Richard Major

GUNPOWDER, SPITTLE & PARCHMENT:

The curious origins of the greatest English Bible

a talk given at the four hundredth anniversary commemoration of the King James Bible at Faculty of Teacher Education, Zagreb, Croatia, on 10 November 2011,

organised by the Anglican Chaplaincy of Zagreb (www.anglican.hr) and Hravatsko Biblijsko Drutvo (www.hbd.hr)

richard@richardmajor.com

Its a great privilege to be here before you. And its a pleasure to be here to praise something as splendid and beautiful as the King James Bible. Were come together this evening to commemorate the greatest of all modern bibles. Youll be hearing from Janet Berkovic about its literary beauty, and from Jutta Henner about the principles of its translation. Its my job to tell you why, humanly speaking, the King James Bible came into existence. Im here to discuss the politics and history. If you came expecting an edifying story youll be disappointed. Its a matter of intrigue, perversion, menace, and above all of violence: of gunpowder, spittle and grubby old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times. And that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible:
King James himself.y ol
d parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

1. SPITTLE:
King James and his Bible

In spring of 1603 a curious little Scot travelled south to England, a country he had never seen before. James had been King of Scotland for 33 years.

.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

Now at last, after a lifetime of waiting, he had become King of the much larger and richer realm of England.

.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

It is difficult to like James. Of course hed had a wretched life. His mother was the infamous

.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times:

Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, Queen of Scots, the most notorious woman of the age.

Mary, Queen of Scots, the most notorious woman of the age.

His father was

the pitiful Henry, Lord Darnley,

the pitiful Henry, Lord Darnley,

a diseased and dimwitted teenager.

the pitiful Henry, Lord Darnley,

a diseased and dimwitted teenager. In March 1566, when Mary was heavily pregnant, Darnleys cronies broke into her bedroom, put a gun to her head,

and stabbed to death David Rizzio,

her Italian secretary.

her Italian secretary. Very soon afterward later James was born; then the house where Darnley was staying was blown up with gunpowder,

and Darnley was found in the orchard,

dead.

Everyone thought Mary was guilty of her husbands assassination. She was forced to abdicate, and fled to England, where she plotted to murder Queen Elizabeth. In the end, Elizabeth had to have her

beheaded.

Meanwhile her son, little James Stuart was, from the age of one,

James VI, King of Scots.

He grew up ugly and furtive. He stammered. His tongue was too big for his mouth he had the unfortunate habit of spitting, which everyone noticed, which annoyed everyone,

and which somehow seemed to define him.

James was, in a way, clever, an intellectual but without being, in any sensible direction, intelligent. He was bookish and foolish. His nickname was the wisest fool in Christendom. He was a pedant, a bigot and a bore. His mind was full of bent, bitter, nightmarish notions,

and so were his books.

The book King James was proudest of was not the King James Bible, but a treatise he wrote as King of Scots called

Dmonologie (1597), which was all about witches: how to detect if they had got through a keyhole; how to track them down; how to prosecute and kill them.

Such he was, for many decades: King of Scotland; scribbler of treasties; witch-hunter; red-headed, arrogant, sneaky, full of spit.

Such he was, for many decades: King of Scotland; scribbler of treasties; witch-hunter; red-headed, arrogant, sneaky, full of spit.

He was waiting, waiting for a death, waiting for his splendid cousin

Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland,

to die; and

when she did, early in 1603,

to die; and

when she did, early in 1603,

James came south to

London,

the greatest metropolis of Christendom,

to be crowned

king.

king. Great though Elizabeth had been, England was tired of her, and expectations were high for

King James.

All those expectations were

disappointed. His reign was a failure and a scandal.

England has never before or since known

a morass of intrigue, corruption and depravity. of almost unthinkable wickedness, of poisoning, assassination and debauch.

a morass of intrigue, corruption and depravity. of almost unthinkable wickedness, of poisoning, assassination and debauch.

James himself was grossly fond of a succession of

beautiful young men,

of whom the very worst,

Steenie, created by James Duke of Buckingham, was allowed to dominate the government.
James was notorious everywhere. About the time he was having the King James Bible printed, this

filthy poem was being circulated in France

James was despised throughout Europe, and under the mismanagement of Buckingham the prestige of the kingdom sank low. More seriously, the king abused the English constitution, and bequeathed a civil war to his saintly son and successor. James was, surely,

the worst king we have ever had. He left our history defiled with his spittle.

But one very good thing came out of James reign. James I commissioned a revised translation of the Bible; and the beauty and dignity of its English dazzled everyone then, and ever since. As long as the language lasts, people, religious or not, will read the King James Version with delight. The very phrase King James has come to mean, most often, not the ghastly little monarch, but the glorious book he ordered into existence. Did King James commission the King James Bible out of virtue or poetry or good taste? No; not a bit of it. He commissioned it out of fear. His fear was the origin of its beauty.
y old

parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

2. GUNPOWDER:
The explosive nature of translating the Bible

James was full of fear naturally enough, I suppose. When he was in the womb hed heard the shrieks and roars as Rizzio was hacked to death in his mothers chamber. He grew up knowing his mother had conspired to murder his father with gunpowder. His mother was in prison throughout his boyhood, while his own government connived at her beheading so that he might succeed the woman who killed her. It is not surprising that James nervous, tyrannical, distrustful. Being a highbrow, he knew ways to deck out his vices as virtues: he posed as a peacemaker, and took as his motto Beati pacifici, Blessed are the peacemakers. But the truth is that James was simply afraid afraid of the world, notably afraid of soldiers, and afraid, most of all, of gunpowder.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

Unfortunately, when James arrived in England the situation was indeed explosive. The Reformation had wrecked the unity of Europe. It had created a huge civil war in European civilisation, ebbing and flowing over the whole divided Continent. In 1603 this civil war, eighty years old, was not dying down. It was intensifiying. Catholicism, revivified by the Council of Trent, had reclaimed Austria, Hungary and Poland from the new religion. it was now pressing its counter-attack into the heartland of heresy: into Germany itself.

Politically, too, Catholicism was reviving. Its great secular champion, the imperial Hapsburg dynasty, was on the march. The Hapsburgs vast territories surrounded France

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times:

 and looked across the Narrow Seas at England. Already religious wars were alight in the Netherlands and Ireland, and in beseiged France. It was clear that the whole Continent was rolling towards a final conflagration, a culmination of all the wars of religion since Luther, a war that would decide the future of European civilisation. And indeed that war was to erupt while James was still on the throne. It would go on for thirty years, kill eight million people and end, alas, in a draw, so that Europe remained divided; and still does.

Meanwhile, England herself was divided. In 1603 James found his new kingdom torn into three antagonistic religious factions. There was

the Established Church, the state Church, under the domination of the monarchy: a Church shapeless, formless.

neither unimpeachably Catholic, nor properly reformed,

practising that ill-defined sort of Christianity later known as

Anglicanism.

Then, on the religious Left, were the party known as the

Puritans, so-called because they upheld the creed of pure

Calvinism. The Puritans thought the English Reformation had not gone far enough, and they were growing impatient with delay.

And on the religious Right were the Papists (as they were always called), who rejected the Reformation altogether, and remained loyal to the ancient creed of

Roman Catholicism.

The government fiercely persecuted the Papists, and intermittently persecuted extreme Puritans. And both these groups were increasingly committed to violent revolution against the government.

Now, all three religious factions in England had their own English version of the Bible. Each translation expressed partisan position, and bolstered its faction in its position and its militancy. For nothing in the seventeenth century was more politically charged than Bible translation.

Lets think about Bible translation for a moment. In the beginning were the actual words, the Hebrew books of the Old Testament and the Greek books of the New Testament. The only people who can actually read the Bible are those fluent in ancient Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek. And there have never been many of them. A few centuries before Christ, the Jews of the Diaspora had stopped using Hebrew, and their scriptures were translated into Greek as the Septuagint.

Then, as Christianity spread to the West, there were more and more Christians who couldnt read Greek, either. The Old and New Testaments were therefore translated into Latin. The definitive Latin text, produced by St Jerome at the beginning of the fifth century, became known as the Vulgate.

The Vulgate is incomparably the most important version of the Bible. For more than eleven centuries the Vulgate simply was the Bible. Latin was the educated language of almost all Christendom, and the vast majority of Christians knew only one Bible, the Vulgate. It was the verbal expression of the unity of the Church. Its influence throughout the West was absolute far greater than the influence of the King James Bible in England. The highest praise we can give the King James Bible is that it is an echo, in one vernacular, of some of the universal authority and power of the Vulgate.

Heres a mediaeval manuscript of the Vulgate Bible;

and heres Gutenbergs printed, handilluminated Vulgate of 1454

This is the Louvain printing of the Vulgate, done in 1583.

Heres an edition of 1922,showing the In principio, the luminous prologue to John,

and here are exactly the same words from a lavish manuscript prepared in Canterbury eight centuries earlier.

Its worth stressing that there was no prohibition on translating the Vulgate into local ptois, and this was often done, when pastorally useful just as people sometimes try to render bits of the English Bible into various slangs and dialects. For instance, the tenth century Wessex Gospels translated the four evangelists from Vulgate Latin into a Western dialect of Old English. Heres the Lords Prayer. See if you follow it ( represents th):

Fder ure u e eart on heofonum, si in nama gehalgod. To becume in rice, gewure in willa, on eoran swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedghwamlican hlaf syle us todg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfa urum gyltendum. And ne geld u us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. Solice.

One of Luthers first acts of rebellion was to produce a Bible of his own. It was a revolutionary act. Indeed it would have been even more revolutionary if Luther had had his way. He wanted to make the canon his own by ejecting certain books: Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation (I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced them, he argued). He made the text his own, amending it to make the Lutheran intention of the authors more clear. Thus Luthers Bible reads man is justified alone through faith (Romans iii28). That word allein, alone, isnt in the Greek St Paul had forgotten to write it but Luther was there to make the Epistle to the Romans a Lutheran work. Most importantly, Luther rejected the Vulgate altogether. He translated and adapted the Hebrew and Greek texts into German, or rather into a version of German of his own devising. And because Luthers Bible became so influential, his particular dialect became the foundation of Modern High German.

Lets reflect on the Vulgate. The Vulgate was the Bible of (virtually) all Christendom. The Church was happy to see cribs produced, so that the illiterate could have things read to them in their own parochial speech. But the Vulgate remained, the literary symbol of Christian unity. Luthers Bible was an attack on the principle of universality. It was sectarian, because it meant to vindicate the claims of the new religion from its own rewriting of scripture; and it was national, designed to be read only by Germans, and even helping to define a separate Germany by helping forge a separate German literary language.

Thus in the sixteenth century Bible translation suddenly became an explosive matter. To revolt against the Vulgate was to revolt against the universal Church. To create new vernacular Bibles (which sometimes involved inventing a vernacular) was to set up national Christianities, in revolt against the one Latin Church.

This impulse quickly spread from Germany to other northern nations. One of Luthers first followers in England was a clergyman named

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

William Tyndale,

who left England for Luthers Wittenberg, and in 1525 produced an English version of the New Testament translating straight from the Greek (although naturally he couldnt get the Vulgate out of his head).

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

Like Luther, Tyndale was anxious to prove that the new religion was there in the ancient texts, by making the ancient texts consonant with Protestant views. Thus (presbuteros), which for twelve centuries had been the Christian word for priest, was translated not priest but senior. And (ekklesia) became congregation, not church, lest the New Testament sound ecclesial. This was all very provocative. Tyndales Bible was burned by the authorities, when they could seize it, and Tydnale himself was on the receiving end of almost a million words of printed abuse by St Thomas More.

But even if we grant Mores point, the fact is that Tyndale wrote the most wonderful English. Heres his version of the prologue to Johns Gospel. (Note, by the way, how printed Bibles were touched up by hand to look more like manuscripts!)

In the begynninge was that worde/ and that worde with god: and god was thatt worde. Its very like the version were used to, the King James Bible. And theres no surprise there, for some 83% of the King James Bible simply is Tyndale.

Well, then: if the King James Bible is not a new translation but a mild revision, why is it so important? Why are we making a fuss about the King James Bible, and not about William Tyndale? That is the question! Well answer it in due course.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

Tyndale, despite his Protestantism, was consistently biblical enough to oppose Henry VIIIs divorce the issue which was the shipwreck of Catholic England. His old opponent More was martyed for opposing the divorce in 1535, and a few months later Tyndale was captured near Brussels on a warrant from Henry, and burned at the stake, having first been strangled. His last words, famously, were Lord, open the King of

Englands eyes:

Sure enough, within a few years Henry had decided it suited his own ends to co-opt the new religion. He broke definitively with the Pope, began to persecute Catholic loyalists, and commanded the publication of an official English Bible. The Coverdale Bible had many weaknesses. Miles Coverdale, who produced it, wasnt proficient in Hebrew or Greek. So he had to cobble his Bible together from Tyndale, from the Vulgate and even from Luthers German.

Worse still, this hodgepodge was obviously a political gambit by the English monarchy. Henry was quite happy to martyr both More and Tyndale. He was happy to have Catholics hanged for treason (for following the Pope) and Protestants burned for heresy (for following Luther) on the same day, in the same market-places. They both had to die, because they both defied the essence of King Henrys new religion, which was his own role as autocratic Head of the Church. The English Bible Henry produced was essentially a royalist document and we can see from its

title page. At the top are a few images summarising

salvation history, from Adam to Christ (note the quotation from the Vulgate!); but the big important picture is of Henry himself,

handing out copies of his book to his grateful peers and bishops, kneeling before him.

Revisions of the Coverdale were just as overtly political. Heres the Great Bible of 1539; Henry is now at the top of the page

(with Christ crowded into a niche behind the throne), and beneath Henrys feet are scores of English subjects receiving his book with shouts of

VIVAT REX!

GOD SAVE THE KING!

The Bible said what the King told his translators it said. The divine text was throughly subordinated to the Tudor project.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

The next revision, the Bishops Bible of 1568 (a paticularly feeble piece of work, by the way), had Henrys daughter, Queen Elizabeth, on its title-page.

In this half-coloured edition of the Bishops Bible she is being crowned by Justice and Mercy, and hailed by Fortitude and Prudence, between garlands and cornucopias and caryatids. Amidst all this pagan clobber there is

no room for any Christian symbol at all!

While the royal presses were grinding out the official, royal scriptures (the Coverdale, which evolved into the Great Bible, which evolved into the Bishops Bible), the Puritans or Calvinist zealots were not idle. They were not satisfied by the monarchys shoddy Bibles; they produced their own version,

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

the Geneva Bible (1560, 1576),

which in terms of mere scholarship was an advance on Tyndale. Its English was very bold and energetic, too. But here was the problem:

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha l argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

quite overshadowing the text of the Geneva Bible was a preposterously large and controversial apparatus:

Ephesians i3-4

headers, defining the subject

interpolated essays

the actual text marginal commentary, setting out Calvinist doctrine

The divine text was thus thoroughly subordinated to the Calvinist project.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha l argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

The Roman Catholics, meanwhile, answered both the royal and Puritan Bibles with their own English translation. The Catholic position had hardened in the face of the sectarian Bibles of the Protestants. The Council of Trent declared that the

old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church, be held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever .

Christ had promised to remain with His Church, the Catholics argued, leading His people into all truth; the Vulgate, which had bee authoritative for eleven of the fifteen-and-a-half centuries since Christ, was the normal vehicle for Christs bibical revelation of Himself. Therefore the Catholics counterblast,

the Douai-Rheims New Testament of 1582, declared forthrightly that it was

translated faithfully out of the authentical Latin, but also diligently conferred the Greek. In other words, it aimed at being authoritative, and aimed at the discovery or exposure of

corruptions of diverse late translations the Bishops Bible, the Geneva Bible and the resolution of the controversies in religion, of these days. The Douai-Rheims didnt clear away controversy, of course. But it greatly strengthened the Catholic position. They now had an English text translating what Christians had read as the Bible for over a millennium a text which didnt say what the Reformers said the Bible said.

So what did the Bible say? In 1603 there were three rival English Bibles, each confidently preaching a different religion, each justifying violence against the other two.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha

Three different Bibles! Three hostile Christianities! The time for religious reconciliation seemed over. The season of coexistence was gone. The great controversy was coming to a head. Europe was slithering towards a final, total religious conflict the Thirty Years War. In England too there was a dangerous increase in tension. Expectations had been high when James arrived in England. Puritans hoped he would reform the Church, Papists that he would lighten persecution. But he was a sneaky fellow, as we have seen, used to worming out of promises. Both factions were disappointed and disgusted with James, and their reaction was terrifying A group of young papist aristocrats

resolved to move the situation along at the next State Opening.

resolved to move the situation along at the next State Opening.

They secreted a ton of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament. The blast would obliterate James, the royal family, the entire government, the peers and the House of Commons except for a few Papists warned to stay home.

Heres a crash-test dummy mock-up of the Jacobean House of Lords, constructed for a sensationalist documenary, The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding The Legend (ITV, 2005).

Here is James, reading his address from the throne to

his peers; and this is what things look like

a second later.

Of course it didnt quite happen. The governments spies followed the Gunpowder Plot from the beginning. On the eve of the blast they swept in to arrest the plotters, who were

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha ill argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

put to death

with the utmost

barbarity.

3. PARCHMENT:
The creation of a new Bible

All this would have been sufficiently alarming for any government; with King James hereditary horror of gunpowder, it was critical. For at some moment, the other wing of English Christianity was becoming more restive. The Puritans were insisting on religious reform. James summoned them to a conference at the most imposing of his palaces,

Hampton Court

a good place to intimate people.

The Hampton Court conference of 1604 was a very mixed success. Puritan demands were not met; except in one area.

Reynolds, one of the Puritan leaders, moved his Majesty there might be

a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of Henry VIII .were corrupt, and not answerable to the truths of the original.
James, who always liked to think himself a great scholar, declared he could never yet see a Bible well translated into English, but the worst of all his Majesty thought, the Geneva, since some of its notes

were very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoured too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.

The stress here is on sedition and treason. The Bible must no longer serve the Kings enemies. It had to stop being a weapon against him. It had to stop encouraging the assassination of kings (James explained at some length how the Geneva Bible notes tended to regicide). The Bible had to be pacified. Beati pacifici.

As a matter of fact, the Puritans had a case. There was a lot of corruption in the royal Bibles (the Coverdale-Great Bible-Bishops Bible text). It was often marred by awkward misprints. In 1562, for instance, instead of Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God, it read Blessed are the placemakers. And apart from typos, some translations were pretty shocking.

Psalm xci5
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night

(King James Bible)

Psalm xci5
Thou shall not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.

The Coverdale Bible (popularly known as the Bug Bible), and also the Great Bible

Jeremiah viii22
Is there no balm in Gilead?

(King James Bible)

Jeremiah viii22
Is there no tryacle in Gilead?

The Great Bible (henceforth known as the Treacle Bible)

Genesis iii7
they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

(King James Bible)

Genesis iii7
they sowed figge-tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.

The Geneva Bible (generally known as the Breeches Bible)

And so James resolved to commission a new translation, as one way of soothing the dangerous divisions of England. This revised translation would be of such splendid scholarship would sound so serene and authoritative would be so free of controversial marginal notes that it would drive out all the alternatives, and unite the nation. Beati pacifici.

Who were they, the 47 men James appointed to revise the Bible? A mixed bag. They divided up the text and worked in separate companies, and the differences still show. Some were companies were hardworking, and some more inclined to leave their base-text, the Bishops Bible, untouched. Some made more use than you might expect of the Douai-Rheims Bible of the Roman Catholics. Forty-six of the 47 were clergymen, but their religious politics were various, too.

There was Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester and then of Ely, a saintly figure, and an author of exquisitely lovely prose. He acted as general editor of the new translation.

There was Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury. Bancroft maintained general control of the project until his death in 1610, and insisted on a few changes in language, to make the new Bible teach a more Catholic sort of Christainity. He was a great persecutor of Puritans. If Bancroft had lived, says Clarendon, he would quickly have extinguished all that fire in England which had been kindled at Geneva.

And after Bancroft died, he was succeeded as Archbishop by George Abbot, a sincere but narrow-minded Calvinist, who saw the new Bible through the press. (Abbot came to a bad end. While hunting deer he shot a keeper dead by accident, fell into depression, was deprived of his primacy, thrust out of power ...).

They worked quickly, and presented their work to King James

only six years after he commissioned them. And so in 1611 the new translation or Bible without notes was

published.

Now theres a lot of cant spoken and written about the King James Bible, the KJB; lets try to praise it honestly. Was it a great translation? No, it wasnt a translation at all. It was just a revision, and a light revision at that, of the Bishops Bible, often lifting passages from the Geneva Bible where the Bishops Bible was too verbose. And both the Bishops Bible and the Geneva Bible overwhelmingly preserve William Tyndales English. The KJB companies referred to published editions of the Hebrew and Greek text and more than you might expect the Vulgate, but they didnt bother looking at any old manuscripts. No actual parchment was involved. Theres not much fresh scholarship involved in their work. (True, the title-page of the KJB claimed to offer the Old and New Testaments

newly translated out of the original tongues but that is a fib!)

So (as we have already said) why do we make such a fuss about the KJB, if it was merely the final revision of Tyndales work? Why arent we talking about Tyndales Bible?

This is why. Tyndales Bible was a self-consciously heretical work. It was meant to blow up the existing English Church and create something new in the rubble. That was Tyndales project. King James Bible was a self-consciously soothing work. It was meant to defend and vindicate the existing English Church. That was James project. And it was James project that succeeded.

Of course most of Tyndales work survived in the 1611 Bible unchanged, counting word by word. But the changes were enough to change what the English Bible signified. The KJB is the Bible of peace. It is designed to soothe.

1. For instance: James insisted that all the Greek ecclesial terms be translated in a way that affirmed the existing arrangements in England. Thus we read church, priest, bishopric but not penance. The KJB is an Anglican Bible. It fits in nicely with the style and terms of the Book of Common Prayer. There is nothing in it to suggest that the Church of England should reform itself further and become more like Continental Protestantism; there is nothing in it to suggest that the Church of England should recover its history and return to Rome. The KJB is mellow. It affirms the existing compromise.

2. Although James was just as insistent as Henry VIII that his Bible say what he want, the monarchical quality of the Bible is much more discretely expressed.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

True, the KJB has a nasty craven Preface, dedicating the whole Bible to James.

It continues:

ru

No mention of spittle, then, nor of Steenie.

But in appearance the KJB carefully avoids looking like royalist propaganda

the title page actually shows the Twelve Apostles, rather than the English monarch! Here (it is implied) is the Bible: simply the Bible.

3. Again, the KJB is not meant to stir the reader into angry theological debate. It has none of the polemics of Luther or Tyndale or Geneva or DouaiRheims. There is no doctrinal commentary in the margins to guide the reader,

just a few marginal glosses on Greek and Hebrew terms,

and modest, uncontroversial headnotes, summaring each chapter.

4. Again, while there is some preemptive aggression against Roman Catholics and Puritans in the Dedication, the final note is of peacefulness: James, the prince of peace, will guarantee the KJB against uncharitable and violent critics.

5. But of course the title-page and the Dedication arent the most important thing. What matters about the KJB so much is its style. It is the style of the KJB that transformed the English Bible from an angry Protestant tract, liable to promote rebellion, liable to provoke gunpowder plots, into a thing of such universal serenity and beauty no one could resist it. The KJB virtually brought English Bible translation to an end for three centuries: no one could want anything else. Its style was irresistible

You hear a lot of nonsense about the style of the King James Bible. The important thing to remember is this ravishing beauty has a political purpose. It was part of King James programme. Most of the base-text (which was, ultimately, Tyndales work was preserved. But the deft touches made by King James men all point in the same direction. They make the Bible sound more mellow and even more dreamy.

The KJB virtually invents its own dialect. It perfumes the mind of the reader with archaic, romantic terms: verily, and it came to pass. The KJB is happy to sound Latinate. The Douai-Rheims translators had invented lots of English words to turn the Vulgate into English: acquisition, adulterate, advent, allegory, verity, calumniate, character, cooperate, prescience, resuscitate, victim, and evangelise. Whereas the Geneva often simplified the Greek into Anglo-Saxon words (with pungent marginal notes to raw out the full Calvinist -- meaning), the KJB, forbidden marginal commentary, is not afraid of long, newly-invented Latinate words where they are necessary.

And the KJB prefers old-fashioned English forms. Thee and thou are always used instead of singular you. The third person singular present is always -eth and never not -es : appeareth and hateth, that is, never appears and hates. Quite often the KJB has which instead of who or whom: Lot also which went with Abram. In all these matters the Jacobean English spoken in the streets (and on the stage) was closer to modern English than is the KJB. Consider these two versions of a passage in the Apocalypse:

Revelation vi12
the sun was as black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon was like blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, as a fig tree casteth her green figs, when it is shaken the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken

The top version is the Geneva Bible, the bottom the KJB. The Geneva is more modern, the KJB much more beautiful. In KJB the vision of cosmic annihilation (windfall constellations raining down) is softened, and we can behold it with pleasure. The moon was like blood is alarming, it sounds like eyewitness testimony of a catastrophe; the moon became as blood is an incantation. Green figs is ominous, untimely figs is poetry. Even the end of the world charms us. This is an Anglican apocalypse: gentle, moderate, whimsical, comfortable, cheerful, clever. These differences may not seem much in this short passage. But the King James Bible is consistent; all its touches are in the same direction; and the differences accumulate over the whole gigantic bulk of Scripture until they create what is really a new book.

The Geneva Bible became contraband after 1616. It was printed in Amsterdam and smuggled into England. It lay in the hands of a Caroline Puritan as an act of defiance against King and Church and law. Its language was as bare and belligerent as the traditions of English translation then allowed. We have seen much more bleak prose purporting to translate the Bible, but bleakness is relative, and to a Baroque Englishman, the Geneva seemed brutal and swaggering as a 1960s poured concrete tower block. And its every marginal note, folding itself into the text so it could scarcely be distinguished, was a whispering tempter, urging pride or rebellion or slaughter.

The Geneva was the book the Roundheads literally carried into battle a selection of passages from the Geneva was given to every soldier in the New Model Army as The Soldiers Pocket Bible (Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord? I hate them with perfect hatred.) It was book that pricked them to their murders in England, their assassinations in Scotland, their massacres in Ireland. What else was it likely to inspire? When King Asa deposing his grandmother for worshipping other gods, the Geneva Bible hisses in this he showed that he lacked zeal, for she should have died but he gave place to foolish pity. The leitmotif of the Geneva Bible is put them to the sword.

When Cromwell laid Ireland waste he was only acting out the Geneva Old Testament, as he said himself, and his words are full of what he thought were biblical notes. Drogheda surrendered; Cromwell had the garrison and population exterminated. I believe we put to the

sword the whole number of the defenders. I do not think 30 of the whole number escaped with their lives. Women and children crowded into a church were burned to death. The moon was like blood. Any Catholic clergy were, as he breezily said, knocked on the head, which is

to say clubbed to death without any foolish pity, after the manner of the Children of Israel with the priests of Baal.

When good triumphed over evil in 1660, many things were restored along the monarchy: the Church, parliament, drama and the King James Bible. The Geneva, was finally stamped out; its infamous notes were printed for the last time in 1715. That is the early history of the KJB: it was generally known as the Bible without notes, the Bible that wasnt the Geneva. The Geneva was the regicide book , the book of perfect hatred; the Douai was the Bible of the Gunpowder Plotters; the KJB was the book of peace. That is why it sounds so serene. It had to.

4. GLORY:
a fresh revelation

So far I have tried to describe the origins of the KJB levelly. Now its time to ask: What do we really think of it? Now we turn controversial. There is so much pious balderdash uttered about the KJB that its healthy to hear from a wise and cynical pagan: in this case, the great American journalist H.L Mencken.

Whoever it was who translated the Bible into excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life wherever English is spoken. They did their work at a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were beginning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain English; the language they used was deliberately artificial even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by crooning to it. The Bible that they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of it, could not fix their minds upon the ideas in it. To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians, at least sentimentally.
y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin w

Mencken, in his ironic, hardboiled fashion, is putting his finger on an important truth. English-speakers

still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger. It is not much, but it is something.

I think its quite a lot. For many Anglophone Christians, the sound of the KJB is tied up with what they mean by religious experience. Its English was designed to soothe to soothe rebellious Calvinists and recalcitrant papists. But it is too splendid merely to soothe: it conjures up the peace that passes understanding, the richness of heaven, the presence of God. The language of the King James Bible is a sacred language.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently argued that we have no sacred languages.

Of all the great world religions, it is Christianity that has the most obvious and pervasive investment in translation. We do not have a sacred language; from the very first, Christians have been convinced that every human language can become the bearer of scriptural revelation. The words in which revelation is first expressed are not solid, impenetrable containers of the mystery ..
But this cannot be right. Christianity does have sacred languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, the only languages whose words were hammered up over the dying Word.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha ill argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

That is a particular fact about Jesus. All the interesting facts about Jesus are particular. God didnt just become human, He became a man. God first revealed Himself in Hebrew poetry, and became a man in a particular place within Hellenistic culture and within Latin polity. The church He founded remains Jewish in its poetry, Greek in thought and Roman in structure. These are often thought to be scandalous facts; but after all incarnation always involves the scandal of particularity. The Gospel of Tiberius subject the man Whose name was always hellenised to Jesus, can't be culturally neutral. Vatican II inculturation is bunk.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha ill argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

Every language presumes a culture. Language is very noisy. I fear that vernacular translation risks drowning out the concrete and specific Christ in the roar or titter of random cultures. After all, isn't the Living Bible essentially a faithful record of what liberal West Coast Protestantism was like in the 1960s? And if so, of what else can it be a faithful record?

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha ill argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin with the man behind the King James Bible: King James himself.

Myself, I would cheerfully have burned Tyndale. But the irony is that in due course his translation was adapted by King James men into a text almost as numinous, opaque, and evocative as the Vulgate. The loudest note in King James English is exoticism. The KJB cries out: These words come from a different place, far away, long ago. It resists the idea of a God Whos very like me (which means, in the end, culturally like me) murmuring directly to me, the solitary Bible reader, without His voice crossing through any distance of history or ecclesial authority. It is this false idea of the solitary reader, at one with the Word whatever words he happens to be reading, which has has produced all the modern heresies and schisms and massacres.

Bring back the Vulgate! But failing that, KJB forever! For I suppose we might say that Christianity has, beside its three legitimate sacred languages, fabricated certain semi-sacred languages: Old Church Slavonic; and King-James-ese. The language of the KJB is just as much a self-conscious art-tongue as Old Church Slavonic in Eastern Europe. And that is why the KJB seems such a huge thing: it is not just a book, it is a whole language.

y old parchment. The production of the King James Bible was a desparate act, made in desparate times: and tha ill argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that.

We seem to have wandered quite some way from 1611! Let us return to King James reign. He was lucky to commission his Bible when he did. These were the years of

Shakespeares final plays:

Elizabethan English, having reached its classic perfection, was just passing into baroque decadence. It was an ideal moment to compose something of perpetual value. The KJB is perpetual. It is so valuable it surmounts its sordid background and its origin in that obscene king, in his effeminate timidity and horror of bangs in the night. It is so valuable it survived the failure of his selfish political goals. For there was a failure. The incomparable literary excellence of the KJB drove all competitors from the market; it soon became the English Bible; Papists and (in the end, after 1660) even Puritans embraced it. Nonetheless, James was not a real peace-maker. The Roman Catholics were never reconciled to the Church of England.

And, as for the Puritans, they clung to the Geneva, rebelled against King James son, the saintly Charles Stuart,

defeated him, and martyred him.

The English dynasty King James founded was overthrown, its place eventually usurped by princes from Germany. But the English Bible King James sponsored has never been overthrown, nor had its place usurped. The glory of King James Bible has outlasted the disgraces and scandals of his reign the wretchedness of his parentage and catamitery, the witch-dread, gunpowder and the slobber. In the end no one could resist it. It has dominated English l iterature and the English language ever since 1611, virtually unaltered. And I suspect it always will. The glory King James Bible is inexhaustible. We never quite get to the end of it. It tells us something about England which we cant hear anywhere else, something about English, something about language, something about the peace that passeth understanding, and even something about God.

AN AFTERTHOUGHT

We say the KJB is unchanging but that is to forget printers errors! The King James Bible has not been well served by the press, beginning with the so-called Printers Bible of 1612, its second year of publication:

Psalm cxix161 Princes have persecuted me without a cause

was misprinted as

Psalm cxix161 Printers have persecuted me without a cause

And printers have persecuted it!

Psalm cxix161 Printers have persecuted me without a cause

And printers have persecuted it!

Exodus xx14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

(King James Bible)

Exodus xx14 Thou shalt commit adultery.

(The Adulterous Bible of 1631; printers fined 300; only 11 copies survive)

John viii11 Go and sin no more

(King James Bible)

John viii11 Go and sin on more

(Sin On Bible of 1716)

Psalm xiv1 the fool hath said in his heart there is no God

(King James Bible)

Psalm xiv1 the fool hath said in his heart there is a God

(The Fools Bible of 1763; printers fined 3000; all copies ordered destroyed)

ANOTHER AFTERTHOUGHT
Incidentally, there is a Croatian connection to all this!

In 1616 the Archbishop of Split, Marko Antun Domniani[ (or Marcus Antonius de Dominis), a native of the island of Rab, fell out with the Pope and fled to England, where he was welcomed (for political reasons) by King James. In the end he retroapostasised to Roman Catholicism, and died as a priosner of the Inquisition. But for a few years he was the Dean of the royal town of Windsor. If you had gone into the

chapel of Windsor Castle in time for Evensong, you might have heard the lovely cadences of the King James Bible being read aloud to King James himself in a Croatian accent.

SOME NOTES
The views of late Elizabethan London, and of Shakeaspeares stage, are stills from Roland Emmerichs imbecilic film Anonymosus (2011). The enthroned portrait of King James I of England and VI of Scotland is by Danil Mijtens (1621). The obscene manuscript poem addressed to the duc de Boukinquan (Buckingham) is by Thophile de Viau; it was composed around 1611, and is archived in Paris as MS. Fr. 15220 B.N. (fol. 50v) . Chesterton from Charles II in Twelve Types: A Collection of Biographies. H. L. Mencken, Holy Writ, from the Smart Set, October 1923. The Eadwine Psalter is in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS R.17.1).

SOME MORE THINGS ONLINE

Rowan Williams sermon in St Paul's Cathedral to celebrate the bicentenary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 8th March 2004, at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1648/bicentenary-of-the-britishand-foreign-bible-society; Im grateful to Matjaz Crnivec of the Bible Society of Slovenia for this reference. You can boggle at James morbidity in this online version of Dmonologie, http://www.general-anaesthesia.com/demonologie/index.html; and at Mores rancour against Tyndale, http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/moretyndale.pdf. For a fine but fusty defence of the Douai, see http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/wbible.htm#CHAPTER XIII The Geneva Bible notes are at http://www.reformedreader.org/gbn/gbnmatthew.htm The Soldiers Pocket Bible is at http://www.archive.org/stream/soldierspocketbi01rale#page/14/mode/2up The bloodthirsty devoitons I quote are on p. 14. I have been unable to master the technology and embed these videos: the execution of Tyndale at http://www.anglican.si/1611/Tyndale.flv; an excerpt from Exploding the Legend at http://www.anglican.si/1611/boom.flv; and an edifying hangingdrawing-and-quartering to go with the Gunpowder Plot, http://www.anglican.si/1611/hanging.flv.

MORE BOOKS ON THE KING JAMES BIBLE The best general introduction is Bruce M. Metzger and Michael Coogans Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993; ISBN 0-19504645-5); or more narrowly Frederick Fyvie Bruce, History of the Bible in English (Lutterworth Press, 2002, ISBN 0718890329). For the political aspects of the King James Bible, you can read the excellent but, alas, Marxist, Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the seventeenth-century revolution (Allen Lane, 1993, ISBN 0713990783); or the Whiggish Benson Bobrick: Wide as the waters: the story of the English Bible and the revolution it inspired (Simon & Schuster, 2001, ISBN 0684847477). On the religious impact, see, from an Evangelical perspective, Alister McGraths In the beginning: the story of the King James Bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture (Anchor Books, 2002, ISBN 0385722168). On the language, see Charles Laurence Barber, Early modern English (Edinburgh University Press, 2nd edition 1997, ISBN 0748608354). Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, a member of a great English literary dynasty, wrote a charming book, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 0007108931), which was published in America as Gods Secretaries, and reissed this year with the camp new title When God Spoke English. However, the best recent book on the Jacobean period is John Stubbs John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2008; ISBN 0393333663, 9780393333664), an exemplary literary biography which manages to be lots of other things too, including a harrowing account of Jamie Stuart.

Dr Richard Major richard@richardmajor.com

A FINAL CAVEAT Chesterton, writing in the Daily News Protestant Christianity believes that here is a Divine record in a book; that everyone ought to have free access to that book; that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it, whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dustcart. Catholic Christianity believes that there is a Divine army or league upon earth called the Church; that all men should be induced to join it; that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever opening any of the old books of the Church at all. The Bible is only one of the institutions of Catholicism, like its rites or priesthood; it thinks the Bible only efficient when taken as part of the Church.
as a desparate act, made in desparate times: and that, I will argue, is why it sounds so sublime and so peaceful. It had to sound like that. Lets begin w