1611-2011: The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible

As you’ve just heard this year we’re celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James version of the English Bible. To contemporaries in the 17th century it was, of course, just The Bible, and the title of Authorised Version, by which so many of us know it now, didn’t actually appear until 1833 – a fact which surprises many people in the lectures that I have given.

Nationwide there are going to be conferences, special church services, academic events, exhibitions in great libraries, and it’s very good that The National Archives is participating and making available such [a] magnificent and fascinating array of documents at the back. So if you haven’t looked at them please make a point of doing so. There are also going to be radio and television programmes and there’s considerable public and media interest in the United States and in the Commonwealth and other countries with an English language culture.

As you’ve just heard in the United Kingdom we have the King James Bible Trust founded to celebrate this anniversary. Our patrons are the Prince of Wales, the Bishop of London and the noted anti-poverty campaigner, Frank Field MP, and I’m a trustee, hence, I get to do these talks.

The trustees were delighted when the Queen, at The General Synod, in November 2010, went out of her way to point to the 400th anniversary and acclaimed the translation as one of the defining elements of our heritage. Well, that from the supreme governor of the Church of England is, of course, praise indeed.

It’s important, I think, to emphasise that this is only one of many translations of the Bible that are done between the 14th to the 17th centuries. So, first of all, we must ask why is this particular translation so significant.

First of all, it really has deeply enriched the English language with many familiar words and phrases: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ begins the Book of Genesis; ‘‘Let there be light” God said, and there was light’; ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Cain asks when God demanded to know what had happened to Abel; ‘Joseph had a coat of many colours’ – an expensive garment.

Recently the Daily Telegraph demanded: ‘Is David Cameron hiding his light under a bushel?’ I hope all the readers got that rather obscure biblical reference. And more familiarly leading politicians more often refer to one another as ‘the blind leading the blind’. Other opinion formers are accused of ‘not reading the signs of the times’ and (perhaps the most remarkable example I’ve found) in fact the phrase ‘get behind me Satan’ is also the title of a lyric by Irvin Berlin: so we can imagine what temptations are set out in that song.

All of these phrases, of course, come from the King James version. Many of them, or something very similar, had been used in earlier versions – earlier translations – but the new bible, published in 1611, had an astonishing cumulative impact. It spread worldwide to the American colonies and then throughout the British Empire.

The 1611 Bible wasn’t a brand new translation, but a thoroughly revised version: the product of cutting-edge scholarship in Greek, Latin and, in particular, Hebrew, which had made great strides forward in understanding the sophistication of Hebrew texts in the later 16th century.

The project of a new translation was initially suggested to King James VI of Scotland by the Scottish Kirk, not the English church, in 1601 at Burntisland in Fife. But James, although accepting the proposal in principle, did nothing further. However many English churchmen were in agreement with their Scottish colleagues. And then at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, the English Godly (or Puritan leaders as we would now call them) pressed King James I of England – as he had now become on the death of Queen Elizabeth – to implement various ceremonial reforms; that was the main part of their package. The King declined. He knew that these would be controversial and he didn’t intend to destabilise the Church of England so early on in his reign.

However, the Godly party also put forward a request for a new translation of the Bible, and this was something that King James could concede, and was indeed entirely willing to concede – not least because he prided himself on his own scholarly accomplishments. Being the Patron of Scholars suited his public image and his own self-image. I was in Oxford yesterday giving a similar talk and, of course, many of you will know, in the façade of the Bodleian library there is James as the Patron of Scholars surrounded by books, commemorating his visit to the library in 1605.

James had already, of course, encountered the idea in Scotland. And in England politically it was very useful to him as a tactical concession to those who were unhappy with the current state of the church. Perhaps, above all – and James was wily enough to realise this – although it was a concession it had the additional advantage of kicking much of the Puritan controversy into the long grass because a new translation would inevitably take a considerable amount of time.

James and his churchmen could look back, by the early 17th century, to a long established tradition of translation of the scriptures into English. Anglo-Saxon versions of the Gospels and the Psalms were the first to translate scripture into the English vernacular. Then, around 1300, Genesis, Exodus and the Psalms were available in Middle English.

In the 14th century the Lollard Movement, led by John Wycliffe, produced two versions of the full Bible – neither of them the work of Wycliffe himself and involving a group of translators. But both versions closely follow the wording of the Latin Vulgate. And it has been suggested that they weren’t so much stand-alone texts to be read in Medieval English, as cribs for those who had a modicum of Latin but not enough to read the Bible familiarly for themselves.

In any case the Wycliffite Movement was condemned in 1407 and any fresh translations of the Bible or the use of any Wycliffite translations was forbidden. But there was a let out. You could use a translation if it had received diocesan or synodical sanction.

And exploiting that clause – that little bit of wiggle room – manuscript versions of the Wycliffite texts were widely copied and circulated right up until the early 16th century. So clearly there was a real hunger for the Bible in English well before The Reformation. Too many historians, I think, have simply thought that the struggle for an English Bible is a 16th century phenomenon . It isn’t, it certainly goes back much, much earlier.

But then, of course, came printing – the transformative technology of the early modern world. The printed Vulgate emerged in 1456 followed by a wave of editions, learned editions, clever editions of classical texts.

And these inspired the brilliant young English scholar William Tyndale. But he fell under suspicion in England and fled to Germany. He almost certainly met Luther at Wittenberg, only two years earlier Luther’s own German Testament had appeared in 1522. And Tyndale’s English New Testament was printed at Worms [Germany], significantly outside England in 1526.

Tyndale had also started on translating the Old Testament, and he left some translations in manuscript. But he was hunted down and burned as a heretic in Holland in 1536. Significantly, the same year that Anne Boleyn, Queen Anne Boleyn, another devotee of The New Learning, was executed on Tower Green; it’s a backlash year against new ideas coming in.

Significantly, Queen Anne owned her own copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, and it’s now in the British Library. Much of translating done by Tyndale of the New Testament passed almost unchanged into the 1611 King James Version, an acknowledgment of the significance of Tyndale’s achievement.

By the 1530s the idea of an English Bible was becoming mainstream and Miles Coverdale, a Cambridge monk, published in 1535 a complete English Bible, tactfully dedicated to Henry VIII. Coverdale knew German so he could put Luther’s translations into English. The rest he translated from the Latin Vulgate.

Coverdale didn’t know enough Hebrew to tackle the Old Testament afresh, but his translation into English of the German Psalms became an English liturgical classic. Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, reinstated by Queen Elizabeth in 1559, uses the Coverdale Psalms within the settings of matins and evensong, and traditional Anglican congregations still sing the Psalms in those services in the earlier translation. Happily, Coverdale survived to see his work acknowledged. Although he had been in exile under Mary Tudor he returned under Elizabeth’s accession and he assisted at the consecration of Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1560.

But to return to the reign of Henry VIII: in 1537 Henry softened a little towards bible translations and a revised version using the text of both Tyndale and Coverdale emerged. This was known as Matthew’s Bible and it was the first to carry Royal authorisation. Matthew, however, was a pseudonym – almost certainly the radical Protestant, John Rogers, was the promoter. Rogers paid a high price for his work because he was burned under Mary Tudor in the Catholic backlash of the mid-century.

Then, shortly after came the Great Bible of 1539, printed in Paris under the patronage of Henry VIII’s leading minister, Thomas Cromwell, who was himself a Reformer. This was in response to the Royal Injunctions of 1538, which ordered a lectern-size bible to be set up in all English churches. So ‘Great’ in Great Bible really refers to the size that these were not bibles for individuals’ study or reading, they were lectern bibles, used to read to the congregation.

In 1540 Archbishop Cranmer extended the use of the Great Bible to all English places of worship. The title page of the Great Bible is superb, often reproduced, almost certainly from a woodcut by Hans Holbein. And it shows God blessing Henry VIII, who, in turn, is handing the Bible down on his right hand and his left hand to Archbishop Cranmer and his great minister Thomas Cromwell.

All these 1530s editions rely heavily on the work of Tyndale and Coverdale, but in 1539 the Oxford scholar Richard Taverner produced a revision of Matthew’s Bible, with improved versions from the original New Testament Greek. A pattern was established. Taverner knew no Hebrew, so for the Old Testament he based his translations on the Latin Vulgate. And the pattern was: translators did what they could. When they didn’t have all the skills necessary (perhaps only one skill, like knowledge of New Testament Greek) they would get the text from whatever source they could enter such as a German version.

The other driving force here was printing, of course, which had vastly increased the number of inexpensive copies that could be printed and sold. And it mustn’t be forgotten that scholars and publishers alike saw in this a commercial opportunity just as much as a religious or educational opportunity.

But it still remained the case that commissioning a translation of the whole text of the bible with a uniform prose style throughout would need considerable resources. Academics would have to be supported with an income away from their jobs or their parishes for the length of time required. And so, meanwhile, the best that publishers could do was offer an amalgam of different pieces of translation.

Then, in 1540, came the great political upheaval of the downfall of Thomas Cromwell after his disastrous choice of Anne of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife. The conservative faction at court returned to power along with the Latin Vulgate for official use. And, in 1546, use of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s Bible translations was forbidden by Royal Proclamation. But only for a year because, with the accession of the boy King, Edward VI in 1547 and the Protestant regimes of First Protector Somerset and then the Duke of Northumberland, English Bibles could, once more, be printed, circulated, and used in worship.

But after a brief six-year reign, the boy King Edward died and his half sister the Catholic Mary Tudor overthrew Northumberland to claim the Crown. Mary, at once, put the Protestant Reformation into reverse. The Mass was restored and, with it, the use of the [Latin] Vulgate. Yet, by now, printing had made it virtually impossible for any government to control the translations that had previously been printed, that people had already bought, and that they could still keep at home for their personal use.

New technologies always push up against the frontiers of confidentiality. Printing is one of those great breakthroughs that pushes up against confidentiality and widens the audience for all sorts of material. And I suppose you can think recently of the internet, of ‘Wikileaks’ and so forth – that’s pushing up against these frontiers of confidentiality in our own age.

In exile at Geneva, already a great focus of radical Protestantism, the Oxford classicist and Calvinist William Whittingham, published in 1557 a Revised New Testament. He intended it for his fellow English Protestants sheltering there. But for the first time, innovatively, the text was divided into verses to enable easy reference, and it was printed in Roman type, not Blackletter.

When everyone else rushed back to England on Mary’s death Whittingham stayed behind to supervise a complete translation. And in 1560 he produced the Geneva Bible. He dedicated it to Elizabeth I.

It’s possible to see the influence here of Calvin and other continental Reformers and, particularly perhaps French translators like [Jacques] Lefèvre d’Etaples. This Bible of 1560 was popularly known as the ‘Breeches Bible’ from its rendering of Genesis, where Adam and Eve, realising they were naked, sewed themselves breeches. The Geneva Bible remained very influential, under Elizabeth many passages were reused in the King James Version, and the last printing of Geneva was as late as 1644. So this was an exceptionally influential translation of the bible for English readers.

At the same time, after 1558 the Great of Cromwell and Cranmer returned to popularity. In 1566 Archbishop Matthew Parker and his colleagues undertook a revision which became known as the Bishops’ Bible, and in 1571 Convocation ordered all church wardens to obtain a copy for their churches.

We can see here the influence of the Northern Rising between 1569 and 1571. The Northern Rising had seen the religiously conservative rebels of the North of England destroying the English bibles and English prayer books. Northern churches would need re-equipping to get the Protestant message across.

The Bishops’ Bible followed the Geneva Bible in dividing the text into verses for easy reference. That was a device that very quickly proved very popular for both readers and preachers. In The Bishops’ Bible any phrases savouring of lightness or obscenity were discreetly tided up. It wasn’t a new translation but there was an attempt to make it perhaps rather more acceptable. No marginal notes were allowed, in the same way, to avoid contention over the meaning of the text.

The translators worked book-by-book without much coordination so the translation is uneven. It does vary in quality and it doesn’t have that wonderful homogeneous flow which later on distinguishes the Authorized Version. But in the frontispiece of the Bishops’ Bible the Queen and her ministers are depicted as presiding over a bishop-dominated church. Here is a clear visual indication that there will be no change to the 1559 religious settlement. After The Protestant Settlement in Parliament in 1559 a Catholic minority still survived in Elizabethan England.

In Roman Canon Law it was necessary for laymen to receive special permission to read a vernacular bible. Intent on creating an acceptable version, members of the English Catholic College abroad, first of all at Reims, and later they moved to Douai where they settled for a much longer time. These English Catholics translated the New Testament in 1582. An English Old Testament followed in 1609-[16]10.

Both translations were based on the Vulgate as the Council of Trent had insisted that the Vulgate retain its preeminence for Catholics, but the original Greek was consulted by the translators for the New Testament. Much of the English is truly Elizabethan. It’s a very direct, vivid translation. It catches Elizabethan England and Elizabethan language at a peak period and this direction, this vividness, this clarity was admired by the translators of the King James version. They read the Reims New Testament and one can hear its echoes in many of their own verses.

The number of versions of the Bible in circulation by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, together with increasing scholarly knowledge of Greek and, particularly, of Hebrew (Hebrew moves forward in terms of scholarly knowledge in the second half of the 16th century) – that lay behind the request from Hampton Court in 1604 for a new translation. The leading speaker was the Puritan academic Dr John Reynolds. At the end of a long list of hoped for reforms Reynolds asked for one only translation of the Bible to be authenticable and read in the Church. Another version has the rather more courtly ‘may your majesty be pleased that the Bible be new translated’.

But Richard Bancroft, the authoritarian Bishop of London was initially opposed. He said ‘there’s no point in having translations that will accommodate every man’s humour’. And of course he had a point – translating the Bible isn’t a value-free exercise, you can slant it. And what Bancroft thought, was that there would be a multiplicity of translations, giving each wing of The Church their own version – not a stupid objection.

James, however, remained open to the idea. Not least because he personally had strong objections to the Geneva Bible, which he found offensive in its explicit condemnation of royal rule and its frequent use of the word ‘tyrant’ where the more tactful translation would just have been ‘King’. Significantly, the word tyrant is not found at all in the King James version.

James also made his views clear, ‘His Highness wishes that some especial pain shall be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation, and this to be done by the best-learned at both the universities. After then, to be reviewed by the Bishops and the chief learned of The Church. From then to be presented to the Privy Council, and, lastly, to be ratified by His Royal Authority to be read in the whole church and none other’. Notice the pyramidal structure of authority that James erects – the hurdles, if you like – that the new translation must get across before becoming the new translation authorised to be used in churches.

Old Archbishop Whitgift had died in February 1605 and James elevated Bancroft from London to Canterbury. The new Archbishop was keen to follow the King’s wishes, and in July 1605, he wrote to a group of Cambridge scholars that James was ‘genuinely enthusiastic’ about this new translation. It hadn’t been grudgingly conceded – not at all. Bancroft said that James was more than enthusiastic about the new translation of the Bible than he was with peace concluded with Spain. Well that’s a high accolade because James was certainly very proud of, having in 1604, concluded the Treaty of London with Spain and brought to an end the long Armada War that had dogged the later years of Elizabeth. So, if Bancroft was telling the truth about James’ attitude that was certainly a striking endorsement of his keenness for bible translation.

Bancroft also organised the financing: the practicality of Bancroft is one of the things that stand out in the emergence of the King James Bible. Bancroft required his bishops to find livings for the Translators (usually by now capitalised with a capital ‘T’), livings of more than 20 pounds a year (a decent income) and to provide curates for those livings so that the parish would not suffer, so that the Translators would be free of parochial responsibility. And 20 pounds a year was a decent income. The Translating Committee was to be divided into six companies of eight members each, with six directors supervising them. However we only know the names of 47 men so either seven of them were never appointed or we’ve lost seven names. I am inclined to the point of view that they simply couldn’t find enough learned men to fulfill the strength of the companies that they had initially hoped for.

Bancroft insisted that the base text used by all the Translators must be the Bishops’ Bible – as little altered and as much as was compatible with the original texts. And Robert Barker, the King’s Printer, supplied 40 unbound copies of the Bishops’ Bible for the Translators use. However Bancroft’s instructions to use the Bishops’ Bible seem to have been discreetly ignored. Modern studies (modern textual studies) have shown that perhaps as little as ten percent of the Authorised Version can be traced directly to the Bishops’ Bible. Clearly the translators cast their net very much more widely than Bancroft had intended.

James appointed Godly Puritans like (John) Reynolds of Corpus Oxford, but also high churchmen – the new style of churchmanship that was beginning to come forward in the Jacobean church: men like John Overall and Lancelot Andrews. And he appointment one layman: the pioneering manuscript scholar, collector, mathematician, astronomer and translator of Sir John Christensen – this was Sir Henry Saville.

Yesterday in Merton College we had a special evensong and the choir, the wonderful choir of Merton College sang a special laudatory hymn to the bust of Sir Henry Saville, which was a very appropriate acknowledgement of the great man’s work.

The aim of the bible was a thorough revision rather than a brand new translation. Careful marginal notes were allowed but only on matters of text and translation. There were to be no controversial matters of doctrine sneaked into these marginal notes.

And the scale of the project was remarkable. These six groups were to work in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster: two groups in each place. Each cleric was to produce his own individual translation, which would then be discussed by the members of his group. An agreed text was then circulated to the other five groups until a final version emerged. If the Translators disagreed about any passage, or found something obscure, they could ask for assistance wherever they liked clergy or laymen.

There was also insistence on uniformity. Texts quoted in the New Testament were to be reproduced in exactly the same words as they were translated in the Old Testament. In other words, if you quoted from the Old Testament in the New Testament, they both had to be in exactly the same words. But biblical scholars already knew that the so-called quotations in the New Testament were much more often paraphrases – sometimes slightly inaccurate – of New Testament verses.

Samuel Ward, one of the translators on the Cambridge panel – allocated the Apocrypha – kept a very personal diary, which still survives. Clearly from this diary Ward was a Puritan. He agonises over the most menial things like eating too many cherries or, as he says, ‘bloating himself with cheese at lunch’. All these things: on and on and on. Major sins like pride and all the rest he doesn’t much touch on, but Greed, yes he’s very worried about Greed. These spiritual reflections make it clear that Ward was a Puritan, but he reveals little about the work of the Translators in his diary.

Once the translation was set into motion the project drops from sight and only scraps remain. In November 1604 Bishop Lancelot Andrews sent a note to the secretary of The Society of Antiquaries that he couldn’t attend the meeting, as ‘the afternoon is our translation time’. I see here several members of The Society of Antiquaries, to which membership I have the honour of belonging myself, and we still meet on Thursday afternoons, so you see how very traditional English academic life is.

There is also an extraordinary velum bound book of 125 pages in Lambeth Palace Library. This is entitled An English translation of the Epistles of Paul the Apostle. And textual evidence points to its origins within the second Westminster Company under William Barlow. Interestingly the manuscript has gone through several hands for corrections, so here we have manuscript proof that that passing of the text around the members of your group was actually done, and they wrote their alternative versions on this penultimate text.

It’s also clear that such manuscript books were called in when they were needed for final editing. A letter survives from the great orientalist William Eyre, fellow of Emmanuel [College], Cambridge, to James Ussher, later an Irish Archbishop and famous, of course, for preserving The Book of Kells. Eyre asked for the return of his the manuscript book because the king had ordered the Archbishop to hurry up with the translation and get it printed. James wanted the bible translation speeded up; he clearly hadn’t expected it would take quite as long as it did.

Lastly, the Bodleian Library possesses a copy of the Bishops’ Bible printed in 1602, the base text that Bancroft told the Translators to use. And marked on it are the suggestions of an individual Translator, followed by comments and corrections of his colleagues. It’s clear that that the group that met in Merton College, Oxford for their initial meeting on 13 February, 1605, and the group included the rising figure of George Abbott, future Archbishop of Canterbury. They met in the rooms of Sir Henry Saville. Here on these pages in these various bibles, we can see the Translators really getting to grips with text and working as a group, testing their different translations one against the other.

Bishop Miles Smith of Gloucester was chosen to write the long and beautiful preface in 1610, by which time a final text was virtually ready for the printer. Miles Smith is an unheralded great writer of English prose, I think, because he begins ‘translation it is that openeth the window to let in the light’. I think that’s a wonderful English sentence. And Smith hoped that the translation would bring its readers the light of understanding, stableness of persuasion, repentance from dead works, newness of life, holiness, peace and joy.

And the result was a masterpiece of English prose. Moreover, as the work of the team, which had collated their drafts before arriving at the final version; it was remarkably homogeneous from Genesis to Revelation. Here was God’s word speaking in one uniform, divine voice.

However, although it carried an aura of royal authority since the King had initiated the project; there was merely a statement on the title page ‘appointed to be read in churches’. Regarded as simply a revision of earlier texts it wasn’t even entered into the official stations register. The new version – the Authorised Version as we would call it – contained various misprints, and the Geneva Bible was still widely used. It was last printed in fact in 1644. It was only after The Restoration that the King James version became universally familiar, both in the United Kingdom and in the American colonies. It did not acquire its modern sobriquet of the Authorised Version (as I’ve mentioned) until 1833 – strikingly late.

Nevertheless the King James version remained the only bible used in British churches until the Revised Version of 1881-[18]85, and this was, in turn, superceded in the 20th century by the more modern, revised Standard version. But the King James Bible is still the best known translation. Its long history at the centre of the religious devotions of the English speaking world makes it the most important book in the English language and, arguably, the most influential book in the whole history of Western printed culture.

So in 2011 we are celebrating an extraordinary achievement. Not solely religious, but also literary and cultural. Not solely English, but also international and, indeed, worldwide. Thank you.

Transcribed by Poppy Waskett as part of a volunteer project, April 2015