volume One: From Antiquity to by : hardback A History of the Bible as Literature Volume Two: From to the Present Day by : hardback A History of the English Bible as Literature by : hardback ; paperback A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS LITERATURE DAV I D N O RTON Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2004 First published in printed format 2000 ISBN 0-511-03428-8 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-77140-4 hardback ISBN 0-521-77807-7 paperback Contents page ix xi xii List of plates Preface List of abbreviations Creators of English The challenge to the translators Literal translation: Rolle’s Psalter and the Wyclif Bible William Tyndale John Cheke and the inkhorn Myles Coverdale From the Great Bible to the Rheims-Douai Bible: arguments about language Official Bibles Opposing camps Does the verbal form matter? The King James Bible The excluded scholar: Hugh Broughton Rules to meet the challenge The preface Bois’s notes Conclusion Epilogue: Broughton’s last word Literary implications of Bible presentation Presentations of the text, – John Locke’s criticism of the presentation of the text