The details of how and when the King James Bible was published are equally cloudy. Because it was little more than an upgrade on previous versions of the Bible it was never registered as a new publication in the Stationers’ Register, the official register of published books. Nor is there any record of its actual publication date. And even though it is known as the Authorized Version, no document has ever been found granting it this title, nor declaring that it is indeed Authorized. It is not even known whether James’s stipulation that the Bible be ratified by royal authority was ever carried out.
Given the unlikely manner of its production, it is not surprising that the newly published Bible was full of errors. And not just because the Bible may have been typeset from hand-written notes in the margin. Early printing was still a laborious, complicated process. The printed King James Bible comprised 366 sheets, of four pages each. Each sheet needed to be typeset, printed and proofread individually. All this required considerable effort and the opportunity for slip-ups was substantial. Then there was the question of cost. Printing may have been cheaper than manuscript writing, but it was still expensive. Corners were cut wherever possible to try and save money. David Norton counts 351 printer errors in the first edition and another 28 ‘hidden’ mistakes, where a typo would not be noticed because the reading continues to make sense, even though it is wrong. Like the misprint in Daniel 6.13 which reads ‘the children of the captivity’ instead of ‘the captivity of the children’. But, as Norton points out, this number of less than 400 words represents about one mistake for every three and a half chapters, which is not bad, considering the scale of the task. Certainly none of the errors come close to the classic misprint in the 1631 ‘Wicked Bible’ which forgot to include the word ‘not’ in ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. The careless printers of that edition were fined £300; every copy they had sold was recalled, their entire stock destroyed and their licence to print the Bible revoked. But not every owner of the Wicked Bible returned their copy. It is still, according to some internet sites, possible to acquire one. It will cost you in the region of $100,000.
Despite the build-up, the effort and the expectation, when the King James Bible hit the market, it flopped. It didn’t win many fans among the general public, and as every church already had their Great Bible, most were not willing to run to the cost of replacing it with the new version. A long time passed before it found favour. Oliver Cromwell’s puritan-leaning Protectorate, which had come to power in 1653 in the aftermath of the Civil War, were implacably averse to the King James Bible. It represented everything they despised about the monarchy. In the guise of a unifying project the translation had proved to be little more than a tool to diminish the influence of the Puritans. It was not until 1660, when Cromwell was dead and the throne restored in the person of Charles II, that the time grew ripe for the King James Bible to capture the stage in all its majestic, Protestant, English glory.
Part Three
Enlightenment
9
A New Role
King James Vindicated
It had taken until the latter part of the seventeenth century for the King James Bible to take its place as the unique, indispensable version for English-speaking Protestants. Until then, despite all efforts to the contrary, the Geneva Bible had continued as the popular text of choice. Printing of the Geneva Bible had even been banned in England, but this didn’t stop copies being imported from the Netherlands. Nor did England’s political situation help. In the increasingly fractious quarrel between Royalists and Parliament the King James Bible was, quite naturally, associated with the monarchy and all that it stood for. In contrast, the Geneva Bible was the favoured text of the burgeoning Puritan camp which stood foursquare behind the Parliamentarians in their attempts to curtail the autocratic rule of James’s son, Charles I.
Reliance on the Geneva translation became even greater in the years following the civil war. King Charles I had been executed and the monarchy abolished. Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector and his Puritan regime was in control. There was no way now that a Bible translation brought into being by royal decree would eclipse a version that had made its ideological opposition to monarchies abundantly clear. In the battle of the Bibles, the conflict between Parliamentarians and Royalists was played out all over again. Just like the Puritan regime, the Geneva Bible briefly prevailed.
But England’s republican experiment soon crumbled, and with it went the popularity of the Geneva translation. In 1660 the royal throne was restored and the scales tipped, never to be realigned. Now, in an England ostensibly at peace with its royal heritage the King James Bible stood proud, a sovereign text, a pillar of the monarchy, exquisite and demonstrable proof of the majesty and stability that only a hereditary king could guarantee. The Geneva Bible was finished; King James ruled supreme.
In North America too, the Geneva Bible was soon eclipsed. It had been carried there by the early Puritan settlers, desperate to escape the intolerance and persecution of England’s Protestant establishment. But the lure of the New World soon overtook the parochial interests of the early settlers. Pioneers kept arriving, religious separatism gave way to nation building, and a disharmony of immigrant tongues coalesced around a common language. The King James Bible, with its measured tolerance, linguistic artistry and theological moderation proved a more than satisfactory primer for the American razing of the Tower of Babel. The King James Bible’s pivotal role in shaping the American language, its influence on the way people spoke and wrote, was not lost on Noah Webster, the man who was acclaimed in the following century as the architect of the New World’s diction, the philologist who would make a translation of the Bible one of the highlights of his career.
But Webster’s lexicography, and his Bible, is still some way off as far as our story is concerned. Back in the Old World, the Renaissance had faded, the Protestant Reformation had put down roots across northern Europe and now, as the turmoil of the seventeenth century dissolved into the history books, the Enlightenment was taking its place on the switchback of civilization. Translating the Bible was no longer controversial; nobody denied bible translators the right to live or to perform their craft. That the Bible could be translated was taken for granted, and now its role was about to change. The early translators had used common language to bring Scripture to the masses. Now, in a spectacular reversal of that aim, one man was about to use Scripture to provide the masses with a more thorough grasp of common language. That man was Moses Mendelssohn. The masses he wanted to elevate linguistically were the Jews.
Teaching German to the Jews
Throughout most of their history Jewish communities had been far less interested than their Christian counterparts in Bible translations. The ancient practice of reading an Aramaic translation in the synagogue alongside the Hebrew Bible had died out, and had not been replicated in any other tongue. It wasn’t necessary; traditional methods of Bible interpretation, which relied heavily on a close analysis of the Hebrew text, meant that Jews still retained an intimate connection with their ancestral language. For most Jewish children, learning Hebrew was a key part of the educational curriculum. Fluency in Hebrew, combined with the tendency for Jews to live separately, either corralled into ghettos or in self-selecting insular communities, led to them developing their own dialects. Many Jews were not even adept at speaking the languages of the lands in which they lived. This kept them distant from the great social, scientific and technical advances of the eighteenth century. As the world advanced, small, provincial Jewish communities found themselves falling behind.
Conservatives in the Jewish world saw this isolation as a good thing, strengthening Jewish identity and reducing the likelihood of assimilation. One man didn’t see it that way. When Moses Mendelssohn decided that it was high time for insular Jews to enter the modern world, it was obvious to him that the first step had to be for them to learn German. He knew how to do this; he would make them a German Bible translation. Mendelssohn was clear about what he nee
ded to do. The controversy he stirred up took him quite unawares.
Moses Mendelssohn was born to a poor but scholarly family in Dessau, 80 miles south-west of Berlin on 6 September 1729. Like most Jews, the Mendelssohn family lived in a small, inward-looking community, neither celebrated by the German people among whom they lived, nor particularly concerned about engaging with them. Their first language was Yiddish; they had a working grasp of German, which isn’t that different from Yiddish anyway, but the German they knew was only really for the practical business of living reasonably peaceably among their neighbours.
Mendelssohn was a frail, serious boy with a physical frame that would prove weak in later life. But his mind made up for all that his body lacked. He excelled at school and at the age of eleven was picked out as one of a very small number of Dessau’s Jewish boys deemed worthy of further education. This was not as emancipating as it sounds. Secondary education in an eighteenth-century Jewish environment meant studying the Talmud and religious law, usually, as in Mendelssohn’s case, in the cramped and fusty home of the local rabbi. Talmudic education is profoundly challenging, intellectually demanding and mind expanding. But, as the sole topic on the curriculum, it hardly equipped students to go out into a world in which the shoots of the Aufklärung, the German enlightenment, were beginning to emerge. Over the coming decades Kant, Bach, Haydn, Goethe and Schiller, to name just a few, would all make their mark on the world at large. It was not even thinkable that a poor, Talmudic student from a small, provincial, Jewish community could be numbered among them. But even if Moses Mendelssohn was not yet ready to articulate this as his ambition, time proved that it was what he wanted. Fortunately for him, it is exactly what he achieved.
Moses Mendelssohn’s great fortune was that his childhood teacher was no ordinary, rural rabbi. David Fränkel, who seems to have been something of a father figure to the young Mendelssohn,1 was one of the leading rabbinic scholars of his time, one of the very few people to have written a detailed commentary on the relatively obscure and inaccessible Jerusalem Talmud.2 Fränkel, who probably found the majority of boys in Dessau less than invigorating in their intellectual abilities, recognized Mendelssohn’s potential. Here was a young student who had the gifts to break out from the narrow future otherwise prescribed for him. Fränkel took the boy under his wing and Mendelssohn seized the opportunity. When his mentor was offered the post of Chief Rabbi of Berlin, the fourteen-year-old Mendelssohn followed him.
Decamping to Berlin was no easy matter. Residency was tightly controlled. Friedrich the Great, Prussia’s ruler, maintained tight controls on immigration into his flagship capital. Jews were only allowed to live in the city if they were economically useful. An expulsion of Jews had taken place in 1737, but even that had not reduced the number in the city to the permitted level. The consequence was that only a small number of wealthy, mercantile Jewish families felt secure in Berlin, no more than 1,500 souls altogether. But even they were only secure if they fulfilled the royally imposed obligation of ensuring their community remained exclusive, a responsibility they were to discharge by stationing guards at the only two city gates through which Jews were permitted to enter. The guards were instructed to keep out Jewish hawkers, traders or opportunists who might fancy their chances at eking out a living in the great city. According to the story, which probably has a ring of truth to it, Mendelssohn was only allowed to enter Berlin after he had managed to convince the gatekeeper that he was coming solely for the purpose of studying under the chief rabbi. He would, he assured the guard, although he couldn’t have been certain, be supported by charitable Jews in the city. He had no intention of becoming a drain on the capital’s resources.
Yet it was his life as a fourteen-year-old, impoverished Talmud scholar in Berlin that propelled Mendelssohn towards a career that would, twenty years later, see him beating Immanuel Kant in an essay competition sponsored by the Berlin Royal Academy of Science. His steady climb to philosophy’s stratosphere all came about because of a book.
Just before he arrived in Berlin a printing press near Dessau had published the Guide for the Perplexed, the pre-eminent work of Jewish philosophy written by the acclaimed, twelfth-century sage Moses Maimonides. Jewish philosophy had declined in popularity over the ensuing centuries and Maimonides’s work had not been reprinted for two hundred years. Mendelssohn had come across the new edition of the Guide while still in Dessau but was perhaps too young to fully appreciate it. Now, a copy sat in the Berlin library where Mendelssohn pored over his Talmud studies. This time, when he set eyes on it, he was transfixed. Even though it was a complicated, medieval, Aristotelian tract, Mendelssohn imbibed its pages, and set his sights far beyond. Philosophy became all-consuming for him; he couldn’t get enough. Years later he would say that the curvature of the spine from which he suffered so badly was brought on by the hours he spent bent over Maimonides’s work.
It was Talmudic study that brought Mendelssohn into contact with philosophy, but it was philosophy that would lead him away from religious scholarship. The taste that Maimonides gave him encouraged him to learn more. He had been schooled within narrow confines, now he felt impelled towards a greater understanding of the world beyond. It wouldn’t be an easy task for the Yiddish-speaking youth with an inexpert grasp of colloquial German. He would need to immerse himself in languages he had never even heard; French to read the publications of the Academie Royal des Sciences et Belles-Lettres, Latin and Greek for scholarly texts. And not just languages; there were philosophical and scientific concepts to get to grips with, technical vocabularies to understand and masses of literature to read if he was to bring himself up to a level of knowledge befitting his intellectual capability. It would also require him, and this was an even greater challenge, to step outside the social world in which he felt comfortable, and hurl himself, as best he could, into a self-important, exclusive, Berlin intellectual circle that didn’t know him, had no reason to want to know him and would almost certainly look down upon the arriviste, the country Jew, uneducated and newly arrived in the city.
But none of this fazed him. Armed with a dictionary, and the benefit of a friend who taught him a smattering of grammar, he started his new intellectual journey by acquiring a Latin copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It took considerable effort to plough through the strange language and obscure concepts, but the more he read, the more he wanted to read. Philosophy, he was certain, was the discipline that he intended to study.
His breakthrough into Berlin’s salon society came when a friend introduced him to the critic and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who was on the lookout for a challenging chess opponent. The two men became close friends. In 1755 Mendelssohn asked Lessing to read a manuscript he had written. Some months later, when he asked how he was getting on with it, the playwright handed him a bound and printed copy. Lessing had published Philosophical Conversations, the first of what would become Mendelssohn’s many books, without even telling him. By the end of the next decade, when his magnum opus Phaedon, modelled on Plato’s dialogue of the same name, had been reprinted fifteen times and translated into every European language, Mendelssohn’s philosophical reputation was riding high. He became known as the Jewish Socrates.
But fame and respect turned out to be a double-edged sword. One of his correspondents, the Zurich pastor Johann Lavater, who had already tangled with Goethe and Rousseau, believed that converting Mendelssohn to Christianity would set in motion the messianic redemption.3 Lavater had just translated a work by the French philosopher Charles Bonnet, which he believed provided a wholly logical proof of the truth of Christianity. He dedicated his translation to Mendelssohn and called upon him to either refute its arguments or to do what Lavater claimed Socrates would have done, and convert to Christianity.
Mendelssohn was stung by the attack. For the first time in his scholarly career he found that his Jewishness was in the spotlight. It made him profoundly uncomfortable; in common with most Jews at the time he fe
lt that he owed a debt of gratitude to the Christian country which had granted settlement rights to his people, but he had no wish to involve himself in doctrinal polemics. Although he felt obliged to respond publicly to Lavater’s challenge, which he did in a lengthy letter, he was unprepared both for the counter-rebuttal that the Swiss preacher issued and the ensuing, lengthy, public debate in which he found himself embroiled. The whole affair made him ill and distracted him for a number of years from his philosophical activities.
Mendelssohn was not the only one struggling to come to terms with the disparity between religious and national identity. Over the course of the next decade a vigorous debate emerged on the question of emancipation and civil rights. His friend Lessing had already scripted die Juden, a comedy which caused controversy with its favourable treatment of the Jews. He would follow this up in 1779 with Nathan the Wise, a drama set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, which presented a powerful case for religious tolerance. In the political arena, the historian Christian Dohm would, in 1781, publish Concerning the Civic Improvement of the Jews, an essay calling for their emancipation. A year later the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II would issue the Edict of Tolerance which added the Jewish religion to the list of non-Catholic faiths that he had emancipated the previous year. Religious toleration and the emancipation of minorities was a hot political topic.
Mendelssohn, the Jew who had made a personal transition from excluded minority to mainstream German society, the scholar whose intellectual credentials were undisputed yet who was still vulnerable to the religious hubris of people like Lavater, the philosopher whose election to the Berlin Academy was about to be vetoed by the emperor on the grounds of his religious affiliation, threw himself into this debate. The 1770s was to become the decade in which Mendelssohn added the twin titles of political theoretician and architect of an emancipated Judaism to his growing list of achievements.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 18