How Far Is Love From Charity?: The Literary Influence of Reformation Bible Translation

This essay explores the literary and cultural influence of post-Reformation English Bible translation. The massive influence of biblical language and ideas has been well studied, but the specific influence of the translation process, much smaller but still detectable, remains unrecognized. The name of one Bible scholar, Hugh Broughton, became a byword for exceptional or even impossible erudition, perhaps due to prominent references in the plays of Ben Jonson. More pervasive was the legacy of Thomas More and William Tyndale's arguments about the appropriate translation of the Greek &yearn (agape) as either "love" or "charity," revived in the 1580s by William Fulke and Gregory Martin. Allusions and wordplay in plays by Shakespeare and Robert Wilson, prose works by Robert Greene and John Lyly, poems by Henry Constable and John Davies of Hereford, and finally in Milton's Paradise Lost demonstrate that audiences and readers were familiar with the philological controversy beginning in the 1530s.