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Tyndale, Coverdale & Psalm 23

 


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 26th of April, 2026

 “The Lord is my shepherd; I can want nothing.” This year is the 500th 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 me forth in the way of righteousness for his name’s sake.” Tyndale’s English is immediate, sensitive, and scrupulous. He works at a remove from the Middle English styles of the previous generation, a fresh language that is adopted afterwards in all versions of scripture through to the King James Bible (1611), even the Catholic Douai-Rheims (1610). 

 “Though I should walk now in the valley of the shadow of death, yet I fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy staff and thy sheep-hook comfort me.” Inspired by the Humanist desire for vernacular versions and committed to the best possible version in English, Tyndale is one of the most influential writers of that or any period.  

 “Thou preparest a table before me against mine enemies; thou annointest my head with oil, and fillest my cup full.” Here, ‘against’ in the sense of ‘in full view of mine enemies.’ The great linguist David Crystal’s recent analysis estimates that about 70% of the King James Bible is Tyndale. The original purpose of that version was not “to make a new translation, nor yet to make a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one.”

 “O let thy loving kindness and mercy follow me all the days of my life, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

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