How the Bible Became the Kynge’s Owne English

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In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture

Alister McGrath
(New York: Doubleday, 2001) 340 pp., $24.95 (hardback)

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired

Benson Bobrick
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) 379 pp., $26.00 (hardback)

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

Adam Nicolson
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003) 281 pp., $24.95 (hardback)

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Four hundred years ago, in January 1604, the newly crowned King James of England assembled England’s leading clerics at his palace, Hampton Court, to denounce corruption in the church. When the discussion turned to recent Bible translations, the king announced that he had never seen a Bible “well translated in English.” He added: “I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by the Royal authority, to be read in the whole Church, and none other.”

Thus was born the book hailed as the greatest work in the English language—the King James Version of the Bible.

Three recent books, under review here, recount the history of this good book. And what a story it is! Even for scholars and specialists who know it well, this is a great story, well worth reading again or for the first time, especially in the vigorous narratives each of these books contains.

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Before recounting some of the major events and players involved in the creation of the King James Version—the KJV—we should affirm one popular conception, while correcting several misconceptions: The KJV is indeed the most widely read and influential book in the English language, and this in spite of changing literary and even theological tastes over the centuries. On the other hand, the KJV was not the first Bible translation into English, its translators did not claim to have divine guidance, and it is distinctly not the case that Jesus spoke the King’s English—a colossal misunderstanding attributed to both former Arkansas governor Orville Faubus and former Texas governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, both of whom, at least according to legend, held up a copy of the KJV and said, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

Bible translation into English goes back at least to the seventh century, when the poet and cowherd Caedmon retold Bible stories in his Anglo-Saxon verse (photo, above). Shortly thereafter, Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne translated the Psalms into Anglo-Saxon, and England’s first church historian, the Venerable Bede, reportedly began to translate the Gospel of John, although his work is now lost. Two centuries later, the English king Alfred the Great (871–899) included an Old English version of the Ten Commandments in his law code; at about the same time, extensive interlinear glosses, which explained Latin terms in English, began to appear in biblical manuscripts. In the late tenth century, a monk named Aldred inserted his complete Old English translation of the Gospels between the lines of text in the Lindisfarne Gospels (see photo of the Lindisfarne Gospels in this article), a magnificent eighth-century illuminated gospel book now in the British Library.

The dramatic story of the English Bible really begins, however, with the theologian and philosopher John Wycliffe , whose translation of much of the Bible into Middle English appeared in the 1380s. His translation was part of a reformist project to make the Bible and its teachings available to the general public. Wycliffe’s translation was based on the Latin text known as the Vulgate, prepared by Jerome in the fourth century C.E. The church opposed Wycliffe’s work, not just because it was a translation, but because it was a translation into English, then the language of the common folk. (The aristocracy spoke French.) His translation was banned, and, in 1409, Bible translation was forbidden in England. Wycliffe died in 1384, before the ban; but his bones were later dug up and burned as posthumous punishment for his alleged heresy.

It was left to the priest William Tyndale , who was born about a century after Wycliffe’s death, to produce an English-language version that derived directly from Hebrew and Greek, the original languages (along with a bit of Aramaic) in which the Bible was composed. Because Bible translation was still banned in England, Tyndale found it prudent to work in Germany, where he was active in the first part of the 16th century, at precisely the same time Martin Luther was preparing his German-language translation as part of his Reformation. In 1525 Tyndale produced his New Testament. Over the next decade, Tyndale revised his initial English version of the New Testament and published renderings of portions of the Old. Although Tyndale remained on the continent, copies of his translation were smuggled 017into England almost as soon as they came off the press, to increasing popular acclaim but official condemnation. Like Wycliffe, Tyndale insisted that the message of Scripture should be directly accessible to all.

In 1535, before Tyndale could complete his Old Testament, he was imprisoned in Brussels for 16 months, tried by the Catholic Church and strangled and burned at the stake as a heretic.

Tyndale’s work, we are glad to say, did not die with him, as other translators borrowed extensively from his text. In 1535 (likely in Cologne), Miles Coverdale produced the first complete English Bible, called the Coverdale Bible, which used Tyndale’s translation wherever it was available. In 1537, Matthew’s Bible, a revision of the Tyndale and Coverdale Bibles, appeared in England. The translation was named for one Thomas Matthew, which was actually a pseudonym for John Rogers, a Tyndale disciple who, despite this subterfuge, nevertheless suffered the same harsh fate as his master’s: He was burned at the stake two decades later during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I.

The publication of the Coverdale Bible in 1535 marked a shift in the political situation in England. The current king, Henry VIII, had already made England independent from the Roman Catholic Church—so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and remarry. Henry embraced Protestantism and was made head of the Church of England. His second wife, Anne Boleyn, was a patron of Coverdale, and when Coverdale shipped copies of his Bible to England, he included a dedication to the king. Henry apparently approved. In 1538, he commanded that every English church keep a copy of the Bible in English. The 129-year ban on translation was lifted.

As numerous Bible translations began to appear on the market legally, the terms of debate very quickly changed from whether or not there should be a vernacular translation to what sort of vernacular version was best. And Tyndale’s translation decisively set the terms for English-language Bibles until the present.

Tyndale’s translation also introduced two issues that became increasingly controversial throughout the remainder of the 16th and the 17th centuries. First, he used contemporary ecclesiastical terms like “congregation” 019and “senior” or “elder” for “church” and “priest.” In the eyes of his opponents, this usage was much more than a linguistic choice; conservative English Catholics saw in these choices attacks on established norms of ecclesiastical organization and governance. Second, Tyndale frequently used marginal notes to comment on how the biblical text related to contemporary life. Later translators adopted this practice, using some marginal notes—as did Tyndale—to castigate others’ beliefs and practices: Protestants’ marginal notes could adopt a stridently anti-Catholic tone; further, Puritans, who were critical of monarchies, added marginal notes whenever the biblical text allowed for negative observations about the royalty. Examples of this practice abound: Tyndale himself glossed Numbers 23:8 (“How shall I curse whom God curseth not?”) with this remark: “The pope can tell how.” To provide a contemporary reference to “the hire of an whore” and “the price of a dog” (both at Deuteronomy 23:18), Tyndale offers this: “The pope will take tribute of them yet, and bishops and abbots desire no better tenants.” Other translations characterized “the king” of Daniel 11:36 as “a tyrant” whose days are numbered. Likewise, the Pharaoh of the Exodus is “a tyrant.” The translators may have had in mind any of several 16th- or 17th-century English monarchs.

These kinds of issues continued to characterize the next two major Bible translations into English: the Geneva Bible, associated with the Puritans and printed in a small, hand-held format that made it popular among lay folk; and the Bishop’s Bible, prepared by the Anglican bishops for use in churches.

When in 1604 King James I assembled the bishops and church deans at Hampton Court, he ended up displacing both the Geneva Bible (which James deemed “the worst” English translation ever made—perhaps because in its notes, it denied the divine right of kings, which James believed in) and the Bishop’s Bible.

The production of Bible translations at this period (but not at this period alone) was a profoundly political as well as theological and literary enterprise. It is not by chance that James I himself convened these meetings, prepared the guidelines, chose the personnel, oversaw the process and gave final approval (ultimately designated authorization) to the version later named for him. It was he who determined that marginal notes would be minimal in number and muted 020in controversy. He also laid out the principle that the KJV would be primarily a revision of the Bishop’s Bible (which in turn relied heavily on Tyndale) and that it would be acceptable to both Anglicans (high church) and Puritans (low church) alike.

It was left to the translators themselves, six committees in all (three for the Old Testament, two for the New, and one for the Apocrypha) to carry out the translation. We still have extensive notes from some of these committees and also considerable knowledge concerning their education, religious leanings and temperament. Careful textual comparisons reveal the debt owed by these translators to previous or contemporary sources. Much of the credit should go to Tyndale, whose translation, according to a recent study, was used 83 percent of the time, including for such famous lines as “In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and “In the Beginning God created the Word” (John 1:1). But the KJV team borrowed from 021numerous other sources, including, perhaps surprisingly, Catholic and Jewish ones.

Although it is true that no Jews served as KJV translators, many of the Old Testament translators (Lancelot Andrewes, Edward Lively, John Richardson, John Harding and John Rainolds) were deeply steeped in both the Hebrew language and the exegetical traditions of Judaism. The KJV teams charged with preparing the Old Testament translation adopted “Jewish” readings already incorporated into earlier English-language versions and sought out others on their own. They relied heavily on the writings of the 12th-century Jewish exegete and grammarian David Kimchi, also known as Radak. An analysis of the first fifteen chapters of the Book of Isaiah in the KJV reveals a high number of English renderings that reflect Kimchi’s interpretations (including, in the Book of Isaiah, “the chaines” [Isaiah 3:19]; “and their honourable men are famished” [Isaiah 5:13]; “they shall lay their hands upon Edom and Moab” [Isaiah 11:14]; and “the golden city” [Isaiah 14:4]). Of course, theological considerations could prove more powerful than Kimchi: Isaiah 7:14 begins: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive,” and not “a young woman shall give birth,” as Kimchi had it.

Further, as Bible translator Max L. Margolis wrote: “[The KJV] has an inimitable style and rhythm; the coloring of the original is not obliterated. What imparts to the English Bible its beauty, aye, its simplicity, comes from the [Hebrew] original.”

According to Alister McGrath, author of In the Beginning (one of the books under review), the secret of the KJV’s success may lie in the fact that the translators “refus[ed] to adopt a purely mechanical approach to translation, in which a Hebrew or Greek word is woodenly rendered by exactly the same English term throughout … On the one hand, this led to a lack of 052strict accuracy where it might have been expected; on the other, it allowed for a greater richness of the text than a more mechanical approach to the issue might have engendered.” McGrath notes, “Perhaps the greatest tribute to [the KJV’s] success lies in the simple fact that, for nearly two centuries, most of its readers were unaware that they were actually reading a translation.”

Consider one of the most beautiful (and oft-quoted) passages from the King James translation, Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down

in green pastures:

he leadeth me beside

the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

he leadeth me in the paths

of righteousness

for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through

the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil:

for thou art with me,

thy rod and thy staff,

they comfort me.

(Psalm 23:1–4, KJV)

Compare this to the Wycliffe Bible—“The Lord governeth me, and no thing to me shall lack …”—or to the Contemporary English Version’s even clunkier rendition—“You Lord are my shepherd. I will never be in need. You let me rest in fields of green grass.”

The opening of John’s gospel is another glorious passage in the KJV:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

(John 1:1–5, KJV)

The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), first published in 1989 and widely used today, especially among scholars, is indebted to the KJV, as is obvious from its rendition of John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What had come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

(John 1:1–5, KJV)

In a note, the NRSV explains that the term translated as “overcome” in the last line also means “comprehend.” But how much more intriguing is the KJV, with “the darkness comprehended it not,” as if the darkness had a mind of its own?

The modern desire for gender-inclusiveness has also dampened the literary quality of more recent translations. Where the KJV reads, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4 [in Hebrews 8:5]), the NRSV has, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” And the Contemporary English Version offers instead, “Then I ask, Why do you care about us humans? Why are you concerned for us weaklings?”

As noted earlier, the KJV translators relied heavily on the work of Tyndale. But throughout they made subtle changes that vastly improved and clarified the text. As author Adam Nicolson points out in God’s Secretaries, in Tyndale’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples: “This is the cup, the new testament, which shall for you be shed”; the KJV has Jesus say: “This is the cup, the new testament, which shall be shed for you” (italics mine). It is a “miniscule” change, as Nicolson acknowledges, but one that makes the passage all “the more accurate, the more poignant and the more memorable.”

Of course, the KJV translators were not infallible. Compare their inelegant and unintelligible translation of a difficult passage, Job 36:32–33 (“With clouds He [God] covereth the light; and commandeth it not to shine by the cloud that cometh betwixt. The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapour”) with the 054NRSV’s (“He [God] covers his hands with the lightning, and commands it to strike the mark. Its crashing tells about him; he is jealous with anger against iniquity.”)

The first publication of the completed KJV in 1611 ends a chapter in English-language versions of the Bible, but it is hardly the entire story. Reprintings and subsequent editions of the KJV frequently introduced new errors even as they sought to correct old mistakes. Moreover, the tentativeness and modesty of the translators themselves slowly yielded to dogmatic views about the authority of their text; this process was accelerated in no small degree when the practice of printing the translators’ own introduction was abandoned. In this introduction, the translators state humbly and forthrightly, “Truly we never thought from the beginning 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.” Elsewhere they note they have tried to “avoid the scrupulosity of the Puritans [as also] we have shunned the obscurity of the Papists.” Moreover, they openly acknowledge their dependence on the work of myriad predecessors.

Each of the three books under review here tells essentially the same story, and tells it well, so readers selecting any of them will not go wrong. Nonetheless, each book has its own emphasis.

Adam Nicolson’s book is the most complete in terms of the KJV itself. Almost the entire book is devoted to the years 1604 to 1611. This enables Nicolson, a British writer and historian, to regale readers with marvelously revealing portraits of many of the translators. Here, for example, is a part of Nicolson’s description of Lancelot Andrewes, director of the First Westminster Company, which was charged with the translation of Genesis through 2 Kings:

[Andrewes possessed] a narrow and shrewd face, a certain distance in the eyes, as if the person had withdrawn an inch or two below the surface of the skin … He could look the church’s adversaries in the eye, and he was clever enough to slalom around the complexities of theological dispute.

Popular historian Benson Bobrick’s strength lies in his narration of the events and major players that led up to the KJV (for example, he devotes an entire chapter each to Tyndale and Wycliffe); we are on page 208 before we arrive at Hampton Court, which Nicolson introduces on page 42. Bobrick is also the fullest in his descriptions and analysis of relevant events after 1611. Describing events in the late 17th century, he writes:

Pride goeth before a fall: in a sense Protestants had become more Catholic than they knew. For they had exchanged one authority for another: “in the place of the medieval Church,” as one scholar put it, they had Scripture; in the place of an infallible institution, an infallible text; in the place of Tradition, a printed book.

Alister McGrath, an Oxford professor of historical theology, follows a middle path, with Hampton Court first appearing on page 149 of his narration. His literary and textual analyses are pleasingly subtle and sensitive. McGrath is particularly strong on technology, both in terms of Gutenberg’s mid-15th-century innovations and of the possibilities and difficulties facing both the original and subsequent printers of the KJV. In this regard, he writes:

The early printings of the King James Bible included many errors. Many of these arose from weaknesses in the book production processes of the period. Proofing was often a haphazard business … Contemporary sources suggest that a “reading-boy” would then read the proof copy aloud to the compositor, who would check it against the original copy. Errors could arise in all kinds of ways … A further factor contributing to the large number of errors in English Bibles was the constant pressure to reduce their production costs.

Nicolson and McGrath are generous in their presentation of illustrations, which Bobrick lacks. However, only Bobrick has extensive annotation, which unobtrusively appears as endnotes. All three authors provide useful indexes and bibliographies.

My advice: Read one, two or all three of these worthwhile volumes. In the process, spend some time with the KJV itself, preferably in one of its earlier incarnations rather than modern hybrids like the New King James or the Twenty-first Century King James. And, if it has been a while (or never) since you have done so, let the experience of reading the text in translation spur you on to studying the original Hebrew and Greek.

In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture Alister McGrath (New York: Doubleday, 2001) 340 pp., $24.95 (hardback) Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired Benson Bobrick (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) 379 pp., $26.00 (hardback) God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible Adam Nicolson (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) 281 pp., $24.95 (hardback) 015 Four hundred years ago, in January 1604, the newly crowned King James of England assembled England’s leading clerics at his […]