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| Rev Dr John Harris leading a public parade past Flinders Street Station to place a 1611 KJB in the Bible Exhibition at Melbourne City Library |
This is the text of a lecture given by Rev Dr John Harris at the University of Wollongong in September 2011. It is re-produced here in full due to popular demand.
In 1611 a remarkable committee set up by King James 1st of England produced the King James Version of the Bible, the most influential book in the history of the world, published in uncountable millions and still read 400 years later.
On 22nd March 1603, slumped in her chair and dying, the childless Queen Elizabeth responded at last to the urgent pleas of her courtiers to name her successor. Among others, the name of her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, was spoken. Unable to speak, she managed to cross the fingers of both hands above her head to form a crown. She died the next morning.
In the summer of 1603, when James was journeying south from Scotland 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 careful legislation, her so called 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. But 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 Prebyterianism 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 of his own appointed bishops, obligated to him for their status, their wealth and their 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 although 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. Also, his bishops could feel they had some control over the text. After all, 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. ‘I have lived among Puritans and was kept for the most part as a ward under them,' he said, ‘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 spent his infancy. 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 instill 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, of which I am certain there were many, perhaps among the minor nobility, allowed to mix 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 with himself in charge of it.
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. Old Testament kings were labelled tyrants and disobedience to the king was often applauded in the margins. James declared that he had not yet seen a good translation of the Bible into English and that the Geneva Bible was the worst of all.
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 6 teams - what they called ‘companies’, reporting to an overall editorial committee, the Privy Council and the King Probably 47 of them were still there at the end. They were the famous and the less-known, bishops and college principals, university professors and humbler learned men. There were moderates, extreme high churchmen and at least 25% were acknowledged Puritans. While it is true they were all middle-aged or elderly men, they were nevertheless people who differed greatly in outlook and lifestyle. There was the formidable Lancelot Andrewes of whom it was said that the world did not have sufficient learning to know how learned he was. Second perhaps only to Andrews was the Puritan John Reynolds who at Hampton Court had suggested the new translation in the first place, described as a ‘living library’ and ‘England’s third university’. The widely-traveled linguist Hadrain a Saravia had served as a chaplain on expeditions to the New World. Hebrew scholar Edward Lively fathered 13 children and lived in poverty all his life. He died during the translation project, bequeathing his few goods to the poor of the parish. Master of the Puritan Emmanuel College, Laurence Chaderton was one of the greatest preachers of his day. On one occasion, he preached for two hours and when he stopped the congregation with one voice cried out, ‘For God’s sake, go on, go on, we beg you!’ There was the urbane Richard Thomson who ‘seldom went to bed sober’, and the hassled John Overall, Professor of Divinity, who caused himself no end of marital complications by marrying a celebrity during the project ,a vivacious young woman described in the press as ‘the greatest English Beauty of her time’.
They were a very mixed and in some ways curious group, but 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 dominance of the King James Version needed no help. 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 education started to become normal for English children, those primary schools were Church of England schools where the Bible was heard every day and was a major component of the curriculum.
Across the Atlantic in the Puritan new world, the Geneva Bible persisted for a while longer but soon, even more so than in England, the KJV became the sole defining text of conservative Protestantism and, in ultra conservative circles, remains so today.
As the translators had so passionately hoped, it had become heard, read and understood by the people; a Bible which, in the translators’ own words, ‘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. 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 Gettysberg Address with the words ‘four score years and seven 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 those Biblical images in the souls 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.
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. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in 2008,
‘If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.’
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’ . 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.’ A reference of course to Hebrews 13.
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. In this the King James Bible’s 400th Anniverary Year, even the world’s leading atheists have sincerely acknowledged its place in history, society and culture. Christopher Hitchins described its language as ‘something timeless‘. Richard Dawkins urged that ‘our schools bring this precious piece of our heritage to all our children’ . Another 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 English language and literature.
Firstly, there is the influence of the Bible narrative itself which of course 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 of Bible stories in the English-speaking world. Many today who never open a Bible will still know what a ‘prodigal son’ is, or a ‘good Samaritan’ . A billboard at my local shopping centre proclaims ‘Let There be Lightest’. It’s an ad for a New Balance sports shoe. 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 our local football team 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 – from Tyndale and Coverdale, from the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva Bible - and introduced its own memorable innovations. Literally hundreds of its expressions have entered our 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’, ‘nothing new under the sun’, 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.
There is another reason for the enduring power of this Bible. It is not just that the KJV gave the English language so many potent figures of speech. It also had what we might call its own register, its own memorable style, an amalgam of rhythm, cadence and word choice that lent it a remarkable rhetorical power. One of the main factors is to do with the choice of strong words foreshadowed by King James himself in one of his instructions to the translators – that they favour the older, simpler words.
Let us pause for a moment here to consider just what the English language had become. The language of England prior to the Norman French Conquest had been Saxon or Old English. After 1066 the old language began to be overlaid by French terms, the speech of the Conquerors. Thus what we now understand as English is an amalgam of Saxon and French. Many words which we consider to have come from Latin actually came via the French, already heavily Latinized or, as they say, a Romance language.
But many of the old Saxon words yet survive today. They include what the linguists call the strong verbs – to take, to do, to bring, to make, to love, to eat, drink, dig, speak, say, sit, lie, sleep, to live and to die. They remain also in the simple, mostly one-syllable words of family life, words like man, wife, child, food, bread, meat, salt, house, room, fire and hearth.
French words on the other hand were terms for those things which interested the conquerors – government, the legal system, the sophisticated life and the church. It’s easy to catch the flavour of Norman French concerns in the words of government the French have saddled us with - administration, authority, state, court, treasury and taxation. In the law we have been given judge, plaintiff, defendant, attorney ,inquest, summons, verdict, punishment, imprisonment, infringement and fine. In the worlds of art and learning we have been bequeathed prose, rhyme, prologue, volume, chapter, sculpture and tragedy. Many of us as schoolchildren may have wished they had not given us grammar, geometry and study.
In the church we gained religion, theology, sacrament, clergy, confession and penance. The French had many words for wrong-doing like crime, infringement, transgression and misdemeanour. Saxon had a good simple word, synne (sin) and thankfully the KJV translators chose mostly to use it and we all know exactly what it means. Yes, they French language gave us beautiful words too like devotion, salvation and redemption, words which had by then gained specific theological meanings. The Second Westminster Company which translated Paul’s Epistles used these theologically-laden words somewhat more liberally than the other companies, partly because of the nature of their text.
May I pause a moment and dare to suggest that in many cases the Saxon words would still have communicated better than the new theological terms like propitiation and justification. It is clearer to speak of Jesus buying us back than of our redemption, simpler to say that we are put right with God rather than justified. That is why we use the Saxon terms in modern English translations because the truth is that the simple, old Saxon words still communicate better, even today.
This tiny critique of the translation of Paul ‘s epistles aside, the power of the language of the KJV comes very largely from the fact that over 90% of its words are Saxon. They had then and in many ways still have the power that comes from directness and simplicity.
Some of the King James Bible’s most memorable and inspired phrases consist entirely of one-syllable Saxon Words.
And the Word was made flesh.
I am the bread of life.
King of kings and Lord of Lords.
I am the way, the truth and the life.
And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
But also, to add to that, the translators wanted the Bible to sound good, to be memorable, beautiful and authoritative. They wanted words of power.
They achieved this by revising the translation as it was read aloud to them thus continually adjusting how it sounded. They wanted it to impact reader and hearer alike. And herein lay some of its genius. While the KJV, acting under the king’s specific instructions, drew heavily on the great work of the past, on Tyndale, Coverdale , the Bishop’s Bible and the Geneva Bible, they had the knack of tweaking it, of making tiny changes which made an immense difference.
Take Genesis 1:2. Tyndale had translated the last phrase, and the spirit of God moved upon the water, leaving out the Hebrew word face or surface as redundant. All subsequent English translations followed his lead. The KJV translators, hearing the verse read, reinstated the word ‘face’ – moved upon the face of the waters. This gave the text rhythm – moved upon the face of the waters. This is the anapestic metre of two unstressed syllables and then a stressed syllable, or simple variations of it.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
This metre, this rhythm is embedded deeply in the English language, especially in its Saxon phrases, because French words are too long and often differently stressed. For this reason it is a commonly used metre for humorous or popular verse, notably the limerick:
There was a young lady from Clyde
Of eating green apples she died…
It is no accident that many important and memorable texts have been cast in the anapestic metre. It is in the DNA of our language.
I am the light of the world
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
As long as it is the basic metre, its power and retentiveness is retained whether absolutely every syllable fits the metre or not, especially when the key words fall on the stressed syllables.
I am the way the truth and the life.
Yea though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death.
And John 1 verse 1: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
Well do I recall my grandfather’s horror on opening the New English Bible when it first came out in the 1950s, and reading that verse:
In the beginning God was, and what God was, the Word was. “They have taken a verse which culminates in God”, he declared, “and made it culminate in was!”
Let me leave you with one last but supremely important gift from the Saxon language, celebrated in every English Bible, not just the KJV, but in every English Bible from the Saxon , through Wycliffe and Tyndale and on to all modern-language Bibles today.
The Saxon language has given us God whose essence is goodness as we understand God to be. The Hebrew Scriptures gave us El-shaddai, Almighty God, the God of Power and Might, and Adonai-sabaot, the Lord of Hosts, the Supreme Lord of all the Hosts of Heaven. Never must we forget this powerful , transcendent aspect of our God who is indeed God Almighty. And Jesus gave us God as Abba, Father, the Supreme Parent to whom we can relate as children of God.
But the Saxon language gave us God who is Good, for in Saxon, God and Good are cognate, they are the same word. The could have given us Thor, whom we still celebrate today on ‘Thorsday’, a name some think may be related to the Greek Theos. But they did not.
They gave us our word for God, the one who is not only eternally powerful, but eternally Good. This is a truth we must cherish, a gift across all space and time that touches us still today. This God who is Good has been proclaimed by the King James Version of the Bible for 400 years.
The King James Version of the Bible has changed the world. It is the most influential book ever published. It’s legacy will never be lost whether people acknowledge it or not. It’s message is timeless.
It may have been born of religious and political turbulence. It may have begun life as the Bible of King and Church. But it became the Bible of the people. It fulfilled its destiny.
King James would have been amazed!
