This is a newly released transcript of a moving address given by Rev Dr John Harris, curator of Bible Society Australia's Historic Bible Collection, at the official launch of the The Book that Changed the World exhibition tour. It was delivered at the University of Adelaide on 1st April 2010.
In 1611, King James’ translators produced the iconic King James Version of the Bible, the most influential book in the history of the world, published in uncountable millions and still read today, 400 years later.
In the summer of 1603, when King James VI of Scotland was journeying south to become James I of England, he had no way of knowing he would be most remembered for an English Bible that would forever bear his name.
Hardly had his horses and carriage left Edinburgh when he was met by a delegation of earnest English Puritans. God had appointed him their physician, they said, “to heal the diseases of the church”. James liked their suggestion of a major conference to set the church right, but what he and the Puritans thought was wrong with it were not exactly the same thing.
After Elizabeth I, the old Catholic vs Protestant struggle had retreated somewhat into the background, due as much to the long 45 years of stability of her reign as it may have been to her religious settlement. But the old tensions had emerged in a new form as an Episcopal vs Puritan contest within the Church of England.
Puritan concerns were to ensure the centrality of Scripture, to enforce a stricter morality and to limit abuses of power by the Church hierarchy. James’ concern was to preserve what he believed to be his divine right to control the Church. He wanted no breath of actual Catholicism, but he was bitterly opposed to anything which smacked of the dour Presbyterianism of the stern men who had raised him as an orphan from childhood. He had no intention of weakening the power of the monarch and his own appointed bishops, obligated to him for their status and power.
Socially and physically awkward, James nevertheless had the best mind of any English monarch before or since. He had at least been allowed books, the one solace of many lonely orphaned children, and he was extremely well read. He knew many languages including Greek and Hebrew and could translate them by the age of ten. And he knew his Bible very well.
James called the Hampton Court Conference almost as soon as he reached London but the plague delayed it until early in 1604. When, among many suggestions, came the idea of a new translation of the English Bible, James jumped at it. He needed to make some kind of a concession to the powerful Puritans. His bishops could also feel they had some control over the text and besides, a Bible was safe. The project would take a long time and have no immediate unintended consequences. And in any case, James actually liked the idea.
The English Bible had already passed through two dramatic and sometimes bloody centuries. But gone now were the days when English Scriptures were banned and translators were burned at the stake. People no longer feared the midnight knock on the door. They could freely read the Bible and that Bible was the Geneva Bible, the Bible of the Reformation. But the Geneva Bible had been the Bible of James’ Presbyterian school masters who had quite literally tried to beat it into him, and he had come to dislike it immensely. At the Hampton Court Conference, he referred on several occasions to his childhood and its effect upon him. The way these severe men had treated him as a child, he said, was well known. In reference to the Geneva Bible, he said ‘I have lived among Puritans and was kept for the most part as a ward under them, yet, since I was ten years old, I have ever disliked their opinions.’ And in critiquing what he judged to be the weak arguments advanced by the Puritans at the Conference, he wrote later to a friend that had they been scholars, a rod should have been applied to their buttocks, a none too subtle reference to his own education.
We have here one of those intriguing little quirks of history where something as seemingly insignificant as an unfortunate upbringing has changed the course of the world. With his father, Lord Darnley, murdered and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned and eventually executed in England, James was virtually an orphan from the age of one. His nominated guardians were the Earl and Countess of Mar, at whose Stirling Castle he was raised. But the Privy Council of Scotland, was determined that he become a God-fearing, Protestant king accepting strict limitations on the power of the monarchy. The Council, dominated by Puritans, appointed several stern Presbyterian men as his schoolmasters to instil this into him from the age of four. These men then proceeded to physically abuse him as part of his severe education. Had James been raised by a kindly Presbyterian family with other children, and given a normal childhood among people he could know and love, he may well have grown up better disposed to the Protestant Church of Scotland. He may have arrived in England with a far different agenda. As it was, his brutal upbringing turned him against anything which smacked of Scottish Protestantism. What he wanted was the Church of England.
The English Puritans had been happy enough with the Geneva Bible but all they really wanted was to see the Bible preached upon. They readily warmed to the notion of a Bible more accurately translated from the original languages especially if that guaranteed its status as the ‘Authorised’ Bible, firmly at the centre of Church life. But James’ interests were otherwise. He wanted to get rid of what was in the margins. The Geneva Bible had long become a vehicle for divisive comment with anti-Papal and – what James was more concerned about – anti-monarchist remarks masquerading as doctrinal notes in the margins.
The thought of a new English Bible really enthused James: accurate, less boring than the unpopular Bishop’s Bible and without the marginal invective of the Geneva Bible. Trusting no one else to get it right, he personally supervised the drawing up of precise guidelines. Impatient with the slowness of his bishops, he set up the project himself, choosing the translators and demanding regular reports.
What James put together was the world’s greatest translation project: 54 of England’s greatest scholars in 4 teams, reporting to an overall editorial committee. A mixed group, their combined strength was immense. They cared about accuracy, they cared about readability and they cared about the English language. In 1611 they produced the iconic King James Version, the most influential book in the history of the world, published in uncountable millions and still read 400 years later.
We cannot be certain that the King James Version was ever actually ‘Authorised’, as all records from 1611 to 1613 were destroyed in a fire. But it hardly matters. In retrospect the triumph of the King James Version was unstoppable. The Geneva Bible did linger on for a while, due as much to the expense in those days of a new Bible if you already had one, than it was to the loyalty of hard-line Puritans. Under James’ son, Charles I, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, thought to help the KJV along by banning the printing of the Geneva Bible, but all that did was line the pockets of Dutch printers. They too gave up by 1644. The truth was that people were replacing their old and worn-out Geneva Bibles with the KJV. Not even the execution of Charles and the decade of Puritan domination in Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth affected its growing popularity. Within a generation the KJV had supplanted all other English Bibles.
Simply, in a church-going era, time and familiarity had ensured its acceptance. The Church of England required three readings at every service, Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel. And in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, still today the defining document of the Anglican Church, the Epistle and Gospel were printed out in full from the King James Version.
As the translators had so passionately hoped, it had become heard, read and understood by the people; a Bible which ‘openeth the window to let in the light’.The King James Bible changed the way people understood their relationship to God. It changed the way they lived their lives and it changed the way they faced death.
Because it changed people, the KJV had the power to change society. Every literate person now had access to the Bible, often the only book they owned. No wonder they called it THE book– indeed a book or codex as we understand it had been invented centuries before to make the awkward Biblical manuscript scrolls more portable and user-friendly.
In the Bible, ordinary folk recorded their births, their marriages and their deaths. Children learned to read by mouthing its words and from this one family volume, they learned the potential power of books. This inexorably led to an entirely new spirit of inquiry through reading and reflection, accelerating the growth of commercial printing and the ever-widening circulation of books.
Free to interpret the Bible according to the light of their own understanding, people began to feel they also had the right to question the authority of both religious and secular institutions. Stimulating reformation within the Church, it led also to the reduction of the power of the monarchy and the rise of constitutional government. Carried far beyond the shores of England, oppressed peoples found in it the hope of freedom. The King James version of the Bible underpinned great social reforms including the abolition of slavery. It was the King James Version of the Bible which finally created liberty and democracy.
When Abraham Lincoln began his Gettysburg Address with the words ‘four score years and seven years ago’, he was consciously grounding his speech in the familiar but powerful words of the King James Version and when he concluded with his famous pronouncement that government of the people, by the people and for the people ‘shall not perish from the earth’, he was again calling upon the collective intellectual and emotional resonance of an audience steeped in the Bible’s phrases.
When Martin Luther King began his legendary ‘I have a dream’ speech with the words ‘five score years and ten,’ not only was he linking himself to Lincoln’s speech but to the words of that same King James Version of the Bible that had entered the hearts and minds of his fellow Afro-Americans. And the rest of the speech overflows with Biblical allusions. When he spoke of ‘coming out of great tribulation’, of ‘justice rolling down like water’, of the day when “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together”, he was calling forth the Biblical images in the soul of his black countrymen and women that had sustained them and would continue to sustain them in their pursuit of freedom and justice. And when on the night before his assassination he proclaimed that God had allowed him to go up to the mountain, that he had looked over and seen the promised land, he had become a new Moses leading the Exodus of his people out the new Egypt of oppression in the United States to that place of liberty that the Bible, when read by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, declares that they must and will inherit.
It is sobering indeed to see the same Biblical phrases in more than a century of speeches and writings of Australian Indigenous leaders such as William Ferguson, Shadrach James and David Unaipon, tenaciously struggling to assert the equality of all human beings in the sight of God. William Cooper, Victorian Aboriginal leader and one of the architects of the 1938 Aboriginal Day of Mourning wrote in 1936, ‘We have suffered enough, God knows, but the day of our deliverance is drawing nigh’. Here in South Australia, in 1895, when the Aboriginal people were unjustly evicted from Poonindie so that white farmers could have their land, some fair-minded South Australians labelled it ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’. A refugee in his own land, Aboriginal leader, Tom Adams wrote, ‘We must through much trial and tribulation enter the Kingdom of heaven…We feel as if we are strangers in a strange land..the times are indeed hard with us but we know that here we have no continuing city but we seek one to come.’
We could go on. When Nelson Mandela used phrases such as ‘the valley of darkness’ and ‘seeing the light’ and ‘manifesting the glory of God’, he too was employing Biblical imagery – incidentally the same phrases and the same liberating thrust of the same Bible he had read and grown to love in prison. The great speeches about the path from bondage to freedom can hardly fail to employ these images, whether the authors realise it or not. And even when time elapses and the connection between great words and the cadences of the King James Version are forgotten, what will forever remain will be the institutions and liberties which were gained for us by those who read their prophecies in the utterances of the that Bible and who believed in the equalities it proclaimed.
Christian or non-Christian, fair-minded people know this: they know how much they are inheritors of freedoms and a life-style due entirely to the one over-riding historical fact that we were once a society which unashamedly drew its core values from the Christian Bible. One such fair-minded atheist is our own prime minister, Julia Gillard. Recently interviewed on Sky News, Ms Gillard said it was important for people to understand their Bibles "not because I'm an advocate of religion - clearly I'm not - but once again, what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture. It's impossible to understand Western literature without having that key of understanding the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them and deconstructs them and brings them back together”.
Ms Gillard was acknowledging two key aspects of the indebtedness we owe the KJV. First what she labelled ‘culture’, that is our Western life style. As she well knows, this includes those two areas to which she has devoted her life - the rights of the worker and parliamentary democracy. Second, she was acknowledging the role of the Bible in the history and development of the English language.
This is in fact the subject of my next lecture, but for completion’s sake I must allude briefly to the immense influence the KJV has had on the English language.
Firstly, there is of course the influence of the Bible narrative itself which cannot be attributed precisely to the King James Version alone although given its unique dominance for most of the 400 years of its life, the KJV would unarguably be the ultimate source in the English-speaking world. Many today who never open a Bible will still know what a ‘prodigal son’ is, or a ‘good Samaritan’ or know a joke about the pearly gates or what Adam said to Eve. If the second chance John Howard was given as Leader of the Opposition was like ‘Lazarus with a triple by-pass’, most people sort of knew that Lazarus was a character in the Bible. Because of Noah and the flood, the worst natural disasters are always of ‘Biblical’ proportions. Anyone who reads or listens to sports commentators knows that the ‘Davids’ still defeat the ‘Goliaths’; that the Adelaide Crows can be ‘crucified’ one week and ‘resurrected’ the next.
The myriad Biblical allusions in Shakespeare come from the Geneva Bible, not the King James Version which had hardly become popular before his death in 1616. But ever since Shakespeare’s time, when earlier Bibles are seen to have influenced the English language, they have only done so through the King James Version. Earlier versions had neither its circulation nor its longevity. The King James Version brought together the best from earlier English Bibles and introduced its own memorable innovations. Hundreds of its expressions have entered the language. Through the King James Version we can speak of ‘wheels within wheels’, ‘the days of our lives’, ‘the salt of the earth’ , ‘a fly in the ointment’ or even dare to hope for ‘peace on earth’>
Without necessarily being aware, we read or hear the words of the KJV Bible every day. It has helped create much of the power and beauty of English. Through it, our language and we ourselves have all been enriched.
James would have been amazed.
