God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  The churches and biblical scholarship have, by and large, abandoned the frame of mind which created this translation. The social structures which gave rise to it—rigid hierarchies; a love of majesty; subservience; an association of power with glory—have all gone. The belief in the historical and authentic truth of the scriptures, particularly the Gospels, has been largely abandoned, even by the religious. The ferocious intolerances of the pre-liberal world have been left behind—it is inconceivable now that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, or that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country—and perhaps as a result of that change, perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion. There is no modern language that can encompass the realities which the Jacobeans accepted as normal. Modern religious rhetoric is dilute and ineffectual, and where it isn’t, it seems mad and aberrational. It is an appalling fact that the manner of speech which approaches most nearly to the language of these Jacobean divines comes from the mouths of murderous fundamentalists. When asked by a reporter in October 2001 if he was responsible for the anthrax attacks then occurring in the United States, Osama bin Laden answered: ‘These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers’ prayers in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and everywhere.’ That is the kind of remark which would not have raised an eyebrow in Jacobean England. This is not to suggest that the Translators of the King James Bible would have approved of religious terrorism. They certainly wouldn’t; their reactions to 5 November prove that. Even so, there is something that connects the God-shaped mentality of Jacobean England more intimately with the world of modern Muslim fundamentalists than with our own softened, liberal tolerance. These men, and their Bible, exist on the other side of a gulf, which can be labelled liberal, secular, democratic modernity. We do not live in the same world.

  It is impossible now to experience in an English church the enveloping amalgam of tradition, intelligence, beauty, clarity of purpose, intensity of conviction and plangent, heart-gripping godliness which is the experience of page after page of the King James Bible. Nothing in our culture can match its breadth, depth and universality, unless, curiously enough, it is something that was written at exactly the same time and in almost exactly the same place: the great tragedies of Shakespeare.

  That is no chance effect. Shakespeare’s great tragedies and the King James Bible are each other’s mirror-twin. Both emerge from the ambitions and terrors of the Jacobean world. They are, from their radically diverging cores, the great what-ifs of the age. King Lear pursues the implications of a singular and disastrous decision to divide a kingdom; the King James Bible embraces the full breadth of absorbed and inherited wisdom in order to unite one;Lear contemplates, more fearlessly than any text had ever done or has ever done, the falling away of all meaning; the King James Bible enshrines what it understands as the guarantee of all meaning; the rhetoric of King Lear breaks and shivers into multi-faceted shards of songs, madness, grandeur, argument, pathos; the King James Bible masks its immensely various sources under one certain, all-over musical sonority; everything in Lear falls apart, everything in the King James Bible pulls together; one is a nightmare of dissolution, the other a dream of wholeness.

  Lear himself, when exposed to the consequences of his actions, comes to long for the very things which the rhetoric of the King James Translators aimed to enshrine: the necessity of social bonds, reliance on old customs, the place of performance and ceremony as the core of social being. His nakedness is both pure and deprived, both the perfect, stripped, humbled condition which the Puritans longed for, and the utterly diminished condition of an unclothed king. What he needs in that state are the comforts of tradition and inheritance. They are what the text of the King James Bible has on offer. Both play and translation, in that way, might be seen as profoundly conservative texts, both promulgating ‘the old way of doing things’ against the modern, ‘novelist’ requirement for clarity and pure light. But in fact both are strung between those polarities: honesty and tradition, purity and ceremony, nakedness and the comforts of a shared and familiar life. Lear looks the King James version in the mirror because these are clearly the concerns of the Translators too: to hold themselves consciously poised between the claims of accessibility and beauty, plainness and richness, simplicity and majesty, the people and the king.

  I am no atheist but I am no churchgoer, perhaps because these things are no longer voiced in church. These great questions are not the medium of modern religion. But they are there in the King James Bible, a text which embraces the polarities modern religion seems to steer past. I am drawn equally to the richness of ceremony, to the cave-like darknesses you find in the Orthodox Church, its candles and crumbling gilt glimmering in the darkness, its age-blackened icons, the unforgettable sight in a monastery on Mount Athos of a lit chandelier, hanging from the dome high above us, all its candles ablaze, sixty or eighty of them, being swung by the priest in a huge and heavy gilded arc, a vast and dynamic embodiment of glimmering light, orbiting above our heads.

  And at the same time, I am deeply drawn to the holiness of the plain and the stripped, a clarified strictness, of a plain light, of the austerity of those hermitages in the Egyptian desert and on tiny islands along the Atlantic fringes of Europe, where removal from power does not deprive you of glory but gives you access to it.

  There is no need, though, to choose between these things, and that avoidance of choice is, in the end, the heart of the King James Bible. It does not choose. It absorbs and includes. It is in that sense catholic, as Jacobean Englishmen consistently called their church: not Roman but catholic, embracing all.

  Unlike the churches themselves, the words of this Bible remain alive, a way of speaking and a form of the language which is still a vehicle of meaning in circumstances when little else can be. Not long ago, I was talking to a man I have known for years, a fisherman all his life, about his son who drowned in the sea about ten years ago. I knew the son very slightly. Everybody loved him. He was drowned because he couldn’t kick off his big sea boots or struggle out of his waterproof smock after another fishing boat had collided with his—he was setting nets—when no one, or so they said, had been in the wheelhouse of the other boat to keep a look out. The boy was thrown into the sea and was drowned there. The other boat was unaware that anything had happened. He was twenty-four. There was a boy in the boat with him who just saw his hand going down and could not reach it.

  His father told me to read Psalm 77. I didn’t know it. It is a poem of the most utter desolation—or debilitation really—of the deepest doubt and sorrow, more straightly expressed, in its terrible, repetitive questioning, than anything else in the language.

  Will the lord cast off for euer? and will he be fauourable no more?

  Is his mercy cleane gone for euer? doth his promise faile for evermore?

  Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies?

  And I sayd, this is my infirmitie…

  The father did not talk much about it, but I went to see the boy’s gravestone. It’s in the burying ground at Luskentyre, on the west coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, where the Atlantic rolls in, week after week, month after month, in vast, American-scale combers. The wind blows the sand from the beach over the graveyard so that even in midsummer it seems to have a light dusting of snow. There’s an engraving of the boat on the stone, and a verse from the psalm:

  Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters: and thy footsteps are not known.

  That is not consolation, nor the muffling of experience by religion: it is the heightening and realising of experience through language, a statement of the cruelty of things and the unknowable purpose of the universe. A lament written in the seventh or eighth century bc, translated 400 years ago, by Laurence Chaderton’s company in Cambridge, communicating itself now in a way which is quite unaffected, neither literary nor academic, not hi
storical, nor reconstructionist, but transmitting a nearly incredible immediacy from one end of human civilisation to another. That is the everlasting miracle of this book. As Miles Smith wrote in the Preface:

  Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light, that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.

  Appendices

  The Sixteenth-Century Bible

  In the early summer of 1604, Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, drew up his instructions to the Translators. They were to base their revisions, he told them, on the Bishops’ Bible but they were to consult, he said, ‘Tindall’s, Matthews, Coverdales, Whitchurch’s, Geneva’. He was listing the great landmarks in the evolution of the sixteenth-century English Bible, part of the astonishing wave of Bible translation that swept across Reformation Europe.

  There is no connection between the advent of printing and the coming of Protestantism. Early sixteenth-century Europe was awash with printed versions of traditional Catholic prayers and orders of service. The old church and the new technology were the closest of allies. The very trigger of the Reformation, the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church to ease the path into heaven and fill the church’s coffers, were by the late fifteenth century printed documents. Nevertheless, the mere existence of a busy and dynamic publishing industry certainly helped the spread of Protestantism. The first printed Bible had been a Latin Vulgate (the great medieval Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew by St Jerome in the late fourth century) produced by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in 1454– 56, an exquisite folio book, very expensive, modelled precisely on the finest medieval manuscripts, some printed on paper but many on vellum. But when in 1522 Luther, the first genius of mass communications, published his German New Testament, 3,000 copies were immediately printed for sale at a fraction of the cost of a manuscript. One German printer reckoned, forty years later, that he had sold at least 100,000 Lutheran Bibles.

  The backlash was already there: the first burning of Protestant books in 1521, the first burning of a Protestant printer in 1527. Meanwhile, the translated word of God spread across Europe. The Czechs had enjoyed the Bible in the vernacular since the fourteenth century and the first printed Czech Bible appeared in 1488. The rest of Europe soon joined in the Lutheran wave. In 1524 the New Testament appeared in Swyzerdeutsch, followed in 1526 by the first complete Bible in Dutch, and in 1530 in French (although a translation of the Vulgate, not from the original tongues). In the same year a New Testament was published ‘tradotto in lingua toscana’. An Icelandic New Testament appeared in 1540, the first complete Swedish Bible in 1541, a Finnish New Testament in 1548 and a complete Danish Bible in 1550. The first Bible in Spanish was published only in 1569, printed in Basle and later distributed from Frankfurt. Spain itself remained implacably hostile to the vernacular. Further east, a Slovene New Testament was published in 1557– 60, a Croat New Testament in 1563, a Polish Bible (Catholic, from the Vulgate) in 1561, a Hungarian Bible in 1590.

  This astonishing Europe-wide movement is the context in which the sixteenth-century history of English Bible-translation must be set. Parts of the Bible had been translated into Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but not until the end of the fourteenth century had there been a complete text. From about 1382, the followers of John Wycliffe, a blunt Yorkshireman and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, produced a large number of manuscript English Bibles, often clumsily and over-literally translated, but many of which survive. Although they were outlawed by the church in 1407– 09, they remained in secret circulation even into the sixteenth century, some beautifully illuminated, clearly considered as treasured objects.

  The English Lutheran William Tyndale fled to the continent when his projected translation of the Bible looked as if it would offend the authorities. In 1525 he began printing his fluent and idiomatic translation of the New Testament in Catholic Cologne before the work was disrupted by the city magistrates. The complete book was only finished the following year on presses in Worms. The octavo sheets were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and sold at 9d a set. Three copies of this precious book survive, only one of them complete.

  Tyndale pressed on with the Old Testament. In 1531, his translation of the Book of Jonah was published, and in 1534, the same year as Martin Luther’s complete German Bible appeared, Tyndale’s New Testament was reprinted with corrections and revisions, this time in Antwerp.

  Meanwhile, under the encouragement of the bishops of the English Church, another translation had been made by Miles Coverdale, an ex-assistant of Tyndale’s, working for a printer perhaps in Antwerp, perhaps in Cologne and perhaps in Zurich. (The whole milieu of the early translations is a mixture of the covert and the commercial.) It was fulsomely dedicated to Henry VIII and Coverdale’s translations of the psalms remain those in use in the Church of England, never replaced by the slight alterations made to them in the King James Bible.

  In 1536 William Tyndale was martyred in Flanders, garotted and then burnt, betrayed by an English spy who was perhaps in the pay of Sir Thomas More, his old enemy. Tyndale died before he could complete his translation of the Old Testament. His work was continued by another of his Antwerp friends, John Rogers, who under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew published the so-called Matthew’s Bible in 1537. The king licensed 1, 500 copies of it and Matthew’s became the first Bible in English that could be legally sold in England. It is largely a conflation of Tyndale and Coverdale. Rogers was later burnt at Smithfield by Queen Mary.

  The next year, in 1538, Henry VIII ordered a Bible to be placed in every church in England, half the cost to be carried by the parishes themselves. For this purpose, yet another revision, the 1539 Great Bible, was produced by ‘dyverse excellent learned men’, bearing the name of Edward Whitchurch, its printer, on the title page. It is a revision of Matthew’s Bible, directed by Miles Coverdale himself.

  In 1560, English Calvinist exiles in Geneva published the Geneva Bible. A beautiful piece of Renaissance printing, the first English Bible in Roman type, full of illustrations, appendices, maps and tables, almost a forerunner of the family encyclopaedia in feeling, it was the work of at least three translators, many of whose phrases were adopted by the King James Translators. Its highly contentious notes, many of which threw doubts on the validity of unconstrained royal power, made it the favourite of Puritans and suspect in the English royal establishment. It was the version of the Bible which the pilgrims took with them to America.

  Partly in response to it, in 1568, the English Church commissioned a new Bible from a committee of about seventeen translators, most of whom were bishops, chaired by Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their rather ponderous style, and the absence of Geneva’s helpful notes and hints on how to interpret the scriptures, never made the Bishops’ Bible very popular, although it was the one from which lessons were read every Sunday in Elizabethan England.

  The English Catholics abroad in Rheims produced their own translation of the New Testament in 1582 and in 1609– 10, having moved to Douai, of the Old Testament. The King James Translators certainly knew and used the Rheims–Douai Bible although Richard Bancroft made no mention of it in his instructions to them.

  The Six Companies of Translators

  The names of fifty of the Translators are recorded. Some are little more than a name; of others a great deal is known. As this list attempts to show, they were bound together in a complex web of shared experience at both school and university and in a set of mutually reliant networks of clientship and patronage, by which leading members of the church promoted their favourites into well-rewarded positions of influence. A crucial step was to become ‘a prebendary’, a member of a cathedral chapter who receives a yearly ‘prebend’ or share of the income from the cathedral estates. It was the principal means of providing an income for rising stars in the church, for whom the we
ll-worn route went from fellow of a college at Oxford or Cambridge to master of the college, prebendary at a cathedral, dean at a cathedral and finally to a bishopric, beginning usually with somewhere poor, like Rochester or St David’s, ending somewhere well-endowed, such as Winchester, Lincoln or London. Many of the Translators pursued some or all of these steps. The translating of the Bible was only one episode on what really mattered: the career path.

  The First Westminster Company

  Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, II Kings

  LANCELOT ANDREWES (Director)

  1555–1626 born London; Merchant Taylors’ school (with Thomas Harrison); Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; 1589 Master of Pembroke (with brother Roger Andrewes a fellow); chaplain to and client of Archbishop Whitgift; royal chaplain to both Elizabeth and James; client of the Cecils; prebendary at St Paul’s; 1601 Dean of Westminster (with Saravia and Barlow as prebendaries); 1605 Bishop of Chichester; 1609 Bishop of Ely; 1609 Privy Councillor; 1618 Bishop of Winchester; 1619 Dean of Chapel Royal.

  JOHN OVERALL

  1559–1619 born Hadleigh, Essex; Hadleigh Grammar School (with John Bois); Trinity College, Cambridge; 1596 Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge; 1598 Master of Catharine Hall; 1601 Dean of St Paul’s (with Lancelot Andrewes a prebendary); 1614 Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield; 1618 Bishop of Norwich; friend of Andrewes; loathed by Abbot; member of court of High Commission.