Greetings and welcome to Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle. I'm the pastor of Christ Reform Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia. This afternoon, as I record this, I'm sitting inside a classroom at the college where I teach in Charlottesville, Virginia. And in this episode, I'm gonna be looking at a topic that I've titled Fidelity and Intelligibility. Mark Ward, Alan Jacobs, and Tyndale's Plowboy. I have another title. Maybe I'll use this when I post it. And that title is Fidelity and Intelligibility. Has Mark Ward misunderstood Tyndale's Plowboy? And with that, I'm going to just do a reading of my notes that I have here. And I will be posting these notes, um, to my blog at jeffriddle.net. And so let me go ahead and get started with my notes for this episode. Mark Ward is a freelance YouTuber who has become well known as an incessant and sometimes extremist critic of popular contemporary use of the King James version. even claiming that it should no longer be used in Christian institutions, and declaring recently that it would be sinful to give a copy of the King James Version to a child. If you've ever listened to any of Mark Ward's videos, there's a good chance you've heard him make the claim that he is simply following in the spirit of William Tyndale, who lived from 1494 to 1536, and he was the first person to translate the New Testament into English from the original Greek. Of course, Tyndale was a Protestant martyr, and he once famously declared to a Roman Catholic cleric, if God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost." In a recent debate with an independent Baptist pastor, Ward finished his closing statement with several very dramatic references to Tyndale and the plow boy. He lamented that some folk, including the people who had taught him in a Christian high school, supposedly put having the Bible over understanding the Bible. He claimed that, quote, literally no one has done more work than he has to help people understand the King James Version, end quote. He recalled, as he has often done in the past, that in his senior year of high school, he played William Tyndale in the school play. He recalled, as he has often done, Again, that this was a very meaningful play and I think he sees it as providentially important in his life. He declared in that debate, I have the heartbeat of William Tyndale. And he continued in a very impassioned and almost theatrical tone to say, please do not deny that my heart's desire is for the plow boy to understand God's word. adding, I don't want to miss a single word and I don't want the plow boy to miss them either. And he said, you cannot have the help of a preacher. You need a translator. So he's basically saying, you can't just say that the plow boy can rely on the church and the pastors and the elders. He needs a translator to make the Bible meaningful to him. Ward, in that debate, closed his speech with this paraphrase. Of course, Tyndale had famously said, when he was about to die, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. And Ward paraphrased that as, Lord, open King James Version only-isms eyes. If you know Ward, however, you know that he has a very broad definition of King James Version-onlyism. He sees it as essentially encompassing anyone who prefers the Authorized Version and its use to other translations. The question remains as to whether Mark Ward has properly understood what William Tyndale meant in his famous statement, if God spare my life, e'er many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost. Did Tyndale carry out his work of translation in the way that Mark Ward suggests he did? I've noted before some of many problems as I see them with Ward's approach to Bible translation, and in particular his insistence on what I've called absolute intelligibility in Bible translation. Unless the reader, no matter his age, no matter his experience, no matter his maturity, understands the meaning of every single word and phrase at his first sitting, at the first reading, Ward suggests then the translation fails. Criticism of Ward's absolute intelligibility view was well stated by James Snapp Jr. on his blog on October the 29th of 2024 in an article titled, Mark Ward and His Ridiculous Claim About the King James Version. In that article, Snapp offered a critique of Ward's approach to Bible translation. And as of yet, Ward has never acknowledged, much less responded to James Snapp Jr.' 's critique. And I might point out James Snapp Jr., if you're familiar with him and his blog, he is not someone who promotes the traditional text of scripture, nor does he promote a traditional process of translations like King James Version. necessarily, so I don't know why Ward hasn't acknowledged Snap's critique. In that critique, Snap said, quote, Dr. Ward seems to think that the Bible should be translated so plainly that it is incapable of being misunderstood. And then Snap continues, Unfortunately, such a translation has never existed and never will exist on earth. I thought of this conversation, this back and forth about Mark Ward and his approach to Tyndale and the Plowboy recently as I read an essay in a book by a man named Alan Jacobs. Alan Jacobs wrote this book that's titled Wayfaring essays, Pleasant and Unpleasant. It was published by Eerdmans in 2010, and he wrote it while he was a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. And he has since become a professor of humanities at Baylor University. And so this book is a collection of some of his essays. He's a literary critic. And one of the essays within this book that made me think about Mark Ward and Tyndale's Plowboy is one that's titled Robert Alter's Fidelity. And in this essay, begins on page 12 in the book, Alan Jacobs is reviewing the Jewish scholar and literary critic Robert Alter's publication of his translation of the first five books of Moses in the Old Testament. Alter, if you're familiar with his work, has since completed a translation, a Jewish translation of the entire Old Testament. So Jacobs is just dealing with the publication in this essay of the Torah, the first five books of Moses. Jacobs praises Alter's translation, not for its readability, but for its fidelity. And Jacobs makes much of that distinction, the distinction between fidelity and readability or intelligibility. And in the opening pages of this essay, he makes some very interesting comments about William Tyndale and Tyndale's famous statement about the plow boy. And what I found was that Jacob's interpretation of Tyndale's famous statement is not the same as Mark Ward would take it to be. And so I'm going to read just a couple of pages. I hope this isn't too tedious, but I'm going to read from thumb of pages 12 through 14 and maybe the top of the page on page 15 in this book. and I might make some comment on it as I go, might just read it, and then I'll make some summary comments when we get to the end. I think the perceptive reader will be able to pick up on some of the issues that might exist with Mark Ward's view of Tyndale and the Plowboy. So here is, again, Alan Jacobs' essay on Robert Alter's Fidelity. He starts, as the Italians say, tradutore, traditore. And the translation of that is translators are traitors. It's a famous statement. Translators are traitors. But the translator who shrugs and cheerfully or resignedly agrees that every translation is an interpretation after all, has too readily embraced the way of the traditore, the traitor. The translator who strives for strict fidelity, even knowing its elusiveness, will be less treacherous. In translation, fidelity is the ultimate imperative and trumps every other virtue, even clarity or readability. Let me pause here. It's important statement. Fidelity is the ultimate imperative. Faithfulness to the text is the ultimate imperative, and it trumps other virtues like clarity and readability, or we might say intelligibility. He continues. Translators of the Bible seem often to forget this, if indeed they believe it at all. In the introduction to his extraordinary recent translation, The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter points out that modern translations operate under the perhaps unconscious feeling that the Bible, because of its canonical status, has to be made accessible, indeed transparent, to all. Alter is certainly right that modern translators have this feeling and obey it, but the Bible's canonical status is less to blame than a particular conception of how the Bible functions in the lives of believers. He continues, almost all modern translations into English Even versions like the recent Tanakh translation of the Jewish Publications Society owe something to the zeal of such early Christian translators as John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, and their belief that the Bible must be made clear to the common reader. Near the end of the 14th century, Wycliffe wrote, no man is so rude a scholar, but that he may learn the gospel according to its simplicity. A century and a half later, Tyndale would utter, or so reports John Fox in his Acts and Monuments of 1583, the same thought in more vivid language. Responding to a divine reputed for a learned man who had criticized Tyndale's views on scripture, the great translator declared, if God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scriptures than thou dost. It is often said that Wycliffe and Tyndale believed in a characteristic Protestant idea called the peripiscuity of scripture, an effective denial that the scriptures are secret or occult, accessible only to those with special training or institutional authority. Rather, in the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. Or, as Martin Luther tersely put it, evoking the scene on the road to Emmaus, when the risen Christ opened the scriptures to a pair of bewildered disciples, Christ has opened our understanding to grasp the scriptures. Now, these authors are quick to admit that many particular passages in Scripture are, as Luther put it, obscure and abstruse. All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, says Westminster, nor alike clear unto all. Nevertheless, men like Wycliffe and Tyndale have often been thought to say something more radical, that thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit, the whole of Scripture is transparent to the humble but earnest interpreter. Whether they believe this or not, many of their followers do. And later, translators of Scripture have operated under the, again, often unconscious assumption that the ideal experience of reading Scripture is one in which clarity manifests itself fully and immediately. And let me pause for again, depart from Jacob's for a moment. That's precisely what I hear in Ward's frequent references to Tyndale's Plowboy. He thinks it ought to be, scripture ought to manifest itself fully and immediately to every reader. Undergirding, returning to Jacob's, undergirding this assumption is, I think, a memory of Christ's disturbing statement. I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. Does this suggest that any translation that presents more difficulties to the little children than to the wise and understanding is somehow unchristian? The idea may seem absurd, But it would be unwise to underrate the pressure of such thoughts in an assertively egalitarian, democratizing, and anti-elitist culture like our own today. Only in such a culture would something like dynamic equivalence models of translation be developed. Because dynamic equivalence, which encourages translators to ask how we, in our time and place, might say whatever the Bible is taken to say, allows one to deal with difficult passages in the original text, not by translating them, but by interpreting their obscurities out of existence. Such passages must be cleared away whenever possible in order to make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain. The simple and problem-free translation then offers itself as evidence of the simplicity and problem-freeness of the biblical text itself. The translators thus stand to their readers in loco parentis. You know that Latin phrase, this is me again, not Jacobs, in place of the parents. Here's Jacobs, the little children never have to know what struggles their scholarly fathers undertook in order to protect them from the agonies of interpretive confusion. See, again, depart from Jacobs here for a moment. Ward thinks that he has to step in and other people like him and they have to update these elusive translations and they have to democratize them. And the little children can't go through any trauma, any agonies of interpretive confusion, unless it's automatically plain. then you're making the children go through some kind of trauma. The children being the immature readers of whatever age. Let me return to Jacobs. It is noteworthy, Jacobs continues, that Tyndale never thought to adopt such a strategy, despite his concern that the boy at the plow know the Bible. He understood perfectly well that many of the English words, that many of the English words a faithful translation required him to employ would be unknown to many of his readers. Let me read that again. He, Tyndale, understood perfectly well that many of the English words a faithful translation required him to employ would be unknown to many of his readers. In fact, he invented or coined many words and phrases within his translation that were later picked up in other English translations that at the time he wrote were completely unknown to his readers, learned readers, less educated readers. He coined terms, invented terms because fidelity was his key imperative. However, returning to Jacobs, his response to this problem was not to use only common words, but to append to his translation a glossary of difficult terms. I didn't know this. Tyndale had intended, after he'd done the translation, that he would include a little dictionary, a little word list at the back to help the reader. He continues, at a time when real dictionaries were unheard of, this was a brilliant and innovative solution. Alas, Tyndale did not live to implement it. That's why we don't have the Tyndale dictionary in the New Testament, because he was put to death before he could do that. Otherwise, readers would be in a lamentable situation of being unable to distinguish Tyndale's words from those of the text. And if he intruded his own words, even if those words were meant only to clarify or explain the Bibles, he would, by his own lights, have become a traitor rather than a translator. See, if you add to any of your own words to smooth things out and simplify them, you become a traitor to the text rather than a translator. This is the last paragraph we'll read from Jacob's. Likewise, Wycliffe, For all his faith in the power of boys who drive the plows to know their Bibles makes it clear that scripture exhibits its clarity only to those who undergo the lengthy intellectual discipline of submitting to its authority. Quote, the faithful whom he calls in meekness and humility of heart, whether they be clergy or laity, male or female, bending the neck of their inner man to the logic and style of scripture will find in it the power to labor and the wisdom hidden from the proud." End of that quote from Wycliffe. God indeed reveals to the little children what is hidden from the wise and understanding. But transforming oneself into a little child is the arduous work of a lifetime. Christ's yoke is easy and is burden light, but we don't like bending our necks to receive it. And no translation, however it accommodates itself to our language and understanding, can change that. And I'll stop there in Jacob's essay. I think it's a wonderful point. Our problem with reading the Bible is often not our able to read or understand particular words. It is to understand intellectually, and I think spiritually, the scriptures and to be submitted to their authority. So just to highlight a couple of things that Jacobs says, I already pointed out a little statement he made in translation, fidelity, faithfulness to the text is the ultimate imperative and trumps every other virtue, even clarity or readability. Jacobs says that we must not think that Tyndale assumed the ideal experience of reading scripture is one in which clarity, manifests itself fully and immediately. He warns against translations that are swayed by an assertively egalitarian, democratizing, and anti-clerical culture like our own today, and of translators who think of themselves as being in loco parentis, thinking of readers as little children who need scholarly fathers to protect them from the agonies of interpretive confusion. Jacobs says that's a misguided way to think of the translation of the Bible. Tyndale himself did not do this. Think about it. Tyndale, when he did his translation of the New Testament from Greek into English, he introduced words in his translation that his readers would not know. Why? Because Tyndale himself had coined many of these words and phrases to make right the underlying text. So when Tyndale did his translation of the New Testament, he introduced words like Jehovah, the name for God, atonement, Passover, scapegoat, mercy seat, And so he knew that his readers would not immediately know these words. They would have to learn what they meant by reading, by study, by listening to faithful pastors explain, by reading faithful comments upon it. Tyndale was more concerned with fidelity than intelligibility. And this same sense led the faithful Protestant translators including the translators of the Authorized Version to use terms like, as the A.V. Fathers did, terms like propitiation in Romans and in 1 John to describe the atonement. Propitiation was not a term that would have been well known to the plowboy, to the readers of that day, but the translators believed that that word rightly taught the meaning of Christ's atoning death. Fidelity trumps intelligibility. Jacob says men of this era knew that scripture, quote, exhibits its clarity only to those who undergo the lengthy intellectual discipline of submitting to its authority, end quote. No matter how passionately it might be stated, we must conclude that Mark Ward does not, in fact, demonstrate the heartbeat of William Tyndale. Ward's understanding of Tyndale seems frozen in a simplified and unsophisticated version of Tyndale's thought, a version retained from Mark Ward's memory of a high school play. It does not represent a mature and accurate understanding of Tyndale or of his view of what makes for a good translation. As Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13, 11, when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. One of the marks I think of Mark Ward's confusion on this issue is that he claims the text underlying a translation is an unimportant factor in evaluating the worthiness of that translation. So he says, I'm gonna evaluate a translation of the Bible, but I'm not gonna talk about textual criticism. So it might have the ending of Mark, it might not have the ending of Mark. It might have the woman taking an adultery, it might not have it. It might have, John 118 read the only begotten Son, it may have John 118 read the only begotten God, it might have John 118 read God the only Son as it now does in the ESV. He says it doesn't matter, you can evaluate a translation without any reference to the underlying text. What is that? That is a total rejection of what Jacobs would say would be fidelity as the guiding principle of Bible translation. In the end, we have to conclude with Jacobs that those who approach Bible translation, as does Mark Ward, do not approach it in the spirit of Tyndale, whose concern was not that the plow boy might immediately have complete comprehension of every word that he reads, but that he might, over time, with the Spirit's help, under the instruction of the officers of the church, might come to know the Bible truly and faithfully as it reliably conveys the teaching of God's word. Well, with that, I'm gonna bring this episode of Word Magazine to a conclusion. I hope this has been helpful. for those who are listening and I'll look forward to speaking to you in the next episode of Word Magazine. Till then, take care and may the Lord richly bless you.