The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
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was upon the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the water.’
He then quotes Andrewes, whose words he claims are much superior: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’
Thirty-nine words compared to Tyndale’s twenty-nine. The key words ‘void’, ‘darkness’, ‘deep’ are Tyndale. I prefer Tyndale. Nevertheless, T.S. Eliot is to be respected and many have agreed with his judgement about this and others of Andrewes’s rephrasings.
Eliot was much indebted to Andrewes. In his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ he took phrases from him for some of his most admired poetry. From a sermon of Andrewes on the Three Wise Men in 1622, he used and echoed: ‘It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it . . . the ways deep, the winter sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.’
Andrewes and his committee met in the Jerusalem Chamber, still part of the original Abbey House at Westminster.
Other members included Hebrew specialists, Greek scholars and Latinists. One was so fluent in Latin that he found it difficult to talk in English at any length. Another had a permanently faithless wife whose public infatuation with sex saddened him but did not sever his marriage nor, it seems, interfere with his concentration on the translation.
The First Cambridge Company was led by Edward Lively, the Regius Professor of Hebrew, whose thirteen children disabled him from living a life without debt. There was the Regius Professor of Divinity from Cambridge, one of the four Puritans who had attended the Hampton Court Conference. Another scholar had lived through the reigns of four Tudors and two Stuarts and died aged 105, still able to read a copy of the Greek Testament in ‘very small type’ ‘without spectacles’.
The First Oxford Company was headed by John Hardinge, Regius Professor of Hebrew. The most powerful man on that committee, though, was John Reynolds, not only President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but the man who had successfully suggested the idea of a new Bible to James I at Hampton Court. He was variously described as a ‘living library’ and ‘a university unto himself’. He was a moderate Puritan, understanding of the Roman Catholic position, a tried and trusted friend and respecter of Jews, and a man who literally, it was thought, wasted away in his service to translation. He died in 1607 and looked ‘the very skeleton’. Other Puritans were not as tolerant: one, Thomas Holland, would say, on parting company, ‘I commend you to the love of God and to the hatred of Popery and superstition.’
These three companies devoted themselves to the Old Testament. The word ‘company’ for what might better be described as a ‘committee’ indicates the power of fashion of the day. London was a nest of companies: the Actors’ Companies, the Livery companies, the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company . . . There was something vaguely martial and also convivial about a company and that seems to have rubbed off on these biblical companies.
The Second Oxford Company and the Second Westminster Company worked on the New Testament, the Second Cambridge Company on the Apocrypha now sadly omitted from the King James Version.
James drew up fourteen rules after consultation with Bishop (later Archbishop) Bancroft and Robert Cecil, his principal secretary of state. Their aim was to ensure the translation was a conservative one. Perhaps to emphasise that, they kept words and phrases and sentences that had already drifted out of fashion, even archaic, like ‘verily’ and ‘it came to pass’. By retaining them, they ensured that the new Bible from the beginning had a halo of antiquity, a feeling of immemorial validity.
From January 1609, a General Committee of Revision met in London to examine the new version. According to one of the three translators entrusted with the task, only a few of their changes made it into the final version. The companies had done well. From this committee it went to two other translators. One of them, Miles Smyth, wrote the preface. On to Archbishop Bancroft, who made fourteen of his own changes, rather resented by Miles Smyth. It was then finally presented to the King and from the court sent off to the printers.
The Bible was about to be born again and this, the Authorised Version, would, with some retouching along the way, remain the standard English Bible until well into the twentieth century. In many parts of the world it still is and where it has been superseded its loss is often lamented and there are cries to bring it back.
Just as the Scottish King, thrifty in everything save his indulgences, would not pay the translators, so he left the printers to fend for themselves.
Although called the Authorised Version, the King James Bible was never officially authorised. That would have required an Act of Parliament. But within the title the words ‘By his majestie’s special commandment’ and ‘Appointed to be read in churches’ and the common knowledge of King James’s decisive role allow that ‘Authorised’ to be used without too much historical embarrassment. America has it more accurately with the ‘King James Version’.
The printing proved to be a strain. Bibles had been a trade monopoly since the time of Henry VIII and the custom of a cut of the profits, a royalty going to royalty to acknowledge their royal approval, was well established by James’s day. Bibles and theological books were not only good business, they were the biggest proportion of the book business. Under Queen Elizabeth I, in 1577, Thomas Barker secured a monopoly on Bibles. A decade later, by intensive lubrications at court, he had it extended for the whole of his lifetime and that of his son, who became the King’s Printer, solely responsible in 1611 for the publication of the Bible.
It would be lavish, splendid and very expensive. Barker had to set aside an eye-watering sum, £3,500 (in Jacobean times, a king’s ransom). He had to look for partners. They came and they brought troubles and disputes and debts which put him in prison for the last ten years of his life. But even in his cell he remained the King’s Printer and held on to the copyright.
It was printed in 1611 with the title ‘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 speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie Anno Domini 1611’. The New Testament bore a title, the same but for the opening line: ‘the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ . . .’
It cost twelve shillings bound, ten shillings loose leaf. The folio edition was handsome, heavy and designed to impress. The smaller and cheaper quarto edition was on the streets a year later. There were no illustrations. It contained a table for the reading of the Psalms at matins and evensong, a Church calendar, an almanac and a table of holy days and observances. Some of this dropped away as later versions appeared, most notably in 1629, 1638 and 1762 at Cambridge and, most successfully, in 1769 at Oxford.
Punctuation, spelling and capitalisation were often erratic. Of the 1,500 misprints in the first years some are memorable. For instance there was the omission of ‘not’ from the commandment ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’. This became known as ‘the wicked Bible’. The printers were fined. Then there was the ‘vinegar Bible’, where ‘vinegar’ crept in instead of ‘vineyard’. And the ‘murderer’s Bible’, where there was ‘let the children first be killed’ instead of ‘filled’. Hating ‘life’ became hating ‘wife’.
There were disputes. For example, the same Greek verb meaning ‘rejoice’ was translated not only as ‘rejoice’ but also as ‘glory’. ‘We rejoice in . . .’, ‘we glory in . . .’ and ‘we also joy in . . .’. Variation had suited the poetic and illuminating mind of Tyndale and that was one of the characteristics his successors imitated. The fluidity and the rush of richness in and the bounty of almostsynonyms in the Roman-Germanic-Norse-French-English language at the time was too tempting to resist.
But it has been pointed out that literally a liberty had been taken and the cry of Richard III, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ might not have been improved with the introduction of ‘steed’ and ‘nag’. And though