Four hundred and seventy-six years ago this week, on October 4, the first English Bible was published in Zurich, Switzerland thanks to William Tyndale's courage to buck the religious and royal establishment in England and the continent. He was arrested for his efforts and the following year almost to the day, church authorities charged him with heresy and executed him on October 6, 1536 by strangulation at the stake after which his body was burned. His last words were, "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes.”
The king of whom he spoke was the much-married Henry VIII. The first of his six wives, Catherine of Aragon, produced a daughter, Mary, but not the son that Henry wanted (and needed) to consolidate the kingdom in a tumultuous time. His annulment of his marriage to Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, caused the rift between the king and pope, leading to the creation of the Church of England.
Anne Boleyn also produced a daughter, Elizabeth, but no son and lost her head for it. Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, produced the longed-for son, Edward, but she died in childbirth. Henry would marry three more times, producing no more children but producing one more beheading – that of Catherine Howard, wife No. 5.
When Henry died, Edward became King Edward VI at age nine. But he died at age 15, allowing the ascension of Mary, referred to as “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents for having 280 of them burned at the stake in her zeal to return England to Roman Catholicism. After five years on the throne, Mary died without heirs, and the throne passed to Elizabeth I, the namesake of the present queen. She restored England to Protestantism and reigned for 45 years. Though she never married, giving her the appellation the Virgin Queen, she inspired the Elizabethan era of English drama and its most famous playwrights, Shakespeare and Marlow, and she sponsored the seafaring exploits of such men as Sir Francis Drake, who co-commanded the defeat of the Spanish Armada and was the second man to circumnavigate the globe.
As Elizabeth lay dying in March 1603, she would not openly name a successor. But she had let her wishes be known to her closest advisor, and upon her death, he declared James VI of Scotland to be the new king. He was the great-great-grandson of Henry VII and Elizabeth’s cousin twice removed. Elizabeth was the end of the House of Tudor and James, who took the title King James I in England, was the first Stuart king, uniting England, Scotland, and Ireland.
While the news that he was the new king had reached James in three days, he took almost a month to journey to London to be crowned. His journey was like a triumphal procession as people came out to meet him and wish him well. He would need it. Awaiting him in London were the disenfranchised Roman Catholics and the Puritans who believed the Protestant Reformation begun under Elizabeth hadn’t gone far enough. Presbyterian John Knox described Elizabeth as “neither good Protestant nor yet resolute papist.”
Also awaiting the new king were the Presbyterians, who were more conservative Puritans. They were devoted to doing away with vestments and rings and the church hierarchy of bishops, desiring in its place their understanding of the New Testament church model with congregational autonomy under the administration of elders, also called presbyters.
Then there were the bishops of the Church of England – an elite class with power, wealth, and privilege to protect. They had the most to lose if the Puritans won.
There was also Parliament – ambitious and eager to expand its role in governing, which it hadn’t been allowed under Elizabeth. More than a few members of Parliament were Puritans.
The backdrop to all of these parties jockeying for position and influence in the interregnum was the plague, which had hit London especially hard with already 30,000 dead. Some saw it as God’s judgment, making James’ transition to power even more suspicious.
As he had made his journey south to London, one of the groups that went out to greet James was a contingent of Puritans who presented the new king with a list of grievances and requests. To address them, King James called the Hampton Court Conference. His address of their grievances, however, would be a sham. From his early years in Scotland, James had learned to like Puritans little and Presbyterians even less. He had weighted the attendees to Hampton Court toward the influence of the Church of England. But the Puritans would get one critical proposal approved – a commission to produce a new translation of the Bible, which would be the only version authorized to be read in the churches.
The Bible extant at the time was the Geneva Bible – the Bible of Shakespeare, John Knox, John Donne, Oliver Cromwell, and John Bunyan – which had been produced over 50 years earlier by the work of scholars who fled England during the Protestant purges under Bloody Mary. It was a translation from Greek and Hebrew and more than 80% of Geneva’s English translation came from the Tyndale Bible.
The Geneva Bible, however, contained marginal notations, designed to make it “user friendly,” which were distinctly Calvinistic in doctrine. While the Geneva translation was excellent, these marginal glosses offended the bishops of the Church of England because they associated them with Presbyterianism. The Anglican Church of England had instead been using the Great Bible, authorized by King Henry VIII and produced in 1539. Its translation was flawed, however, because it had been produced by Miles Coverdale, a disciple of Tyndale, who was not a Greek or Hebrew scholar. He had finished the incomplete Tyndale translation by using the Latin Vulgate, itself a translation, rather than using Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts. To overcome the translation defects of the Great Bible, the Anglican bishops produced their own translation in 1568 which became known as the Bishops Bible.
In his opening words at Hampton Court in January 1604, James set the tone of the conference. The doctrine and polity of the state church, he said, would not be up for evaluation or reconsideration – notwithstanding the Puritan objections to it. He found security in the hierarchy and structure of the Church of England unlike the Presbyterian model he had witnessed in Scotland. There might be room for some cosmetic changes, he hinted. “I assure you we have not called this assembly for any innovation,” but even the best of systems is subject to corruption over time, he allowed, and he acknowledged that “we have received many complaints, since our first entrance into this kingdom, of many disorders, and much disobedience to the laws, with a great falling away to popery.”
As for the suggestion for a new translation, he liked it. He had despised the Geneva Bible because of its marginal notes, which contained commentary and interpretation that he found politically subversive. He opined, “Let errors, in matters of faith, be amended, and indifferent things be interpreted, and a gloss added unto them.” On balance a project to create a new translation that reliably expressed the original texts had much to commend itself – it would replace the hated Geneva, throw a bone to the Puritans, appear ecumenical, provide a single voice for scripture in the churches, and enlighten the nation to God’s word.
James insisted that he wanted a translation with scholarly and royal authority, observing: “I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by the Royal authority.”
And yet the starting point for this new translation would not be a blank sheet of paper. The starting point would be the Bishops Bible of 1568. This made the King James Version not an original translation, but rather a revision of an existing translation, albeit a revision going back to the work of William Tyndale. This is revealed in the preface to the 1611 King James Version:
Truly (good Christian reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.
Out of the original 54 scholars who were considered for the project, 47 were chosen solely on their scholarly merit. They were the best that England had in their knowledge of the original texts and languages, and while a fourth of them were Puritan, all quite remarkably rose above their sectarian convictions.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, wrote the rules for the translators, which were approved by the king.
The translators were organized into six groups, which met at Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford. Ten at Westminster were assigned Genesis through 2 Kings; seven had Romans through Jude. At Cambridge, eight worked on 1 Chronicles through Ecclesiastes, while seven others handled the Apocrypha. Oxford had seven translating Isaiah through Malachi with another eight working on the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.
Four years were spent by the six groups to produce the preliminary translations after which nine more months were spent at Stationers' Hall in London for review and revision of the works by two men each from the Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford companies. The final revision was then completed by two of the scholars, one of whom wrote the preface.
The completed work was issued in 1611, 400 years ago this year, the complete title page reading:
THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties Special Commandment. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie. ANNO DOM. 1611.
How well did the scholars do their work? One could answer that their translation was so exacting that it translated impenetrable Hebrew and Greek into equally impenetrable English. Expressions thus resulted like a fly in the ointment, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the skin of your teeth, scales falling from eyes, to fall flat on your face, reaping the whirlwind, pour out your heart, sour grapes, two edged sword, old wives' tales, and handwriting on the wall, which would enter the English language as incomprehensible expressions at first but became idioms later although only in the vernacular of those knowledgeable of the King James Bible.
Languages have unique ways of expressing concepts some of which are crystallized in words that are untranslatable into other languages – schwerpunkt in German comes to mind – but most require transliterations rather than word by word translations in order for the readers of one language to understand a work created in another language. Yet the translators of the King James project fastidiously chose word-by-word accuracy over understanding. Thus, since James wanted accuracy, in that respect his project was a success – its bizarre terms notwithstanding.
Shakespeare was a visitor and performing raconteur at Hampton Court on occasions when King James was in residence there, and he began work on his last play, The Tempest, the year the King James Bible was published. Over his writing career, Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon looking for new words and expressions, and yet his plays have not influenced the development of English to the extent that the Bible has done. While Shakespeare’s plays used densely packed word pictures to move his audiences, the Bible uses about 8,000 different words to express its message in terms that most ordinary people at the beginning of the 17th century could understand.
Yet forty years after the Bible’s publication, Handel borrowed large swaths of it to give voice to his magisterial oratorio, Messiah. No ordinary words could express, “Comfort ye my people; Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” Only those of King James translation were adequate.
Likewise, John Winthrop’s vision of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony being a "city upon a hill,” the dominating influence in colonial development, could not have been expressed more efficiently to its original inhabitants than a biblical image familiar to them all. Ronald Reagan borrowed the same phrase when speaking to the Republican National Convention preceding his second term: “We raised a banner of bold colors – no pale pastels. We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill.”
The poetry of the Old Testament inspired the opening words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth a new nation," which are based on Psalm 90:10, "The days of our years are three score years and ten," in combination with the King James prose describing birth: "Mary brought forth a son."
Where would Martin Luther King Jr. have found a better description for his “dream” than the almost verbatim use of the 4th and 5th verses of Isaiah 40?
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low. The rough places will be made plain, the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!
The inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell – "Proclaim freedom throughout the land!” – comes from the King James translation of a verse in Leviticus, and when Samuel Morse sent the first message on his revolutionary telegraph in 1844, he could think of no better words than the question posed in Numbers 23:23 in King James English – “What hath God wrought?”
More than 2.6 billion copies of the King James Bible have been sold since its publication 400 years ago. It is the book of ages, the transcendent voice of English-speaking peoples, without which there would have been no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Paradise Lost, no Negro spirituals, no Handel’s Messiah as we know them. There would be no way to describe a “broken heart” or a “labor of love” or a “cross to bear.” Without the King James translation, we would be unable to give thanks for the undeserved grace that “preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” nor could we confess the heartfelt blessedness that “my cup runneth over.”
Without the King James Bible, we would have had a poorer world.
The king of whom he spoke was the much-married Henry VIII. The first of his six wives, Catherine of Aragon, produced a daughter, Mary, but not the son that Henry wanted (and needed) to consolidate the kingdom in a tumultuous time. His annulment of his marriage to Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, caused the rift between the king and pope, leading to the creation of the Church of England.
Anne Boleyn also produced a daughter, Elizabeth, but no son and lost her head for it. Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, produced the longed-for son, Edward, but she died in childbirth. Henry would marry three more times, producing no more children but producing one more beheading – that of Catherine Howard, wife No. 5.
When Henry died, Edward became King Edward VI at age nine. But he died at age 15, allowing the ascension of Mary, referred to as “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents for having 280 of them burned at the stake in her zeal to return England to Roman Catholicism. After five years on the throne, Mary died without heirs, and the throne passed to Elizabeth I, the namesake of the present queen. She restored England to Protestantism and reigned for 45 years. Though she never married, giving her the appellation the Virgin Queen, she inspired the Elizabethan era of English drama and its most famous playwrights, Shakespeare and Marlow, and she sponsored the seafaring exploits of such men as Sir Francis Drake, who co-commanded the defeat of the Spanish Armada and was the second man to circumnavigate the globe.
As Elizabeth lay dying in March 1603, she would not openly name a successor. But she had let her wishes be known to her closest advisor, and upon her death, he declared James VI of Scotland to be the new king. He was the great-great-grandson of Henry VII and Elizabeth’s cousin twice removed. Elizabeth was the end of the House of Tudor and James, who took the title King James I in England, was the first Stuart king, uniting England, Scotland, and Ireland.
While the news that he was the new king had reached James in three days, he took almost a month to journey to London to be crowned. His journey was like a triumphal procession as people came out to meet him and wish him well. He would need it. Awaiting him in London were the disenfranchised Roman Catholics and the Puritans who believed the Protestant Reformation begun under Elizabeth hadn’t gone far enough. Presbyterian John Knox described Elizabeth as “neither good Protestant nor yet resolute papist.”
Also awaiting the new king were the Presbyterians, who were more conservative Puritans. They were devoted to doing away with vestments and rings and the church hierarchy of bishops, desiring in its place their understanding of the New Testament church model with congregational autonomy under the administration of elders, also called presbyters.
Then there were the bishops of the Church of England – an elite class with power, wealth, and privilege to protect. They had the most to lose if the Puritans won.
There was also Parliament – ambitious and eager to expand its role in governing, which it hadn’t been allowed under Elizabeth. More than a few members of Parliament were Puritans.
The backdrop to all of these parties jockeying for position and influence in the interregnum was the plague, which had hit London especially hard with already 30,000 dead. Some saw it as God’s judgment, making James’ transition to power even more suspicious.
As he had made his journey south to London, one of the groups that went out to greet James was a contingent of Puritans who presented the new king with a list of grievances and requests. To address them, King James called the Hampton Court Conference. His address of their grievances, however, would be a sham. From his early years in Scotland, James had learned to like Puritans little and Presbyterians even less. He had weighted the attendees to Hampton Court toward the influence of the Church of England. But the Puritans would get one critical proposal approved – a commission to produce a new translation of the Bible, which would be the only version authorized to be read in the churches.
The Bible extant at the time was the Geneva Bible – the Bible of Shakespeare, John Knox, John Donne, Oliver Cromwell, and John Bunyan – which had been produced over 50 years earlier by the work of scholars who fled England during the Protestant purges under Bloody Mary. It was a translation from Greek and Hebrew and more than 80% of Geneva’s English translation came from the Tyndale Bible.
The Geneva Bible, however, contained marginal notations, designed to make it “user friendly,” which were distinctly Calvinistic in doctrine. While the Geneva translation was excellent, these marginal glosses offended the bishops of the Church of England because they associated them with Presbyterianism. The Anglican Church of England had instead been using the Great Bible, authorized by King Henry VIII and produced in 1539. Its translation was flawed, however, because it had been produced by Miles Coverdale, a disciple of Tyndale, who was not a Greek or Hebrew scholar. He had finished the incomplete Tyndale translation by using the Latin Vulgate, itself a translation, rather than using Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts. To overcome the translation defects of the Great Bible, the Anglican bishops produced their own translation in 1568 which became known as the Bishops Bible.
In his opening words at Hampton Court in January 1604, James set the tone of the conference. The doctrine and polity of the state church, he said, would not be up for evaluation or reconsideration – notwithstanding the Puritan objections to it. He found security in the hierarchy and structure of the Church of England unlike the Presbyterian model he had witnessed in Scotland. There might be room for some cosmetic changes, he hinted. “I assure you we have not called this assembly for any innovation,” but even the best of systems is subject to corruption over time, he allowed, and he acknowledged that “we have received many complaints, since our first entrance into this kingdom, of many disorders, and much disobedience to the laws, with a great falling away to popery.”
As for the suggestion for a new translation, he liked it. He had despised the Geneva Bible because of its marginal notes, which contained commentary and interpretation that he found politically subversive. He opined, “Let errors, in matters of faith, be amended, and indifferent things be interpreted, and a gloss added unto them.” On balance a project to create a new translation that reliably expressed the original texts had much to commend itself – it would replace the hated Geneva, throw a bone to the Puritans, appear ecumenical, provide a single voice for scripture in the churches, and enlighten the nation to God’s word.
James insisted that he wanted a translation with scholarly and royal authority, observing: “I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by the Royal authority.”
And yet the starting point for this new translation would not be a blank sheet of paper. The starting point would be the Bishops Bible of 1568. This made the King James Version not an original translation, but rather a revision of an existing translation, albeit a revision going back to the work of William Tyndale. This is revealed in the preface to the 1611 King James Version:
Truly (good Christian reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.
Out of the original 54 scholars who were considered for the project, 47 were chosen solely on their scholarly merit. They were the best that England had in their knowledge of the original texts and languages, and while a fourth of them were Puritan, all quite remarkably rose above their sectarian convictions.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, wrote the rules for the translators, which were approved by the king.
The translators were organized into six groups, which met at Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford. Ten at Westminster were assigned Genesis through 2 Kings; seven had Romans through Jude. At Cambridge, eight worked on 1 Chronicles through Ecclesiastes, while seven others handled the Apocrypha. Oxford had seven translating Isaiah through Malachi with another eight working on the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.
Four years were spent by the six groups to produce the preliminary translations after which nine more months were spent at Stationers' Hall in London for review and revision of the works by two men each from the Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford companies. The final revision was then completed by two of the scholars, one of whom wrote the preface.
The completed work was issued in 1611, 400 years ago this year, the complete title page reading:
THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties Special Commandment. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie. ANNO DOM. 1611.
How well did the scholars do their work? One could answer that their translation was so exacting that it translated impenetrable Hebrew and Greek into equally impenetrable English. Expressions thus resulted like a fly in the ointment, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the skin of your teeth, scales falling from eyes, to fall flat on your face, reaping the whirlwind, pour out your heart, sour grapes, two edged sword, old wives' tales, and handwriting on the wall, which would enter the English language as incomprehensible expressions at first but became idioms later although only in the vernacular of those knowledgeable of the King James Bible.
Languages have unique ways of expressing concepts some of which are crystallized in words that are untranslatable into other languages – schwerpunkt in German comes to mind – but most require transliterations rather than word by word translations in order for the readers of one language to understand a work created in another language. Yet the translators of the King James project fastidiously chose word-by-word accuracy over understanding. Thus, since James wanted accuracy, in that respect his project was a success – its bizarre terms notwithstanding.
Shakespeare was a visitor and performing raconteur at Hampton Court on occasions when King James was in residence there, and he began work on his last play, The Tempest, the year the King James Bible was published. Over his writing career, Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon looking for new words and expressions, and yet his plays have not influenced the development of English to the extent that the Bible has done. While Shakespeare’s plays used densely packed word pictures to move his audiences, the Bible uses about 8,000 different words to express its message in terms that most ordinary people at the beginning of the 17th century could understand.
Yet forty years after the Bible’s publication, Handel borrowed large swaths of it to give voice to his magisterial oratorio, Messiah. No ordinary words could express, “Comfort ye my people; Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” Only those of King James translation were adequate.
Likewise, John Winthrop’s vision of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony being a "city upon a hill,” the dominating influence in colonial development, could not have been expressed more efficiently to its original inhabitants than a biblical image familiar to them all. Ronald Reagan borrowed the same phrase when speaking to the Republican National Convention preceding his second term: “We raised a banner of bold colors – no pale pastels. We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill.”
The poetry of the Old Testament inspired the opening words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth a new nation," which are based on Psalm 90:10, "The days of our years are three score years and ten," in combination with the King James prose describing birth: "Mary brought forth a son."
Where would Martin Luther King Jr. have found a better description for his “dream” than the almost verbatim use of the 4th and 5th verses of Isaiah 40?
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low. The rough places will be made plain, the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!
The inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell – "Proclaim freedom throughout the land!” – comes from the King James translation of a verse in Leviticus, and when Samuel Morse sent the first message on his revolutionary telegraph in 1844, he could think of no better words than the question posed in Numbers 23:23 in King James English – “What hath God wrought?”
More than 2.6 billion copies of the King James Bible have been sold since its publication 400 years ago. It is the book of ages, the transcendent voice of English-speaking peoples, without which there would have been no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Paradise Lost, no Negro spirituals, no Handel’s Messiah as we know them. There would be no way to describe a “broken heart” or a “labor of love” or a “cross to bear.” Without the King James translation, we would be unable to give thanks for the undeserved grace that “preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” nor could we confess the heartfelt blessedness that “my cup runneth over.”
Without the King James Bible, we would have had a poorer world.
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