The Murderous History of Bible Translations by Harry Freedman

Author:Harry Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472921680
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-01-05T16:30:58+00:00

8

King James’s Bible

The New King

If any English-language translation of scripture warrants the epithet ‘The Bible’ it is the version bearing the name of King James. The sixteenth century had seen William Tyndale’s Bible lay the foundations for English literature. By the end of the century William Shakespeare’s pen was elevating the language to unprecedented heights. The King James Bible, born out of this rich literary tradition, did not let its progenitors down. It remains an almost inconceivable rarity, a translation that competes with the original for beauty, clarity of expression and turn of phrase. Clearly the ancient Bible was not written in English. But reading the King James version, one might almost think it was.

The murderous climate that had seen Tyndale and his supporters cruelly executed, had assuaged. New initiatives in education, facilitated by social progress, the Protestant Reformation and, to a lesser degree, the English Renaissance,1 had vastly improved literacy. It has been estimated that erudition increased so rapidly during the later decades of the sixteenth century that by 1600 one-third of the male population could read. And with literacy came exhortation after exhortation for people to read the Bible, whether in Latin or in English.2

The flowering of reading skills brought the Bible to the masses. This wasn’t universally seen as a good thing. Although the 1543 law that forbade the reading of the Bible by women and the working classes was unjust and proving unworkable, the fear which had led to the Act, that the ability to read the Bible would lead to new ideas, was well founded. The translated Bible, and its accompanying commentaries, became powerful weapons in the struggle by political radicals against the established social order, and by Puritans against the authority and structure of the new, English Church.3

But the Bible which liberates can also be the Bible that controls. Radicals point to biblical teachings that bolster their arguments and give them moral legitimacy. Conversely, political and religious establishments, who through the weight of their authority assume ownership of the Bible, may present it in a manner which counters the radical view.

The most valuable weapon in the use of the Bible as propaganda is translation. In a variation of Humpty Dumpty’s dictum, ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’,4 the ability of a translator to select the most polemically appropriate meaning can radically alter the way a biblical passage is perceived. Tyndale had deliberately translated the Greek ekklesia as ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’ to counter the primacy of the Pope. In a more nuanced way, the King James rendering of 1 Corinthians 10.11, ‘Now all these things happened unto them for examples’ contrasts with the Rheims–Douay version’s ‘Now all these things happened to them in figure’. Rheims–Douay had followed Augustine in suggesting that the punishments meted out to the Israelites in the wilderness were intrinsic to their status as Jews, King James implies they were simply illustrations of what can happen to people who complain.5 With the creation

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