Sandy Curnow Reflection

This Sunday is the feast of Mary’s birthday – unrecorded in any of the New Testament writings but implicit of course as nine months after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December.  The Church is careful about such matters.

The tradition is that her parents were Anne and Joachim, figures familiar to our neighbour parish in East Kew, but less so across today’s wider Church.  They are nowhere in the infancy accounts, but feature in the Apocryphal Gospel of James – a later writing – and the tradition which grew thereafter has led to some lovely illustrations in medieval manuscripts and frescoes, including the Meeting (below left) and the engaging one by Hans Baldung (1511) of the infant Christ on his grandmother’s knee (below right). The sheer delight of the older woman draping her lap and grandson in royal red, with her other arm tucked around the anxiously hovering new mother makes a tightly related trio, while Joachim, in accepted male fashion (at that time), tries to make himself relevant by pointing out theological truths on the left.  In contrast to the passionate relationship of the kiss between Mary’s parents, Joachim here is deliberately divided from his wife and daughter by the painting’s vertical lines and the outdoor/indoor division of the distant view.

Devotion to Mary’s parents was popular in northern Europe in the Fifteenth century and tradition has it that a young Martin Luther, caught in a terrifying electrical storm, vowed to Saint Anne that if he survived he would become a monk.

Well, so he did, and the rest, the Reformation, is history.  A gifted scholar and linguist Luther found himself at variance with sections of Church belief and practice.  In 1521 at the age of 38, he made his final break with the Catholic Church.  Declared an outlaw, he fled into hiding and spent the first year translating the New Testament into vernacular friendly and readable German.  Eventually, as leader of the Lutheran Church he oversaw a translation of both Old and New Testaments into a language which became the foundation of all modern German.  He lived and taught in Wittenburg and was given residence in an abandoned monastery which can be visited today.

Saints with their intercessionary powers conflicted with Luther’s understanding of salvation, but he agreed that their role as Christian example was valuable.  And so, against a simple whitewashed wall in his home there with his family is a single statue of St Anne and the young Mary standing at her knee.

It is no great work of art.  At best, a product of a local craftsman in the 1520s, its emphasis is not on the girl as future mother of Christ.  Rather, the crucial element of this simple wooden carving is the book, the bible of course, and the fact that Anne is teaching her daughter Mary to read.  Luther argued for universal literacy, it was crucial because everyone should be able to explore the bible for themselves.  Hence his first response after 1521 was his decision to put the testaments into common readable parlance which anyone who could read could grasp.  It is said that after a day working from the Vulgate Latin and Greek, and struggling with an apt translation, he would slip out to the market-place and hear German spoken at its simplest and most colloquial before arriving at a final draft.

The Church tended to disapprove of Biblical translations into the vernacular because churchmen’s Latin was sufficient to read the Vulgate, and a layperson’s private interpretations of the New Testament had a habit of leading to misinterpretation and heresy.  Then a skilled German goldsmith invented movable type in the 1440s and the printing press was born.  Gutenberg’s first printed book was the bible and from then on Christians of moderate means could come face to face with the foundation texts of their religion.  St Anne could afford to teach her daughter to read from a printed book.  Women were supposed to know and understand the gospels.

Protestant printed bibles spread to England and were initially condemned by Henry VIII, and approved by his daughter Elizabeth.  Anyone working in two languages knows that translation sometimes means interpretation, and that different beliefs influence the way a word or concept is rendered into another language.  And as times change, meaning changes.  Thus, the difference between Catholic and Protestant bibles grew.

After the religious turmoil of the Tudor century, King James I appointed a committee of 50 odd experts to – together – produce a scholarly, readable translation of the Anglican bible.  Divided into six groups and writing in three different places it sounds like an editor’s nightmare and an impossible task.  Of course, they were working at exactly the same time as Shakespeare, and in the same literary and linguistic atmosphere, which gave them a head-start, but the beautifully resonating prose of what we now know as the King James Version (KJV), shaped spoken and written English for centuries.  “Fight the good fight”, ”a fly in the ointment”, “see the writing on the wall” all come from the KJV.  Even more remarkable is its simplicity of language; whereas Shakespeare had a vocabulary of about 27,000 words the bible’s is about a third to a quarter of that.  It could be understood by ordinary people, and it changed the way English was spoken.

Both Luther and the KJV, in translating for spiritual purposes, and keeping the simple figures of Saint Anne and her daughter’s readership in mind, wrote in ways that also changed the language and thus the thought of secular worlds.

By Sandy Curnow

Images:

• Giotto, Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.
• Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child, panel painting by Michael Wolgemut, c. 1510; in the Germanic National Museum, Nürnberg, Germany.

Published: 6 September 2024