McGrath

Tracing the very human process that brought us the Bible in English

A brief review of In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture, by Alister McGrath

by Gene TeSelle [8-13-01]

The well-known evangelical scholar Alister McGrath has a new book entitled In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (Doubleday, 2001). It's an interesting cultural and political history with lots of illustrations, suitable for display on your coffee table as well as study in church or seminary groups.

Throughout the narrative McGrath makes the grim details of printing technology interesting, showing the many ways they expanded or limited the possibilities for Bible publication. But of course his chief focus is on the history of English versions. Wyclif's followers were responsible for an overly literal version that got the ball rolling. Much more sophisticated -- in Greek and Hebrew learning, as well as the theological issues of the Reformation era -- were the sixteenth-century translations by Tyndale and then Coverdale. McGrath devotes a whole chapter to the Geneva Bible of 1560 with its marginal notes, which thrilled Calvinists but made moderate Anglicans and crowned rulers grind their teeth.

Presbyterians today, concerned about the relation between Scripture and the confessions and the warfare between different interpretations of Scripture, might draw some interesting lessons from what happened next.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, many people expected a Puritan ruler. But James had had enough of Presbyterianism in Scotland. Thinking of himself as a ruler by the grace of God, he disliked the Geneva Bible's marginal comments at a number of points. These comments also disagreed with the political philosophy of passive obedience taught in the Anglican homilies.

One of the key actions of the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 was to call for a new translation of the Bible, authorized by the king himself. Six companies of translators were to carry out the work, staying as close as they could to the older versions. (For this reason, McGrath points out, some of the language was already archaic, including the consistent use of "thee" and "thou.") The first printing came in 1611, with publication rights limited to the king's printer.

The new translation did not catch on all that quickly. It was controversial in many circles, for a variety of reasons. The main dispute, of course, was with champions of the Geneva Bible, which continued to be printed. The dispute was finally exhausted by the upheavals of the Puritan Interregnum and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, which by that time almost everyone supported. The Authorized Version became the consensus Bible, used by both Anglicans and Dissenters. After 1750 it began to be praised as a classic of English literature, and this became a cliché in the nineteenth century. McGrath offers a long list of English expressions that come from the King James Bible.

There were still a number of serious issues, some of which McGrath mentions, but not others.

For one thing, the Book of Common Prayer continued to print the Psalms in the older sixteenth-century version; Parliament never did get around to substituting the Authorized Version.

Then there was the issue of the Apocrypha. These were translated as a matter of course. While the Geneva Bible had included them, the Westminster Assembly condemned their use. When the Bible Societies began producing inexpensive Bibles in the nineteenth century the Apocrypha were dropped, sometimes as a matter of principle, often simply to reduce costs.

And this brings us to another role of the British and Foreign Bible Society, then the American Bible Society. They adopted the practice of printing the Bible "without note or comment," largely because they were lay organizations that included members of many different denominations and disclaimed any ecclesial function. As a result we get the un-annotated Bible of modern pan-Protestant culture, devoid even of the textual notes that were part of the original King James (the translators, being good philologists in the "Renaissance and Reformation" tradition, were aware of many problems of text and translation).

That was when the Bible, printed in increasingly homogeneous and readable type face, came to be viewed in popular culture as the Word of God straight from heaven. When the Revised Standard Version was issued (the New Testament in 1946, the whole Bible in 1952), the new translation and the sponsoring National Council of Churches were vilified for doing exactly what the King James translators themselves would have done -- changing the language and acknowledging textual problems. The RSV even kept "thee" and "thou" language for God, a habit that most Protestants shook only after Catholics, in the wake of Vatican II, went straight from Latin to contemporary English in their worship.

So what can Presbyterians today learn from this story? It shows that text and translation and interpretation are never as certain as we would like to think; that versions of the Bible are never free from sectarian rivalries; that we must resist the inclination to differentiate, in too facile a way, the Bible from its interpretation. But it also shows us that a broad consensus can develop, bridging denominational and factional rivalries, and that the use of a "good-enough" translation can set at least some of those rivalries in the background and enhance the mission of all the churches to the wider culture.