A Passion for Books

by Harold Rabinowitz

  Erasmus was near the end of his days when he published his text, not only in Greek but also (in 1519) a translation in Latin. Doubtless Erasmus looms so large in biblical history because he was the great scholar and teacher of the era. His materials were meager. Available to him were only a few Greek manuscripts, none earlier than the tenth century. Historians write that the one he most relied upon was of about the fifteenth century, virtually in his own era. It seems reasonable to say that Tyndale could do what he did only because Erasmus had done what he did.

  Had Tyndale been slightly more the politician, or sycophant, he might have saved his life and yet realized his zealously pursued objective to put an English-language Bible within easy reach of whoever wanted to read it. Indeed, within a year after Tyndale was executed, the same Henry VIII who had not lifted a finger in Tyndale’s behalf gave his approval to a Tyndale-like venture.

  Henry had renounced his allegiance to the papacy, and in 1535 a parliamentary act declared him the supreme head of the Church of England. The unfavorable view by Rome of uninstructed Bible reading no longer was consequential to the British ruler. But he had to be approached sensibly. Tyndale had been so confident of the rectitude of his course that he did not bother to be diplomatic.

  Miles Coverdale was a different sort of person. He employed tact to serve his ends. Coverdale, an Austin friar, was a contemporary of Tyndale. They had been together as students at Cambridge, advanced within their respective priestly fields at comparable speeds, are said even to have worked briefly together on Tyndale’s Bible. While Tyndale was in prison, Coverdale began to work on a translation of his own. He was neither as scholarly as Tyndale nor as hard a worker. He made a translation of the entire Bible without much effort, making use of Tyndale’s work, and Luther’s, along with the Vulgate and the Swiss-German Bible of Zwingli, and with little attempt to go back to original sources. His own contribution was a greater felicity of expression.

  That Coverdale won success instead of death may be attributed to two factors: the reform climate had come to England, and Coverdale smoothed a path for himself with flattery. He dedicated his translation to King Henry VIII and “his dearest just wyfe, and most vertuous Pryncesse, Queen Anne.” Coverdale’s Bible has the distinction of being the first complete Bible to be printed in English and, in the edition of 1537, the first to be printed in England, the 1535 printing being either from Zurich or Marburg.

  There ensued now a veritable flood of editions. Coverdale’s Bible, despite his diplomacy, had not received the king’s authorization. But the popularity of Tyndale’s work made it apparent to both king and clergy that, in some form at least, an official Bible needed to be licensed. So, in 1537, there appeared, by “the Kinge’s most gracyous lycence,” what is known as Matthew’s Bible. Thomas Matthew was the pseudonym of John Rogers, who had been an associate of Tyndale and who, seemingly, was Tyndale’s literary executor. For Matthew’s Bible included new translations, undoubtedly by Tyndale, of the Old Testament books from Joshua through Chronicles in addition to Tyndale’s Pentateuch and New Testament and Coverdale’s Ezra to Malachi and Revelations. Almost baldly, the work of the executed scholar became the accepted version. In 1539, Richard Taverner’s revision of Matthew’s Bible was issued; but the objections to Matthew’s version which had led to the revision were not fully answered, and in the same year Coverdale produced what came to be known as the Great Bible. Essentially a combination of Coverdale’s earlier work and Tyndale’s version, this Bible, sponsored by Thomas Cromwell and then by Archbishop Cranmer, was authorized by the king to be read in churches. Thus, three years after Tyndale was martyred, the essence of his work had the accolade of the very men who were responsible for his execution.

  The Great Bible went into another edition within a year, issuing in 1540. The revision was popularly called Cranmer’s Bible, the name deriving from a long introduction written by the archbishop. That was the last biblical version undertaken by Coverdale at home. He rose high in the Church of England but fell from royal grace, and from freedom, when the Roman Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553. Coverdale was imprisoned, released after a year, and then fled to Geneva. There he, William Whittingham, John Calvin, John Knox, and others produced by 1560 what came to be known as the Geneva Bible.

  The Geneva Bible was for many years, until the King James Bible attained its own popularity, the popular version. It was the first English Bible to be printed in roman type, the first to use italics for those words interpolated into the text for smoother English reading, the first to divide chapters into verses. Its language was accurate and readable, and it rapidly won a wider reading than any of its predecessors. The Bible of the Nonconformists, the Geneva Bible—known also as the “Breeches Bible” (so called from the translation of Genesis 3:7, “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves breeches”)—was the Bible brought to America by the settlers of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was reprinted nearly two hundred times by 1644, by which year the King James Version had taken full hold.

  Though the Geneva Bible was the preferred version until the King James Version came out early in the seventeenth century, it had some successors prior to the 1611 translation, principally the Bishops’ Bible, a revision of the Great Bible under Archbishop Parker’s direction, and the Douay Bible.

  The latter, the Roman Catholic translation, was out of the main current of English Bible translation, though it had a definite influence on the translators of the King James Version. Translated by members of the Catholic College, the New Testament was issued in 1582 at Rheims, the Old Testament in 1609–1610 at Douay.

  For centuries the Latin Vulgate had been the only text available to the Roman Catholic clergy, who frequently stumbled when they had to render English translations during their sermons. The ancient dislike of putting the Scriptures into the “barbarous language” of everyday use still existed. But the Reformation had introduced a new factor. The Roman Catholic cause was suffering for lack of an English version of the Bible, and, conversely, the Protestant cause was gaining by having just that. Thus, the Douay Bible, a direct translation from the Vulgate, whose text had been established in the Clementine edition of 1592.

  James I came to the English throne in 1603. Nearly a century had passed since Tyndale had begun his struggle to put an English version of the Bible into everyone’s hands. At the price of his life, he had succeeded, succeeded so very well that, if at the turn of the seventeenth century there was a problem in Bible reading, it stemmed from a multiplicity of Bible versions, not from a paucity. More translations surely were not needed. The need seemed to be for agreement on one, for a standard English version.

  Historians are not wholly agreed where the impulse came from that resulted in the King James Version. That a standard English Bible was needed was well recognized in England. The situation at the close of Elizabeth’s reign and at the beginning of King James’s was unsatisfactory because the two versions then in greatest use were, in effect, competitive. The Bishops’ Bible, regarded as more or less authoritative, was used in the churches. The Geneva Bible was preferred by people for use in their homes.

  Circumstances seemed to point to a revision. There even had been introduced in the Parliament during Elizabeth’s time a measure described as “an act for the reducinage of diversities of Bibles now extant in the English tongue to one settled vulgar translated from the original.” Not the change in English rulers, but the course of events and circumstances seemed to bring about a climate favorable for producing an official standard work. In 1604 King James called the Hampton Court Conference of churchmen to resolve High Church and Low Church differences, and at this conference came action. To the suggestion that there be a new translation, King James commented that he had never seen a Bible well translated into English, and of all he deemed the Geneva Bible to be the worst.

  The king’s slur on the Geneva Bible, essentially the Puritan Bible, may not have been unwelcome, for its popularity among the laity had not been shar
ed by the churchmen. In consequence, some time later the king appointed, so history relates, fifty-four “certain learned men” to proceed with the work, though records produce the names of only forty-seven. All on the list were renowned scholars, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the dean of Westminster, Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, heading the list. Scholastic attainment was the main qualification of these men. They were not chosen for attitude or rank, apart from the rank of scholarly competence; High Church and Puritan leaders alike were selected. Militant Puritans, however, were not included.

  Three years passed in organizing a beginning. The entire group of scholars was divided into six smaller groups. One from Westminster, headed by Dr. Andrewes, was made responsible for the translation of the Pentateuch and the rest of the Old Testament from Joshua to II Kings. A Cambridge group, led by Edward Lively, was made responsible for I Chronicles to Ecclesiastes; Dr. John Harding of Magdalene College headed an Oxford team assigned the major prophets, Lamentations, and the minor prophets; another from Cambridge, supervised by Dr. John Duport, worked on the Prayer of Manasses and the rest of the Apocrypha; another from Oxford, led by Dr. Thomas Ravis, was given the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse; another from Westminster, headed by the dean of Chester, Dr. William Barlow, took the rest of the New Testament.

  The translators had guidance in the form of a set of fifteen specific rules, sometimes attributed to Bishop Bancroft. The translators were to use the Bishops’ Bible as their principal guide and were to use the common rather than the Latin forms of proper names and the commoner meanings of words in general. However, the older forms were to be used for ecclesiastical words—church rather than the Puritan congregation—and there were to be no marginal notes except to clarify an unavoidable awkwardness in the translated text or to indicate a cross-reference. Special rules were laid down for cooperation among the translators; authority was apportioned within the groups; bishops were advised to request suggestions from their clergy; a special group was established to decide on meanings where a word might be subject to several interpretations. As a modification of the rule giving precedence to the Bishops’ Bible, the several existing English Bible versions were listed to which the translators could turn in instances where the preferred text was faulty. All in all, the rules were wisely drawn, providing a framework in which scholars could work without hobbling, overspecific restrictions. A final editing was done by Bishop Bilson of Winchester, and by Dr. Miles Smith, who wrote the Preface.

  Begun in 1607, the work was completed in 1611. The editors had approached and accomplished their task with humility, as the Preface bore out: “We never thought . . . 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.”

  That prefatory statement accurately described the accomplishment. King James had voiced the recognized need when he called for a rewriting; he had appointed an exceptionally qualified editorial group, and they had done, as would be said nowadays, a good job. They disregarded the king’s slur on the Geneva Bible, and what they found to be worthy of choice in it, they chose. Nor did they fail to be influenced by the Douay New Testament. They approached their task with a free, high mind, bent on making the best of the much that was available.

  Expectations for success had been great, and the result was not disappointing. The King James Bible stands as the great monument of English prose. It was written in the period—Elizabethan still, though some discern in Jacobean English a mellowing of the raw youthfulness of the earlier decades—when the language was at the peak of its vitality, and in this translation the vigor of the language is evoked to the full in expressing thoughts for which it alone, in its flexibility, color, and cadence, is the capable tool. As a result, the influence of the King James Version can be felt strongly in the further history of English. The balanced rhythm of the short biblical verses, the use of Anglicism rather than Latinism when the choice among words arose, the shunning of obscurity in favor of clarity of meaning, the figured poetical phrasing, all can be traced in the great writers in English through the centuries that have followed.

  More errors were discovered in printing than in translation. One not subsequently corrected was the use of “at” when “out” was meant in Matthew 23:24. Thus arose the oft wrongly employed “straining at a gnat.” Almost 150 years were to pass before this fine biblical translation appeared without an excess of printer’s errors. In the interim there were many editions, and most of them managed to win labels derived from the mistakes they contained. The very first printing of 1611 is known as the “He Bible,” because of its use of “he” in Ruth 3:15; the second printing, the “She Bible,” corrects this to read “and she went into the city.” When, in 1631, twenty years after the first edition, the Seventh Commandment was affirmatively printed, reading “Thou shalt commit adultery,” the edition promptly was named the “Wicked Bible.” Comparable errors in other editions caused such appellations as the “Vinegar Bible,” due to a printing error of Vinegar for Vineyard. This, a folio edition by John Baskett of Oxford, has been called “Baskett’s Basket full of errors” because of its many typographical errors. Other similar slips of the printer’s stick and proofreader’s eyes have been memorialized in the “Leda Bible,” in which there was used an initial letter showing Leda and the swan which had been intended for an edition of Ovid, the “Unrighteous Bible,” which states “that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God,” the “Wife-Hater’s Bible,” misprinting “wife” for “life” in Luke 14:26, and many more.

  The immediate acclaim which greeted the King James Version was perhaps the main reason for its being thought of as having royal authorization, but this was not the fact. Nevertheless, it became known as the Authorized Version, and the title was never disputed. One of its predecessors, the Great Bible, had been authorized; another, the Bishops’ Bible, contained the words “Authorised and appointed to be read in churches,” but there was no mention of authorization on the title page of the 1611 publication. The phrase used was “Appointed to be read in Churches,” and this was understood to mean that the Bible had been printed by the king’s printer with the approval of the king and the bishops. Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but biblical historians make much of the fact that the King James Version, known over the centuries as the Authorized Version, never was formally authorized. Its superior merits won for it a position as high as authorization could have brought, and even higher than authorization could have won had the translation been less successful.

  The best testimony to its success has been its vitality over the centuries. Many translations have been made in an attempt to supersede the King James Version, but none has supplanted it. During the greater part of the three centuries between 1611 when the King James Version appeared (the Revised Version came out in the late nineteenth century), and the mid–twentieth century when the controversial Revised Standard Version was issued, more than one hundred translations were published.

  Within a half century of the issuing of the King James Bible in England, the book was printed in the American colonies—but not in English. In his missionary zeal, the Reverend John Eliot thought he could make better progress if he had a Bible that the Indians could understand. But the Algonquian Indians he worked among possessed no written language. So the Reverend Mr. Eliot learned their spoken language, established a symbology so that it could be reduced to print, and, with the help of a London printer and London machinery sent to New England to do Eliot’s bidding, produced in 1661 the New Testament and in 1663 reissued it in combination with the Old Testament. This Indian Bible, printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the first edition of the Scriptures in any language to be printed in what became, a little over a century later, the United States of America.

  The Eliot Bible was not the first book printed here. The Bay Psalm Book, biblical in nature, preceded it by twenty-one years. But it was eighty years after Elio
t’s complete Bible was printed before a Bible in a modern European language appeared: in 1743 Christopher Saur of Germantown, Pennsylvania, reprinted Luther’s German Bible in a quarto of 1,272 pages. And Saur’s Bible antedates the first complete English Bible printed here by thirty-nine years, though a New Testament was printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia in 1777. It was Aitken also who printed the complete Bible of 1781–1782, a duodecimo of which fewer than forty known copies have survived. This Bible is distinguished as the only one ever authorized by Congress. Other Bibles followed: the first Catholic Bible in 1790, the first translation in English of the Septuagint in 1808, the bowdlerized Bible of Noah Webster in 1833, the only translation of the whole Bible by a woman—Julia E. Smith of Glastonbury, Connecticut—in 1876.

  The time came when in the United States the printing of Bibles soared to figures which would have appeared fantastic to John Eliot, missionary to the Indian. More than ten million copies of the Bible in whole or part are now annually printed here and sent worldwide. Translations of both Old and New Testaments are now made in 184 languages; of the New Testament alone, in 227 languages. Nothing more significant could be stated regarding the Bible as an influence in the world.

  Since the day of Gutenberg no era has been without an outstanding Bible printer. There is an irresistible compulsion to harmonize the inspired content with exceptional printing. Someone always bows to that compulsion, and it is reasonable to forecast that no future age will fail to produce a printer notable for his Bibles.