Musing about the KJV

James Naughtie writes,

The idea of a new translation was meant to be an instrument for sorting out the wild politics of the Church of England as much as it was a book that could be read aloud in every church, understood and even enjoyed. It turned out to be a stroke of kingly brilliance.


Apart from producing a text that would be adopted as the lingua franca for the Christian story, the translators built one of the pillars of English-speaking culture, a piece of extended poetry that stands alone.

… I sat one day in a room in the Bodleian Library with a Bible from the 1530s open in front of me, one that had been used by one of the translators for the King James Bible. I looked at the first verse of the second chapter of Luke. There was the old verse and, in the margin, the careful notes of the scholar who was trying to make it read a little better. There were emendations, crossings-out, evidence of trial and error. And then: “And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” There it was.

I imagined the scholar, sometime in 1606 or 1607, finishing his afternoon’s work, blowing out a candle, wrapping a cloak against the cold and heading into dark streets to go home. Did he think, “Not a bad afternoon’s work”? Or was he thinking of the next chapter already?

Over at Church Times here’s commentary from a hundred years ago,

HAVING done our best to bury that version of the English Bible known, for some occult reason, as the “Authorized”, we are now in­vited to whiten its sepulchre. In other words, apart from exact dates, the year 1911 being the three hundredth year since the issue of King James’s version of 1611, we are invited to observe the ter­centenary by sermons and meet­ings, and other ways dear to the British public, at home and abroad. The occasion is doubtless of great interest. The work of the translat­ors of 1611 has made its mark through­out the world; the grace­ful­ness of their diction will never be displaced by that of their suc­cessors, and their language has penetrated into quarters, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Mr David Lloyd George] has shown us, where it would have been most desirable to have marked its ab­sence. Nevertheless, in view of the undoubted affection of the English for the diction of their Bible, and in the hope that that affection may prompt a more worthy acceptance of the teaching contained in the Church’s scrip­tures, we look forward with interest to March 26, when the celebration is appointed to com­mence. But in addition to the meetings and sermons and ad­dresses invited from clergy and “ministers”, that is of all denom­inations, it would perhaps be to the advantage of the souls of the people, if a great act of penitential worship could be arranged to sue for pardon for the disregard, so often flagrant, of the authorized teaching contained in the sacred writings.

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