From January 1609, a General Committee of Revision met in London to examine the new version. According to one of the three translators entrusted with the task, only a few of their changes made it into the final version. The companies had done well. From this committee it went to two other translators. One of them, Miles Smyth, wrote the preface. On to Archbishop Bancroft, who made fourteen of his own changes, rather resented by Miles Smyth. It was then finally presented to the King and from the court sent off to the printers.
The Bible was about to be born again and this, the Authorised Version, would, with some retouching along the way, remain the standard English Bible until well into the twentieth century. In many parts of the world it still is and where it has been superseded its loss is often lamented and there are cries to bring it back.
Just as the Scottish King, thrifty in everything save his indulgences, would not pay the translators, so he left the printers to fend for themselves.
Although called the Authorised Version, the King James Bible was never officially authorised. That would have required an Act of Parliament. But within the title the words ‘By his majestie’s special commandment’ and ‘Appointed to be read in churches’ and the common knowledge of King James’s decisive role allow that ‘Authorised’ to be used without too much historical embarrassment. America has it more accurately with the ‘King James Version’.
The printing proved to be a strain. Bibles had been a trade monopoly since the time of Henry VIII and the custom of a cut of the profits, a royalty going to royalty to acknowledge their royal approval, was well established by James’s day. Bibles and theological books were not only good business, they were the biggest proportion of the book business. Under Queen Elizabeth I, in 1577, Thomas Barker secured a monopoly on Bibles. A decade later, by intensive lubrications at court, he had it extended for the whole of his lifetime and that of his son, who became the King’s Printer, solely responsible in 1611 for the publication of the Bible.
It would be lavish, splendid and very expensive. Barker had to set aside an eye-watering sum, £3,500 (in Jacobean times, a king’s ransom). He had to look for partners. They came and they brought troubles and disputes and debts which put him in prison for the last ten years of his life. But even in his cell he remained the King’s Printer and held on to the copyright.
It was printed in 1611 with the title ‘The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie Anno Domini 1611’. The New Testament bore a title, the same but for the opening line: ‘the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ . . .’
It cost twelve shillings bound, ten shillings loose leaf. The folio edition was handsome, heavy and designed to impress. The smaller and cheaper quarto edition was on the streets a year later. There were no illustrations. It contained a table for the reading of the Psalms at matins and evensong, a Church calendar, an almanac and a table of holy days and observances. Some of this dropped away as later versions appeared, most notably in 1629, 1638 and 1762 at Cambridge and, most successfully, in 1769 at Oxford.
Punctuation, spelling and capitalisation were often erratic. Of the 1,500 misprints in the first years some are memorable. For instance there was the omission of ‘not’ from the commandment ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’. This became known as ‘the wicked Bible’. The printers were fined. Then there was the ‘vinegar Bible’, where ‘vinegar’ crept in instead of ‘vineyard’. And the ‘murderer’s Bible’, where there was ‘let the children first be killed’ instead of ‘filled’. Hating ‘life’ became hating ‘wife’.
There were disputes. For example, the same Greek verb meaning ‘rejoice’ was translated not only as ‘rejoice’ but also as ‘glory’. ‘We rejoice in . . .’, ‘we glory in . . .’ and ‘we also joy in . . .’. Variation had suited the poetic and illuminating mind of Tyndale and that was one of the characteristics his successors imitated. The fluidity and the rush of richness in and the bounty of almostsynonyms in the Roman-Germanic-Norse-French-English language at the time was too tempting to resist.
But it has been pointed out that literally a liberty had been taken and the cry of Richard III, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ might not have been improved with the introduction of ‘steed’ and ‘nag’. And though the Authorised Version was more Latinate than earlier versions, Anglo-Saxon words still predominated and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as in Shakespeare, gave the language its dynamism: ‘Song of Songs’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘And the word was made flesh’, ‘man of war’, ‘I am the way, the truth and the light’, ‘three score and ten’, ‘And the word was with God. And the word was God.’
The fi ercest critic of the day was a Puritan Hebrew scholar, Hugh Broughton, who had not been included on the list of translators – very likely because of his tendency to argue with everyone who dared to disagree with him. King James asked for advice from independent scholars and Broughton weighed in. ‘It is so ill done . . . Tell his Majesty I had rather be rent in pieces by wild horses than that any such translation by my comment should be urged upon poor churches. It crosseth me and I require it to be burnt!’ He was not alone, though his intemperance was exceptional.
At first people did not take to it. In some matters, and certainly in this case, people prefer old lamps to new. The Bishops’ Bible ceased to be printed but its translated bulk still stayed on the lecterns in many of the churches. Its words were familiar and it had its hold. It took time for James to decree that his Bible be the sole Bible in churches. After that it took over the lecterns throughout the kingdom.
Then there was the Geneva Bible, much loved, conveniently priced and sized, the portable sustenance of the faith for generations. That too held on and was not entirely supplanted until the middle of the century.
St Jerome, after the years spent turning the Bible into the Latin current in his day at the end of the fourth century, encountered equally harsh opposition which embittered him. He would have been pleased that Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, in his book Leviathan quotes the Bible only in the Latin of St Jerome and disdained the King James Version. Many of the educated preferred what they had studied at university. The beauties of the new Bible’s prose were to be discovered, admired and then loved rather later.
It was the will of James I that made the book happen. It was the poetry of it and a civil war in the kingdoms of Britain and a purposeful and valiant push west across the Atlantic to America that embedded it.
‘The scholars who produced this masterpiece are mostly un-known and unremembered,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill, not, as it turns out, correctly. ‘But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.’
And a scholar’s voice, that of Professor Albert Stanborough Cook, of Yale University in the 1920s: ‘No other book has penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible.’
Finally, from the historian Lord Macaulay: ‘If everything else in our language should perish, it would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.’
Now, 1611, it was done and out in the world. It would help create new worlds and be part of the rise and fall of empires. It would be crucial in shaping America, its faith, its democracy and its language. All this potential was compact in dangerously crowded, small ships which set off from ports in the west of England to find and found a New England, which they did, Bibles in hand, God’s English their guide.
