READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  A reflection on the earliest modern English versions of Psalm 23, found in the pewsheet for the fourth Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd),  St. Peter’s Eastern Hill, the 26 th of April, 2026   “The Lord is my shepherd; I can want nothing.” This year is the 500 th anniversary of   William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, published only a decade before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. Some of his versions of Books of the Old Testament have survived, though he was put to death before completion of that task.   “He feedeth me in a green pasture, and leadeth me to a fresh water.” We glimpse Tyndale in the unsigned Matthew Bible (1537), brought out a year after his execution in the Netherlands. Fellow Protestant translator Miles Coverdale included all available Tyndale translations and was himself a collaborator with Tyndale on the Pentateuch. Some of those translations were still in manuscript.   “He quickeneth my soul, and bringeth...

  Article written by Philip Harvey for the Newsletter of the Community of the Holy Name   Irish historian Eamon Duffy, in ‘A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation’ (Bloomsbury, 2021, page 83) writes that “There are more than 350 different translations of the Bible into English, more than into any other language. And if we count English versions of the New Testament, or of individual books or clusters of books such as the Psalms or the Gospels, the number of different English Bible translations runs into thousands.” Note the quiet sub-clause “more than into any other language”, which only hints at the scale of translations into those “other” languages. Wikipedia, quoting Wycliffe Bible Translators, summons the numbers: “The full Bible has been translated into 704 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,551 languages and Bible portions or stories into 1,160 other languages. Thus at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,41...