God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Its atmosphere is generous and majestic and never more sweepingly vigorous—the influence of the pulpit is everywhere here—when describing the part that scripture might play in a man’s life. The word of God, Smith wrote:

  is not onely an armour, but also a whole armorie of weapons, both offensiue, and defensiue; whereby we may saue our selues and put the enemy to flight. It is not an herbe, but a tree, or rather a whole paradise of trees of life, which bring foorth fruit every moneth, and the fruit thereof is for meate, and the leaues for medicine. It is not a pot of Manna, or a cruse of oyle, which were for memorie only, or for a meales meate or two, but as it were a showre of heauenly bread sufficient for a whole host, be it neuer so great; and as it were a whole cellar full of oyle vessels; whereby all our necessities may be prouided for, and our debts discharged. In a word, it is…a fountaine of most pure water springing vp vnto euerlasting life. And what maruaile? The originall thereof being from heauen, not from earth; the authour being God, not man; the enditer, the holy spirit, not the wit of the Apostles or Prophets; the Pen-men such as were sanctified from the wombe, and endewed with a principall portion of Gods spirit; the matter, veritie, pietie, puritie, vprightnesse; the forme, Gods word, Gods testimonie, Gods oracles, the word of trueth, the word of saluation, &c. the effects, light of vnderstanding, stablenesse of perswasion, repentance from dead workes, newnesse of life, holinesse, peace, ioy in the holy Ghost.

  Was anything ever written about a sacred text that was so fresh, so full of a delight in what these words might bring you? For all the lugubrious seriousness and monomaniac anger and violence that can hang around seventeenth-century religion, Bishop Smith, here writing at the very end of the long translation process in which he had been engaged throughout, remains buoyant with enthusiasm and with a quality that can only be called grace. He had his portrait painted the following year and it hangs in Christ Church College, Oxford. He was sixty-four years old and despite all the paraphernalia of the episcopal garb around him, there is in his eyes, perfectly detectably, the qualities that shaped this marvellous Preface: brightness, a real sweetness of nature, integrity, a Christian spirit which goes beyond the political. The optimism of which his Preface is so full marks the highpoint of all hopes in England for a unified culture. In the following decade, the political atmosphere would deteriorate. Royal relations with parliament collapsed in 1614 as the MPs refused to grant any more cash to fund the ludicrous extravagances; sexual and financial scandals engulfed the court; the interest James had once had in embracing Puritan opinion finally evaporated; the ceremonialist trend in church thinking began to dominate; in Europe, sectarian divisions degenerated into the viciousness of the Thirty Years’ War, and although James tried to act the European peace-broker between Protestant and Catholic camps, the tide was against him and the subtle cross-cultural amalgam he had wished to create began to fall apart. The Bible which bears his name is a monument to hope, produced, ironically, at precisely the point in English history when that hope—for national integration under a beneficent king—was just beginning to look hopeless.

  Integration is both the purpose and method of the King James Bible. And one sign of that attempt at integration is the degree to which the text the Translators had produced was an amalgam of the sequence of translations that had come before it. Take, as one small example of something that could be replicated over the entire volume of the work, Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians 1:11. You would read it and think little of it: a typically complex reflection by the apostle, written for the young congregation in Greece, on the richly shared nature of church life, on its life as a web of mutual help and support:

  You are also helping together by prayer for vs, that for the gift bestowed vpon vs by the meanes of many persons, thankes may bee giuen by many on our behalfe.

  These words are a tapestry of many different decisions taken over many decades, from Tyndale’s first 1526 translation, to its adaptation for Thomas Cromwell’s official Great Bible in 1539, the 1557 New Testament produced in Calvinist Geneva, the 1560 complete Geneva Bible and finally the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, on the basis of which the Translators had done their work:

  You are also helping [Bishops’ Bible] together [Geneva 1557] by [Bishops’] prayer for vs [Tyndale], that [Tyndale] for the [Geneva 1560] gift [Great] bestowed vpon vs [Geneva 1557] by the meanes of many [Tyndale] persons [Great], thankes may bee giuen [Tyndale] by [Geneva 1557] many on our behalfe [Tyndale].

  This one tiny example of the minutely detailed nature of what the translators had done demonstrates their astonishing achievement. There is, on the whole, no telling that this text has been assembled like a mosaic floor, every tessera gauged and weighed, held up, examined, placed, replaced, rejected, reabsorbed, a winnowing of exactness from a century of scholarship. It is often said that the 1611 Translators contributed almost nothing to the versions which William Tyndale had produced in the 1520s and 1530s. Champions of Tyndale’s name maintain that he is the great and unjustly forgotten hero of the English Bible. The powerful government enterprise of the seventeenth century, taking almost everything from the earlier work, they say, has done its best to obliterate the memory of the man we should all revere as the king of English translators, the man who gave us so many of the most treasured passages in the Bible.

  Tyndale’s, for example, is the Last Supper:

  And he toke breed, and gave thankes, and brake itt, and gave it unto them, sayinge: Thys is my body which is geven for you, Thys do in remembraunce of me. Lykewyse alsoo, when they had supped, he toke the cuppe, sayinge: This is the cuppe, the newe testament, in my bloud, which shall for you be shedde.

  The 1611 Translators took that over, as so much else from Tyndale, very nearly wholesale, altering only the very last phrase, changing ‘which shall for you be shedde’ to the more accurate, the more poignant and the more memorable, ‘which is shed for you’, a change, as ever, which is minuscule but formative.

  There is an important point here. Tyndale enthusiasts have calculated that 94 per cent of the New Testament in the King James Bible is exactly as Tyndale left it. Therefore, the argument goes, the Jacobean Translators were in some ways little better than plagiarists, promoting as their own work a translation that belonged essentially to another man, a Protestant martyr, who died a horrible death, attacked repeatedly and mercilessly by Thomas More, and who nevertheless reshaped the English language, who framed the phrases we all know: ‘Love suffereth long and is courteous, Love envieth not’; ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I imagined as a child’; ‘eat, drink and be merry’; ‘salt of the earth’; the ‘powers that be’; ‘as bald as a coot’; ‘Our father which art in heaven’, and so on.

  But this is scarcely enough. Word-counting is no route towards understanding a translation, its intention or its effects, and wherever a less pedantic comparison is made between Tyndale’s words and those of the Jacobean Translators, something else, far more significant, and in a way far more obvious, becomes apparent. Each is a reflection of its historical moment: Tyndale required and produced a simple and plain man’s translation to be slapped in the face of the medieval church and its power-protective elite. He was, in that way, a straight Lutheran, looking for immediacy and clarity in scripture which could shake off the thick and heavy layers of medieval scholasticism and centuries of accumulated ecclesiastical dust. The Jacobean Translators had a different commission: to evolve a scriptural rhetoric which could be both as plain and dignified as Tyndale’s and as rich and resonant as any book in the language.

  What they did could not have been done without Tyndale, but their task reached beyond his. And the heart of this richness and resonance is in the musicality of the Jacobean Translators’ work. Tyndale was working alone, in extraordinary isolation. His only audience was himself. And surely as a result there is a slightly bumpy, stripped straightforwardness about his manner and his rhythm.

  Thys ys my commaundement, that ye love togedder as I have loved you. Gretter love the
n this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his lyfe for his frendes.

  The Jacobean translation process was richly and densely social. Endless conversation and consultation flowed across the final judging committee, testing the translation not by sight but by ear. This Bible was appointed to be read in churches (and thus had no illustrations for study at home) and so its meaning had to be carried on a heard rhythm, it had to appeal to what T. S. Eliot later called ‘the auditory imagination’, that ‘feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word’. Under these pressures, Tyndale’s words become, very slightly but very significantly, musically enriched:

  This is my Commaundement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you.

  Greater loue hath no man then this, that a man lay downe his life for his friends.

  The meanings of the two translations are not essentially different, but the Jacobean words are clarified where Tyndale’s are clotted; they are memorable where Tyndale stumbles over his grammar; the Jacobean choice of word is more authoritative, ‘one another’ better than ‘togedder’, ‘lay down’ better than ‘bestowe’; and the Jacobean sentences sound like the voice of a divine wisdom and certainty, establishing a marvellous law, where Tyndale conveys perhaps another Jesus: human, uncertain, seeking to articulate his revolutionary gospel.

  Far from burying Tyndale, the 1611 Translators honoured him. They were quite explicit about their debt to the past. The king’s own instructions had referred them to the sequence of sixteenth-century versions and Miles Smith’s Preface is concerned to reiterate the point. The earlier translators ‘deserue to be had of vs and of posteritie in euerlasting remembrance’. All they wanted was to improve the work that had gone before, so

  that whatsoeuer is sound alreadie…the same will shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished; also, if anything be halting, or superfluous, or not so agreeable to the originall, the same may be corrected, and the trueth set in place. And what can the King command to be done that will bring him more true honour than this?

  The idea, in fact, was not to make a new translation, Smith maintained, but to make ‘out of many good ones, one principal good one’. And that was their triumph: a polished collation, a refinement of a century’s translating, a book that became both clear and rich.

  Of course, what they delivered to Robert Barker was not entirely good. The Hebrew and particularly the Greek texts they were working from were not the most accurate, even by the standards of their own time. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor as the head of the church in Geneva, had prepared an edition of the New Testament some forty years earlier based on a more ancient and less corrupt manuscript. The English scholars were still a little adrift on tenses in Hebrew, while koine, the form of rubbed down and difficult Greek in which the New Testament is written, so unlike the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, still held mysteries for them, which only later translations would correct. And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul’s Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6:11–13:

  O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged.

  Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels.

  Nowe for a recompense in the same, (I speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged.

  Even though Tyndale’s effort was even more opaque, this is clearly a translation done by people who didn’t really understand what they were translating, and in those circumstances rhythmic language and interesting vocabulary can do very little to save the situation. As modern translations make clear, Paul is asking the Corinthians, as a father might ask his children, to be more open with him, since he feels he has been open with them himself, but no one would have divined that simple meaning from the muddle which (at least in this instance) the Jacobean Translators served up.

  Some form of text was handed over to Robert Barker, ‘Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Maiestie’, perhaps an annotated version of the Bishops’ Bible, perhaps a manuscript. What was said to be the ‘manuscript copy of the Bible’ was sold twice in the seventeenth century, once to Cambridge University Press, once to a firm of London printers, but has now disappeared. According to one romantic theory, it was burnt in the Great Fire of London.

  Barker’s printshop began to apply its own level of chaos to the production process. It seems to have been a sort of anarchy. Either two editions were produced one after another; or both at the same time and sheets from each edition were bound together in single volumes. As a result no copy of the 1611 Bible is like any other. And they were riddled with mistakes. The Translators had intended that any word inserted to improve the sense should be printed in a different face. In fact, that principle became confused early on and if a word is in italics in the printed Bible, there is often no telling if it is in the original Greek or Hebrew or not. Marginal references to other relevant parts of the Bible are highly inaccurate, particularly in the Psalms, where references are made to the numbering system used in the Vulgate, not the numbering system in this Bible itself.

  Calmly elegant Bibles in Roman typefaces had been in production in France and Switzerland for decades. This Bible, looking back to an imagined antiquity before the modern age, was given a heavy, antique feel with its dense blackletter typeface, a ‘Gothic’, non-Roman typeface, and a certain airlessness on the page. It may be that because the Geneva Bibles were printed in open and accessible Roman type, and the Bishops’ Bible, which this was intended to replace, had itself been in blackletter, that Barker made this retrograde decision. Although editions of the King James Bible were appearing in Roman type within a few years, blackletter editions continued to be printed and sold, well into the first years of the eighteenth century. Even at its birth, this was sold as the Bible of Old England.

  And it was littered with misprints, ‘hoopes’ for ‘hookes’, ‘she’ for ‘he’, three whole lines simply repeated in Exodus, and alarmingly ‘Judas’ for ‘Jesus’ in one of the Gospels. None of these was quite so catastrophic as a misprint that would appear in a 1631 edition, the so-called Wicked Bible, which failed to put the word ‘not’ in Exodus 20:14, giving the reading ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’, but the degree of muddle is scarcely what a modern scholarly text would tolerate. When, finally, in the nineteenth century, Dr F. Scrivener, a scholar working to modern standards, attempted to collate all the editions of the King James Bible then in circulation, he found more than 24,000 variations between them. The curious fact is that no one such thing as ‘The King James Bible’ – agreed, consistent and whole—has ever existed.

  The book crept out into the public arena. Being only a revision of earlier translations, and not a new work, there was no need for it to be entered in the Stationers’ Register, which recorded only new publications and so, in addition to this most famous book having no agreed text, it also has no publication date. Nor is it known how many were printed of the first big folio edition for use in churches. When the first state Bible, the so-called Great Bible, was issued in 1540, 20,000 copies were run off, more than enough to provide one for every parish church in England, costing 10 shillings each, 12 shillings bound. For the King James Bible, though, there is no record of either print-run or price.

  Everything that could have been done for it had been done. Something approaching three hundred and fifty scholar years had been devoted to its excellence; the Crown and state church had given it their imprimatur; a laudatory preface and dedication, by permission, to the king, had been included. Any publisher would have hoped for the most enormous success.

  They didn’t get it. Some critics thought its dependence on a kind of English which seemed sixty or seventy years out of date (although its English was in fact a form no one had ever spoken) made it ridiculous and bogus. Hugh Broughton, a cantankerous and aggressive Puritan Hebrew scholar, who had wanted to be pa
rt of the great committee, sending papers and suggestions to Bancroft, but barred because of his incivility, lambasted the translation for its errors and its slavish following of the old Bishops’ Bible. In the opening words of his Preface, Miles Smith had predicted such a reaction. ‘Zeale to promote the common good’, he had begun—and there is no phrase which encapsulates more precisely the ideals of the project – ‘findeth but cold intertainment in the world.’ Broughton castigated the Translators. Their understanding of Hebrew was inadequate; where they had stumbled on something worthwhile, they had usually relegated it to the margins. These worldly divines, he said, were interested only in promotion in the church and crawling to royal authority. Blasphemy, most damnable corruptions, intolerable deceit and vile imposture were terms scarcely bad enough to describe the depths of their degeneracy. ‘The late Bible’, he wrote,

  was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is ill done. Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches…The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt.

  Not that Broughton was in any way bitter; these accusations were, he said, not ‘the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind’.

  The Geneva Bible continued to hold its position in English affections, at least partly because it was so useful for its notes and appendices, a guidebook to the world of the divine. It continued to flood off the presses: a folio and a quarto in 1611, another folio in 1612, three quartos in 1614, two more in 1615 and a folio in 1616. Then, in 1616, the king put a halt to it, or at least attempted to: no more editions of the Geneva Bible were to be printed. The King James Bible (henceforth known as the Authorised Version, although no document authorising its use by the king, Council or anyone else survived the 1619 Whitehall fire) was to become, by order, the only English Bible. But the appetite for the Geneva text could not be so easily denied. Presses in Amsterdam and Dort started to roll, producing Geneva Bibles for the English market well into the 1630s. All too significantly, Robert Barker, printer to the king, a chaotic man who would end up in debtors’ prison, bought up the Dutch Geneva editions, added a title page with the fraudulent date 1599 clearly stamped on it, and flogged them to a ready market. The King James Bible languished on the side, a royal project, whose language it seemed was not the language of the people.