The sublime chorus

The King James Bible After 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W Jones, Cambridge University Press, RRP£25, 378 pages

Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, by David Crystal, Oxford University Press, RRP£14.99, 336 pages

Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011, by Gordon Campbell, Oxford University Press, RRP£16.99, 368 pages

The People’s Bible: The Remarkable History of the King James Version, by Derek Wilson, Lion Hudson, RRP£14.99, 222 pages

The King James Bible: A Short History From Tyndale to Today, by David Norton, Cambridge University Press, RRP£14.99, 232 pages

The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011, by Melvyn Bragg, Hodder and Stoughton, RRP£20, 384 pages

King James Bible: 400th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, RRP£50, 1,520 pages

Not so long ago the Reverend Mary Garbutt, Anglican pastor of a village in Northamptonshire, performed a gruelling sponsored marathon. She read out loud the entire 823,156-word text of the 1611 King James Bible over three and a half days. She read for 14 hours at a stretch, with only occasional 10-minute breaks, while parishioners stood by with orange juice, cakes and throat lozenges. Croaking through the final pages, she burst into tears, she said, from a sense of “spiritual joy”.

Rector Garbutt’s project was just one of many readings, conferences, broadcasts and exhibitions in recent months to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible (KJB), which falls putatively on May 2. For centuries the dominance of the KJB was unchallenged among English-speaking Protestants, and still is among many American Christian faith communities. At his inauguration, President Barack Obama took the oath of office from Lincoln’s copy of the KJB.

Reputedly the most read book in English, it now competes with scores of subsequent translations that have strived to reduce obsolete expressions; yet it still sells some 250,000 copies each year. Despite the stumbling block of its archaic language and spelling, the KJB retains for many an impression of peerless sublimity. All those “begats”, “knoweths” and “spakes”, and occasional sheer gobbledegook – “Moab is my wash-pot ouer Eom wil I cast out my shooe” (in the spelling of the 1611 edition) – interpenetrate with cadences of pure poetry. No translation in English outshines the elegant simplicity, for example, of the KJB’s first verse of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

The anniversary has prompted publication of a stack of celebratory books, not least Oxford’s fine facsimile presentation edition in imitation leather and gold leaf. It could become a popular Christening Bible in years to come. Most of the new KJB commentaries and histories remark on the impact of the Bible on the common language and writers, while listing their favourite phrases culled from the text. Here’s David Crystal’s selection in his Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language: fly in the ointment; rod of iron; lick the dust; how are the mighty fallen; wheels within wheels. Melvyn Bragg, in his The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible, comes up with: fell flat on his face; apple of his eye; man after his own heart; signs of the times; ye of little faith; rise and shine; sour grapes. Derek Wilson, in his The People’s Bible, chooses: clear as crystal; sweat of his brow; fat of the land, but he interestingly adds once-popular biblical phrases that have passed out of fashion: highways and hedges; the nether millstone; dark sayings.

The fact is that many of these famous phrases are owed to William Tyndale’s earlier version. Tyndale, the 16th-century Protestant scholar, was the first to translate large portions of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English; it is estimated that 80 per cent of the KJB derives from his original. Since time immemorial the Bible had been a closed book to all except those who had a mastery of Latin, the “authorised” Bible of the Catholic Church being Jerome’s Vulgate Latin version commissioned by Pope Damasus in the 4th century. It was Tyndale’s life’s passion to make the Bible available to the lay English-speaking public, and he was imprisoned, strangled and burnt at the stake for his pains by Roman Catholic authorities. Within four years of his death in 1536 four new translations of the Bible were written, all dependent to an extent on his initial efforts.

All the studies under review here insist that the KJB achieves something unique, despite the circumstances of its making. As David Norton, in his scholarly history The King James Bible, makes plain, the KJB was not a fresh translation from scratch, nor did the translators strive after literary effect. It was contrived by a committee of 47 scholars based in Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, having before them Tyndale and several subsequent English language Bibles, notably the Bishops’ Bible – used in many churches at the time. The texts of the Old and New Testaments were shared out between the translating groups, and they proceeded by commenting on the existing translations, altering a word here, a phrase there. They frequently returned to the original languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek – while cross-referencing with the English versions of their predecessors. At times, however, they referred to the Jerome Latin text and other translations in modern European languages.

Most of our anniversary commentators claim that the KJB arose from royal vanity. King James I, who succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603, first called a conference of bishops at Hampton Court in 1604. His aim, it seems, was to supersede the previous translations in English with a single authorised version bearing his name. In the preface to the first edition, Myles Smith, then Canon of Hereford Cathedral, wrote that the scholars set out not “to make a new translation, nor yet to make a bad one, a good one ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.”

After the work of separate “companies” of scholars had been completed, 12 of their representatives came together in Stationers’ Hall in the City of London. The final stage of the process is described in a contemporary report to be found in full in the Oxford facsimile: “That part of the Bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue ... and then they met together; and one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian etc; if they found any fault they spoke, if not they read on.”

As Gordon Campbell comments in his lucid description of the process, Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011: “It would be hard to imagine a more rigorous procedure.” The complex ritual of reading the text took the final translators nine months, stopping and starting to discuss a word here, a word there.

The new commentaries divide between those writers who are content to emphasise in general terms the aesthetic resonances of the KJB, and those who focus on specific scholarly details of composition. The tension is reminiscent of the literary spat 60 years ago between the critics FR Leavis and FW Bateson. Leavis, the spiky Cambridge don, insisted that the critic requires no biographical or scholarly background to the text, just keen attention based on untrammelled receptivity. Bateson, however, insisted that only a meticulous dissection of the drafting, emendations, borrowings and variant meanings yields proper receptivity leading to appreciation.

David Norton, more of a Batesonite than a Leavisite, produces a masterly account of the interstices of translation, enabling us to look over the shoulders of those remarkable KJB scholars. The meaning, for him, is in the detail, right down to the addition of an “and” or a “now” at the beginning of a sentence. Take Luke and the story of Mary and Joseph: the delicate shift of meaning by substituting “just” rather than “righteous” in describing Joseph; the description of the couple being “espoused” rather than engaged or married; the decision to retain the word “privily” in Joseph “was minded to put her away privily”. And the subtle shade of difference, indicating the passage of time, between “while he thought these things” and “while he thought on these things”. Norton is intrigued by the minutiae of choice: how a word might aid alliteration here, a doctrinal nuance there, or approximate more closely to the true burden of an original Greek word in an original scriptural codex.

A less pernickety engagement with the KJB texts is ably exemplified by Stephen Prickett in his essay “Language Within Language: King James’ Steamroller”, included in Hamlin and Jones’s collection, The King James Bible After 400 Years. Prickett, a distinguished literary critic and theologian, starts by citing the admiration of generations of writers and critics with no consciousness of the scholarly perspectives of someone like Norton. Typical is the praise of the KJB by early 20th-century critic Arthur Quiller-Couch: it is “a wonder”, he wrote, “before which I can only stand humble and aghast”; or H Wheeler Robinson, for whom it was simply “a miracle”. Prickett notes that the rise in adoration of the KJB’s prose coincides with the initial emergence of the idea of “literature” in the late 18th century. The KJB’s aesthetic achievement, deriving from uniformity of rhythm, and what Mary Allan Chase has called its “one inspired imagination”, presents us, Prickett writes, with “real mysteries about both its sources and the phenomenon of actual creation”. How on earth was this achieved by a committee?

Prickett’s ingenious explanation resides precisely in the committee process whereby the language of Tyndale’s Bible was sanitised by scholars wary of its political, military and Puritan content (even where it agreed more accurately with the Hebrew or Greek original) so as to accord with the timeless, lofty, English ecclesiastical language of the period. For example, Tyndale’s Christmas angels are described as “soldiers”, whereas the KJB translates them as a “heavenly host”; elsewhere Tyndale’s “congregation” is translated as “church”. The effect, according to Prickett, was a “Church English” that was hugely influential, impersonal and intended to be read aloud rather than privately: “high-flown and poetic, related to everyday speech but also at one remove from it”.

But how accurate were the KJB translators, and their predecessors? Robert Alter, no mean translator of the ancient languages himself, offers a brilliant essay in the same collection titled “The Glories and the Glitches of the King James Bible”. From now on I shall always feel queasy on reading the finale of Ecclesiastes in the KJB: “The almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” Alter reveals that the poetic power of this famous line is a mistranslation. The “grasshopper” (from the Hebrew hagav) is more accurately a “locust-tree”, and the word “desire” (aviyyonah) is better translated as “caper-fruit”.

It is left to Melvyn Bragg to claim far-reaching social and political consequences from the KJB in an unabashedly Whiggish class of his own. He argues that the KJB prompted the quest for freedom that inspired Oliver Cromwell; that it gave impetus to the Union against the Confederates and the slave states in the American civil war. By the same token, he declares, the language of the civil rights movements in the 20th century – “Set my people free” – is the language of the KJB. And women such as Octavia Hill, he goes on, were similarly influenced by the authorised Bible, leading to the suffragette movement.

If Bragg’s essential story is a deep distrust of Roman Catholicism for its enslavement of the mind, due in part at least to its lack of a vernacular Bible through the Middle Ages, the great democratic leap forward is owed, according to him, to the influence of the KJB. His view of the “two English-speaking empires” and their Bible-inspired social and political beneficence may not convince all his readers but I am inclined to accept his final word: that the KJB’s impact “has been immeasurable and it is not over yet”.

John Cornwell is author of ‘Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint’ (Continuum)