God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  Even more strangely, given the sanctity with which the text of the King James Bible has been regarded in later ages, the very people who might have championed it continued to use the Geneva Bible. Lancelot Andrewes nearly always took his sermon texts from the Geneva. Even William Laud, the most anti-Calvinist bishop in the church, quoted from the Geneva. Most extraordinarily of all, Miles Smith, in the Preface to the new translation, quotes from the very Geneva Bible which it was, in part, intended to replace. And in the Separatist congregations in Amsterdam, Leiden and eventually on the Mayflower, it was of course the Geneva Bible they took with them.

  Geneva Bibles continued to be printed until 1644, and only after the Restoration in 1660 did the King James Bible, hallowed now as something that had its origins before the great rupture of the Civil War, redolent of monarchy and antiquity, come to take its place as the Bible itself, the national text and the symbol of England as God’s country. In America, a slightly different process occurred, but with the same effect. Calvinist Christianity is inherently fissive. Its emphasis on the primacy of a vengeful God constantly throws into doubt the validity of worldly government, and its repeated emphasis on the difference between the elect, who would be saved, and the rest, who would be damned, is no basis on which to found a nation. These radically disruptive ideas are the repeated threnody of the Geneva Bible, the food and fuel on which the whole phenomenon of Separatism and the emergence of the Pilgrim Fathers was based.

  As the American settlements widened and deepened, and their political processes matured, the need for a separatist gospel ebbed. The relationship of Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists’ Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation’s lifeblood had been inclusiveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanctioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.

  As such, the great Jacobean Bible, for all its faults, wrinkles and inaccuracies, has persisted. How can one, in the end, approach this mystery? What is it, uniquely, that the King James Bible gave the English? What need did it satisfy? Only comparison with some other attempts at translating scripture can give an idea of what the fifty-odd Jacobean men managed to achieve. Compare for example a passage from the Psalm 8(3–5) as the committee men produced it, and the same lines translated by Milton. In 1611, these were their words:

  When I consider thy heauens, the worke of thy fingers, the moone and the starres which thou hast ordained;

  What is man, that thou art mindfull of him? and the sonne of man that thou visitest him?

  For thou hast made him a little lower then the Angels; and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

  The marvels of this passage consist above all in one quality, or at least in one combination of qualities: an absolute simplicity of vocabulary set in a rhythm of the utmost stateliness and majesty. The words are necessarily slowed to a muffled drumbeat of a pace. There is no hurrying this, no running away with it, as a Shakespeare speech can sometimes hurry, a rushed cataract of words tripping over itself even as it emerges. The characteristic sound of the King James Bible is not like that but, like the ideal of majesty itself, is indescribably vast and yet perfectly accessible, reaching up to the sublime and down to the immediate and the concrete, without any apparent effort. The rhetoric of this translation has, in fact, precisely the qualities which this psalm attributes to God: a majesty that is mindful of man.

  When Milton addressed this Psalm 8 in the 1640s he wrote this:

  When I behold thy heavens, thy Fingers art,

  The Moon and Starrs which thou so bright has set

  In the pure firmament, then saith my heart,

  O what is man that thou remembrest yet,

  And think’st upon him; or of man begot

  That him thou visit’st and of him art found:

  Scarce to be less then Gods, thou mad’st his lot,

  With honour and with state thou hast him crown’d.

  Although Milton is having to accommodate rhyme and the iambic pentameter, something has gone wrong here. The simplicity has been lost in a search for a more evolved and more sophisticated form. And with the loss of simplicity has come not only a loss in clarity, immediacy and obviousness, but, mysteriously, a loss in dignity, scale and grandeur. That precious Jacobean alloy, the fusion of light and richness, has gone.

  Jump to the eighteenth century, and the decay in religious language has become even clearer. By the 1760s, the peculiar nature of Jacobean Bible English had started to irritate some Enlightenment tastes. In 1768 a Dr Edward Harwood, a Bristol Presbyterian, published a version of the New Testament which aimed, he said, ‘to clothe the idea of the Apostles with propriety and perspicuity’, replacing the ‘bald and barbarous language of the old vulgar version with the elegance of modern English’. Even at the time he was something of a laughing stock, ‘shunned by the multitude like an infected person’ who ‘could hardly walk the streets of Bristol without being insulted’. But what Harwood got wrong is another way of measuring the Jacobean achievement.

  Take, for example, the Nunc Dimittis, the words of Simeon on seeing the child Jesus, which in the King James Bible had run as follows:

  Lord now lettest thou thy seruant depart in peace, according to thy word.

  For mine eyes haue seene thy saluation,

  Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

  A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

  Harwood wrote: ‘O God, thy promise to me is amply fulfilled. I now quit the post of human life with satisfaction and joy, since thou hast indulged mine eyes with so divine a spectacle as the great Messiah.’

  The Jacobean version has the great imperturbability, the air of irreproachable authority, which is the essence of sacred ritual. The Translators made a ceremony of the word. But the passage is also astonishingly vivid, turning those words into a tangible experience. They never lose sight of the physical and the bodily dimensions of existence—service, departure, eyes, sight, face, light, illumination—and adopt them as markers of and symbols for the divine. Poor Harwood’s version has never left his library, has never known darkness and light, has none of the music and none of the utter memorability of the miraculous Jacobean translation. It should come as no surprise that Dr Harwood is never more at a loss than at moments of greatest spiritual intensity. At the Transfiguration, when the divinity of Jesus is revealed to the apostles, his clothes and face glowing and shining in front of them, Peter stood amazed, scarcely able to speak. Tyndale had translated his stumbling words as the slightly odd, ‘Master here is good beinge for us’, which was perhaps a mistake, perhaps an attempt to convey Peter’s confusion. The King James Translators had him say simply, ‘Lord, it is good for vs to be here.’ Harwood, reaching high for propriety and perspicuity, managed to turn the apostle into a frock-coated, bewigged and slightly obsequious 1760s estate agent, exclaiming ‘Oh, sir! what a delectable residence we might establish here!’

  The nineteenth century veered the other way. By 1870, it had become obvious not only that the manuscripts on which the King James Bible had been based were no longer the best available, but that the Jacobean
Translators had made many mistakes in translation. The first major revision of the English scriptures was set in train but Victorian England was so enamoured of Jacobean word forms and the rhythms of the King James version, that the translators were urged to make their new translation as much like a Jacobean text as they could. The King James Bible had been, at least in the mainstream, unchallenged for 270 years, eight or nine generations. Its language, archaic even in 1611, derived from a form of English current in the mid-sixteenth century, had come to seem like the language spoken by God. As a result the Revised Version, finally published in 1885, although introducing some very odd translatorese by following the Greek word order (‘Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth’) also introduced a string of Jacobethanisms which had not been in the 1611 text: howbeit, peradventure, holden, aforetime, sojourn and behooved all appeared in the new Bible, nineteenth-century changes posing as the real oak-panelled thing, as if a team of London solicitors suddenly appeared for work in ruffs and doublets.

  The twentieth century took yet another turn. During World War II, military chaplains in the British army had been unable to make their soldiers understand the words of the Bible, or so it was claimed, and in 1946 the idea of another new translation was raised. Committees, sub-committees, translating panels, literary advisers, doctrinal experts: all were drafted in. Representatives from the Protestant churches, conformist and Nonconformist, were included. They even met in the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, where Lancelot Andrewes and his company had met, hoping perhaps to draw inspiration from the walls (even if, as perhaps they did not realise, those walls had been lined with mid-Victorian repro-Tudor linenfold panelling). Roman Catholics were allowed in to observe and the process took its time. Their version of the New Testament appeared in 1962, the complete New English Bible in 1970. The product, as T. S. Eliot wrote at the time, ‘astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic’.

  The committee had got itself lost. Dr C. H. Dodd, the general director of translation, ex-professor of Divinity at Cambridge, had asked for a ‘timeless’ prose, in which archaism and ‘hallowed associations’ were to be avoided, and ‘a sense of reality’ sought. But aiming for this plain accessibility, the New English Bible ended up as nothing much to anyone. Wanting timelessness, they achieved the language of the memo. Avoiding archaism, they embraced the banal. Looking for reality, they lost all feeling for the extraordinary and overpowering strangeness of the Bible, its governing sense of the metaphysical somehow squeezed, dragged and stretched, like Christ himself, into the world of men. They had somehow forgotten that ordinariness is not the Bible’s subject.

  Take the moment, for example, after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, when he appears to the apostles on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The men have been fishing all night but have caught nothing. This is how it was translated in the seventeenth century, drawing very heavily here, as so often, on William Tyndale:

  But when the morning was now come, Iesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knewe not that it was Iesus.

  Then Iesus saith vnto them, Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No.

  And he said vnto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and yee shall finde. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it, for the multitude of fishes.

  Therfore that Disciple whome Iesus loued, saith vnto Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fishers coate vnto him, (for hee was naked) & did cast himselfe into the sea.

  Every rhetorical decision is right here. The first sentence—afloat on ‘now’ – brings an effortless immediacy; we are with the apostles in the boat, with the dawn and the exhaustion of a futile night around us. ‘Iesus stood on the shore’: no explanation, a miraculous appearance from nowhere, simply there. ‘Iesus saith vnto them, Children, have ye any meat?’ He talks to them, no shouting, no calling out, a conversational tone even though they are a hundred yards or more away on the waters of the lake. And as he is their father, they are his children. He says to them, ‘The right side of the ship’, a casual use of language, its authority consisting in its ease, but then a subtle technicality ‘yee shall finde’ – the huntsman’s and fisherman’s word for ‘coming on prey’. The apostles then catch and draw up ‘a multitude of fishes’: a murmured pun thrown forward to the time when these men would be fishers of men, a multitude of people drawn into their nets. The final verse, written in a language as ruggedly straightforward as the fishermen would have used themselves, brings to a point the intense reality of this unreal scene. This is a form of writing which is consistently alert to its many purposes. It translates an alien moment through intelligible description. It makes that moment quiveringly alive, folding up the space of sixteen or twenty-one centuries. It is ever conscious of the miraculous nature of what is happening.

  Turn to the twentieth-century attempt at this passage and it becomes clear enough what has been lost. Every right decision by the Renaissance Translators is abandoned, every wrong fork taken.

  Morning came and there stood Jesus on the beach, but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. He called out to them ‘Friends, have you caught anything?’ They answered ‘No’. He said, ‘Shoot the net to starboard, and you will make a catch.’ They did so, and found they could not haul the net aboard, there were so many fish in it. Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ When Simon Peter heard that, he wrapped his coat about him (for he had stripped) and plunged into the sea.

  This is dead; there is no immediacy to it, nothing vibrant. The tone of surprise is too overt and so the shock is diminished. It is a description of an inert normality, mundane, tensionless and mystery-free. The atmosphere is of a 1930s bathing party.

  Again and again, the seventeenth-century phrases seem richer, deeper, truer, more alive, more capable of carrying complex and multiple meanings, than anything the twentieth century could manage. It happens in linguistic history that languages lose aspects of themselves, whole wings of their existence withering, falling off, disappearing into the past. Has it now happened to English? Does English no longer have a faculty of religious language?

  Of course, alongside this history of dissatisfaction with the inherited text, and of constant attempts to renew it in the light of current fashion, the King James Bible persisted, the touchstone, the national book, the formative mental structure for all English-speaking people. For generation after generation, it gave the English, and the English in America, a template against which to measure their own utterances. It was in many households the only book and became itself a spur to literacy. It is surely no coincidence that its creation coincides with the first great surge in literacy levels in England.

  The King James Bible, gradually replacing the Geneva Bible, was in the vanguard of that movement and it gave the English, more than any other book, a sense of the possibilities of language, an extraordinary range of richness, more approachable than Shakespeare, more populist than Milton, a common text against which life itself could be read. This is more about rhetoric, a certain way of speaking or writing, than about the dogma or the many conflicting theologies which the Bible can be found to contain. The sense of the many threads by which the real physical world is bound to a magnificence which goes beyond the physical; the simple word held in a musical rhythm; a poetic rather than a philosophical approach to reality, an openness to the reality of dreams and visions: all of these treasured qualities of Englishness can be seen to stem from the habits of mind which the Jacobean Translators bequeathed to their country. It emerges powerfully of course in the seventeenth century, in Milton, Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, dives a little underground perhaps in the eighteenth century, and re-emerges with renewed power in the nineteenth century. Coleridge’s poetry is couched for line after line in the rhythms of the King James Bible. The Romantics’ hunger for the archaic, which in English consciousness seems scarcely distinguishable from the poetic, is at one with the
Jacobean search for the ancient and the primitive, a deeply retrospective habit of mind which searches for meaning in the past. The old, for the English, is holy and beautiful, largely because the language of the King James Bible has conveyed that to them.

  Take the opening lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘On Westminster Bridge’, smoothed a little compared with Jacobean vigour but nevertheless an encapsulation of the sensibility which the King James Bible enshrines:

  Earth has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.

  The idea that ‘majesty’ might be ‘touching’ is precisely what the Jacobean Translators embraced, both as a conscious political programme and, as this book has attempted to argue, in the rhetoric of the Bible they created.

  As the essence of an inclusive polity, few ideas have been more powerful and in America that rhetoric of ‘a touching majesty’ has formed the backbone of the great milestone speeches in the country’s history. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, repeated in New York on the first anniversary of 11 September 2001, would have been impossible without the King James Bible. The great speeches of twentieth-century America, including J. F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and the series of speeches made by Martin Luther King in the eighteen months leading up to his death, are descendants in a direct line from the words and the evaluating minds, and ears, of the divines who gathered in the wainscoted rooms in Westminster, Cambridge, Oxford and the City of London 400 years ago.