The ‘King James Bible’

THE Authorized or ‘King James’ Version of the Bible was begun in 1604 and published in 1611, under the patronage of King James VI and I. James, who was born in 1566, ruled Scotland as King James VI from 1567; in 1603, he also inherited the crown of England from his cousin Elizabeth I, so he is known as King James the Sixth and First. He died in 1625.

The new translation was not the first English translation of Scripture: they had been in circulation since Anglo-Saxon times. It was not the first English translation of the whole Bible: that was made by followers of John Wyclif, and banned in 1407 on account of their supposedly extreme, unorthodox and treasonable opinions. It was not even the first complete Bible in English to be printed: that was the translation by Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, in 1535. Two years later, Matthew’s Bible became the first to be officially authorized for use in English churches. King Henry VIII’s Great Bible of 1539 was Coverdale’s revision of his earlier text, and in 1540 was distinguished by a preface penned by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Other official Bibles followed, notably the Bishops’ Bible of 1572.

The translation commissioned by King James and published in 1611 was, therefore, not a ‘first’. It occupies a position of greater honour, which is the last. No more translations were ‘authorized to be read in churches’ by King or Queen. No translation since has had, or ever will have, such an impact on English language and literature.

Church English

AS the appointment ‘to be read in churches’ implies, this is a Bible not just to be read but to be read aloud, a Bible intended primarily for public liturgy, for the ceremony of the courts of heaven. It is often assumed that the Authorized Version reflected the English of its day, an assumption used to justify re-translating the Bible into the current popular idiom of every new generation, and even of different social or economic groups; but the English of the Authorized Version was never everyday English, whether in taverns, theatres or palaces. The translators chose to adopt an archaic and lofty tone that sounded old-fashioned and other-worldly even then — that same year, 1611, William Shakespeare put on ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest’ at the Court of King James. As John Birkbeck (1859-1916), an expert on the Russian Orthodox Church, expressed it:

The Book of Common Prayer (1549) had already begun to raise English to new heights in striving to do justice to the sacred texts of the public liturgy, but the translators of the Authorized Version continued and accelerated the process. They sought to create a sense of antiquity, of sacred space and of reverence; but more than that, they sought to let the Holy Ghost speak as he would. Such was their respect for our holy book, that they crafted an English whose sole purpose was to convey the message of Scripture in the context of a ceremonial worship in which the Bible played the starring role. Greek and Hebrew idioms not familiar to English speakers were left in the raw, and to the whole text they imparted a sound and rhythm that felt as distinctively ecclesiastical to the English as Church Slavonic felt to the Russians, a tongue uniquely shaped by and for the public liturgy, one which was ‘understanded of the people’ (as the Articles of Religion expressed it), but not commonly spoken or written. No other translation reminds us so clearly, by the very way it speaks to us, of the words spoken through the prophet Isaiah: