October 11, 2011
In the beginning : the story of the King James Bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture by Alister E. McGrath.
I was a while getting here. I had read What the Gospels meant by Garry Wills, which I enjoyed tremendously. Then I worked through a book [title forgotten] on the difficulties in translating the Bible from a technical viewpoint. The danger of working with an idiomatic language for one is quite underestimated by Americans, many of whom speak only one language and never have to experience just how confusing they can be.
Next I picked up Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantell, which I reviewed here. On that, suffice it to say that it deals with Henry VIII and the first half of his reign. At the same time, I watched the show Who Do You Think You Are, which had an episode with Ashley Judd. Her Pilgrim ancestor was jailed for opposing King James and his Bible and they showed the cell he shared with my ancestor, William Bradford.
This being the 400 anniversary of King James’ Bible, I wanted a better look at the document and the process. As a Catholic, I mostly knew they got rid of a few books they didn’t like and used some very bad Greek texts, but that it was the best effort of the times. So I picked up McGrath’s In the Beginning and found just what I was looking for.
McGrath starts with the context and builds a compelling and well documented narrative, just the kind of NF I live for. The importance of the printing press and other new technologies that made paper and ink suitable for book production. The growth of scholarship of both Greek and Hebrew in Europe. The mixture of politics, social movement and religion that was the Reformation. The battle not only of Bibles, but of Biblical notation to explain the “hard parts”. Many of the contestants ended up executed and Thomas Cromwell (the main character of Wolf Hall) ends up erased from the frontispiece of one Bible after his downfall. James and his opposition to the egalitarian and proto-parliamentarian Puritans (thus the imprisonment of those promoting the wrong translation and especially the wrong explanatory notes). The battle of the translators and the unpopularity of the new text.
It is only with the passage of time that King James’ Bible wins out. It wins to the extent that to most English speakers it is the Bible and not a translation, a mistake that a Muslim would never make. They reverence each of the original words of their scripture, while Christians can’t even agree on what the original words were. Maybe that’s why they treat the Koran like it was the Word of God and we use markers on our copies and throw them in the trash when they wear out.
The KJB as a literary phenomenon is subject enough for another book, so McGrath only makes a down payment on that. Enough to encourage me to read further. I’ll settle for this example.
