The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg

conference: ‘I profess I could never yet see a Bible translated well into English . . . I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation which should be done by the best learned men in both universities, then revised by Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by Royal Authority, to be read in the whole church, and none other.’

      That became his battle plan. And the book that proved that a work of lasting value, unique significance and unparalleled popularity could be assembled by committee got under way. King James put his oar in even before the work had begun. Not only did he outline the schedule – and see that it was followed – he marked the cards of those he chose to make the new translation.

      The Geneva Bible, the most popular of all the Bibles published at that time, had irritated James in Edinburgh where he had to bite his tongue. In London it was loosened and he rounded on his tormentor. His chief objection to the Geneva Bible was not the translation of the Scriptures but the marginal notes, which he saw as ‘untrue, seditious and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits’. He pointed out that in Exodus i, 17, in its marginal notes the Geneva Bible had commended the example of civil disobedience shown by Hebrew midwives. In 2 Chronicles xv, 16, the notes stated that King Asa’s mother should have been executed, not just deposed for her idolatry. This, he thought, could be used to reflect badly on his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who had indeed been executed. Worse, Exodus challenged the Divine Right of a King to be above the law.

      There would be no marginal notes in his new Bible. Nor was the word ‘tyrant’, which appeared more than 400 times in the Geneva Bible, to be used.

      James grasped what many later ideologues and rulers and tyrants grasped – that authority was secured by the enforcement of detail. Just as Marxists, Leninists and Maoists argued for months on apparently hair-splittingly different interpretations of their own sacred books, so here James saw the Bible as his outward and visible authority. It would be his Bible. No notes.

      But the overall guidance still left a great deal of room for manoeuvre. In King James’s Bible, the ambiguities of the language and the multiple possible uses to which the stories could be put were to prove both a book for the establishment and, equally, a book with revolutionary potential. Yet at the time of publication it seemed that the Book of Books had become solely the Book of the King. The Scriptures would serve the state and only through the King of the state would they serve God. He wanted the Bible to sound familiar and it did; he wanted it revised by his own selection of great scholars and it was.

      The country, at that intellectually blossoming time in its history, was quite remarkably well served with scholars in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon. James had only to cast out his net to haul in a glittering catch of linguists.

      The scheme was set up in a few months. The preliminary translation took four years. There were nine months of review and revision in London. Then followed final revisions, including that of the King. From the court it would make its way to the Royal Printer.

      Fifty-four scholars were sifted from the mass of bibliophiles who had accreted in Oxford and Cambridge and around Westminster. Deaths and illnesses culled the field a little and probably forty-seven were active. A mighty and intellectually dazzling host from a small country to be funnelled into one book. Almost all of them came from the south-east of England, which both characterised and unified the English, which in that period was a quilt of dialects. About 25 per cent of the translators were Puritans, evidence of an impressive fight-back after their humiliation at Hampton Court.

      These men took their work with gravity. To them, the Scriptures were the books of eternal life, the guides to daily life, the story of Jesus Christ, the only Saviour, the history of the world and the Word of God. They were not timid in their learning. One of the reasons the book has lasted and was so resonant is that it was scrupulously tested by superbly learned minds whose life’s work had been to fathom ancient religious texts. They took translation seriously and, in his preface to the Bible, Miles Smyth defended this memorably. He wrote: ‘Translation it is that openeth the window to let in the light; that breaketh the shell that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well that we may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well.’

      Smyth also wrote: ‘we never sought to make a new translation, nor yet a bad one to make a good one, but to make a good one better; or out of many good ones, one principal good one.’

      The scholars worked in six committees, two based in Oxford, two in Cambridge and two in Westminster. The Bible was carved up between them. The majority was firmly Anglican. The committees worked separately until completion when two from each committee met to revise and harmonise the whole. The King did not pay them. Either their colleges supported them or they were steered towards well-paid parishes and dioceses which gave them the time to do the work. They worked in an orderly, even a drilled manner, for years. A contemporary, John Selden, in his Table Talk, writes: ‘the translation in King James’ time took an excellent way. That part of the bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue . . . and then they met together, and one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian etc. If they found any fault they spoke up, if not he read on.’

      ‘He read on.’ That is crucial. From the beginning the Bible in England had been a preaching and a teaching Bible. Wycliffe and Tyndale were aware that they were delivering their translated Scriptures into a largely illiterate society. They wrote as scholars for scholars, but they also wrote as preachers for everyone who needed to be reached. Later it would be read not only in churches and in vast open air rallies, but in schools and homes, in meetings and conferences. It would be quoted by soldiers on the battlefield and nurses in hospitals and its poetry would later be translated into the gospel songs. In this as in much else, they modelled themselves on the practice of Jesus Christ who spoke directly to the people.

      The scholars had a substantial library at their disposal. Not only the versions in English, beginning with Wycliffe, but the Complutensian Polyglot (of 1517, in which Hebrew, Latin and Greek were printed side by side), the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572, the Tremellius-Junius Bible of 1579, Sebastian Münster’s Latin translation of the Old Testament, Theodore Bega’s translation of the New Testament; Latin translations of the whole Bible by Sanctes Pagninus, Leo Judo and Sebastian Castalio; the Zurich Bible, Luther’s German Bible; the French Bibles of Lefèvre d’Étaples (1534) and Olivétan (1535); Casiodoro de Reina and Cypriano de Valera (1569) in Spanish; Diodati in Italian; the 1,600-year-old Latin Vulgate by St Jerome and commentaries by early Church fathers, rabbis and other contemporary scholars. And, of course, Tyndale.

      Since Tyndale’s day, Greek and especially Hebrew scholarship had advanced rapidly; there were more and better Hebrew grammars and the scanning of existing versions was fine-toothed. All the more remarkable then that Tyndale’s final version still accounted for about 80 per cent of the King James New Testament and the same percentage obtained in those books he had translated of the Old Testament. Yet the contribution by these later scholars was important both for the grand authority their reputations brought to it and for the work of improvement and finessing they undertook.

      The First Westminster Company was led by Dean Launcelot Andrewes, of whom it was said he ‘might have been interpreter general at Babel’. He went to Cambridge University at sixteen, where he met and befriended Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of The Faerie Queen. It appears that he was studious and ‘avoided games of ordinary recreation’. He climbed rapidly up the Church ladder until he became Dean of Westminster Abbey and one of the twelve chaplains to Queen Elizabeth I.

      We are told that he mastered fifteen languages and had an outstandingly tenacious memory. Grotius, the leading Dutch legal authority and historian, said that meeting Andrewes was ‘one of the special attractions of a visit to England’. It is said that King James sometimes slept with Andrewes’s sermons under his pillow and was in awe of him. T.S. Eliot, almost four centuries later, praised his gift for ‘taking a word and developing the world from it’. Too Latinate and self-absorbed for some, but to the greatest poet of the twentieth century he was a literary hero.

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