Today is the birthday of the King James Bible.
The earliest complete translation into English was made by a team of scholars under John Wycliffe in the 14th century. These translations were banned in 1409 due to their association with the Lollards, who were considered heretics for rejecting some of the teachings of the Catholic church. The Wycliffe Bible pre-dated the printing press but was circulated very widely in manuscript form, often inscribed with a date earlier than 1409 to avoid the legal ban. As the text translated in the various versions of the Wycliffe Bible was the Latin Vulgate, and as it contained no heterodox readings, there was in practice no way by which the ecclesiastical authorities could distinguish the banned version; consequently many Catholic commentators of the 15th and 16th centuries (such as Thomas More) took these manuscript English Bibles to represent an anonymous earlier orthodox translation.
In 1525, William Tyndale, an English contemporary of Martin Luther, undertook a translation of the New Testament. Tyndale's translation was the first printed Bible in English. Over the next ten years, Tyndale revised his New Testament in the light of rapidly advancing biblical scholarship, and embarked on a translation of the Old Testament. Despite some controversial translation choices, and in spite of Tyndale's execution by Henry VIII ostensibly on charges of heresy for having made the translated Bible but really because he opposed the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the merits of Tyndale's work and prose style made his translation the ultimate basis for all subsequent renditions into Early Modern English.
Nothwithstanding his being burned at the stake for heresy, in 1539, Tyndale's New Testament and his incomplete work on the Old Testament became the basis for the Great Bible. With the accession of Queen Mary and her attempt to return England to Catholicism, a number of English reformers fled the country, landing in Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, which became the chief international center for reformation.
These English expatriates undertook a translation that became known as the Geneva Bible This translation, dated to 1560, was a revision of Tyndale's Bible and the Great Bible on the basis of the original languages. Soon after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, the flaws of both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible became painfully apparent (namely, that the Geneva Bible did not "conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy"). In 1568, the Church of England responded with the Bishops' Bible, a revision of the Great Bible in the light of the Geneva version. While officially approved, this new version failed to displace the Geneva translation as the most popular English Bible of the age – in part because the full Bible was only printed in lectern editions of prodigious size and at a cost of several pounds. Accordingly, Elizabethan lay people overwhelmingly read the Bible in the Geneva Version – small editions were available at a relatively low cost. At the same time, there was a substantial clandestine importation of the rival Douay – Rheims New Testament of 1582, undertaken by exiled Roman Catholics. This translation, though still derived from Tyndale, claimed to represent the text of the Latin Vulgate.
The newly crowned King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the Puritan faction of the Church of England. Instructions were given to the translators that were intended to limit the Puritan influence on this new translation, and to conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England.
James' instructions included several requirements that kept the new translation familiar to its listeners and readers. The text of the Bishops' Bible would serve as the primary guide for the translators, and the familiar proper names of the biblical characters would all be retained. If the Bishops' Bible was deemed problematic in any situation, the translators were permitted to consult other translations from a pre-approved list: the Tyndale Bible, the Coverdale Bible, Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible (all derivatives of Tyndale). In addition, later scholars have detected an influence on the Authorized Version from the translations of Taverner's Bible and the New Testament of the Douay–Rheims Bible. But translations were to be rooted in the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic texts.
The translation task began in 1604 and concluded in 1609. The first versions of the King James Bible included 15 books of Apocrypha, which were finished first. The Apocrypha served as a sort of non-canonical, popular, light reading in between the blood and thunder god of the Old Testament and the distant, philosophical god of the New. As they were not considered canon, they eventually dropped out in 1666. The first printing, in a folio version, was in 1611. There were actually two editions published that year, differing only by a typo in Ruth 3:15; the first edition reading "he went into the city", where the second reads "she went into the city"; So these are known to collectors and the he and she bibles.
There have been a number of subsequent translations that are considered to be more accurate as they are based on source texts that were not available to the committees. But none of them sing like the King James text. It exerted a profound influence on subsequent English literature, and many critics consider it, along with Shakespeare, to be the pinnacles of English literature.
And that is largely due to the heretic Tyndale. A complete analysis of the King James version was made in 1998. It shows that Tyndale's words account for 84% of the New Testament and for 75.8% of the Old Testament books that he translated. Although the Authorized King James Version is ostensibly the production of a learned committee of churchmen, it is mostly cribbed from Tyndale with some reworking of his translation and additions of books he didn't get to.
This has led to generations of protestants laboring under the belief that God speaks Early Modern English, and so needs to be addressed in prayer using as much of it as people can remember, with all the thees and thous and hasts and dosts. It has probably escaped their notice that, in preferring the King James over all other versions, they're also absorbing a large chunk of the theology of the Church of England.
The image is the first page of the Gospel of John, as translated by William Tyndale.
Comments
Post a Comment