Charles McGrath
The King James Bible,which was first published 400 years ago next month,may be the single best thing ever accomplished by a committee. The Bible was the work of 54 scholars and clergymen who met over seven years in six nine-man subcommittees,called companies. So there must have been disputes shouting; table pounding; high-ruffed,black-gowned clergymen folding their arms and stomping out but there is no record of them. Far from bland,the King James Bible is one of the great masterpieces of English prose.
From the start,the King James Bible was intended to be not a literary creation but rather a political and theological compromise between the established church and the growing Puritan movement. What the king cared about was clarity,simplicity,doctrinal orthodoxy. The translators worked hard on that,going back to the original Hebrew,Greek and Aramaic,and yet they also spent a lot of time tweaking the English text in the interest of euphony and musicality. Time and again the language seems to slip almost unconsciously into iambic pentameter this was the age of Shakespeare,commentators are always reminding us and right from the beginning the translators embraced the principles of repetition and the dramatic pause: In the beginning God created the Heauen,and the Earth. And the earth was without forme,and voyd,and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.
The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of idioms from it that have slipped into everyday speech,taking such deep root that we use them all the time,is practically endless: sour grapes; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; skin of ones teeth; apple of ones eye; girded loins; feet of clay; whited sepulchres; filthy lucre; pearls before swine; fly in the ointment; fight the good fight; eat,drink and be merry.
But what we also love about this Bible is its strangeness its weird punctuation,odd pronouns (as in Our Father,which art in heaven),all those verbs that end in eth. The translators didnt want their Bible to sound contemporary,because they knew that contemporaneity quickly goes out of fashion. When the Victorians came to revise the King James Bible in 1885,they embraced this principle wholeheartedly,and like those people who whack and scratch old furniture to make it look even more ancient,they threw in a lot of extra Jacobeanisms,like howbeit, peradventure,holden and behooved.
This is the opposite,of course,of the procedure followed by most new translations,starting with Good News for Modern Man,a paperback Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1966,whose goal was to reflect not the language of the Bible but its ideas,rendering them into current terms. There are countless new Bibles available now,many of them specialised: a Bible for couples,for gays and lesbians,for recovering addicts,for surfers,for skaters and skateboarders,not to mention a superheroes Bible for children. They are all accessible, but most are a little tone-deaf,lacking in grandeur and majesty,replacing through a glasse,darkly, for instance,with something along the lines of like a dim image in a mirror. But what this modernising ignores is that the most powerful religious language is often a little elevated and incantatory,even ambiguous or just plain hard to understand.
Not everyone prefers a God who talks like a pal or a guidance counsellor. Even some of us who are nonbelievers want a God who speaketh like well,God. The great achievement of the King James translators is to have arrived at a language that is both ordinary and heightened,that rings in the ear and lingers in the mind.
