I say this as a secular person: Read the Bible. It will make you a better writer.
The more Bible prose is in you, the less likely you will be to ever write a really bad English sentence. Don’t take my word; try it.
But you’ll want a very old translation, one written in a century when writers, even churchmen, instinctively felt how to pack meaning into their sentences with the right rhythm and meter.
William Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament, for instance. He stands between Chaucer and Shakespeare. His quill is alive to the heave and slip of the English tongue in its vigor. And he understands a poet’s mastery: the precise and graceful arrangement of sounds.
If you know a modern Bible, try the same stories in Tyndale. The voices will brace you, especially the little ones.
“Lorde by this tyme he stenketh.”
“… the babe spronge in her belly.”
“Zache attonce come doune for to daye I muste abyde at thy housse.”
For the latter, a modern rendition has something like, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down because today I must stay at your house.”
(Zachy was a stumpy, honest guy who kept a tavern in Jericho. He swarmed up a tree to get above the taller heads when the town turned out to eye the new prophet. And the prophet spotted him and called him by name and told him to go home and make ready for a special customer.)
The effect comes in part from charming vagaries of 16th-century spelling and typesetting, but mostly from the sound. Jesus in robust 16th-century English has not quite the same tone as bland, 20th-century Jesus. (I deliberately chose one of the worst modern ones.)
The voices shift register. Tyndale’s Jesus sounds wholly vigorous and alive. He’s more demanding, and he’s more familiar. This treats the Bible as literature, not scripture. But, as poets know, sound makes up a third or so of what we call sense. I leave it to the preachers to know what to make of that.
Potent writing
Tyndale’s version is more potent than the flat dishwater of the other text because it packs some of its power into the rise and ebb of the speaking voice. The modern translation seems never to think of being heard, even though this is one of the books most often read aloud.
“Zache attonce come doune …” Read it aloud: It scans. Firm well-spaced dactyls make the command to get busy, and then the anapests come at a rush. It’s dramatic poetry. It’s literature, in a way the other, through its unawareness, can’t ever be.
When spoken, the words flow in measured, varying times. He’s picked them for the length of their syllables and the balance of the accent as well as their sense. They please by the rules of regularity and by the artful violation of those rules. They make plain sorrow more plaintive, noble thoughts more memorable.
This word-flow is not a schoolroom study. It is as human as dance and drum. Young children seem to respond to it instinctively. Hip-hop rhyming is brilliantly alert to a few qualities in it.
Ruskin taught the entire range of it using elementary musical time notation and the popular 18th-century Scottish border ballads. For a negative example try anything by Black Sabbath, who botch it so regularly and so perfectly they must be trying.
The art that raised Tyndale’s New Testament to literature is everything modern translations jettison in chasing simplicity. Very well, they do a different work for a different time than did William Tyndale, tried for heresy on the Continent 10 years after this translation, strangled to death that autumn while tied to the stake, where his corpse then was burned.
Years before, Tyndale had told a high Church official who was sniffing him for heresy that, if he, Tyndale, got the chance, “he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than (the priest) did.”
He was ahead of his time, but only a little. Within four years of his death, four English translations of the Bible issued from English presses, at the order of the king who had wanted Tyndale killed.
All were based on Tyndale’s work. Tyndale chose the diction of our Bible; the King James translators almost a century later kept his word choices, with some corrections, and improved the metrics.
Usually. In the Lord’s Prayer, Tyndale’s “forgive those who trespass us” is far better than the mumbling sibilants of “trespass against us.” The transitive use of “trespass” is odd, but the meaning is clear. But I leave the rest to the theologians.
“Zachy, at once come down.” You can feel poor Zachy’s heart shift with a jolt.
“Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.
