it is that openeth the window to let in the light; that breaketh the shell that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well that we may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well.’
Smyth also wrote: ‘we never sought to make a new translation, nor yet a bad one to make a good one, but to make a good one better; or out of many good ones, one principal good one.’
The scholars worked in six committees, two based in Oxford, two in Cambridge and two in Westminster. The Bible was carved up between them. The majority was firmly Anglican. The committees worked separately until completion when two from each committee met to revise and harmonise the whole. The King did not pay them. Either their colleges supported them or they were steered towards well-paid parishes and dioceses which gave them the time to do the work. They worked in an orderly, even a drilled manner, for years. A contemporary, John Selden, in his Table Talk, writes: ‘the translation in King James’ time took an excellent way. That part of the bible was given to him who was most excellent in such a tongue . . . and then they met together, and one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian etc. If they found any fault they spoke up, if not he read on.’
‘He read on.’ That is crucial. From the beginning the Bible in England had been a preaching and a teaching Bible. Wycliffe and Tyndale were aware that they were delivering their translated Scriptures into a largely illiterate society. They wrote as scholars for scholars, but they also wrote as preachers for everyone who needed to be reached. Later it would be read not only in churches and in vast open air rallies, but in schools and homes, in meetings and conferences. It would be quoted by soldiers on the battlefield and nurses in hospitals and its poetry would later be translated into the gospel songs. In this as in much else, they modelled themselves on the practice of Jesus Christ who spoke directly to the people.
The scholars had a substantial library at their disposal. Not only the versions in English, beginning with Wycliffe, but the Complutensian Polyglot (of 1517, in which Hebrew, Latin and Greek were printed side by side), the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572, the Tremellius-Junius Bible of 1579, Sebastian Münster’s Latin translation of the Old Testament, Theodore Bega’s translation of the New Testament; Latin translations of the whole Bible by Sanctes Pagninus, Leo Judo and Sebastian Castalio; the Zurich Bible, Luther’s German Bible; the French Bibles of Lefèvre d’Étaples (1534) and Olivétan (1535); Casiodoro de Reina and Cypriano de Valera (1569) in Spanish; Diodati in Italian; the 1,600-year-old Latin Vulgate by St Jerome and commentaries by early Church fathers, rabbis and other contemporary scholars. And, of course, Tyndale.
Since Tyndale’s day, Greek and especially Hebrew scholarship had advanced rapidly; there were more and better Hebrew grammars and the scanning of existing versions was fine-toothed. All the more remarkable then that Tyndale’s final version still accounted for about 80 per cent of the King James New Testament and the same percentage obtained in those books he had translated of the Old Testament. Yet the contribution by these later scholars was important both for the grand authority their reputations brought to it and for the work of improvement and finessing they undertook.
The First Westminster Company was led by Dean Launcelot Andrewes, of whom it was said he ‘might have been interpreter general at Babel’. He went to Cambridge University at sixteen, where he met and befriended Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of The Faerie Queen. It appears that he was studious and ‘avoided games of ordinary recreation’. He climbed rapidly up the Church ladder until he became Dean of Westminster Abbey and one of the twelve chaplains to Queen Elizabeth I.
We are told that he mastered fifteen languages and had an outstandingly tenacious memory. Grotius, the leading Dutch legal authority and historian, said that meeting Andrewes was ‘one of the special attractions of a visit to England’. It is said that King James sometimes slept with Andrewes’s sermons under his pillow and was in awe of him. T.S. Eliot, almost four centuries later, praised his gift for ‘taking a word and developing the world from it’. Too Latinate and self-absorbed for some, but to the greatest poet of the twentieth century he was a literary hero.
As merely one example, Eliot takes Tyndale’s opening lines of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness 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,
