The Bible in English

Today, we take a historical survey of the Bible in English, from early partial translations and paraphrases in the 7th century through the magnificence of King James I's Authorized Version of 1611.

Transcript

Hello and welcome, Litterbugs, to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Today, alas, no rhyme gets its reason.  Before we start today’s show, I want to let you know about a new feature called Fan Mail.  If you look at the episode’s page, you’ll see a button that says “Send us a text.”  Click it, and you can communicate with me directly.  Might be a bit easier than the outside email or antisocial media platforms.  Give it a shot.  I think that I’m also able to use it to send messages out to you all, so I’ll be fooling around with it in the coming days.

Today’s episode is a little bit different.  It’ll be more a historically-focused show than an analytical or interpretive one.  Loyal listeners know that we have arrived, in our chronological survey of English literature, in the early 17th century and the reign of his Britannic majesty King James I.  Under this most intellectual of monarchs – or so he fancied himself – one of the most significant events in English language and literature occurred.  No, not just the high tragedies of Shakespeare, but the production of the so-called Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, promulgated in 1611, and known to posterity as the King James Version, which, for many people in the Anglosphere and beyond, sounds like the language of God Himself.  

Of course, while many regard the KJV as the pinnacle of literary Biblical translation – and if it’s not actually the most read book in history, it’s certainly in the running – it’s not by a long stretch the first time the Word of God was rendered in the English vernacular.  Today’s show will thumbnail an English history of arguably the world’s most influential book and for that, we need to jump into the Wayback Machine and set the dials for Anglo-Saxon civilization.

The Anglo-Saxons never produced an entire Biblical translation, but there were glosses or interlinear translations of the Psalms and the Gospels, as well as poetic paraphrases of Biblical books, most famously those attributed to the first English poet Caedmon, of whom we spoke oh so many moons ago in episode 2.  Found in the Junius manuscript at the Bodleian library, Genesis A, or Elder Genesis, and Genesis B, Later Genesis, are two fragmentary poems telling the story of the Bible’s first book in alliterative verse.  The dates of the writing fall at least a century after Caedmon’s death, so don’t really work for Caedmon as himself the translator, but it’s very pleasant to think of him as the composer and I shall continue to do so.  Here are lines 112-119 of the Caedmonian Genesis (see?) which corresponds to Genesis 1:1:

her aerest gesceop    ece drihten,

   helm eallwihta,       heofon and eordan,

   rodor araerde         and pis rume land

   gestapelode           strangum mihtum,

   frea aelmihtig,       folde waes pa gyta

   graesungrene,         garsecg peahte

   sweart synnihte       side and wide,

   wonne waegas.(29)     (112-19a)

And here’s a rough and ready modern English version:

Here first created the eternal Lord,

helm of all creatures, heaven and earth,

raised the sky and this spacious land

established with mighty power,

almighty Lord, the earth was then

green with grass, the ocean covered

dark with sinuous waves far and wide,

a dusky path.

Even given the relative liberalness of this modern translation, one readily sees that we’re not dealing here with a transliteral translation as we usually think of it.  What we’ve got is much more of the “inspired by a true story” kind of rendering than any kind of transmutation from one language to another.  To be fair, however, that was not the poet’s project – that project was literary, not merely linguistic.

The translation work that did occur was based on St. Jerome’s 4th century Latin translation the Vulgate (which included passages from the Vetus Latina – an earlier Latin translation), and not, crucially, on the ancient Hebrew and Greek of the original texts.  Perhaps the oldest of these glosses is the Durham Book, which comes to us in the famous Cotton Manuscript , which also contains Beowulf, the Riddles, and the elegies.  The Latin of the Durham Book probably dates from before 690 and the English rendering, done by Bishop Aldred, from around the turn of the 10th century.

Our old friend the Venerable Bede, England’s first historian, also put his dab hand to the art of translation, rendering the Gospel of John.  Woe and lack-a-day, the manuscript is lost, but a buddy of his, Cuthbert of Jarrow, tells us of Bede’s late work in an account of his last days:

And during those days, besides the lessons we had daily from him, and the singing of the Psalms, there were two memorable works, which he strove to finish; to wit, his translation of the Gospel of St. John, from the beginning, as far as the words, ‘But what are they among so many?’ into our own tongue, for the benefit of the Church of God; and some selections from the books of Bishop Isidore, saying, ‘I would not have my boys read a lie, nor labour herein without profit after my death.’

We have copies and rumors of copies of perhaps a dozen or more interlinear glosses of the Book of Pslams from the 9th to the 12th centuries, including the Mercian Vespasian Psalter, as well as the Blickling, Eadwine, and Tiberius psalters.

The 9th-century West Saxon King Alfred, the only English ruler given the honorific “the Great” for unifying the several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into something resembling a nation, for withstanding repeated Danish invasions, and for inaugurating something of an English Renaissance, was also, obviously, quite dedicated to the idea of a Bible in the people’s tongue.  He felt the security of the kingdom and the moral rectitude of the English depended on it, saying, “that all the freeborn youth of his kingdom should employ themselves on nothing till they could first read well the English Scriptures.”   Apropos of that, Alfred gave us more Psalms in English and tasty helpings of the Gospels.  Additionally, he translated the 10 Commandments (kinda) from the Book of Exodus, which he used (sort of) as the basis of his law code.  Here is an interlinear version of Alfred’s Decalogue (kinda):

Dryhten wæs sprecende ðas word to Moyse and þus cwæð:  Ic eam dryhten þin God, ic ðe uttgelæde of Egypta lande of heora þeowdome.  Ne lufa þu oðre fremde godas ofer me.  

"The Lord spoke these words to Moses, and said: 'I am the Lord your God. I led you out of the lands and out of the bondage of the Egyptians.  Do not love other strange gods before Me!”

Ne minne naman ne cig þu on ydelnesse; forðam þu ne byst unscyldig wið me, gif þu on idelnesse gecygst minne naman.  

"Do not call out My Name in idleness! For you are not guiltless with Me, if you call out My Name in idleness."

Gemun ðæt þu gehalgie þone restendæg.  Wyrcað eow syx dagas,  on ðam seofoðan restað eow; forðam on syx dagum Crist gewohrte heofenas  eorðan  sæ  ealle gesceafta ðe on heom sindon,  hine gereste on þone seofoðan dæg;  forðam Dryhten hine gehalgode.  

"Mind that you hallow the rest-day! You must work six days; but on the seventh you must rest! For in six days Christ made Heavens and Earth, the seas, and all the shapen things in them; but He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord hallowed it."

Ara þinum fæder 7 þinre meder, þa þe Drihten sealed, þæt ðu sy þe leng libbende on eorðan.  

"Honour your father and your mother whom the Lord gave you — so that you may live longer on Earth!"

Ne sleah þu.  

"Do not slay!"

Ne lige þu deornunga.  

"Do not lie in secret!" (as in sleep with someone)

Ne stala þu.  

“Do not steal.” 

Ne sæge þu lease gewitnesse.  

“Do not witness falsely.” 

Ne gewylna þu ðines nyhstan yfres mid unryhte.

"Do not unrighteously desire your neighbour's goods!"

It is, of course, no surprise that few of the words, even in Modern English, have classical etymologies.  This is good, sturdy Germanic prose!  Note “hallow” and the fact that Sabbath is rendered “rest-day” in the kenning style so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon verse.  Also, the word “shapen” pleasingly reminds me of the scop, the singer or shaper of tales.  As I say, even now, this passage is redolent with the smoky, stony aroma of Old English literature.

As a curiosity, did any of you holy-rollers note that Alfred only gives us 9 commandments?  You know the one that’s missing?  The proscription against graven images!  I imagine there was a good deal of lobbying from the justly renowned jewelers and metalworkers of Anglo-Saxon civilization.  Perhaps Alfred felt that God, as a brother king, would understand the pressure of managing competing interests.

So far, all of the Biblical texts in English have been vernacular renderings of a Latin rendering – we all know that neither the Old nor New Testaments were composed in Latin.  Rather, Hebrew for the former and Greek the latter.  Not until about 990 do we have a full translation the Gospels rendered from the source language.  These are called the Wessex or West Saxon gospels, the earliest of the seven extant copies dating from the waning years of the first millennium.  From these do we get the most familiar Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer, the one I recited in episode 2 of the program.  Scholars call the book Codex Evangeliorum Anglice and its copies enter the official register in the 14th century at the Benedictine Christ Church Library.  This particular copy actually made its way into the possession of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VIII’s reign, and so would have been available during that great unquietness of the realm.  We also know that other copies were available to the great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus while he professed divinity at Cambridge and as he worked on his Textus Receptus, a publication of the Greek Christian Scriptures.  Not to get ahead of myself too much here, but the Wessex Gospels would also have been consulted by the translators of the Authorized Version in the early 17th century.

In 1066, you might remember, Billy the Bastard swept into England and turned the Saxons normal . . . Norman.  That smoky, stony Old English aroma became a bit more continental as the sweet odors of Norman French mingled to produce the fragrant perfume of Middle English.  Oh, my.  I’ll stop now.

There’s a curious volume from the 12th century called the Ormulum – it’s a work of Biblical exegesis (that’s a sexy scholarly term for interpretation) as a collection of sermons.  It’s in metrical verse, nearly 19,000 lines over the course of the 32 surviving homilies (we reckon 242 were originally composed).  The author, Orm (yep, named it after himself, playing on the vogue for Latin speculum literature) was an Augutinian monk working at either Elsham Priory or Bourne Abbey in Lincolnshire who finished the book in 1150 or 1180.  

In terms of Biblical translation, it’s not even in the same league as the Old English glosses.  Mainly, each sermon begins with a paraphrase of the Biblical text under discussion – essential not only for a laity who was illiterate, but also for clergy who could not command Latin well (and their numbers were legion, in fact).  What’s cool about this book from a linguistic-historical perspective is that Orm writes in the peculiar dialect of an English still unsettled by the incursion of the Normans, one that had been liberally seeded with Danish characteristics from the Viking raids of the 8th and 9th centuries.  Orm had to develop his own spelling system to capture this unique language, so philologists and linguists and historians find the Ormulum invaluable for describing the transition to Middle English.

But, as I said, not really translation work proper, but a cool book nonetheless, and certainly worthy of a cameo on an obscure little podcast.

The translation work proper that looms over the whole of the medieval period is that of theologian John Wycliffe, a Yorkshire lad who studied and then taught at Oxford University.  You may recall that in a bonus episode about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (episode 17, for those keeping score at home), I mentioned a proto-Protestant religious movement derogatively dubbed the Lollards.  They taught that piety, not necessarily ordination, made the sacraments possible, that women should be ordained if they chose, that the Eucharist was only a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, not its substance (that is, they believed in consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation), and they placed Scriptural authority over the traditions of the Church.  This last naturally fed a desire for a vernacular Bible (it is from this advocacy and their incessant preaching that the Lollards received their name, mocking the Blah, Blah, Blah of their endless prattle).  Anyway, Wycliffe was a big mover and shaker in this movement, attracted the great fury and execration of the institutional Church, who sought his life and posthumously declared him a heretic.  44 years after his death in 1384, the Pope ordered his body disinterred and the bones crushed and scattered downstream to put a stop to any more extra-curricular thinking.  A martyr makes a great figurehead,thus, in the popular imagination, Wycliffe conducted his work of Biblical translation in a dreary little garret above a Buckinghamshire church porch.

While the Wycliffe Bible and the adjective Wycliffite have come down to us, historians have found scant material evidence that Father John did any of the actual translating.  Nothing like the facts to ruin a perfectly good story.  Probably, the actual translating (which, by the by, bases itself on Jerome’s Vulgate, not Erasmus’ Textus Receptus) was accomplished by a fellow named Nicholas of Hereford, from Rutland, obviously.  No.  Silly.  Well, the Hebrew scriptures anyway.  Maybe Wycliffe did some Christian scripture stuff, but we definitely know that the rest of the New Testament and then a whole text overhaul was done by a young scholar named John Purvey in 1388.  And by “definitely know,” I mean we think so.  We really do.

At any rate, he was certainly the driving force behind the project.  His conviction that the Scriptures were the supreme spiritual and moral authority and that, as they contained Christ, they contained “all that is necessary for salvation.”  And if that’s the case, the word of God should not be the special provenance of a priestly class.  Wycliffe argued:

Christ and His Apostles taught the people in the language best known to them. It is certain that the truth of the Christian faith becomes more evident the more faith itself is known. Therefore, the doctrine should not only be in Latin but in the vulgar tongue and, as the faith of the church is contained in the Scriptures, the more these are known in a true sense the better. The laity ought to understand the faith and, as doctrines of our faith are in the Scriptures, believers should have the Scriptures in a language which they fully understand.

Obviously, that’s been modernized.  The language, not the sentiment.  Because, if you think about it, the sentiment is already pretty modern.  In what appears to be merely a statement in support of open access to the Bible, Wycliffe also implies that the institutional Church is superfluous.  He, in a sense, argues for the democratization of spiritual knowledge, that the individual reader of God’s Word has as much authority and understanding as a priest  through “the instruction of the Spirit.”  This is a radical idea, and one not entirely welcome in the late Middle Ages.  Henry Knighton, a priest and historian who knew Wycliffe at Oxford, felt that he was a brilliant scholar but a dangerous man:

Master John Wyclif translated the Gospel from Latin into the English—the Angle not the angel language. And Wyclif, by thus translating the Bible, made it the property of the masses and common to all and more open to the laity, and even to women who were able to read … And so the pearl of the Gospel is thrown before swine and trodden underfoot and what is meant to be the treasure both of clergy and laity is now become a joke of both. The jewel of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity, so that what used to be the highest gift of the clergy and the learned members of the Church has become common to the laity.

He fakes you out on the tone at first, doesn’t he?  He says that Wycliff has made the Bible the property of the masses and common to all and more open to the laity – and we small “d” democratic moderns are ready to cheer Knighton’s progressivism.  Ah, but then he rounds on you, saying even women would be able to read it.  Perish the thought!  Uproar!  Consternation! 

Nice play on the Angle/angel language thing there, huh?  Bet he chuckled smugly to himself as he scratched that one on the parchment: “Oh, very good, very good, Henry, you clever dog!”

But, in all seriousness, Knighton’s concerns do address problems inherent in devolving power on the hoi polloi: how to do so without weakening central and expert authority?  Can a peasant understand the Bible in the same way and with the same sophistication as a theologian?  Even with Wycliff’s “instruction of the Spirit”?  If the Bible, as Wycliff and others would have it, forms the very basis of civil society, how can such a society be maintained in the face of radical individual autonomy?  In the 21st century, we often find it easy to dismiss the objections of medievals like Knighton or the Bishop Arundel, who called Wycliff wretched and pestilent, as those of recalcitrant power-mongers bent on denying the lower classes their freedom of conscience.  If we put ourselves in their position, we could see that the very basis of their civilization is called into question – this is an existential moment in the life of the West.  But we don’t usually empathize with the traditionalists because we live in civilizations that grew out of the debate and, largely, those of the Wycliffite faction, with an emphasis on individual rights and liberties, won the day.  The modern world – at least that part that exists as what we can broadly call liberal democracy in the classic sense – traces its origins back to the arguments of John Wycliffe and his merry band of scholars.

Despite its social, cultural, and political significance, the literary style of Wycliff’s Bible can often feel stiff and stilted – listen to the Wycliff rendering of the commandment that King Alfred omitted – that one about graven images:

Thou schalt not make to thee a grauun ymage, nethir ony licnesse of thing which is in heuene aboue, and which is in erthe bynethe, nether of tho thingis, that ben in watris vndur erthe; thou schalt not `herie tho, nether `thou schalt worschipe; for Y am thi Lord God, a stronge gelouse louyere; and Y visite the wickidnesse of fadris in to the thridde and the fourthe generacioun of hem that haten me, and Y do mercy in to `a thousynde, to hem that louen me, and kepen myn heestis.

Here’s the rough and ready:

You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor worship them. For I am the Lord your God, a strong and jealous lover. I visit the wickedness of fathers upon the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but I show mercy to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

The rough and ready actually sounds much smoother than the Middle English.  If I did a direct translation Wycliff’s (or Hereford’s) opening line here (by which I mean just switching word for word, not trying to smooth out a style), it would read: 

“You shall not make to you a graven image neither any likeness of thing which is in heaven above and which is in earth beneath, neither of those things that been in waters under earth.”

Bit blocky sounding, lacks a certain mellifluousness, and that’s because the Wycliff translators really tried to hew as closely as possible to Jerome’s Latin in the Vulgate, regardless of the fact that it becomes more difficult to read.  Presumably, trying to avoid the pitfalls St. Jerome himself had to answer when his Vulgate prompted charges of heresy.  Jerome avers: “I have made alterations in the letter and that a simple translation may contain errors though not wilful ones. . . or I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek I render sense for sense and not word for word.”

So in Wycliff’s version, sounds have been replaced, but without a great regard for the subtle changes in syntax and grammar necessary because Latin and English come from two entirely different language families.  And at the time of this translation, English is still settling itself into the new Latinate contributions from the Norman Conquest.  For instance, the translator says “thou shalt not herie tho” (you shall not bow down).  The verb “herie” comes from the Old French, so probably a post-Hastings (haha) addition.  But the word commandments is rendered “heestis”, from the Old English “haes” – which persists today in our word “behest.”

Wycliff’s Bible, coming as it did before Gutenberg set up shop, was circulated in manuscript form.  Once movable type became widespread in the late 15th century, the tenor of English Biblical translation became more literary, and the big name to know here is that of William Tyndale.

He was born probably in 1494 in Gloucestershire and got his education at the Oxbridges.  A gifted polyglot, he could chat you up in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as German, French, and Spanish.  Oh, and English, too, probably.  He got caught up in the church reform movement and, probably around 1522, he got hold of a copy of Luther’s German translation of the Gospels, and well, that was it.  He committed himself to the project of a full Bible in English, knowing full well that, to coin a phrase, he was playing with fire.  Luther’s agitations had done little to soften the Catholic Church’s mood concerning uppity troublemakers and it remained staunchly against vernacular Bibles, fearing the chaos that would certainly ensue.  

But young Tyndale persisted, moving to a seemingly more tolerant Germany in 1524 producing a quite elegant and eloquent English version of the entire New Testament, as well as the Old Testament Pentateuch and history books, all from the original Hebrew and Greek texts (though correlated with Latin editions as well).   The 1526 New Testament was somewhat insufficient though, and he published a corrected version in 1534 (just as Henry VIII is starting to bristle against the Church poking its nose into his affairs, too).  The rest of the translation fell to Myles Coverdale, who, working with Latin and German sources, banged out the rest of the Henrew Scriptures and the Apocrypha.  He then dedicated the completed text to His Royal Rotundity in 1535.

Too late for poor Mr. Tyndale, however, who was betrayed to the Church authorities and sentenced to be strangled to death, his body then burned, not for the translation work per se, but for promulgating Lutheran reformist views deemed seditious.  His last words are said to be “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes” and, would you believe it, blessed listener, that very same year of 1536, King Henry the Fickle granted permission for the Tyndale/Coverdale Bible’s general circulation.  Not quite sure if that’s a happy ending or not.  The 1537 version became known as the Matthew Bible since it was printed by one John Rogers under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew.  A later rebranding of essentially the same text became known as the Great Bible, the first authorized Bible in English.

Tyndale’s work may well be the high water mark for a truly literary English Bible.  I know at the outset of this episode I intimated that such an honor belongs to the King James Version, which we will discuss soon, but I should point out here that perhaps 80% of that work comes directly from Tyndale’s version.

And the reason for that is not only its quite beautiful prose – prose that teeters into poetry, actually.  Some of the most familiar and inspiring phrases in the English language come from Tyndale’s nuanced sensitivity to wordcraft.  Surely you’ve heard these at one time or another:  

let there be light

my brother's keeper

the salt of the earth

the powers that be

and fight the good fight.

These are a few of the most deeply embedded idioms in the language and their power does not diminish when once again your attention is called to them.  

And we owe to Tyndale a few new coinages and familiar names that now seem quite natural in our speech.  From him we get the word “Passover,” the general name “Lord” with a capital L for the deity, and the personal name for the same Jehovah (which has now been shown to be an incorrect pronunciation of the Hebrew vowels).  Tyndale also knocks out “atonement” and “scapegoat,” I think, words we still commonly use.

But as I say, not only for the lovely writing is the Tyndale or Matthew Bible remarkable.  The words chosen by Tyndale and Coverdale and Rogers indicate a quite pronounced theo-political agenda.  That is, they translated with an eye toward connotations that promoted the reformist platform.

To wit, a modern reader might easily gloss over the distinction between the word “repentance” and the phrase “do penance.”  Tyndale chose the former.  Why?  Because “repentance” is an act of personal will, a choice, a feeling on the part of the individual.  It conforms to Luther’s doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura: only faith and only scripture are necessary for the believer’s salvation.  Contrastingly, Tyndale felt the phrase “do penance” smacked too much of Catholic sacramentalism, as if reconciliation could be achieved by a prescribed act or ritual, and not an authentic emotion.  In short, “repentance” supports the Protestant belief that faith, not works, achieves salvation.

There’s a similar prejudice against the word “charity,” which Tyndale rendered as “love,” feeling that charity too was a “work” and not a spiritual state.  Nor does he use the words “church,” “priest,” substituting the more egalitarian “congregation” and “elder.”

We already know how these proto-democratic sympathies ended up for Tyndale, so you can easily imagine how happy Mary I felt about such a Protestant-biased Bible when she assumed the throne in 1553 and wrenched England back to the Roman Church.  You probably know she earned the handle Bloody Mary for her religious persecutions and the execution of some 300 Protestants.  The fact that her Protestant sister Bess executed at least that many Catholics has not resulted in such a sanguinary sobriquet, but winners write history, don’t they?

The so-called Marian persecutions forced some 800 reform-minded scholars to the continent, where a number of them convened in Geneva, Switzerland, where for some decades, the work of renowned French theologian John Calvin had made the city of some 14,000 people a conducive community for the Protestant cause.  Indeed, it was something of a utopian experiment.  The city had been brought effectively under the control of Calvin’s church, which enforced strict discipline and quashed any dissent.  But it also managed labor relations, decreased food prices, and set up care for the poor and elderly.  To this city came several of Marian England’s orphans, including Miles Coverdale and the fulminating Scottish preacher John Knox, under the leadership of William Whittingham and produced a revision of Tyndale’s work, also based on the original languages, called the Geneva Bible in 1560.  And this is the version that dominated the intellectual landscape of the Elizabethan era.  This is the Bible from which Shakespeare quotes, as will later luminaries such as the Johns Bunyan and Milton.  It remained popular well into the 17th century, and was the Bible used by the Pilgrim Separatists who landed the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. 

The Geneva Bible sets itself apart by really being the first English one with what we would now call a scholarly apparatus.  The text is replete with maps, tables, woodcut illustrations, not to mention extensive cross-references, marginal notes, and glossaries – all intended to guide the individual reader in her understanding of the text.  Many of these commentaries were composed by Calvin himself.  Also, this is the first English translation to use the chapter and verse citation system with which we are familiar.  

While this version was popular with Puritans (those radical Protestants who felt that the English Reformation had not gone far enough in its purge of Catholic ritual and superstition) and, in the fullness of time, Scottish Covenanters, Presbytarians who sought to proscribe the crown’s interference in religious affairs, Mary’s successor Elizabeth would need a Bible that would united the Church of England and promote the Elizabethan Settlement.

What’s this, you may ask?  The settlement was a series of legislation during the first dozen or so years of Gloriana’s reign.  She sought a compromise between Anglicans and Catholics, and thus a formal end to her father’s Reformation.  While scrupulously avoided building any windows into men’s souls, The Act of Supremacy made the monarch the head of the Church.  The Act of Uniformity mandated worship rituals, and sacraments while establishing the Book of Common Prayer as the Church’s official liturgical text.  All Libby needed now was a Bible.

Here, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, and co-creator of the 39 Articles, that great statement of Anglican theology –stepped forward to produce his answer to the Geneva Bible.  It was called, quite humbly, it seems to me, the Bishop’s Bible.  While the translators wanted to restore a high church diction and style to the Word of God – give it a bit of class – the main point of the Bishop’s Bible was to encourage doctrinal conformity among the various branches of English Protestantism as an established Anglicanism, and not rile the Catholics up too much.  It worked for a while.  The general title page includes a portrait of Elizabeth I with a subscribed New Testament verse: Romans 1:16: ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believeth.’ That verse is rendered identically in both the Geneva and Bishop’s Bibles, but here,Seemingly without irony, that inscription is in Latin.  Never became as popular as the Geneva and so eventually the schisms it attempted to heal broke open again.

So, after Elizabeth shuffled off her mortal coil, James Stuart, whose mother had been executed by Elizabeth for being the center of Catholic plot against the throne, decided something had to be done.

In January of 1604, King James, sixth of that name in Scotland and first in England, had retreated from Westminster to Hampton Court Palace to escape another unannounced visit by Mr. Plague.  He had wearied of his troubles with the Scottish Kirk and dreaded the sequel in the Anglican Church.  To take his mind off his troubles that cold winter month, the new king ordered a theatre troupe, recently of his sponsorship, to perform.  On new year’s day occurs the first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Bard and the King’s Men.

But two weeks later, James calls the Hampton Court Conference, a colloquium between the King, his Anglican Bishops, and leaders of the Puritan – they would have called themselves the “Godly” – faction.  The proximate cause is a document called the Millenary Petition, the requests of supposedly 1000 Puritan ministers  “desiring reformation of certain ceremonies and abuses of the Church.”  Rather loaded language there already, no, seeing as they list among the putative “abuses” that the cross is present at the baptism ceremony, that people bow at the name of Jesus, that words like “priest” and “absolution” be stricken, and that rings no longer accompany the wedding ceremony.  OK, being a little cheeky at the dour old Puritans’ expense.  Issues that may seem more weighty to us include fending off excessive power and remuneration in church offices, protecting people from unwarranted excommunication, and ensuring that ministers be learned and upright.

The primary spokesperson for the Puritan faction was John Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, who had been scolded by Elizabeth the first for his doctrinal obstinacy.  He presented his case before the king, who delighted in the disputation, having once called Puritans “very pests.”  As the king dismissed the idea of establishing a Scottish-style presbytery system – the famous “No bishop, no king!” declaration – as antithetical to his views on monarchy’s divine right, Reynolds finally proposed “one only translation of the Bible to be authentical and read in church’ in order to establish some comity between the factions.  James agreed because he had great reservations about all those explanatory footnotes in the Geneva Bible especially.  More on that momentarily.

And so, the project of the Authorized Version was launched.  Some 54 scholars, divided into six different committees, were charged with the new translation’s production.  Seven years later, in 1611, the book we now call the King James Bible was published for the first time.  Unfortunately, Mr. Reynolds had died of consumption in 1607 and never saw the great gift he gave to the English language and people.  The frontispiece shows no king, however, instead presenting the twelve apostles, Moses and Aaron flanking the title inscription, and the four evangelists in each corner.

While we think of the Authorized Version as the ultimate literary version of the English Bible – as I said, for many people, this text and its phrases and cadences are the very shape of religious experience itself – it’s work noting that some 80% of it derives straight from William Tyndale’s version.  If you’ve noticed, all the English Bibles since Tyndale’s have really been reworkings, not new translations.  The KJV, which sounds to modern ears rather formal, even exalted, was remarkably colloquial for its day.  For instance, the translators often opted for what is called “dynamic equivalence” in the translation game, which means that they favored the sense of the language’s meaning and its accessibility to the target audience rather than literal translation, a word-for-word re-rendering (which Wycliff and his team leaned toward, making his translation somewhat less readable).  So, while Tyndale translates 1 Timothy 6:6 as, "Godliness is great riches, if a man be content with that he hath,"  Jimmy’s translators went with, "Godliness with contentment is great gain."  Bit tighter, more direct, more pithy.  Same thing with, like, John 20:28.  Geneva: Then Thomas answered, and said unto him, Thou art my Lord, and my God.  Authorized: And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.  Cuts to the chase, yeah?  Still and all, though, the King James Bible, for many, is the perfection of that decades-long process and probably the greatest thing ever produced by a committee – though the bar is not too high there.  

Modern conversational English takes some 250 phrases from this Bible, which is more than any other single source.  “See eye to eye,” “a thorn in your side,” “eat drink and be merry,” “bottomless pit,” “born again,” “two edged sword,” “skin of their teeth,” and on and on.

But we must remember that while the KJV may be the literary apex of Bibles, that was not the reason for its development.  Godly Puritans had theological concerns about diction that smacked too much of Catholicism in earlier translations.  Anglicans wanted a broadly acceptable text to support the Elizabethan settlement, and James wanted those pesky footnotes out of any Bible with his name on it.

Well, what’s the problem, then, Jamie?  The Geneva Bible, especially, contained all those glosses of Biblical passages written by scholars like John Calvin, John Knox, Miles Coverdale, and William Whittingham, which you should all by now recognize as major figures in the Puritan movement.  Their focus on, as I’ve termed it, a more proto-democratic or even populist, understanding of the Scriptures seemed to James a threat to divinely ordained monarchy.  The king demanded all uses of the word “tyrant” be expunged and replaced with the word “king” (to be fair, neither of these terms is politically neutral).   So, like, the Geneva’s Isaiah 49:25 reads “But thus saith the Lord, Even the captivity of the mighty shall be taken away: and the prey of the tyrant shall be delivered” and includes a footnote reading “This is the answer to their objection, that none is stronger than the Lord, neither hath a more just title unto them.”  James saw the wording of that verse and the gloss as antimonarchical.  So the Authorized Version reads instead “But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered.”  The verse becomes far less about unbounded political power and more about a generalized malice.  

Similarly, Daniel 6:22 questions the monarch’s ultimate power in the Geneva: My God hath sent his Angel and hath shut the lion’s mouths, and they have not hurt me: for my justice was found out before him: and unto thee, O king, I have done no hurt.

Footnotes

1. Daniel 6:22 My just cause and uprightness in this thing wherein I was charged, is approved of God.
2. Daniel 6:22 For he did disobey the king’s wicked commandment to obey God, and so did no injury to the king, who ought to command nothing whereby God should be dishonored.

James found such sentiments “untrue, seditious, and savoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.”  Scholars have noted several other instances in which either the language in the Biblical text itself or the implications of the footnotes fell afoul of James’ political philosophy.  Among the more remarkable are to be found in Daniel, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Chronicles.

Regardless of the political and theological, James’ version has certainly become the most influential Bible in the Anglophone world.  Who, regardless of religious upbringing or faith, does not recognize the opening words of Genesis: 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

It’s just very stirring language.  Countless authors, from all continents and cultures, have taken inspiration from it, using lines as book titles, adapting stories, and so much more.  Such is the power and influence of the Authorized version that there is a movement called Onlyism, which asserts the KJV as the perfect translation of the Bible and that all others are corrupt and will mislead believers.  Adherents tend to be, of course, on the conservative side of the spectrum, but there are debates about the theological inerrancy of the book, not to mention some debates over outright mistranslations.

For instance, one of the most historically consequential verses from the KJV is Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  You may recall from the Macbeth episode that James had a great fascination with the witchcraft phenomenon and wrote a scholarly treatise called Of Demonology in 1597.  Anyway, the Exodus verse was often invoked as justification for the witch persecutions of the 17th century.  Some have argued that, far from being an injunction to kill witches, it is rather a prohibition to consult them.  Something more like, “You shall not allow a witch to earn a living.”  So, don’t pay them for their services.  Others note that the Hebrew word translated as “witch” might have a root not meaning “muttering” as in like casting a spell, but rather cutting, like cutting herbs, so a better term might actually be herbalist or medicine woman or even pharmacist!

There have been, of course, many English translations since the King James, and with different purposes.  There are those focused on the textual faithfulness to the Hebrew and Greek suitable for scholarly work.  There are those, like the Living Bible and the Good News, that nearly paraphrase the texts to maximize their accessibility, and many others in between.  However, I doubt that we will ever see a more culturally significant version in English of the world’s most influential book.  

OK, that’ll do for today.  Hey, check out the new feature on the homepage.  It’s called Fan Mail. You can text me directly with one click – so let me know what’s on your mind.  The support the show button is right there, too, give it a click if you’ve found a couple of bucks in that summer blazer you just took out of the closet.  

Thanks for listening, everyone.  As the Gospel of St. Matthew says, in the Authorized version of course: “whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.”  Keep building, Litterbugs.  You’ll hear from me soon.