The Book of Books (6 page)

Smyth also wrote: ‘we never sought to make a new translation, nor yet a bad one to make a good one, but to make a good one better; or out of many good ones, one principal good one.'

The scholars worked in six committees, two based in Oxford, two in Cambridge and two in Westminster. The Bible was carved
up between them. The majority was firmly Anglican. The committees worked separately until completion when two from each committee met to revise and harmonise the whole. The King did not pay them. Either their colleges supported them or they were steered towards well-paid parishes and dioceses which gave them the time to do the work. They worked in an orderly, even a drilled manner, for years. A contemporary, John Selden, in his
Table Talk
, writes: ‘the translation in King James' time took an excellent way. That part of the bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue . . . and then they met together, and one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian etc. If they found any fault they spoke up, if not he read on.'

‘He read on.' That is crucial. From the beginning the Bible in England had been a preaching and a teaching Bible. Wycliffe and Tyndale were aware that they were delivering their translated Scriptures into a largely illiterate society. They wrote as scholars for scholars, but they also wrote as preachers for everyone who needed to be reached. Later it would be read not only in churches and in vast open air rallies, but in schools and homes, in meetings and conferences. It would be quoted by soldiers on the battlefield and nurses in hospitals and its poetry would later be translated into the gospel songs. In this as in much else, they modelled themselves on the practice of Jesus Christ who spoke directly to the people.

The scholars had a substantial library at their disposal. Not only the versions in English, beginning with Wycliffe, but the Complutensian Polyglot (of 1517, in which Hebrew, Latin and Greek were printed side by side), the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572, the Tremellius-Junius Bible of 1579, Sebastian Münster's Latin translation of the Old Testament, Theodore Bega's translation of the New Testament; Latin translations of the whole Bible by
Sanctes Pagninus, Leo Judo and Sebastian Castalio; the Zurich Bible, Luther's German Bible; the French Bibles of Lefèvre d'Étaples (1534) and Olivétan (1535); Casiodoro de Reina and Cypriano de Valera (1569) in Spanish; Diodati in Italian; the 1,600-year-old Latin Vulgate by St Jerome and commentaries by early Church fathers, rabbis and other contemporary scholars. And, of course, Tyndale.

Since Tyndale's day, Greek and especially Hebrew scholarship had advanced rapidly; there were more and better Hebrew grammars and the scanning of existing versions was fine-toothed. All the more remarkable then that Tyndale's final version still accounted for about 80 per cent of the King James New Testament and the same percentage obtained in those books he had translated of the Old Testament. Yet the contribution by these later scholars was important both for the grand authority their reputations brought to it and for the work of improvement and finessing they undertook.

The First Westminster Company was led by Dean Launcelot Andrewes, of whom it was said he ‘might have been interpreter general at Babel'. He went to Cambridge University at sixteen, where he met and befriended Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of
The Faerie Queen
. It appears that he was studious and ‘avoided games of ordinary recreation'. He climbed rapidly up the Church ladder until he became Dean of Westminster Abbey and one of the twelve chaplains to Queen Elizabeth I.

We are told that he mastered fifteen languages and had an outstandingly tenacious memory. Grotius, the leading Dutch legal authority and historian, said that meeting Andrewes was ‘one of the special attractions of a visit to England'. It is said that King James sometimes slept with Andrewes's sermons under his pillow and was in awe of him. T.S. Eliot, almost four centuries later, praised his gift for ‘taking a word and developing the world
from it'. Too Latinate and self-absorbed for some, but to the greatest poet of the twentieth century he was a literary hero.

As merely one example, Eliot takes Tyndale's opening lines of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the water.'

He then quotes Andrewes, whose words he claims are much superior: ‘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.'

Thirty-nine words compared to Tyndale's twenty-nine. The key words ‘void', ‘darkness', ‘deep' are Tyndale. I prefer Tyndale. Nevertheless, T.S. Eliot is to be respected and many have agreed with his judgement about this and others of Andrewes's rephrasings.

Eliot was much indebted to Andrewes. In his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi' he took phrases from him for some of his most admired poetry. From a sermon of Andrewes on the Three Wise Men in 1622, he used and echoed: ‘It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it . . . the ways deep, the winter sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.'

Andrewes and his committee met in the Jerusalem Chamber, still part of the original Abbey House at Westminster.

Other members included Hebrew specialists, Greek scholars and Latinists. One was so fluent in Latin that he found it difficult to talk in English at any length. Another had a permanently faithless wife whose public infatuation with sex saddened him but did not sever his marriage nor, it seems, interfere with his concentration on the translation.

The First Cambridge Company was led by Edward Lively, the
Regius Professor of Hebrew, whose thirteen children disabled him from living a life without debt. There was the Regius Professor of Divinity from Cambridge, one of the four Puritans who had attended the Hampton Court Conference. Another scholar had lived through the reigns of four Tudors and two Stuarts and died aged 105, still able to read a copy of the Greek Testament in ‘very small type' ‘without spectacles'.

The First Oxford Company was headed by John Hardinge, Regius Professor of Hebrew. The most powerful man on that committee, though, was John Reynolds, not only President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but the man who had successfully suggested the idea of a new Bible to James I at Hampton Court. He was variously described as a ‘living library' and ‘a university unto himself'. He was a moderate Puritan, understanding of the Roman Catholic position, a tried and trusted friend and respecter of Jews, and a man who literally, it was thought, wasted away in his service to translation. He died in 1607 and looked ‘the very skeleton'. Other Puritans were not as tolerant: one, Thomas Holland, would say, on parting company, ‘I commend you to the love of God and to the hatred of Popery and superstition.'

These three companies devoted themselves to the Old Testament. The word ‘company' for what might better be described as a ‘committee' indicates the power of fashion of the day. London was a nest of companies: the Actors' Companies, the Livery companies, the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company . . . There was something vaguely martial and also convivial about a company and that seems to have rubbed off on these biblical companies.

The Second Oxford Company and the Second Westminster Company worked on the New Testament, the Second Cambridge Company on the Apocrypha now sadly omitted from the King James Version.

James drew up fourteen rules after consultation with Bishop (later Archbishop) Bancroft and Robert Cecil, his principal secretary of state. Their aim was to ensure the translation was a conservative one. Perhaps to emphasise that, they kept words and phrases and sentences that had already drifted out of fashion, even archaic, like ‘verily' and ‘it came to pass'. By retaining them, they ensured that the new Bible from the beginning had a halo of antiquity, a feeling of immemorial validity.

From January 1609, a General Committee of Revision met in London to examine the new version. According to one of the three translators entrusted with the task, only a few of their changes made it into the final version. The companies had done well. From this committee it went to two other translators. One of them, Miles Smyth, wrote the preface. On to Archbishop Bancroft, who made fourteen of his own changes, rather resented by Miles Smyth. It was then finally presented to the King and from the court sent off to the printers.

The Bible was about to be born again and this, the Authorised Version, would, with some retouching along the way, remain the standard English Bible until well into the twentieth century. In many parts of the world it still is and where it has been superseded its loss is often lamented and there are cries to bring it back.

 

Just as the Scottish King, thrifty in everything save his indulgences, would not pay the translators, so he left the printers to fend for themselves.

Although called the Authorised Version, the King James Bible was never officially authorised. That would have required an Act of Parliament. But within the title the words ‘By his majestie's special commandment' and ‘Appointed to be read in churches' and the common knowledge of King James's decisive role allow that ‘Authorised' to be used without too much historical
embarrassment. America has it more accurately with the ‘King James Version'.

The printing proved to be a strain. Bibles had been a trade monopoly since the time of Henry VIII and the custom of a cut of the profits, a royalty going to royalty to acknowledge their royal approval, was well established by James's day. Bibles and theological books were not only good business, they were the biggest proportion of the book business. Under Queen Elizabeth I, in 1577, Thomas Barker secured a monopoly on Bibles. A decade later, by intensive lubrications at court, he had it extended for the whole of his lifetime and that of his son, who became the King's Printer, solely responsible in 1611 for the publication of the Bible.

It would be lavish, splendid and very expensive. Barker had to set aside an eye-watering sum, £3,500 (in Jacobean times, a king's ransom). He had to look for partners. They came and they brought troubles and disputes and debts which put him in prison for the last ten years of his life. But even in his cell he remained the King's Printer and held on to the copyright.

It was printed in 1611 with the title ‘The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie Anno Domini 1611'. The New Testament bore a title, the same but for the opening line: ‘the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ . . .'

It cost twelve shillings bound, ten shillings loose leaf. The folio edition was handsome, heavy and designed to impress. The smaller and cheaper quarto edition was on the streets a year later. There were no illustrations. It contained a table for the reading of the Psalms at matins and evensong, a Church calendar, an almanac
and a table of holy days and observances. Some of this dropped away as later versions appeared, most notably in 1629, 1638 and 1762 at Cambridge and, most successfully, in 1769 at Oxford.

Punctuation, spelling and capitalisation were often erratic. Of the 1,500 misprints in the first years some are memorable. For instance there was the omission of ‘
not
' from the commandment ‘thou shalt not commit adultery'. This became known as ‘the wicked Bible'. The printers were fined. Then there was the ‘vinegar Bible', where ‘vinegar' crept in instead of ‘vineyard'. And the ‘murderer's Bible', where there was ‘let the children first be
killed
' instead of ‘
filled
'. Hating ‘
life
' became hating ‘
wife
'.

There were disputes. For example, the same Greek verb meaning ‘rejoice' was translated not only as ‘rejoice' but also as ‘glory'. ‘We rejoice in . . .', ‘we glory in . . .' and ‘we also joy in . . .'. Variation had suited the poetic and illuminating mind of Tyndale and that was one of the characteristics his successors imitated. The fluidity and the rush of richness in and the bounty of almostsynonyms in the Roman-Germanic-Norse-French-English language at the time was too tempting to resist.

But it has been pointed out that literally a liberty had been taken and the cry of Richard III, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!' might not have been improved with the introduction of ‘steed' and ‘nag'. And though the Authorised Version was more Latinate than earlier versions, Anglo-Saxon words still predominated and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as in Shakespeare, gave the language its dynamism: ‘Song of Songs', ‘King of Kings', ‘And the word was made flesh', ‘man of war', ‘I am the way, the truth and the light', ‘three score and ten', ‘And the word was with God. And the word was God.'

The fi ercest critic of the day was a Puritan Hebrew scholar, Hugh Broughton, who had not been included on the list of translators – very likely because of his tendency to argue with everyone who
dared to disagree with him. King James asked for advice from independent scholars and Broughton weighed in. ‘It is so ill done . . . Tell his Majesty I had rather be rent in pieces by wild horses than that any such translation by my comment should be urged upon poor churches. It crosseth me and I require it to be burnt!' He was not alone, though his intemperance was exceptional.

At first people did not take to it. In some matters, and certainly in this case, people prefer old lamps to new. The Bishops' Bible ceased to be printed but its translated bulk still stayed on the lecterns in many of the churches. Its words were familiar and it had its hold. It took time for James to decree that his Bible be the sole Bible in churches. After that it took over the lecterns throughout the kingdom.