Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ James was sensitive about the way the Presbyterians had restricted his power as a monarch in Scotland and felt he had to assert his role as head of the Church by supporting bishops. Viewing the Puritans’ motion as a move to limit his power, he voiced the infamous threat: ‘No bishop, no king!’ and won the day.

      As the conference proceeded, Reynolds suggested delegates discuss producing a new translation of the Bible. It was a timely move, for even though the Geneva version was popular, the clergy didn’t like its marginal notes which proclaimed the Pope as the Antichrist. Reynolds explained that ‘Those which were allowed in the reigns of Henry the eighth, and Edward the sixth, were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.’

      James was keen that ‘some special pains were taken for a uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities’. The conference agreed that a translation be made of the whole Bible ‘as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service’.

      The king appointed fifty-four ‘learned men’, including Reynolds, Lancelot Andrewes and William Barlow (though, oddly, not Hugh Broughton, the foremost English Hebrew scholar of the time), to work on the new translation, dividing them in six groups at Westminster, Cambridge and Oxford. They based their new edition on the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, but also consulted previous milestone works by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale. The task took four years, including nine months of refining carried out in London. Thomas Bilson and Myles Smith, who wrote the preface, conducted the final revision, which was then printed in London by Robert Barker, printer to the king.

      The King James Bible or Authorised Version (it was authorised by the king) stands as a masterpiece, but more for its literary content than its religious validity. Phrases that are now a rich part of English vocabulary – ‘coat of many colours’, ‘fight the good fight’ – were first found within, alongside passages of unmatchable quality and clarity: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal . . .’ and ‘His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude’, for instance.

      In the eighteenth century the King James replaced the Latin Vulgate as the standard version for English-speaking scholars. But disingenuously it also came to be seen as the divine text, refutation of which was a cardinal sin. Subsequent versions, while trying to jazz up the translation to make it more ‘relevant’, have come little nearer to capturing the original intention of the Scriptures and have fallen well short of the King James version in literary qualities.

      → The Gunpowder Plot, p. 81

      Islington

       ALEXANDER CRUDEN’S ADDRESS, Camden Passage

      The alleyway near Angel tube station, which contains one of the greatest concentration of antique shops in Britain, was home in the early eighteenth century to the biblical expert Alexander Cruden. In 1737 he completed the first English concordance to the Bible, a monumental production, longer than the complete works of Shakespeare. It lists alphabetically every significant word in the Scriptures and indicates where in the Old and New Testaments it can be found.

      Cruden was something of an eccentric. He would stride through the streets of Islington removing all traces of the number 45 to show his contempt for the radical orator and pamphleteer John Wilkes, whose issue No. 45 of the North Briton magazine had criticised George III. The king must have been pleased, for in 1758, the year the second edition of the Concordance appeared, he gave Cruden £100.

      Lambeth

       LAMBETH PALACE, Lambeth Palace Road

      The London residence and offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury date back to the thirteenth century. It was here in April 1378 that John Wycliffe, the first man to translate the Bible into English, was ordered to appear before William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, accused of heresy after rejecting the idea of transubstantiation – that the Communion wafer actually becomes the body of Christ during the service. As the trial began a message came to the judges from the Queen Mother, Joan of Kent, forbidding the council to pass sentence upon Wycliffe, which left them dumbfounded. This gave him some time to resubmit his case. He also handed the judges a statement of his principles:

      1. The Pope of Rome has no political authority.

      2. All popes are sinners just as other men and need to be reproved.

      3. The Pope has no right to the national resources of England.

      4. Priests have no power to forgive sins.

      5. Neither the Pope nor his priests have the power of excommunication.

      6. The Church is a plunderer of the world’s goods.

      7. No tithes should be paid to Rome.

      8. The Mass is blasphemous.

      The archbishop reprimanded Wycliffe for his teachings, but the trial ended inconclusively.

      Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards, were imprisoned here in 1434–5 in what was known as the Lollard’s Tower, destroyed by Second World War bombs but since rebuilt.

      → William Tyndale translates the Bible into English, p. 250

       THOMAS TANY BIBLE BURNING SITE, St George’s Fields, Lambeth Road

      Thomas Tany, a London silversmith, was found in St George’s Fields in December 1654 burning the Bible, armed with a sword and pistols. He had rowed over the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament earlier that day, trying to deliver a petition which backed his claim that he was directly descended from Aaron, Moses’ brother, High Priest of the Israelite, when God gave the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The petition also alleged that Tany was now Theauraujohn, High Priest of the Jews, who would soon rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with himself as High Priest.

      By a remarkable coincidence, the same day that Tany was jailed John Reeve, a local tailor, supposedly received a divine visitor who told him he had been chosen as the Lord’s ‘last messenger’. With his cousin, Lodowick Muggleton, Reeve formed the Muggletonian sect (→ p. 16), which later condemned Tany as a ‘counterfeit high priest and pretend prophet, the spawn of Cain’.

      Tany was sent to jail, but while he was inside a series of fires began to blaze in the City. Tany claimed that these were a sign of the imminent destruction of the world. A more likely explanation came with the arrest of an arsonist who may have been in his pay. The self-styled ‘High Priest’ later perished at sea while journeying to the Holy Land ‘to recover Jerusalem for the true Jews’.

      → Prophet John Wroe, p. 200

      Moorfields

       THOMAS EAMES RESURRECTION SITE, Bunhill Fields Cemetery, City Road

      When Dr Thomas Emes, a self-styled prophet, died in December 1707 his supporters claimed that he would be resurrected five months later. Huge crowds turned up at Bunhill Fields Cemetery the СКАЧАТЬ