| Four hundred years ago, in January 1604, the newly crowned
King James of England assembled England’s leading clerics
at his palace, Hampton Court, to denounce corruption in the
church. When the discussion turned to recent Bible translations,
the king announced that he had never seen a Bible “well
translated in English.” He added: “I wish some special
pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should
be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then
reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly
ratified by the Royal authority, to be read in the whole Church,
and none other.”
Thus was born the book hailed as the greatest work in the
English language—the King James Version of the Bible.
Three recent books, under review here, recount the history
of this good book. And what a story it is! Even for scholars
and specialists who know it well, this is a great story, well
worth reading again or for the first time, especially in the
vigorous narratives each of these books contains.
Before recounting some of the major events and players involved
in the creation of the King James Version—the KJV—we
should affirm one popular conception, while correcting several
misconceptions: The KJV is indeed the most widely read and
influential book in the English language, and this in spite
of changing literary and even theological tastes over the
centuries. On the other hand, the KJV was not the first Bible
translation into English, its translators did not claim to
have divine guidance, and it is distinctly not the case that
Jesus spoke the King’s English—a colossal misunderstanding
attributed to both former Arkansas governor Orville Faubus
and former Texas governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson,
both of whom, at least according to legend, held up a copy
of the KJV and said, “If English was good enough for
Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”
Bible translation into English goes back at least to the
seventh century, when the poet and cowherd Caedmon retold
Bible stories in his Anglo-Saxon verse
. Shortly thereafter, Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne translated
the Psalms into Anglo-Saxon, and England’s first church
historian, the Venerable Bede, reportedly began to translate
the Gospel of John, although his work is now lost. Two centuries
later, the English king Alfred the Great (871-899) included
an Old English version of the Ten Commandments in his law
code; at about the same time, extensive interlinear glosses,
which explained Latin terms in English, began to appear in
biblical manuscripts. In the late tenth century, a monk named
Aldred inserted his complete Old English translation of the
Gospels between the lines of text in the Lindisfarne Gospels
, a magnificent eighth-century illuminated gospel book now
in the British Library.
The dramatic story of the English Bible really begins, however,
with the theologian and philosopher John Wycliffe
, whose translation of much of the Bible into Middle English
appeared in the 1380s. His translation was part of a reformist
project to make the Bible and its teachings available to the
general public. Wycliffe’s translation was based on the
Latin text known as the Vulgate, prepared by Jerome in the
fourth century C.E. The church opposed Wycliffe’s work,
not just because it was a translation, but because it was
a translation into English, then the language of the common
folk. (The aristocracy spoke French.) His translation was
banned, and, in 1409, Bible translation was forbidden in England.
Wycliffe died in 1384, before the ban; but his bones were
later dug up and burned as posthumous punishment for his alleged
heresy.
It was left to the priest William Tyndale
, who was born about a century after Wycliffe’s death,
to produce an English-language version that derived directly
from Hebrew and Greek, the original languages (along with
a bit of Aramaic) in which the Bible was composed. Because
Bible translation was still banned in England, Tyndale found
it prudent to work in Germany, where he was active in the
first part of the 16th century, at precisely the same time
Martin Luther was preparing his German-language translation
as part of his Reformation. In 1525 Tyndale produced his New
Testament. Over the next decade, Tyndale revised his initial
English version of the New Testament and published renderings
of portions of the Old. Although Tyndale remained on the continent,
copies of his translation were smuggled into England almost
as soon as they came off the press, to increasing popular
acclaim but official condemnation. Like Wycliffe, Tyndale
insisted that the message of Scripture should be directly
accessible to all.
In 1535, before Tyndale could complete his Old Testament,
he was imprisoned in Brussels for 16 months, tried by the
Catholic Church and strangled and burned at the stake as a
heretic.
Tyndale’s work, we are glad to say, did not die with
him, as other translators borrowed extensively from his text.
In 1535 (likely in Cologne), Miles Coverdale produced the
first complete English Bible, called the Coverdale Bible,
which used Tyndale’s translation wherever it was available.
In 1537, Matthew’s Bible, a revision of the Tyndale and
Coverdale Bibles, appeared in England. The translation was
named for one Thomas Matthew, which was actually a pseudonym
for John Rogers, a Tyndale disciple who, despite this subterfuge,
nevertheless suffered the same harsh fate as his master’s:
He was burned at the stake two decades later during the reign
of the Catholic Queen Mary I.
The publication of the Coverdale Bible in 1535 marked a shift
in the political situation in England. The current king, Henry
VIII, had already made England independent from the Roman
Catholic Church—so that he could divorce Catherine of
Aragon and remarry. Henry embraced Protestantism and was made
head of the Church of England. His second wife, Anne Boleyn,
was a patron of Coverdale, and when Coverdale shipped copies
of his Bible to England, he included a dedication to the king.
Henry apparently approved. In 1538, he commanded that every
English church keep a copy of the Bible in English. The 129-year
ban on translation was lifted.
As numerous Bible translations began to appear on the market
legally, the terms of debate very quickly changed from whether
or not there should be a vernacular translation to what sort
of vernacular version was best. And Tyndale’s translation
decisively set the terms for English-language Bibles until
the present.
Tyndale’s translation also introduced two issues that
became increasingly controversial throughout the remainder
of the 16th and the 17th centuries. First, he used contemporary
ecclesiastical terms like “congregation” and “senior”
or “elder” for “church” and “priest.”
In the eyes of his opponents, this usage was much more than
a linguistic choice; conservative English Catholics saw in
these choices attacks on established norms of ecclesiastical
organization and governance. Second, Tyndale frequently used
marginal notes to comment on how the biblical text related
to contemporary life. Later translators adopted this practice,
using some marginal notes—as did Tyndale—to castigate
others’ beliefs and practices: Protestants’ marginal
notes could adopt a stridently anti-Catholic tone; further,
Puritans, who were critical of monarchies, added marginal
notes whenever the biblical text allowed for negative observations
about the royalty. Examples of this practice abound: Tyndale
himself glossed Numbers 23:8 (“How shall I curse whom
God curseth not?”) with this remark: “The pope can
tell how.” To provide a contemporary reference to “the
hire of an whore” and “the price of a dog”
(both at Deuteronomy 23:18), Tyndale offers this: “The
pope will take tribute of them yet, and bishops and abbots
desire no better tenants.” Other translations characterized
“the king” of Daniel 11:36 as “a tyrant”
whose days are numbered. Likewise, the Pharaoh of the Exodus
is “a tyrant.” The translators may have had in mind
any of several 16th- or 17th-century English monarchs.
These kinds of issues continued to characterize the next
two major Bible translations into English: the Geneva Bible,
associated with the Puritans and printed in a small, hand-held
format that made it popular among lay folk; and the Bishop’s
Bible, prepared by the Anglican bishops for use in churches.
When in 1604 King James I assembled the bishops and church
deans at Hampton Court, he ended up displacing both the Geneva
Bible (which James deemed “the worst” English translation
ever made—perhaps because in its notes, it denied the
divine right of kings, which James believed in) and the Bishop’s
Bible.
The production of Bible translations at this period (but
not at this period alone) was a profoundly political as well
as theological and literary enterprise. It is not by chance
that James I himself convened these meetings, prepared the
guidelines, chose the personnel, oversaw the process and gave
final approval (ultimately designated authorization) to the
version later named for him. It was he who determined that
marginal notes would be minimal in number and muted in controversy.
He also laid out the principle that the KJV would be primarily
a revision of the Bishop’s Bible (which in turn relied
heavily on Tyndale) and that it would be acceptable to both
Anglicans (high church) and Puritans (low church) alike.
It was left to the translators themselves, six committees
in all (three for the Old Testament, two for the New, and
one for the Apocrypha) to carry out the translation. We still
have extensive notes from some of these committees and also
considerable knowledge concerning their education, religious
leanings and temperament. Careful textual comparisons reveal
the debt owed by these translators to previous or contemporary
sources. Much of the credit should go to Tyndale, whose translation,
according to a recent study, was used 83 percent of the time,
including for such famous lines as “In the Beginning
God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1),
“Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and “In
the Beginning God created the Word” (John 1:1). But the
KJV team borrowed from numerous other sources, including,
perhaps surprisingly, Catholic and Jewish ones.
Although it is true that no Jews served as KJV translators,
many of the Old Testament translators (Lancelot Andrewes,
Edward Lively, John Richardson, John Harding and John Rainolds)
were deeply steeped in both the Hebrew language and the exegetical
traditions of Judaism. The KJV teams charged with preparing
the Old Testament translation adopted “Jewish” readings
already incorporated into earlier English-language versions
and sought out others on their own. They relied heavily on
the writings of the 12th-century Jewish exegete and grammarian
David Kimchi, also known as Radak. An analysis of the first
fifteen chapters of the Book of Isaiah in the KJV reveals
a high number of English renderings that reflect Kimchi’s
interpretations (including, in the Book of Isaiah, “the
chaines” [Isaiah 3:19]; “and their honourable men
are famished” [Isaiah 5:13]; “they shall lay their
hands upon Edom and Moab” [Isaiah 11:14]; and “the
golden city” [Isaiah 14:4]). Of course, theological considerations
could prove more powerful than Kimchi: Isaiah 7:14 begins:
“Behold, a virgin shall conceive,” and not “a
young woman shall give birth,” as Kimchi had it.
Further, as Bible translator Max L. Margolis wrote: “[The
KJV] has an inimitable style and rhythm; the coloring of the
original is not obliterated. What imparts to the English Bible
its beauty, aye, its simplicity, comes from the [Hebrew] original.”
According to Alister McGrath, author of In the Beginning
(one of the books under review), the secret of the KJV’s
success may lie in the fact that the translators “refus[ed]
to adopt a purely mechanical approach to translation, in which
a Hebrew or Greek word is woodenly rendered by exactly the
same English term throughout ... On the one hand, this led
to a lack of strict accuracy where it might have been expected;
on the other, it allowed for a greater richness of the text
than a more mechanical approach to the issue might have engendered.”
McGrath notes, “Perhaps the greatest tribute to [the
KJV’s] success lies in the simple fact that, for nearly
two centuries, most of its readers were unaware that they
were actually reading a translation.”
Consider one of the most beautiful (and oft-quoted) passages
from the King James translation, Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside
the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths
of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me,
thy rod and thy staff,
they comfort me.
(Psalm 23:1-4, KJV)
Compare this to the Wycliffe Bible—“The Lord governeth
me, and no thing to me shall lack ...”—or to the
Contemporary English Version’s even clunkier rendition—“You
Lord are my shepherd. I will never be in need. You let me
rest in fields of green grass.”
The opening of John’s gospel is another glorious passage
in the KJV:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with
God. All things were made by him; and without him was not
any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life
was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness;
and the darkness comprehended it not.
(John 1:1-5, KJV)
The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), first published
in 1989 and widely used today, especially among scholars,
is indebted to the KJV, as is obvious from its rendition of
John 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him
not one thing came into being. What had come into being
in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not
overcome it.
(John 1:1-5, KJV)
In a note, the NRSV explains that the term translated as
“overcome” in the last line also means “comprehend.”
But how much more intriguing is the KJV, with “the darkness
comprehended it not,” as if the darkness had a mind of
its own?
The modern desire for gender-inclusiveness has also dampened
the literary quality of more recent translations. Where the
KJV reads, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4
[in Hebrew 8:5]), the NRSV has, “What are human beings
that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
And the Contemporary English Version offers instead, “Then
I ask, Why do you care about us humans? Why are you concerned
for us weaklings?”
As noted earlier, the KJV translators relied heavily on the
work of Tyndale. But throughout they made subtle changes that
vastly improved and clarified the text. As author Adam Nicolson
points out in God’s Secretaries, in Tyndale’s
version of the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples: “This
is the cup, the new testament, which shall for you be shed”;
the KJV has Jesus say: “This is the cup, the new testament,
which shall be shed for you” (italics mine). It is a
“miniscule” change, as Nicolson acknowledges, but
one that makes the passage all “the more accurate, the
more poignant and the more memorable.”
Of course, the KJV translators were not infallible. Compare
their inelegant and unintelligible translation of a difficult
passage, Job 36:32-33 (“With clouds He [God] covereth
the light; and commandeth it not to shine by the cloud that
cometh betwixt. The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the
cattle also concerning the vapour”) with the NRSV’s
(“He [God] covers his hands with the lightning, and commands
it to strike the mark. Its crashing tells about him; he is
jealous with anger against iniquity.”)
The first publication of the completed KJV in 1611 ends a
chapter in English-language versions of the Bible, but it
is hardly the entire story. Reprintings and subsequent editions
of the KJV frequently introduced new errors even as they sought
to correct old mistakes. Moreover, the tentativeness and modesty
of the translators themselves slowly yielded to dogmatic views
about the authority of their text; this process was accelerated
in no small degree when the practice of printing the translators’
own introduction was abandoned. In this introduction, the
translators state humbly and forthrightly, “Truly we
never thought from the beginning that we should need to make
a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one,
but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one
principal good one.” Elsewhere they note they have tried
to “avoid the scrupulosity of the Puritans [as also]
we have shunned the obscurity of the Papists.” Moreover,
they openly acknowledge their dependence on the work of myriad
predecessors.
Each of the three books under review here tells essentially
the same story, and tells it well, so readers selecting any
of them will not go wrong. Nonetheless, each book has its
own emphasis.
Adam Nicolson’s book is the most complete in terms of
the KJV itself. Almost the entire book is devoted to the years
1604 to 1611. This enables Nicolson, a British writer and
historian, to regale readers with marvelously revealing portraits
of many of the translators. Here, for example, is a part of
Nicolson’s description of Lancelot Andrewes, director
of the First Westminster Company, which was charged with the
translation of Genesis through 2 Kings:
[Andrewes possessed] a narrow and shrewd face, a certain
distance in the eyes, as if the person had withdrawn an
inch or two below the surface of the skin ... He could look
the church’s adversaries in the eye, and he was clever
enough to slalom around the complexities of theological
dispute.
Popular historian Benson Bobrick’s strength lies in
his narration of the events and major players that led up
to the KJV (for example, he devotes an entire chapter each
to Tyndale and Wycliffe); we are on page 208 before we arrive
at Hampton Court, which Nicolson introduces on page 42. Bobrick
is also the fullest in his descriptions and analysis of relevant
events after 1611. Describing events in the late 17th century,
he writes:
Pride goeth before a fall: in a sense Protestants had become
more Catholic than they knew. For they had exchanged one
authority for another: “in the place of the medieval
Church,” as one scholar put it, they had Scripture;
in the place of an infallible institution, an infallible
text; in the place of Tradition, a printed book.
Alister McGrath, an Oxford professor of historical theology,
follows a middle path, with Hampton Court first appearing
on page 149 of his narration. His literary and textual analyses
are pleasingly subtle and sensitive. McGrath is particularly
strong on technology, both in terms of Gutenberg’s mid-15th-century
innovations and of the possibilities and difficulties facing
both the original and subsequent printers of the KJV. In this
regard, he writes:
The early printings of the King James Bible included many
errors. Many of these arose from weaknesses in the book
production processes of the period. Proofing was often a
haphazard business ... Contemporary sources suggest that
a “reading-boy” would then read the proof copy
aloud to the compositor, who would check it against the
original copy. Errors could arise in all kinds of ways ...
A further factor contributing to the large number of errors
in English Bibles was the constant pressure to reduce their
production costs.
Nicolson and McGrath are generous in their presentation of
illustrations, which Bobrick lacks. However, only Bobrick
has extensive annotation, which unobtrusively appears as endnotes.
All three authors provide useful indexes and bibliographies.
My advice: Read one, two or all three of these worthwhile
volumes. In the process, spend some time with the KJV itself,
preferably in one of its earlier incarnations rather than
modern hybrids like the New King James or the Twenty-first
Century King James. And, if it has been a while (or never)
since you have done so, let the experience of reading the
text in translation spur you on to studying the original Hebrew
and Greek.
Books Under Review
In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and
How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture
Alister McGrath
(New York: Doubleday, 2001) 340 pp., $24.95 (hardback)
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and
the Revolution It Inspired
Benson Bobrick
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) 379 pp., $26.00 (hardback)
God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003) 281 pp., $24.95 (hardback)
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