EPIPHANY · 20 JANUARY · BISHOP, TRANSLATOR & CONFESSOR
Miles Coverdale
Bishop of Exeter · Translator of the First Complete Printed English Bible · The Man Whose Psalter the Church Has Prayed Every Day Since 1535 · d. 1568
Coverdale — KUV-er-dayl · Coverdale Bible — the first complete printed English Bible, 1535 · Great Bible — 1539, placed in every parish church · Miles — MYLZ · Augustinian — aw-GUS-tin-ee-an · Zurich — ZYOO-rik (his exile) · Authorized Version — 1611, which replaced everything except Coverdale’s Psalter
O God, who by thy servant Miles didst give to the Church of England the Psalter it has prayed without ceasing since 1535; Grant that the rhythms he found for David’s songs may continue to form our prayer, and that the English tongue may always have words worthy of the worship it is called to offer; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There is a singular fact about the Anglican Psalter that every person who has ever said Morning or Evening Prayer carries in their mouth without necessarily knowing it: the words are not from the Bible they read. When the Authorised Version of 1611 was appointed for use in the Church of England, replacing every previous English translation for public reading of scripture, a single exception was made. The Psalter was not updated. Miles Coverdale’s (KUV-er-dayl) translation of the Psalms — made not from the Hebrew directly but from the Latin Vulgate, Sebastian Münster’s Latin, and Luther’s German, completed in 1535 and included in the first complete printed English Bible — was retained in the 1549 BCP and has remained in every subsequent BCP to this day. The reason was plain and has never been seriously disputed: it had been sung. The churches of England had set Coverdale’s English to plainchant and polyphony and Anglican chant for nearly a century before the Authorised Version appeared, and the rhythms had entered the liturgical memory and the musical tradition so deeply that to replace them would be to replace the prayer life of the Church itself. Anglicans read the Authorised Version; Anglicans pray Coverdale. The distinction is the whole difference between a translation one reads and a translation one inhabits.
Miles Coverdale (MYLZ KUV-er-dayl) was born around 1488 in Yorkshire, entered the Augustinian (aw-GUS-tin-ee-an) friary at Cambridge, came under the influence of the Prior Robert Barnes — who would later be burned for heresy — and was early drawn to the reforming movement. He assisted William Tyndale in his translation work on the Continent, and when Tyndale was imprisoned and then executed at Vilvoorde in 1536, the work of giving England its scriptures in its own language fell substantially to Coverdale. His 1535 Bible had already appeared — the first complete printed Bible in English, dedicated to Henry VIII, produced at a continental press with the king’s implicit approval — and he followed it with the Great Bible of 1539, commissioned by Cromwell and Cranmer and ordered to be placed in every parish church in England: the large chained Bible whose reading aloud in the nave Cranmer required and whose Psalter was Coverdale’s revision of his own 1535 translation. This is the Psalter the BCP preserves. It is the Psalter prayed by every person who has opened this archive and sung the Lauds and Compline services.
What Coverdale accomplished in his translation of the Psalms is a matter of linguistic precision as much as devotional instinct: he found English rhythms for Hebrew poetry that make the words singable without making them light, that carry the weight of the original without becoming literal to the point of awkwardness, that flow in the mouth as prayer flows — not as argument but as breath. The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing. Tyndale’s version of this verse is crisper; the Authorised Version is more accurate to the Hebrew; but Coverdale’s is what five centuries of Anglican congregations have sung, and the reason is not sentiment but music: the rhythm of therefore can I lack nothing against the expectation of I shall not want creates a slight suspension before the completeness of the assurance arrives, and that suspension is the sound of faith resting in the promise before it speaks it. God is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help? Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. These are not merely beautiful sentences; they are the exact verbal forms in which countless millions of English-speaking Christians have addressed God in their extremity, and they are Coverdale’s sentences, shaped in the 1530s by a Yorkshire Augustinian working from Latin and German on a continental press with a marked-up Tyndale beside him.
Coverdale lived through the full turbulence of the English Reformation: appointed Bishop of Exeter under Edward VI in 1551, deprived and exiled to Zurich (ZYOO-rik) under Mary I, returned under Elizabeth I but never restored to his see, spending his last years as a parish minister in London. He was present at the burning of Cranmer in Oxford in 1556 and preached at the funeral of Martin Bucer in Cambridge. He died in 1568, aged about eighty, outliving Tyndale by thirty-two years and Cranmer by twelve, the last survivor of the great first generation of English Bible translators. His feast on 20 January falls in Epiphany — the season of light and manifestation and disclosure — which is entirely right for the man who gave the English language the daily words in which it has disclosed its heart to God ever since. The Psalter he gave the Church is not a literary monument to be admired; it is a living instrument of prayer being used at this moment, in every Anglican church and every Anglican household that keeps the Daily Office, as it has been used without interruption since the chained Bibles were set up in the naves of England in 1539. Of all the figures in this archive, Coverdale is the one most immediately present in its pages: every versicle and response in the Lauds and Compline is his; the antiphons are his; the psalm verses are his; the prayer language that the archive has been breathing since the first service is the language he made.
O Almighty God, who by the labours of thy servant Miles didst give the Church of England the Psalter it has prayed without ceasing for five centuries, and who didst preserve his rhythms against all subsequent revision because they had become the sound of English prayer itself; Grant that we may inhabit his language as he intended it — not as literature to be read but as prayer to be lived — and may find in the words he chose for David’s songs the words our own souls most need to say; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.