The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible has received only
muted celebrations in the English-speaking world, and no
celebrations at all elsewhere. This book, which shaped the syntax,
the imagery, and the wisdom of everyday discourse among speakers of
English, and which has probably been more frequently quoted than
any other source, including the Greek and Hebrew originals, is now
receding behind the screen on which our ephemeral messages are
scribbled. But the history of the English Bible is of great
importance to us today, since it reminds us that our civilization
is built upon translations. The Septuagint, the Vulgate, the
Wulfila Bible (the fourth-century translation into the Gothic
language), the Wycliffe Bible, and the translations of early
reformers — the Czech Králice Bible, Luther’s Bible, the Geneva
Bible, and the seminal translation by William Tyndale on which the
King James translation is ultimately based — all these have
brought with them profound and far-reaching changes in the social,
political, and religious lives of ordinary people in Christian
Europe.
Every new translation has offered a promise of power to some and
a threat to the power of others. A society governed by a privileged
class of priests and clerks, whose authority derives from a text
that only they can read, will be suspicious of translations of that
text, and inclined to forbid them. Wycliffe survived only because
he was protected by the powerful John of Gaunt, and Tyndale was
burned at the stake in Bruges. Still, by the time of King James I
versions of the Bible in English were available in every church,
and it was no longer a threat to any vested interest to authorize a
new and complete translation. How lucky we English-speakers were,
that this translation should have been made in the wake of the
Elizabethan dramatists, at a time when the English language was at
its most muscular and taut, when it could be applied to matters
both earthly and heavenly and at once give a fully imagined account
of them, gripped in what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call the
“native thew and sinew” of the English tongue. All subsequent
translations, set beside this version, are on a downhill path
toward banality, and by the time of the New English Bible
(completed 1970) it is fair to say that the immediacy and urgency
of the King James Bible had been more or less dissolved in watery
literal-mindedness.
It is not just the literary merits of the King James Bible that
recommend it, however. This was the Bible that the Pilgrim Fathers
brought with them across the Atlantic, that the Methodist riders
took around the farmsteads and cabins of rural America, the Bible
that the merchant adventurers carried to India, Australia, and
Africa, the Bible that provided the texts of Handel’s oratorios and
which inspired the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. It is
the Bible that was planted in the depths of the English-speaking
soul during the crucial centuries when the sphere of
English-speaking freedom was formed. I doubt that you can
understand the motives of the early settlers of America without it.
It gave them the names of their towns and villages, the names of
their children, the maxims of their daily life and the routines and
rituals of their sparse forms of enjoyment. They fought and cursed,
made love and sermons, in the language of the King James Bible, and
everywhere about us we see the difference that this has made. Ask
yourself how it came about that a suburb of Washington, D.C. should
bear the beautiful Hebrew name of Bethesda and you will unearth a
history that is dependent at almost every point on the King James
Bible and its immediate sources in Tyndale and Myles Coverdale.
BUT THERE ARE OTHER and equally interesting ideas suggested by
the history of biblical translation. When Christendom was first
shaping itself from within the Roman Empire it was by means of the
Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin version of the sacred texts. Those
early Christians did not doubt that their most authoritative text,
the one which contained the most direct messages yet received from
God to man, had been translated from other languages, spoken by
other people, in whom God had, for reasons of His own, chosen to
confide. A kind of openness to the world and to other ways of life
was the natural consequence of this. And this openness has
characterized the Christian religion ever since.
I may be wrong, but it does seem to me that this marks out an
important cultural difference between Christian civilization and
Islam. Ever since the 11th-century triumph of the Asharite school
of Islam it has been orthodox to believe that the Koran cannot be
translated, that the surahs were literally spoken, as we find them,
to the Prophet, and that any attempt to represent their meaning in
another language would falsify God’s word. Versions of the Koran in
other languages are therefore routinely described as
“interpretations.” A devout Muslim may learn to recite the Koran in
Arabic without knowing, except in rough outline, what it means. And
it is only Arabic speakers, who today form less than 20 percent of
Muslims, who know what nonsense it is to say that this text cannot
be translated. Of course, something is lost in translation
— in particular the taut, breathless syntax of the original, and
the poetic rhythms of the rhyming prose. But then, something is
lost in every translation. And as our Bible teaches us, something
may also be gained, and the gain may be more than the loss. It is
perhaps true of St. John’s Gospel that the Greek original is
inferior to Tyndale as literature. But the reader of Tyndale will
discover exactly what the writer of the Gospel intended to say.
The official non-translatability of the Koran has had important
political consequences. The mullahs and ayatollahs have been able
to assert a kind of monopoly over the sacred text, to withhold it
and themselves from public scrutiny, and thereby to establish
theocratic forms of government in which they hold power in God’s
name. The downgrading of secular authority and secular law, the
claim to absolute and incorrigible justification, follow from this
as a matter of course. This is what we have seen in Iran and will
no doubt see in Egypt should the Muslim Brotherhood finally fulfill
its ambition of ruling that country, its Christian minority
included, according to the shari’ah.
The translatability of the Bible has had equally far-reaching
political consequences. When the nation-states of Europe began to
emerge after the Reformation, it was partly because people were
beginning to see that law and language are far more reliable
criteria of political loyalty than dynasty and religion, since law
and language are instruments of peace, whereas dynasties and
religions are always at war. The translations of the Bible brought
the Christian religion to heel, contained it within the borders of
the linguistic community, and overcame the medieval orthodoxy that,
in matters of religion, the real authorities were situated
elsewhere and outside the kingdom. They helped to domesticate the
religious impulse and who can doubt, looking back at the wars of
religion, that Europeans needed, at the time, to identify
themselves in some other and more peaceful way than the way of
faith?
TRANSLATION OPENS THE WAY to a new kind of scholarship. Granted
that the texts we hold sacred originated in Hebrew, Aramaic,
Syriac, and Greek, what do we know about the people who first wrote
them down, and how can we be sure what they meant by the
words they wrote? During the late 18th century this question gave
rise to the science of biblical hermeneutics, which led the
universities of Europe toward a new kind of skepticism. It became
clear that the ancient texts belonged to specific social and
political contexts, and that they were not necessarily aimed at the
whole of humanity. People began to assign precise dates to them, to
draw a map of Jewish history, and to distinguish which parts of the
Gospels told the authentic story of Christ’s mission, and which
were later fabrications.
This scholarship has made it difficult to think of the Bible as
God’s word — that is to say, as the word spoken to
prophets and others by God. At best the Bible consists of words
inspired by God, words which might have been marred and
distorted in the process of recording them, and in which the
element of inspiration and the element of fabrication might be hard
to unravel. (Think of the bloodthirsty book of Joshua, for
instance, and the story of Rahab, about whom the best can be said
is that she was a whore: did God have a hand in that?) It
is impossible that the Bible should now have, for the educated
Christian, the kind of authority that the Koran has for the Muslim.
The Bible is a text to be discussed and interrogated, whose message
does not remain entirely the same from generation to generation,
but which responds to the changing circumstances of those who
consult it. And one proof of its inspired nature is that it always
does respond, that it offers thoughts, arguments, words,
and guidance in all the changing scenes of life — including the
changing scenes of our species-life. We can no longer point to the
Bible as the final authority in any disputed question. But the
Bible is as much a help to us as ever it was to the Pilgrim
Fathers. It has persuaded us to take responsibility for our
actions, and not to bequeath our problems to humorless old men in
beards who pretend that only they know how to read the sacred
text.
That makes it the more sad that the King James Bible, which
raised us to a higher level of seriousness, should have slipped
behind the screen, taking with it so much of the English-speaking
soul.
