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| Today is the 400th birthday of the KJV |
However, though this fact appears to mean something, no-one has ever been able to discover what it might be. There is simply no evidence, for example, that Shakespeare himself had anything to do with the translation. Without connection to something larger, this information is ultimately just a piece of trivia. It is merely interesting.
The same is true with anniversaries. They seem to mean something—but what exactly? This year marks the 400th year since the publication of the King James Version, in 1611. In honour of the date any number of conferences are being held and several books have been published. What are we to make of this? Are we to hearken back with nostalgia to a time when the English-speaking peoples of the world had a majestic, single translation of the Bible? Are we to praise the aesthetic qualities of the KJV’s language? Even the arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens has written a celebratory essay, noting the remarkable influence of the English Bible on English culture, law and language.
For more than a century and a half it has been widely recognised that the KJV translation is not based on the best versions of the Greek and Hebrew that are now available. Its elevated and sonorous language seems far removed from the language we speak today even at our most formal. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair read from the KJV of 1 Corinthians 13 at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, he changed the KJV’s somewhat wooden and impersonal rendering “charity” to “love”. Few would deny that he made the right choice. Having said that, the KJV remains stubbornly popular. The latest figures from the Christian Booksellers’ Association show that sales of the KJV continue to outrank modern versions like the ESV, Holman and the NRSV.
The real reason to celebrate is in fact not the enduring literary quality and cultural resonance of one English translation of the Bible, but the fact that there are translations of the Bible into English at all. What 1611 represents is the culmination of a process of translating the Bible that began in the 1520s with a man named William Tyndale (d. 1536). It is Tyndale’s vision—a vision of the ordinary ploughboy reading the Scriptures for himself —that lies behind the 1611 version. And it is this vision that is worth celebrating.
The Oxford scholar Tyndale was convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ was not a matter of religious observance or of church membership. God himself had spoken in words that ordinary people could understand, so that they might turn and believe. Apparently fluent in eight languages, Tyndale gave his life to translating, printing and distributing parts of the Bible into the English tongue, something that had been expressly made illegal in 1409.
For Tyndale, the God of Jesus Christ is not a mysterious, distant and unknown deity who, if he speaks at all, speaks in a babble of Latin. By no means: the message of Jesus Christ and his victory over the devil and the grave is for all people everywhere, of every tribe and every tongue.
This message is not static, but dynamic: it is marvellously potent. It is the power of life itself. What Tyndale realized was that thepower of God himself lay not in the structures of the church, or with popes and bishops, or even with kings, but in the word of God, living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.
Tyndale staked his life and safety on the power of God’s word. He knew that the word of God in the hands of the ploughboy was dynamite to kings and popes because it was the word about the rule of the Lord of lords. King James’ ancestor Henry VIII had Tyndale hunted down to his hiding place in Belgium and burnt at the stake. He had only completed the New Testament and the Pentateuch. The sad irony of it was that not so long after
Tyndale’s death King Henry himself authorized an English translation of the Bible which was substantially based on Tyndale’s work.
That Bible—called the “Great” Bible because it was immensely big—still remained out of reach of the ploughboy. It wasn’t until 1560 that a Bible was published that the ploughboy—and the milkmaid—could call their own: the Geneva Bible.
The Geneva translation of the Bible was produced by a group of Protestant exiles who had fled the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. They busied themselves with producing a translation that would make the word of God accessible to ordinary people without any need for some kind of go-between.
The Bibles they produced were not beautiful. They were printed in clear roman type and not the more ornate gothic type. They had for the first time a system of verse numbers for easy reference. They were cheaply bound and affordable, in an age when books could be as expensive as cars are now. And the Geneva Bible was produced in great numbers. It is estimated that over 300,000 were produced in the period between 1560 and 1640, in more than 140 editions. Even after the KJV was published, the Geneva Bible continued to be extremely popular with the English people. As Alister McGrath writes, “England was a Protestant nation, and the Geneva Bible was its sacred book”.
We hear in this period for the first time of events called “prophesyings”. These were long sessions of what we now call “Bible teaching” in which the congregation sat with Geneva Bibles open on their laps, ready to question the speaker. We also learn of the Bible entering the family home for the first time, with Protestant patriarchs adopting the practice of family devotions.
Controversially, the Geneva Bible included with it explanatory and interpretative notes in the margin—rather like a modern study Bible. These notes were designed to aid people in their reading of the Bible for themselves. Most of them are simply clarifications of the translation. But some of them strayed onto theologically and politically dangerous territory, suggesting for example that a king might be deposed by his people were he to be found by them to be sufficiently corrupt.
Naturally enough, the Geneva Bible was never popular with officialdom. When King James VI of Scotland came south to sit on the throne of his cousin Elizabeth as James I of England, one of his first acts was to commission a new translation of the Bible for the Church of England. In commissioning the new version at the Hampton Court Conference (1604) he indicated that he disliked the Geneva Bible because its explanatory notes were “very partiall, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much, of dangerous, and trayeterous conceites”. It was clear what was at stake as far as he was concerned.
What the translators produced was definitely a more conservative translation. The vocabulary they chose, for example, more clearly endorsed the Church of England’s existing structures over and against more Presbyterian alternatives. Tyndale’s “elder”, “overseer” and “congregation” are translated in the KJV as “priest”, “bishop” and “church”. If we might say anything about the stylistic emphasis of the KJV, it would be to note that, where Geneva was a Bible for private reading, this was a Bible designed to be read aloud in church. It was translation to be heard as well as read. It reflects a high priority on the reading of Scripture in the language of the people—something that seems to have been forgotten by our contemporary translators.
Regardless, the translators of the Authorized Version show their great debt to Geneva and to Tyndale. Clearly they had an eye on the work that had been done before them. As a result, it would be seriously misleading to claim that the King James on its own was the source for the influence of biblical language upon English. As David Crystal in his recent book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language shows, many of the most beloved Biblical phrases emanated from Tyndale’s pen. The KJV merely transmitted his influence.
The 400th anniversary of the KJV could be merely interesting—an item of nostalgia for a time that is long past, or a moment for antiquarians to dote on a few decaying books. But if we recall what the translation of the Bible into English meant—that the voice of God was now addressed to the ordinary English speaker in his or her own language— then the memory of 1611 assumes a profound significance. The word of God is not to be chained in foreign or archaic language. Ratherit is to be made available to people everywhere that they might hear—and hearing, believe.
This article was first published at eternity.biz. Used with permission.
