If you Google Psalm 46 and Shakespeare, you will be treated to an engaging debate about whether the Bard had a hand in the writing of the King James Bible. The circumstantial evidence is provided by what appears to be a hidden byline in the text. Count 46 words down from the beginning and you land on “shake”. Count 46 words up from the end – ignoring Selah which was a musical direction – and you get “spear”.
This is the kind of word game Shakespeare loved and, given he was 46 in 1610 when the final revisions to the Authorized Version were being made, it is hard to dismiss this as coincidence. But Gordon Campbell does. Or at least I think he does. Because he never tells us why the notion is absurd, simply stating it is. Why, I wondered, was the finest writer in the English language not consulted on a project which many consider to be the finest writing in the English language?
Professor Campbell’s failure to answer this question is the only obvious omission in an otherwise fascinating and unexpectedly witty book by one of our foremost Biblical scholars to mark the 400th anniversary of the KJV. This is not just a book for theologians but students of the language, too, given how much ours owes to it.
It was William Tyndale, in his 16th century translation, who was responsible for phrases such as “fight the good fight” and “the powers that be”. But they only became common currency when they also made their way into the KJV where they were joined by many others that we still use to this day. You will find “at their wits’ end” in Psalm 107; “skin of my teeth” in Psalm 19 and “salt of the earth” in Matthew 5.
When the King James Bible says it is “appointed to be read in churches” that is exactly what it means; it was written to be read aloud. So the language was kept simple, and often used the iambic pentameters familiar to theatre goers of the day as when Adam blames Eve for the Fall saying: “She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Punctuation tends to be rhetorical rather than grammatical.
Yet the language of the KJV was archaic even in its own time. That’s because the translators had the kind of conservative classical background Boris Johnson so enjoys showing off. So, like the Mayor of London, they preferred the idioms of the past to those of the present. They worked from earlier English translations – including John Wyclif’s 14th century version of the Latin Vulgate Bible and Tyndale’s translation from the Greek – as well as reading not only the original Hebrew and Greek but Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic texts, too.
If you were lucky enough to get an education in 17th century England then it was a better one than you would find today, and Campbell says it would now be hard to assemble 50 scholars in the world with as much linguistic knowledge as the KJV translators.
There have been many translations since which are more user-friendly for the modern reader. The New Revised Standard Version is the one preferred by most of the clergy I know, but it has an irritating gender-neutral political correctness which jars. Where the original Greek had “brothers”, for instance, the NRSV adds “sisters”. But if you are buying a Bible for Harriet Harman, this is the one to give her, I guess.
Schoolchildren then – as now – would enjoy some of the misprints in the King James Version. The 1631 edition makes committing adultery compulsory by leaving out the “not” in Exodus 20:14; the waters in Isaiah should “overflow” rather than “overthrow”; Luke’s “five loves” make more sense as “loaves”; and “slew their flesh” in Psalm 105 should have been “fish”. But Campbell detects deliberate mischief near the beginning of Deuteronomy when “the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great asse”, which should have read “greatnesse”.
By the 19th century the KJV was being hailed not just as an inspiration but by evangelicals as divinely inspired, while others who were not interested in it as a sacred text decided it was nevertheless our greatest literary masterpiece. Campbell wisely cautions against both extremes; the former because it leads to crackpot creationist ideas about the world being formed in 4004BC, and the latter because it misses the point that the Bible is first and foremost a holy book.
“I cannot help suspecting…that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible,” wrote CS Lewis. “It would be strange if they did.”
