From: Edward Hobbs (EHOBBS@wellesley.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 25 1996 - 13:27:13 EST
Carl Conrad's post of his correspondence with Maurice Sullivan includes the
comment (by one of them -- the > and >> and >>> made it hard for me to
follow who said what) that though KJV and RSV translate "tender mercy,"
Roman Catholics throughout the world use "lovingkindness" derived from
Tyndale's translation here. If they use the "lovingkindness" here, they didn't
get it from Tyndale, who (for the first time in English) translated Luke 1:78
with "tender mercy," a translation carried into the Great Bible of 1539,
thence into the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 (surviving there 430 years,
until the 1979 Prayer Book ventured "tender compassion", a translation which
is the 1,001st example of the unhappy fact that the 1979 PB revisers couldn't
recognize a line of poetry if it hit them in their faces), thence into the
1611 ("KJV") version, into the RV, the ASV, the RSV, and the NRSV.
Perhaps this has been confused by someone with the fact that Tyndale created
the wonderful translation (in the OT) of the Hebrew HESED (CHESED) by
"lovingkindness." That was a masterstroke indeed!
--Edward Hobbs
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