when he comes to the throne in 1603 King
James inherits a divided world he had to
bring together the Puritan and the royal
the rich and the clear one way to do
that was to make a new Bible this was a
book which had to fuse something that
feels cosmic in scale
majestic in turn with a real intimacy I
think that the King James Bible is
probably the greatest thing that England
has ever made and that is my subject and
how it emerged is is a mystery and a
conundrum because first of all it begins
with this appalling figure here those
are surely the most magnificent trousers
you’ve ever seen certainly the greatest
garment ever worn by a member of the
British royal family I can assure you of
that and notice the pink stockings this
is King James the first of England King
James the sixth of Scotland often
considered like that more as a piece of
furniture than a man ridiculous
drunk obsessed with young men totally
incompetent as a king profligate unable
to steer England towards any kind of
happy condition how on earth could this
man have sponsored this extraordinary
book but he did and because the reason
is that there’s much much more to James
than that traditional sub cartoon of him
might imply this is him when he was
still King of Scotland a canny man very
intelligent man the most intelligent
person ever to have sat on the English
throne not that there’s much competition
Oh who’d had a terrible upbringing in
Scotland he’d been kidnapped by a set of
brutal lords he’d been lectured by
ferocious Presbyterian ministers he’d
been educated by the worst of them all
george buchanan the most terrifying man
in europe the tutor of Montaigne among
others our great towering European
intellectual and he had been king of a
country where the crown was one of the
weakest in Europe and in England it was
very very different matter
at the English Reformation in the 1530s
Henry the Eighth had got rid of the Pope
as many countries across Europe during
the Reformation did but it’s often said
that in the European Reformation Lady
throned the Pope and put the Bible in
its stead but Henry the Eighth didn’t do
that he dethroned the Pope and put
himself in his stead now this is the
title page of the first official Bible
in English the great Bible published in
the late 1530s drawing largely on the
work of William Tyndale and this is the
title page of the actual copy that
belonged to Thomas Cromwell who was
Henry the eighth’s chief minister and
organizer of the Reformation and you can
see there Henry the eighth is at the top
he’s handing out two books these are the
Bible II they actually say on them
verbum dei the Word of God to his
bishops here down through the church to
the people and to the laity to the to
the great Lords the lesser Lords and the
people down here so he is the fount of
all goodness and all of these people
down here they have little red cartoons
coming out of their faces and every
single one of them says long live the
king
God doesn’t get a mention of course this
is exactly the kind of arrangement that
James in Scotland would love was longing
for a king who centrally instituted in
the church and becoming the source of
all meaning but the people of England
were not entirely booked in to that
royal supremacy picture they had
absorbed much of the Reformation and
loved the individual freedom it promised
to them and so during Mary’s reign
Mary’s Bloody Mary’s ferocious Catholic
reign many English Protestants went
abroad many to Geneva and a great new
translation of the Bible was produced
there in 1560 known as the Geneva Bible
and this is a copy of it and it’s
Shakespeare’s Bible it was the Bible the
Pilgrim Fathers brought and it was
really like a kind of family
encyclopedia this is open to a page with
the map of the Holy Land
with a kind of key to the map on the
bottom and then you can see along each
border of the page of text on the right
marginal notes now the marginal notes of
the Geneva Bible were the thing that
James hated more than anything else
because they loathed royalty and in the
notes and also in the text of the Old
Testament the word King appears
something like 400 times every single
time it is translated as turrent
not entirely loved by the royal
establishment and so Elizabeth in the
late 1560s produced another Bible known
as the bishops Bible after the 14 or so
no one’s quite sure about the number
bishops who translated it and this is
the title page of Elizabeth’s own copy
of the bishops Bible and there she is
there is actually a mention of God on
this page down there you’re getting the
picture I think but the trouble with the
bishops Bible all very well as far as
the royal establishment is concerned but
it was an absolute dog of a translation
the phrase that appears in the King
James Bible as cast thy bread upon the
waters is translated in the bishops
Bible as lay thy bread upon wet faces
which doesn’t have quite the same ring
to it somehow so England is in this very
very divided unresolved condition it is
a very very polarized moment that you
have this ferocious stripped Puritan
strictness this is a chapel in
Shropshire and it is an incredibly
untouched rare survival of exactly what
your Puritan church in the late 16th
century would have been about you also
have this kind of sense of no
elaboration no sense of grandeur no
sense of substance would be too much
this is the marble hall in Hatfield the
Great Palace which was built by James
the first secretary Robert Cecil who
I’ll talk about in a minute this room
was completed in exactly the same month
that the King James Bible was published
this is the upper chamber there there is
James himself presiding over the upper
upper chamber and when he comes to the
throne in 1603
inherits a divided world a world which
has these deep divisions divisions which
in the rest of Europe have produced
vicious and destructive civil war and
would go on to do that right on until
1630s he had to bring together the
Puritan and the royal the rich and the
clear and one way to do that was to make
a new Bible it may seem strange I think
for us to hear that now but religion in
the early 17th century is really utterly
inseparable from life that someone once
said to me when I was describing the
making the King James Bible to them an
American said to me it reminds me of the
Manhattan Project
here is no mentally powerful and
potentially explosive instrument which
could be the great savior of the country
and yet is extremely difficult to get
right and the only way of getting it
right is to summon as many of the great
brains as you could and with very very
careful and exact tinkering create an
instrument which the country which the
country could save the country and so
the Puritans demanded of James that he
should do something about the church and
he summoned a great conference in
Hampton Court in early in 1604 we’re
leading Puritans rather moderate
Puritans were invited and also many of
the bishops and for three days they
debated with each other and on the third
day one of the Puritans said to James
what we really need is a new Bible
meaning of course that the bishops Bible
the official the official Bible was
inadequate and what we should have is
the Geneva Bible the Bible they loved
but James this very slick and instant
clever immediate operator jumped on it
and said are a new Bible what a good
idea
let’s have a new Bible and so this book
emerges from just a little wrinkle in a
conference in a almost as a debating
point and James appointed this man
Robert Cecil to be the organizer of it
Robert Cecil his secretary of state
easily the most corrupt man in England
at the time England was at war with
Spain when this portrait was painted he
as the King Secretary was receiving a
handsome handsome pension from the king
of Spain
every year but he was also a brilliant
organizer and he got together the
leading brains of the country 54 of them
and organized them into six different
committees or companies he was helped by
his companion in arms this man who is
then Bishop of London soon to become
Archbishop of Canterbury Richard
Bancroft a wild man from the north of
England from Cumbria I don’t know if you
know in Cumbria but they love a bit of
wrestling in Cumbria and Richard
Bancroft even as Archbishop of
Canterbury used to wrestle people as
they came in the front door of Lambeth
Palace so you have this very good crew
you know the tough man and the slick
operator the persuader and the enforcer
and they arranged the six committees in
the most careful bureaucratic way and
each of these committees given very
precise 14 precise instructions written
out by Bancroft each of the committee’s
was to take its chunk and each member of
the committee eight of the scholars and
and the ninth as the director each of
them were instructed to take away their
whole chunk of the Bible the whole
Pentateuch whatever it might be and to
translate that on their own without
conferring and so the idea was you had
these
fifty-four theoretically brilliant men
very well-versed in ancient modern
languages and and set them as a very
wide mouth to the net so that as much as
wide as possible a take could be made on
what the first decade of 17th century
thought the Bible should be then each of
the members of the committee would come
to a meeting of that committee and read
out what he suggested and they would
agree verse by verse on what their
translation would be that committee
would then submit their suggested
translation to a revising committee in
London which met in the stationers hall
and at the station as hall there was no
written text visible to the revising
committee the committee sat round and
one person had the suggested text on his
knee and read it out aloud to the other
members of the committee so that the
only editorial instrument at work was
the ear the ear presumably attached to a
mind but the eye the reading I played no
part in it because this was a Bible
which was to be read out in churches as
it says in the on the frontispiece of
the Bible when it was printed and so if
it didn’t appeal to the ear if it wasn’t
intelligible to the ear and if it wasn’t
memorable through the ear it wasn’t any
good and so what you have you have this
highly elaborate and sophisticated
mechanism by which you get a big intake
and then through filter after filter
after filter you arrive at something
which will work theologically orally for
the ear and politically this was a book
which had to both embody the majesty of
of kingliness of godly kingliness
and be totally accessible to the people
of England this was the leading
translator another superbly corrupt
individual called Lancelot Andrews a
sort of marvellous terrible man but also
a great great writer I mean one of the
great writers of the century this is
George Abbott
a translator later became Archbishop of
Canterbury in fact the only Archbishop
of Canterbury ever to have murdered a
gamekeeper
with a crossbow it was on a Thursday and
as a penance every Thursday for the rest
of his life he he restricted himself to
a single meat pie one of the reasons I
think that the King James Bible is a
great book is that the people who did
this who made these translations were
not tucked away in the ivory tower of
the University in their gravy necks and
their gold rimmed spectacles they were
deeply involved with the world politics
commerce each other kind of a hubbub of
interaction with the very very dynamic
London of the of the 16 first decade of
the seventeenth century and it’s it’s
that real-world infusion which gives the
book as much of it sort of bottom and
it’s juice well I think that the social
share verbal effusive mists and
effervescence of this language is one of
the things that the King James Bible is
relying on but it has another element
allied to that and it’s it’s connected
to the thing I was talking about earlier
about richness and clarity that you have
this bubbling turbulent wordy froth
coming up from below but applied to it
is an extremely strict scholarly
understanding and also religious
understanding that the job of the
translator of a Bible is not in any way
to be an author they are not authors
they are translators only by really
submitting to that authority not in any
way establishing your own authority
alongside it or in connection to it only
by being secretarial could you hope to
get a translation good and so the
English of the King James Bible is
certainly not the English that was
spoken or written in the first decade of
the 17th century it is actually not a
form of English that was ever spoken
anywhere or written but it is actually
an English pulled towards the condition
of the Greek in the Hebrew it is more
like a kind of middle-ground if you
think of translation as having a source
and a target source in Hebrew or Greek
target in English the King James Bible
exists somewhere like here that English
is pulled over here and so the forms of
the sentences of forms of the grammar
the incredible repetitiveness for
example of the Hebrew is of the Old
Testament is English as Hebrew and I
think we’ve all or many of us have come
to think of that as the sort of language
that God might speak and it’s it’s
deliberately strange in my mind it is
deliberately taken to a place where
people wouldn’t naturally feel that was
the sort of language which you or I
might use to each other because that is
not the subject of this book this book
is about intense strangeness and I think
there is a sort of very very conscious
distancing from ordinariness so the King
James Bible went through its processes
it’s all very obscure because nearly
all the documentation has disappeared
there were great fires in Whitehall in
the Royal Palace in 1618 another one in
the 1690s so most of the documents have
disappeared and somehow or other it
emerged in 1611 and when it emerged it
was exceptionally badly done it was
absolutely catastrophic the printing a
19th century scholar started to count
the mistakes in the King James Bible as
it was printed in 1611 in the various
editions and he stopped counting at
25,000 the were of course some very
famous mistakes in the famous wicked
Bible published in 1631
a rather crucial word was left out
I’m told that this is the Bible that
many politicians have found themselves
in possession of that’s a cheap jig
nevertheless it was a great book and and
it remains a great book and it remains
remained a great book from the day it
was made
until maybe 50 or 60 years ago maimed
the book which the whole of the
english-speaking world would turn to for
wisdom for famous phrases for just as a
touchstone in life and I think one of
the ways in which one can see how good
it is is by comparing it to later
attempts to do the same thing so I’m
just it’s now I’m going to talk about
really the words the words of the Bible
and this is from Psalm 8 as the
translators did it in in 1611 when I
consider the heavens the works of thy
fingers the moon and the stars which
thou hast ordained what is man that thou
art mindful of him and the son of man
that thou visitest him for thou has made
him a little lower than the Angels and
has crowned him with glory and honour
now I think that those few lines embody
a great deal of what this book is about
the words are immensely simple and yet
those words actually do what James
wanted the Bible to do it does actually
fuse something that is great that feels
cosmic in scale with a real intimacy
with a sense that this is a set of
meanings that we can all have access to
it has about it a kind of majesty that
is mindful of man and so if you then
move on to an attempt to translate that
made by
Milton in the 1640s what Milton rate was
when I behold thy heavens thy fingers
art the moon and stars which thou so
bright has set in the pure firmament
then Seth my heart what is man that thou
rememberest yet and think’st upon him or
a man begat that him thou visitest and
of him art found scarce to be less than
God’s though amazed his lot with honor
and with state thou hast him crowned now
Milton is he’s having to cope with you
no rhyme and I Amba cuenta meter and so
on but he’s reaching higher he’s
reaching for something grander than the
Jacobean translators were reaching for
and in doing that full short of where
they got to that actually by trying to
be too much he loses that precious
Jacobi an amalgam of the rich and the
clear the the majestic and the ordinary
which they I think you can use the word
they miraculously landed on it’s
drifting away into a sense of its own
importance beyond this amazing
communicativeness of that reading out to
the listening editorial board that
desire simply to communicate meaning to
the ear and this gets are worse as time
goes on there is a drift in
english-speaking culture so this you
will know it from the non committees
that’s among the most famous words of
the whole Bible Lord now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace according to
thy word for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation which thou has prepared before
the face of all people a light to
lighten the Gentiles and the glory of
thy people Israel all those same
qualities and famously loved phrases
through the centuries but in the 18th
century this language started to seem
inadequate and there was an unfortunate
man called the Reverend Edward Harwood
who is a
Minister in Bristol in the West of
England and he decided in the 1760s to
do a new translation of the New
Testament and which he said he aimed to
close the idea of the Apostle the
Apostles with propriety and perspicuity
replacing the bald and barbarous
language of the old vulgar version
that’s the King James Bible with the
elegance of modern English now
so his version of the knock committees
goes like this Oh God
thy promise to me is amply for filth I
now quit the post of human life with
satisfaction and joy since Loused
indulge my eyes were so divine a
spectacle as the great Messiah well
think many of us have made better
resignation speeches about Jose and in
the 20th century it takes a third time
so if you have 18th century
rationalization 19th century fancy-dress
effectively 20th century boredom 20th
century translations aim not to embody
any of these these kind of great ideas
of the music of the Holy if you like you
know none of them are interested in
creating an atmosphere or conveying even
a sense of mystery in what is going on
the strangeness that the Scriptures
address they instead famously as the
director of the great project called the
new English Bible the worst translation
ever made which appeared in the early
60s he said he was wanting a timeless
prose in which archaism and hallowed
associations were to be avoided and a
sense of reality sought now the sense of
reality was actually a sense of total
ordinariness an idea that information
was what was required
just information adjust the ordinary
facts as transmitted by the most boring
people who’ve ever lived there is
certainly something about the King James
Bible which can stimulate in people an
extreme and obsessive conservatism and
although it is a great book of
liberation and beauty it is in my mind
certainly both those things it is also
and has often been an instrument of
control and oppression through much of
its history but I would prefer to see
this marvelous image here this is the
finest edition
maybe they King James in eighth Bible
thank you very much
you
James inherits a divided world he had to
bring together the Puritan and the royal
the rich and the clear one way to do
that was to make a new Bible this was a
book which had to fuse something that
feels cosmic in scale
majestic in turn with a real intimacy I
think that the King James Bible is
probably the greatest thing that England
has ever made and that is my subject and
how it emerged is is a mystery and a
conundrum because first of all it begins
with this appalling figure here those
are surely the most magnificent trousers
you’ve ever seen certainly the greatest
garment ever worn by a member of the
British royal family I can assure you of
that and notice the pink stockings this
is King James the first of England King
James the sixth of Scotland often
considered like that more as a piece of
furniture than a man ridiculous
drunk obsessed with young men totally
incompetent as a king profligate unable
to steer England towards any kind of
happy condition how on earth could this
man have sponsored this extraordinary
book but he did and because the reason
is that there’s much much more to James
than that traditional sub cartoon of him
might imply this is him when he was
still King of Scotland a canny man very
intelligent man the most intelligent
person ever to have sat on the English
throne not that there’s much competition
Oh who’d had a terrible upbringing in
Scotland he’d been kidnapped by a set of
brutal lords he’d been lectured by
ferocious Presbyterian ministers he’d
been educated by the worst of them all
george buchanan the most terrifying man
in europe the tutor of Montaigne among
others our great towering European
intellectual and he had been king of a
country where the crown was one of the
weakest in Europe and in England it was
very very different matter
at the English Reformation in the 1530s
Henry the Eighth had got rid of the Pope
as many countries across Europe during
the Reformation did but it’s often said
that in the European Reformation Lady
throned the Pope and put the Bible in
its stead but Henry the Eighth didn’t do
that he dethroned the Pope and put
himself in his stead now this is the
title page of the first official Bible
in English the great Bible published in
the late 1530s drawing largely on the
work of William Tyndale and this is the
title page of the actual copy that
belonged to Thomas Cromwell who was
Henry the eighth’s chief minister and
organizer of the Reformation and you can
see there Henry the eighth is at the top
he’s handing out two books these are the
Bible II they actually say on them
verbum dei the Word of God to his
bishops here down through the church to
the people and to the laity to the to
the great Lords the lesser Lords and the
people down here so he is the fount of
all goodness and all of these people
down here they have little red cartoons
coming out of their faces and every
single one of them says long live the
king
God doesn’t get a mention of course this
is exactly the kind of arrangement that
James in Scotland would love was longing
for a king who centrally instituted in
the church and becoming the source of
all meaning but the people of England
were not entirely booked in to that
royal supremacy picture they had
absorbed much of the Reformation and
loved the individual freedom it promised
to them and so during Mary’s reign
Mary’s Bloody Mary’s ferocious Catholic
reign many English Protestants went
abroad many to Geneva and a great new
translation of the Bible was produced
there in 1560 known as the Geneva Bible
and this is a copy of it and it’s
Shakespeare’s Bible it was the Bible the
Pilgrim Fathers brought and it was
really like a kind of family
encyclopedia this is open to a page with
the map of the Holy Land
with a kind of key to the map on the
bottom and then you can see along each
border of the page of text on the right
marginal notes now the marginal notes of
the Geneva Bible were the thing that
James hated more than anything else
because they loathed royalty and in the
notes and also in the text of the Old
Testament the word King appears
something like 400 times every single
time it is translated as turrent
not entirely loved by the royal
establishment and so Elizabeth in the
late 1560s produced another Bible known
as the bishops Bible after the 14 or so
no one’s quite sure about the number
bishops who translated it and this is
the title page of Elizabeth’s own copy
of the bishops Bible and there she is
there is actually a mention of God on
this page down there you’re getting the
picture I think but the trouble with the
bishops Bible all very well as far as
the royal establishment is concerned but
it was an absolute dog of a translation
the phrase that appears in the King
James Bible as cast thy bread upon the
waters is translated in the bishops
Bible as lay thy bread upon wet faces
which doesn’t have quite the same ring
to it somehow so England is in this very
very divided unresolved condition it is
a very very polarized moment that you
have this ferocious stripped Puritan
strictness this is a chapel in
Shropshire and it is an incredibly
untouched rare survival of exactly what
your Puritan church in the late 16th
century would have been about you also
have this kind of sense of no
elaboration no sense of grandeur no
sense of substance would be too much
this is the marble hall in Hatfield the
Great Palace which was built by James
the first secretary Robert Cecil who
I’ll talk about in a minute this room
was completed in exactly the same month
that the King James Bible was published
this is the upper chamber there there is
James himself presiding over the upper
upper chamber and when he comes to the
throne in 1603
inherits a divided world a world which
has these deep divisions divisions which
in the rest of Europe have produced
vicious and destructive civil war and
would go on to do that right on until
1630s he had to bring together the
Puritan and the royal the rich and the
clear and one way to do that was to make
a new Bible it may seem strange I think
for us to hear that now but religion in
the early 17th century is really utterly
inseparable from life that someone once
said to me when I was describing the
making the King James Bible to them an
American said to me it reminds me of the
Manhattan Project
here is no mentally powerful and
potentially explosive instrument which
could be the great savior of the country
and yet is extremely difficult to get
right and the only way of getting it
right is to summon as many of the great
brains as you could and with very very
careful and exact tinkering create an
instrument which the country which the
country could save the country and so
the Puritans demanded of James that he
should do something about the church and
he summoned a great conference in
Hampton Court in early in 1604 we’re
leading Puritans rather moderate
Puritans were invited and also many of
the bishops and for three days they
debated with each other and on the third
day one of the Puritans said to James
what we really need is a new Bible
meaning of course that the bishops Bible
the official the official Bible was
inadequate and what we should have is
the Geneva Bible the Bible they loved
but James this very slick and instant
clever immediate operator jumped on it
and said are a new Bible what a good
idea
let’s have a new Bible and so this book
emerges from just a little wrinkle in a
conference in a almost as a debating
point and James appointed this man
Robert Cecil to be the organizer of it
Robert Cecil his secretary of state
easily the most corrupt man in England
at the time England was at war with
Spain when this portrait was painted he
as the King Secretary was receiving a
handsome handsome pension from the king
of Spain
every year but he was also a brilliant
organizer and he got together the
leading brains of the country 54 of them
and organized them into six different
committees or companies he was helped by
his companion in arms this man who is
then Bishop of London soon to become
Archbishop of Canterbury Richard
Bancroft a wild man from the north of
England from Cumbria I don’t know if you
know in Cumbria but they love a bit of
wrestling in Cumbria and Richard
Bancroft even as Archbishop of
Canterbury used to wrestle people as
they came in the front door of Lambeth
Palace so you have this very good crew
you know the tough man and the slick
operator the persuader and the enforcer
and they arranged the six committees in
the most careful bureaucratic way and
each of these committees given very
precise 14 precise instructions written
out by Bancroft each of the committee’s
was to take its chunk and each member of
the committee eight of the scholars and
and the ninth as the director each of
them were instructed to take away their
whole chunk of the Bible the whole
Pentateuch whatever it might be and to
translate that on their own without
conferring and so the idea was you had
these
fifty-four theoretically brilliant men
very well-versed in ancient modern
languages and and set them as a very
wide mouth to the net so that as much as
wide as possible a take could be made on
what the first decade of 17th century
thought the Bible should be then each of
the members of the committee would come
to a meeting of that committee and read
out what he suggested and they would
agree verse by verse on what their
translation would be that committee
would then submit their suggested
translation to a revising committee in
London which met in the stationers hall
and at the station as hall there was no
written text visible to the revising
committee the committee sat round and
one person had the suggested text on his
knee and read it out aloud to the other
members of the committee so that the
only editorial instrument at work was
the ear the ear presumably attached to a
mind but the eye the reading I played no
part in it because this was a Bible
which was to be read out in churches as
it says in the on the frontispiece of
the Bible when it was printed and so if
it didn’t appeal to the ear if it wasn’t
intelligible to the ear and if it wasn’t
memorable through the ear it wasn’t any
good and so what you have you have this
highly elaborate and sophisticated
mechanism by which you get a big intake
and then through filter after filter
after filter you arrive at something
which will work theologically orally for
the ear and politically this was a book
which had to both embody the majesty of
of kingliness of godly kingliness
and be totally accessible to the people
of England this was the leading
translator another superbly corrupt
individual called Lancelot Andrews a
sort of marvellous terrible man but also
a great great writer I mean one of the
great writers of the century this is
George Abbott
a translator later became Archbishop of
Canterbury in fact the only Archbishop
of Canterbury ever to have murdered a
gamekeeper
with a crossbow it was on a Thursday and
as a penance every Thursday for the rest
of his life he he restricted himself to
a single meat pie one of the reasons I
think that the King James Bible is a
great book is that the people who did
this who made these translations were
not tucked away in the ivory tower of
the University in their gravy necks and
their gold rimmed spectacles they were
deeply involved with the world politics
commerce each other kind of a hubbub of
interaction with the very very dynamic
London of the of the 16 first decade of
the seventeenth century and it’s it’s
that real-world infusion which gives the
book as much of it sort of bottom and
it’s juice well I think that the social
share verbal effusive mists and
effervescence of this language is one of
the things that the King James Bible is
relying on but it has another element
allied to that and it’s it’s connected
to the thing I was talking about earlier
about richness and clarity that you have
this bubbling turbulent wordy froth
coming up from below but applied to it
is an extremely strict scholarly
understanding and also religious
understanding that the job of the
translator of a Bible is not in any way
to be an author they are not authors
they are translators only by really
submitting to that authority not in any
way establishing your own authority
alongside it or in connection to it only
by being secretarial could you hope to
get a translation good and so the
English of the King James Bible is
certainly not the English that was
spoken or written in the first decade of
the 17th century it is actually not a
form of English that was ever spoken
anywhere or written but it is actually
an English pulled towards the condition
of the Greek in the Hebrew it is more
like a kind of middle-ground if you
think of translation as having a source
and a target source in Hebrew or Greek
target in English the King James Bible
exists somewhere like here that English
is pulled over here and so the forms of
the sentences of forms of the grammar
the incredible repetitiveness for
example of the Hebrew is of the Old
Testament is English as Hebrew and I
think we’ve all or many of us have come
to think of that as the sort of language
that God might speak and it’s it’s
deliberately strange in my mind it is
deliberately taken to a place where
people wouldn’t naturally feel that was
the sort of language which you or I
might use to each other because that is
not the subject of this book this book
is about intense strangeness and I think
there is a sort of very very conscious
distancing from ordinariness so the King
James Bible went through its processes
it’s all very obscure because nearly
all the documentation has disappeared
there were great fires in Whitehall in
the Royal Palace in 1618 another one in
the 1690s so most of the documents have
disappeared and somehow or other it
emerged in 1611 and when it emerged it
was exceptionally badly done it was
absolutely catastrophic the printing a
19th century scholar started to count
the mistakes in the King James Bible as
it was printed in 1611 in the various
editions and he stopped counting at
25,000 the were of course some very
famous mistakes in the famous wicked
Bible published in 1631
a rather crucial word was left out
I’m told that this is the Bible that
many politicians have found themselves
in possession of that’s a cheap jig
nevertheless it was a great book and and
it remains a great book and it remains
remained a great book from the day it
was made
until maybe 50 or 60 years ago maimed
the book which the whole of the
english-speaking world would turn to for
wisdom for famous phrases for just as a
touchstone in life and I think one of
the ways in which one can see how good
it is is by comparing it to later
attempts to do the same thing so I’m
just it’s now I’m going to talk about
really the words the words of the Bible
and this is from Psalm 8 as the
translators did it in in 1611 when I
consider the heavens the works of thy
fingers the moon and the stars which
thou hast ordained what is man that thou
art mindful of him and the son of man
that thou visitest him for thou has made
him a little lower than the Angels and
has crowned him with glory and honour
now I think that those few lines embody
a great deal of what this book is about
the words are immensely simple and yet
those words actually do what James
wanted the Bible to do it does actually
fuse something that is great that feels
cosmic in scale with a real intimacy
with a sense that this is a set of
meanings that we can all have access to
it has about it a kind of majesty that
is mindful of man and so if you then
move on to an attempt to translate that
made by
Milton in the 1640s what Milton rate was
when I behold thy heavens thy fingers
art the moon and stars which thou so
bright has set in the pure firmament
then Seth my heart what is man that thou
rememberest yet and think’st upon him or
a man begat that him thou visitest and
of him art found scarce to be less than
God’s though amazed his lot with honor
and with state thou hast him crowned now
Milton is he’s having to cope with you
no rhyme and I Amba cuenta meter and so
on but he’s reaching higher he’s
reaching for something grander than the
Jacobean translators were reaching for
and in doing that full short of where
they got to that actually by trying to
be too much he loses that precious
Jacobi an amalgam of the rich and the
clear the the majestic and the ordinary
which they I think you can use the word
they miraculously landed on it’s
drifting away into a sense of its own
importance beyond this amazing
communicativeness of that reading out to
the listening editorial board that
desire simply to communicate meaning to
the ear and this gets are worse as time
goes on there is a drift in
english-speaking culture so this you
will know it from the non committees
that’s among the most famous words of
the whole Bible Lord now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace according to
thy word for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation which thou has prepared before
the face of all people a light to
lighten the Gentiles and the glory of
thy people Israel all those same
qualities and famously loved phrases
through the centuries but in the 18th
century this language started to seem
inadequate and there was an unfortunate
man called the Reverend Edward Harwood
who is a
Minister in Bristol in the West of
England and he decided in the 1760s to
do a new translation of the New
Testament and which he said he aimed to
close the idea of the Apostle the
Apostles with propriety and perspicuity
replacing the bald and barbarous
language of the old vulgar version
that’s the King James Bible with the
elegance of modern English now
so his version of the knock committees
goes like this Oh God
thy promise to me is amply for filth I
now quit the post of human life with
satisfaction and joy since Loused
indulge my eyes were so divine a
spectacle as the great Messiah well
think many of us have made better
resignation speeches about Jose and in
the 20th century it takes a third time
so if you have 18th century
rationalization 19th century fancy-dress
effectively 20th century boredom 20th
century translations aim not to embody
any of these these kind of great ideas
of the music of the Holy if you like you
know none of them are interested in
creating an atmosphere or conveying even
a sense of mystery in what is going on
the strangeness that the Scriptures
address they instead famously as the
director of the great project called the
new English Bible the worst translation
ever made which appeared in the early
60s he said he was wanting a timeless
prose in which archaism and hallowed
associations were to be avoided and a
sense of reality sought now the sense of
reality was actually a sense of total
ordinariness an idea that information
was what was required
just information adjust the ordinary
facts as transmitted by the most boring
people who’ve ever lived there is
certainly something about the King James
Bible which can stimulate in people an
extreme and obsessive conservatism and
although it is a great book of
liberation and beauty it is in my mind
certainly both those things it is also
and has often been an instrument of
control and oppression through much of
its history but I would prefer to see
this marvelous image here this is the
finest edition
maybe they King James in eighth Bible
thank you very much
you
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