Indeed, many of those millions are commentaries — on biblical books, on biblical personalities, on biblical themes, on biblical interpretation. This spring books edition of the Presbyterian Outlook offers reviews of some recent, important books on such themes, some analysis of persistently pertinent topics — the Dead Sea scrolls and the creation story — and, most especially, on the KJV Bible itself.
A cinematic version of a remarkable 20th century story is showing in movie theaters in early 2011. “The King’s Speech” describes a relationship between King George VI, a stammerer, and his unorthodox language tutor, Lionel Logue.
After the death of his father King George V and the scandalous abdication of his elder brother King Edward VIII (who married American socialite Wallace Simpson), Albert, or Bertie, is crowned King George VI of England in 1937. With his country on the brink of war and in desperate need of a public spokesman, his wife, Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, arranges for her husband to see an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue. After a difficult start, the two men begin meeting for an unorthodox course of treatment and eventually form an unbreakable bond. With the support of Logue, his family, his government and Winston Churchill, the king overcomes his stammer and delivers a radio address that inspires his people and unites them for the war effort.
Based on the true story of King George VI, “The King’s Speech” follows the monarch’s quest to find his voice. The movie recalls for me another English story that will be celebrated in 2011: The King James Bible is 400 years old this year. Perhaps no other book or document (with apologies to Shakespeare) did so much to give English speakers their “common voice” as did this remarkable Bible translation.
The king’s Bible translation project was initiated by King James in 1604 at the request of Puritan church leaders meeting at the Hampton Court Conference. The translation team consisted of 47 scholars, all members of the Church of England. They labored for more than seven years at Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster to produce the new Bible.
In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew text and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. First printed by the king’s printer, Robert Barker, this was the third such official translation into English; the first having been the Great Bible commissioned by the Church of England in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second having been the Bishop’s Bible of 1568. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, promoted the cause of the Bishop’s Bible, a necessary cause because the Geneva Bible’s margin notes displayed a Presbyterian emphasis that flattered neither bishops nor royalists. The King James Bible particularly was intended to replace the Bishop’s Bible for official readings in worship and public use.
The KJV is the most celebrated translation product belonging to that intricate history of vernacular Bible translation in the British Isles. Pioneer translators John Wycliffe and William Tyndale did their work in days of theological controversy and in the shadow of the Roman church and its Latin Bible. Wycliffe and his associates finished translating the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate by 1382. Wycliffe died two years later before theological opponents could have him condemned or arrested. He was attacked posthumously and his followers deemed heretics.
Tyndale’s English translation was the first one based on the Hebrew and Greek texts. It is estimated that the King James version agrees with nearly 80 percent of Tyndale’s earlier translation. Living in the contentious era of the Protestant Reformation, Tyndale was incarcerated for 500 days before he was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. His colleagues finished the translation the following year. Tyndale’s last words were, “Oh Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” This prayer would be answered just three years later in 1539, when King Henry VIII finally allowed, and even funded, the printing of an English Bible known as the “Great Bible.”
Other translation notables of this era were John Rogers and Miles Coverdale. Coverdale was engaged by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to edit the “Great Bible” as allowed by Henry VIII. Twenty years later, Henry VIII, Edward VI and Queen “Bloody” Mary all had passed from the throne. Before Mary died her “bloody” reign of persecution claimed the lives of John Rogers and Thomas Cranmer.
Coverdale and William Foxe (“Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”) fled to Geneva where they enjoyed the protection of John Calvin. The Church of Geneva commissioned another English Bible; the Geneva Bible was completed in 1560. This translation featured for the first time numbered verses in the chapters and study notes in the margins. William Shakespeare’s hundreds of Bible quotations are taken from the Geneva edition.
The King James “translation to end all translations” (for a season) took into consideration The Tyndale Bible, The Coverdale Bible, The Matthews Bible, The Great Bible, The Geneva Bible and even the Rheims New Testament (Roman Catholic). The great revision of the Bishop’s Bible had begun. From 1605 to 1606 the scholars engaged in private research. From 1607 to 1609 the individual translations were assembled by six teams. In 1610 the work went to press, and in 1611 the first of the huge (16 inches tall) pulpit folios known today as the 1611 King James Bible came off the printing press. A typographical discrepancy in Ruth 3:15 rendered a pronoun “He” instead of “She” in that verse in some printings. This caused some of the 1611 first editions to be known by collectors as “He” Bibles, and others as “She” Bibles. One year after the huge 1611 pulpit-size King James Bibles were printed and chained to every church pulpit in England, printing began on the earliest normal size printings of the King James Bible. *These were produced so individuals could have their own personal copies of the Bible.
English translations and paraphrases have proliferated since the turbulent days of the 16th and 17th centuries. In my lifetime, I have read or studied the RSV, NRSV, NIV, J. B. Phillips, the Living Bible, the New English Bible, the ESV, the Message and others I have forgotten. English speakers enjoy an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Bible versions in the vernacular. Our bounty was produced at great cost by English-speaking pioneers like Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale and others.
Say a word of thanks for the majestic King James Bible in this anniversary year and pray for the translators who labor to bring the Scriptures to those peoples who cannot yet read the word of God in their mother tongue.
*In my city you can see on display two leaves from the 1611 folio edition of the KJV in the library at Union Presbyterian Seminary (3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Va.). Also on display are two smaller entire Bibles: a 1613 King James Bible (Robert Barker publisher) and a 1625 King James Bible (Bonham Norton & John Brill publishers).
Richard Haney is interim pastor of the Tuckahoe Church in Richmond, Va.
