The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  The king agreed to consider the petition. In his heart of hearts he knew that he would never agree to the Puritan demands; the good life was too attractive to him to have it curtailed by gloomy, naysaying zealots. But he was determined to unite his country and perhaps he was still high from the enthusiastic reception his subjects had given him; from the lavish fare and hunting parties which the English nobility from Northumberland to Hertfordshire had laid on. The opportunity to be seen to be doing something to unite the disparate factions, no matter how little would actually be accomplished, was too great for James to overlook. He could afford to make a grand gesture to the Puritans, to show that he was willing to address their discontent. Nothing would come of it, he knew this, but nevertheless James responded to the Puritan petition by calling a conference, to be held at Hampton Court, at which representatives of the established English Church and the Puritans would put their heads together and resolve their differences.

  Discarding the Geneva Bible

  Had James allowed the Puritans a free rein in choosing their delegates, the conference may have progressed towards a reconciliation between the two factions. But as it was, only four Puritan delegates were invited, and each one of them was an old friend or schoolmate of several of the sea of bishops arrayed against them. The modestly attired, self-effacing Puritans appeared uncomfortable and incongruous in the opulent, regal court studded with satin-clad prelates; the conference gave the impression of an intimate gathering of the self-interested. The truly radical Puritans, those causing all the trouble, who wished to purge England of its bishops and ceremonials, were not present.

  With the odds stacked against them, the Hampton Court conference of 1603 would never produce a satisfactory outcome for the Puritans. But it did present James with an opportunity. It helped him to rid the country of the Geneva Bible, favourite of the Puritans and popular with the masses, with its anti-monarchist overtones. James’s disdain for the Geneva Bible was not just personal; it was a matter of principle. James was a firm believer in the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, that the king is not subject to any worldly authority or control. The Geneva Bible undermined this doctrine; many of the notes in its margins implied that all kings were tyrants, and it fumed against them.8

  There had already been one attempt during Elizabeth’s reign to supersede the partisan Geneva Bible with one more appropriate to a national Church. The English ecclesia had never fully accepted the non-hierarchical ideals of the European Reformation; structurally the Church in England had done little more than replace the Pope with the monarch as its supreme head. But the ‘official’ Bible the English Church had commissioned during Elizabeth’s reign had failed to catch on. The Bishops’ Bible, so called because it was compiled by a team of fourteen bishops, had even won itself a derisory nickname. People called it the ‘Treacle Bible’, because of its rendition of Jeremiah’s ‘is there no balm in Gilead?’ as ‘is there no treacle?’9 In contrast to the Bishops’ Bible, treated as an object of mockery, the Geneva Bible, with its extensive notes and subversive anti-royalism, won the hearts of the masses. The English religious and royal establishments couldn’t wait to see the back of it.

  The Hampton Court conference had been bogged down for days in futile argumentation when the leader of the Puritan delegation, John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, made a proposal designed to break the impasse. Reynolds suggested that henceforth both factions should use the same translation of the Bible, as a way of demonstrating their common interest. Reynolds probably didn’t mean that a new translation needed to be made; his intention was almost certainly to dispense with the Bishops’ Bible in favour of the Geneva. But the king jumped at the idea; he saw it as a way of getting rid of the Geneva Bible altogether, by means of a new, universally acceptable, translation.10

  James had made up his mind about the Geneva Bible, even before the Conference was called. He was very clear about what he wanted, and now that the proposal was in the air he didn’t mince his words. ‘I profess that I could never see a Bible well translated in English, but I think that of all, that of Geneva is the worst. I wish some special pains were taken for a uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned in both universities, then reviewed by the bishops, presented to the privy council, lastly ratified by royal authority to be read in the whole church, and no other.’11

  The new Bible was to be constructed by an academic committee and overseen by the bishops, before being passed to the secular authorities for approval. In pointed contrast to the ethos of the Geneva Bible, it was to receive royal sanction before being released to the churches. Whether this last stipulation was ever met is uncertain but, as Alister McGrath points out, ‘the fact that there is no known royal “authorisation” for the translation cannot necessarily be taken to imply that such “authorisation” was not forthcoming’.12

  The Making of King James

  Much has been written about the making of the King James Bible. Yet there is a dearth of hard evidence about both the build-up to the process, and the act of translation itself. The few original documents often contradict each other and the gaps in what we know can only be filled by hypothesis. According to David Norton’s analysis of the translation’s textual history: ‘The evidence we do have tells a lot about the work but not enough to clear up all mysteries . . . : speculation and guesswork will be unavoidable as we try to establish just how the text was created.’13

  Among the facts that are as certain as history can ever be is that the committee was to be headed by Richard Bancroft, the tough, pragmatic bishop of London. Bancroft had taken part in the Hampton Court conference. He had ridiculed the idea of a translation when Reynolds proposed it. But he soon came round. One of the factors that won him over was the realization that chairing the translation committee was an excellent way to win the king’s favour. Bancroft was the front runner for the soon-to-become-vacant position of Archbishop of Canterbury; John Whitgift, the current incumbent, was on his deathbed, and the appointment of his successor was in James’s gift. Bancroft’s sudden enthusiasm for the Bible project paid off. He was put in charge of the committee and, as a reward for his selfless work on the translation, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in October 1604.

  Bancroft was a fanatical opponent of the Puritans, considering their austere solemnity a threat to England’s Protestant reformation. His disdain for the self-effacing Puritans exceeded even his dislike of the militant Catholic extremists who would, on 5 November 1605, try to blow up Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot. Bancroft had cut his political teeth rooting out Presbyterians during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Now, as head of the translation committee, he had his opportunity to emasculate the Puritan challenge, once and for all.

  First, however, Bancroft had to get the committee into a workable shape. The king had not just ordered him to recruit the most appropriate translators. He’d also charged him with the tricky task of finding the money to pay for the project. Bancroft was not given a budget but his manipulative skills soon helped him devise a solution that was neat and to the point. The bishops at the Hampton Court conference had ingratiated themselves to the king by obsequiously endorsing his enthusiasm for the new translation. Now Bancroft would get them to pay for their flattery. He passed responsibility for funding the translation on to them, informing them that they were to provide livings for the translators. The bishops would pay the translators’ salaries and the translators would carry out their work for Bancroft.

  Bancroft managed to dispose of the funding situation to his own satisfaction. But his solution didn’t work well for the translators. Not all were granted a living; not everyone got paid. In the end Robert Cecil, the King’s Lord Treasurer, had to find the money by doing a deal with Robert Barker, the head of a firm of printers who’d had a monopoly on printing English Bibles since 1577. Cecil persuaded him to pay the sum of £3,500 for a licence to publish the finished translation.14 But by the time the deal was done it no longer mattered to Banc
roft; the translation was virtually complete, he was Archbishop of Canterbury and no longer interested in the details of the project’s financing.

  A more delicate task for Bancroft was to get a diplomatically acceptable balance of voices on the translation committee. Although the unspoken purpose of the translation was to assert the authority of the English Church, the Puritans could not simply be left out in the cold. They had been represented at the Hampton Court conference, the translation had even been the Puritan John Reynolds’ idea. To exclude them from the process of translation would have been an invitation to all-out sectarian conflict.

  It wasn’t simply a question of Bancroft selecting those Puritans who were best versed in the Hebrew and Greek languages. There was the king to consider. In his eyes, the new Bible would unite his fractured kingdom. This meant that only moderate Puritans, those who wished to remain with the religious establishment, could be included. The monarch would not brook a committee that included Separatists, that troublesome brand of Puritan which saw no value in a united Church and agitated for each congregation to be an independent entity. Bancroft needed to manage the selection of Puritan delegates very carefully.

  His solution was to divide the translation committee into six separate companies, each comprising nine people. Two of the companies were to be based in Westminster, two in Oxford and two in Cambridge. Moderate Puritans would be put in charge of two of the companies, John Reynolds, whose idea the translation had been, in Oxford and Laurence Chaderton in Cambridge. Bancroft hoped that the independence of each company, together with the authority of Reynolds and Chaderton, would satisfy any concerns the Puritans may have had of being outmanoeuvred.

  Bancroft’s next challenge was to ensure that, despite each translation company working independently, the style of the final product was consistent throughout, remaining free of sectarian bias and influence. We can’t say if he consciously adopted the model laid out in the Septuagint legend, or whether it was just a coincidence, but he put in place a system of cross checking that resonated with echoes of Alexandria.

  Each company was allocated particular books of the Bible to translate. Every scholar in the company was to work on the same passage. Just like the Alexandrian translators, they would translate independently. When finished, they would confer, compare and agree. Once the company was agreed, their work was passed to the other companies for consideration and assent. A general meeting would then approve everything. Finally, supervisors from the universities were to ensure consistency of translation between similar passages appearing in different places. The system of checks and balances that Bancroft put in place was just about as watertight as it could possibly be. All this, and more, was set out in sixteen rules that Bancroft drew up.

  It is often thought that the King James Bible was a new work, composed from scratch by its translators. But that wasn’t so, as the first of Bancroft’s sixteen rules made clear. The translation was to be, and is, a revision of the Bishops’ Bible, which in itself was based on previous versions, going all the way back to Tyndale. The translators themselves stress this in their Preface to the reader: ‘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’.15 As much as 94 per cent of the New Testament translation in King James comes directly from Tyndale.16

  The new Bible was intended to top the pinnacle of all English translations since Tyndale. Its culminating virtue is as much, if not more, in its style and exquisite use of language as it is in content. For, elegant as it is, Tyndale’s version scarcely approaches the majesty and poetic style of the King James Bible, even though in many cases the later translators merely made cosmetic changes. We need only to compare one random example, this one taken from the story of Noah’s Ark, to see the difference:

  Tyndale: And after the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. And sent forth a raven which went out ever going and coming again until the waters were dried up upon the earth. Then sent he forth a dove from him to wit whether the waters were fallen from of the earth. And when the dove could find no resting place for her foot she returned to him again unto the ark for the waters were upon the face of all the earth. And he put out his hand and took her and pulled her to him in to the ark.

  KJB: And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.17

  Another of Bancroft’s rules, the third in his hierarchy, was unashamedly polemical. It was designed to show the Puritans and Presbyterians that the English Church would brook no compromise when it came to questions of religious authority or ecclesiastical governance. The rule looks innocent enough: The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz.: ‘as the word ‘Church’ not to be translated ‘Congregation’ etc’. But behind this apparent loyalty to the old terminology lay a fractious dispute, which goes to the heart of the Reformation. The early Reformers were forcefully opposed to the hierarchical edifice of the Roman Church. Strict Protestantism was to have no such structure; it was to be a flat composition with no intermediaries, privileged or otherwise, between people and the divine. The hierarchical Church was to be replaced by the egalitarian Congregation. Tyndale makes this point quite clearly. In his translation of Matthew 16.18, he has Jesus saying to Peter, ‘On this rock I will build my congregation’, deliberately changing the Greek word ecclesia from its historic designation as Church. Bancroft would have none of it. English Protestantism had a Church, James was its head and the Archbishop of Canterbury the ‘Primate of All England’. To avoid all doubt, and keep the Puritans in their place, Rule 3 insisted that the Greek word ecclesia was to be translated as Church, not congregation. It seems like a minor point, but, sadly, so do most Bible translation controversies.

  Other rules emphasized the need for continuity from the older versions. The translators were to retain the original chapter and verse numbers. When they were in doubt as to the best word to use they should stick to the old, familiar ones. But they were also not to include any notes or commentaries; the king did not want another variety of the highly annotated, dogmatically ideological, anti-monarchist Geneva Bible. The only material to appear in the margins was cross references to other biblical passages, or the occasional clarification of an ambiguous word in the translation. One additional rule, added a little later,18 required ‘three or four of the most ancient and grave divines’19 from either Oxford or Cambridge to oversee the translation, to ensure consistency of translation. There is some doubt about whether this rule was followed, although we do know the name of one of the ancient divines appointed to the task, George Ryves, Warden of New College, Oxford.

  The remainder of Bancroft’s rules were procedural, setting out the ways the various translators and companies were to communicate with each other.

  The first translators were recruited in 1604. A careful reading of their translations indicates that, despite the king’s disapproval of the Geneva Bible, this was one of the sources they consulted. They also seem to have used the Latin translation from the Hebrew made by Solomon Münster in 1536, and the work of the thirteenth-century, Jewish grammarian David Kimchi.20 Other than this, very little is known about their day-to-day activities or how they went about their work. Their story doesn’t surface again until 1608, by which time they were ready to start planning the general meeting which would agree the final version. Each company was to nominate two people to attend the meeting, to be held at Stationers’ Hall in London. It took a year to get them all together, at least one translator,
Andrew Downes, professor of Greek at Cambridge, refusing to come on the grounds that he had not been paid. The king sent him £50 and he relented.21

  Errors and Disappointment

  History is silent about events between the general meeting and the eventual publication of the King James Bible in 1611. It’s likely that the final printed version was prepared, not as we might have expected from a full manuscript of the translators’ work, but from scribblings onto a particular copy of the Bishops’ Bible. The transcript had been unbound and its individual pages separated. The translators’ amendments and alterations were little more than notes in the page margins. The whole thing had been passed on to the printers to prepare the final version.22

  This sounds like a clumsy way of going about things. Notes in the margins are unlikely to be very clear, the possibility of misprints finding their way into the printed text is very high. It would seem more reasonable to assume, even at the dawn of printing technology, that the printers would receive a clean copy of the translation, proofread and laid out the way the editors wanted it to appear. But there is an annotated Bishops’ Bible in Oxford’s Bodleian Library23 which contains a clue suggesting that this was the copy that was sent to the printers. A direct translation of the original Hebrew in Hosea 6.5 reads ‘Therefore I have hewn them, through the prophets’ and from its second printing onwards the King James Bible reads ‘I have hewed’. But the first printing reads ‘I have shewed’. Presumably the printers of the second edition assumed this was a misprint; ‘shewed’ is not a correct translation of the Hebrew and it is quite reasonable to assume that a careless printer slipped in an extra ‘s’ at the front of ‘hewed’ by mistake. But that is not so. The hand-written margin notes in the Bodleian Library’s copy of the Bishops’ Bible also read ‘I have shewed’. This strange rendering may have been an attempt by the translators to make sense of a difficult Hebrew verse, but it raises the possibility that the first edition of the King James Bible was printed from the Bodleian’s annotated version of the Bishops’ Bible, and not as we might have expected, from a clean, well-laid-out draft.24