field, the old Great Bible and the new Genevan Bible. On all accounts the
Genevan was the better and was driving out its rival. Yet there could be
no hope of gaining the approval of Elizabeth for the Genevan Bible. For
one thing, John Knox had been a party to its preparation; so had Calvin.
Elizabeth detested them both, especially Knox. For another thing, its
notes were not favorable to royal sovereignty, but smacked so much of
popular government as to be offensive. For another thing, though it had
been made mostly by her own people, it had been made in a foreign land,
and was under suspicion on that account. The result was that Elizabeth's
archbishop, Parker, set out to have an authorized version made, selected a
revision committee, with instructions to follow wherever possible the
Great Bible, to avoid bitter notes, and to make such a version that it
might be freely, easily, and naturally read. The result is known as the
Bishops' Bible. It was issued in Elizabeth's tenth year (1568), but there
is no record that she ever noticed it, though Parker sent her a copy from
his sick-bed. The Bishops' Bible shows the influence of the Genevan Bible
in many ways, though it gives no credit for that. It is not of equal
merit; it was expensive, too cumbersome, and often unscholarly. Only its
official standing gave it life, and after forty years, in nineteen
editions, it was no longer published.
Naming one other English version will complete the series of facts
necessary for the consideration of the forming of the King James version.
It will be remembered that all the English versions of the Bible thus far
mentioned were the work of men either already out of favor with the Roman
pontiff, or speedily put out of favor on that account. Thirty years after
his death, Wiclif's bones were taken up and burned; Tindale was burned.
Coverdale's version and the Great Bible were the product of the period
when Henry VIII. was under the ban. The Genevan Bible was the work of
refugees, and the Bishops' Bible was prepared when Elizabeth had been
excommunicated. That fact seemed to many loyal Roman churchmen to put the
Church in a false light. It must be made clear that its opposition was not
to the Bible, not even to popular use and possession of the Bible, but
only to unauthorized, even incorrect, versions. So there came about the
Douai version, instigated by Gregory Martin, and prepared in some sense as
an answer to the Genevan version and its strongly anti-papal notes. It was
the work of English scholars connected with the University of Douai. The
New Testament was issued at Rheims in 1582, and the whole Bible in 1609,
just before our King James version. It is made, not from the Hebrew and
the Greek, though it refers to both, but from the Vulgate. The result is
that the Old Testament of the Douai version is a translation into English
from the Latin, which in large part is a translation into Latin from the
Greek Septuagint, which in turn is a translation into Greek from the
Hebrew. Yet scholars are scholars, and it shows marked influence of the
Genevan version, and, indeed, of other English versions. Its notes were
strongly anti-Protestant, and in its preface it explains its existence by
saying that Protestants have been guilty of "casting the holy to dogs and
pearls to hogs."
The version is not in the direct line of the ascent of the familiar
version, and needs no elaborate description. Its purpose was
controversial; it did not go to available sources; its English was not
colloquial, but ecclesiastical. For example, in the Lord's Prayer we read:
"Give us this day our supersubstantial bread," instead of "our daily
bread." In Hebrews xiii:17, the version reads, "Obey your prelates and be
subject unto them." In Luke iii:3, John came "preaching the baptism of
penance." In Psalm xxiii:5, where we read, "My cup runneth over," the
Douai version reads, "My chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly it is."
There is a careful retention of ecclesiastical terms, and an explanation
of the passages on which Protestants had come to differ rather sharply
from their Roman brethren, as in the matter of the taking of the cup by
the people, and elsewhere.
Yet it is only fair to remember that this much answer was made to the
versions which were preparing the way for the greatest version of them
all, and when the time came for the making of that version, and the helps
were gathered together, the Douai was frankly placed among them. It is a
peculiar irony of fate that while the purpose of Gregory Martin was to
check the translation of the Bible by the Protestants, the only effect of
his work was to advance and improve that translation.
At last, as we shall see in our next study, the way was cleared for a free
and open setting of the Bible into English. The way had been beset with
struggle, marked with blood, lighted by martyr fires. Wiclif and Purvey,
Tindale and Coverdale, the refugees at Geneva and the Bishops at London,
all had trod that way. Kings had fought them or had favored them; it was
all one; they had gone on. Loyal zest for their Book and loving zeal for
the common people had held them to the path. Now it had become a highway
open to all men. And right worthy were the feet which were soon treading
it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Hoare, _Evolution of the English Bible_, p. 39.
[2] Muir, _Our Grand Old Bible_, p. 24.
[3] "Not least art thou, thou little Bethlehem
In Judah, for in thee the Lord was born;
Nor thou in Britain, little Lutterworth,
Least, for in thee the word was born again."
--_Sir John Oldcastle._
[4] _What Is the Bible?_, p. 45.
[5] McGiffert, _Martin Luther_.
[6] _Obedience of a Christian Man._
[7] Pollard, _Records of the English Bible_, p. 151.
[8] The fourth reads in his version, "Blessed are they which hunger and
thirst for righteousness"; the seventh, "Blessed are the maintainers of
peace"; the eighth, "Blessed are they which suffer persecution for
righteousness' sake."
[9] _History of England_, end of chap. xii.
[10] Herman Buschius.
[11] This will mean the more to us when we realize that the literary men
of the day despised the English tongue. Sir Thomas More wrote his _Utopia_
in Latin, because otherwise educated men would not deign to read it. Years
later Roger Ascham apologized for writing one of his works in English.
Putting the Bible into current English impressed these literary men very
much as we would be impressed by putting the Bible into current slang.
LECTURE II
THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES VERSION; ITS CHARACTERISTICS
Early in January, 1604, men were making their way along the poor English
highways, by coach and carrier, to the Hampton Court Palace of the new
English king. They were coming from the cathedral towns, from the
universities, from the larger cities. Many were Church dignitaries, many
were scholars, some were Puritans, all were loyal Englishmen, and they
were gathering in response to a call for a conference with the king, James
I. They were divided in sentiment, these men, and those who hoped most
from the conference were doomed to complete disappointment. Not one among
them, not the King, had the slightest purpose that the conference should
do what proved to be its only real service. Some of the men, grave and
earnest, were coming to present their petitions to the King, others were
coming to oppose their petitions; the King meant to deny them and to
harry the petitioners. And everything came out as it had been planned. Yet
the largest service of the conference, the only real service, was in no
one's mind, for it was at Hampton Court, on the last day of the conference
between James and the churchmen, January 18, 1604, that the first formal
step was taken toward the making of the so-called Authorized Version of
the English Bible. If there are such things as accidents, this great
enterprise began in an accident. But the outcome of the accident, the
volume that resulted, is "allowed by all competent authorities to be the
first [that is, the chief] English classic," if our Professor Cook, of
Yale, may speak; "is universally accepted as a literary masterpiece, as
the noblest and most beautiful Book in the world, which has exercised an
incalculable influence upon religion, upon manners, upon literature, and
upon character," if the Balliol College scholar Hoare can be trusted; and
has "made the English language," if Professor March is right. The purpose
of this study is to show how that accident occurred, and what immediately
came from it.
* * * * *
With the death of Elizabeth the Tudor line of sovereigns died out. The
collateral Stuart line, descending directly from Henry VII., naturally
succeeded to the throne, and James VI. of Scotland made his royal progress
to the English capital and became James I. of England. In him appears the
first of that Stuart line during whose reign great changes were to occur.
Every one in the line held strongly to the dogma of the divine right of
kings, yet under that line the English people transferred sovereignty from
the king to Parliament.[12] Fortunately for history, and for the progress
of popular government, the Stuart line had no forceful figures in it.
Macaulay thinks it would have been fatal to English liberty if they had
been able kings. It was easier to take so dangerous a weapon as the divine
right of kings from weak hands than from strong ones. So it was that
though James came out of Scotland to assert his divine and arbitrary right
as sovereign, by the time Queen Anne died, closing the Stuart line and
giving way to the Hanoverian, the real sovereignty had passed into the
hands of Parliament.
But the royal traveler, coming from Edinburgh to London, is interesting on
his own account--interesting at this distance. He is thirty-seven years
old, and ought to be in the beginning of his prime. He is a little over
middle height; loves a good horse, though he is an ungainly rider, and has
fallen off his horse three or four times during his royal progress; is a
heavy drinker of the liquors of the period, with horribly coarse, even
gross manners. Macaulay is very severe with him. He says that "his
cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and
manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision. Even in
his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently
unkingly."[13] It seemed too bad that "royalty should be exhibited to the
world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at the
drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a
pedagogue." That is truly not an attractive picture. But there is
something on the other side. John Richard Green puts both sides: "His big
head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood
out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry and
Elizabeth as his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity,
his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his contemptible
cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior, however, lay a man of much
natural ability, a ripe scholar with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of
mother wit and ready repartee."[14]
Some good traits he must have had. He did win some men to him. As some one
has said, "You could love him; you could despise him; you could not hate
him." He could say some witty and striking things. For example, when he
was urging the formal union of Scotland and England, and it was opposed,
he said: "But I am the husband, and the whole island is my wife. I hope no
one will be so unreasonable as to suppose that I, that am a Christian king
under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives."[15]
After the conference of which we have been speaking, he wrote to a friend
in Scotland: "I have had a revel with the Puritans and have peppered them
soundly." As indeed he had. Then, in some sense at least, "James was a
born theologian." He had studied the Bible in some form from childhood;
one of the first things we hear of his doing is the writing of a
paraphrase on the book of the Revelation. In his talk he made easy and
free use of Scripture quotations. To be sure, his knowledge, on which he
prided himself unconscionably, was shallow and pedantic. Henry IV. of
France, one of his contemporaries, said that he was "the wisest fool in
Christendom."
Now, it was this man who was making his royal progress from Edinburgh to
London in March, 1603, nearly a year before the gathering of men which we
were observing at the opening of this study. Many things happened on the
journey besides his falling off his horse several times; but one of the
most significant was the halting of the progress to receive what was
called the Miliary Petition, whose name implies that it was signed by a
thousand men--actually somewhat less than that number--mostly ministers of
the Church. The Petition made no mention of any Bible version, yet it was
the beginning of the events which led to it. Back of it was the Puritan
influence. It asked for reforms in the English Church, for the correction
of abuses which had grown under Elizabeth's increasing favor of ritual and
ceremony. It asked for a better-trained ministry, for better discipline in
the Church, for the omission of so many detailed requirements of rites and
ceremonies, and for that perennially desired reform, shorter church
services!
Very naturally the new King replied that he would take it up later, and
promised to call a conference to consider it. And this he did. The
conference met at Hampton Court in January, 1604, and it was for this that
the men were coming from many parts of England. The gathering was held on
the 14th, 16th, and 18th of the month. Its sole purpose was to consider
that Miliary Petition; but the King called to it not only those who had
signed the Petition, but those who had opposed it. He had no notion of
granting any favor to it, and from the first he gave the Puritans rough
treatment. He told them he would have none of their non-conformity, he
would "make them conform or harry them out of the land." Some one
suggested that since this was a Church matter there be called a Synod, or
some general gathering fitted to discuss and determine such things, rather
than leave it to a few Church dignitaries. For the purposes of the
petitioners it was a most unfortunate expression. James had just come from
Scotland, where the Presbyterians were with their Synod, and where
Calvinism was in full swing. He was much in favor of some elements of
Calvinism; but he could not see how all the elements held together.
Predestination, for example, which offends so many people to-day, was a
precious doctrine to King James, and he insisted that his subjects ought
to see how clearly God had predestined him to rule over them! But he
could not tolerate the necessary logical inference of Calvinism that all
men must be equal before God, and so men can make and unmake kings as they
need to do so, the matter of king or subject being purely an incidental
one. He remembered the time when Andrew Melville, one of the Scotch
ministers, had plucked him by his royal sleeve and called him "God's silly
vassal" right to his face. So, when some one said "Synod" it brought the
King up standing. He burst out: "If that is what you mean, if you want
what the Scotch mean by their Synod and their Presbytery, then I tell you
at once that I will have none of it. Presbytery agrees with monarchy very
much as God agrees with the devil. If you have no bishop, you will soon
have no king." He was perfectly right, with reference to the kind of king
he meant. These things were to be settled, he meant, by authority, and not
by conference. That is the point to which Gardiner refers when he says
that "in two minutes James sealed his own fate and that of England
forever."[16]
After that there was only a losing fight for the petitioners. They had
touched a sore spot in James's history. But it was when they touched that
sore spot again that they started the movement for a new version of the
Bible. It was on the second day of the conference, January 16th, that Dr.
Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who represented the
moderate Puritan position, and, like many moderate men, was rather
suspected by both extreme wings, instanced as one of the hardships of the
Puritans that they were compelled to use the prayer-book of the time, and
that it contained many mistranslations of Scripture, some of which he
quoted. Now, it so happens that the errors to which he referred occur in
the Bishops' and the Great Bible, which were the two authorized versions
of the time, but are all corrected in the Genevan version. We do not know
what point he was trying to make, whether he was urging that the Genevan
version should supplant these others, or whether he was calling for a new
translation. Indeed, we are not sure that he even mentioned the Genevan
version. But James spoke up to say that he had never yet seen a Bible well
translated into English; but the worst of all he thought the Genevan to
be. He spoke as though he had just had a copy given him by an English
lady, and had already noted what he called its errors. That was at the
very least a royal evasion, for if there was any Book he did know it was
the Genevan version. He had been fairly raised on it; he had lived in the
country where it was commonly used. It had been preached at him many and
many a time. Indeed, he had used it as the text for that paraphrase of the
Revelation of which we spoke a moment ago. And he knew its notes--well he
knew them--knew that they were from republican Geneva, and that kingly
pretensions had short shrift with them. James told the conference that
these notes were "very partial, untrue, seditious, savoring too much of
traitorous and dangerous conceits," supporting his opinion by two
instances which seemed disrespectful to royalty. One of these instances
was the note on Exodus i:17, where the Egyptian midwives are said to have
disobeyed the king in the matter of destroying the children. The note
says: "Their disobedience to the king was lawful, though their dissembling
was not." James quoted that, and said: "It is false; to disobey the king
is not lawful, and traitorous conceits should not go forth among the
people."
Some of the High Church party objected that there were translations enough
already; but it struck James's fancy to set them all aside by another
version, which he at once said he would order. It was to be made by the
most learned of both universities, then to be revised by the bishops and
other Church dignitaries, then presented to the Privy Council, and finally
to be passed upon by himself. There is the echo of some sharp Scotch
experiences in his declaration that there were to be no marginal notes in
that new version.
When they looked back on the conference, the Puritans felt that they had
lost everything, and the High Church people that they had gained
everything. One of the bishops, in a very servile way, and on his knee,
gave thanks to God for having given the country such a king, whose like
had never been seen since Christ was on earth. Certainly hard times were
ahead for the Puritans. The King harried them according to his word.
Within sixteen years some of them landed at Plymouth Rock, and things
began to happen on this side. That settlement at Plymouth was the outcome
of the threat the King had made at the Hampton Court conference.
But looking back one can see that the conference was worth while for the
beginning of the movement for the new version. The King was true to his
word in this line also, and before the year was out had appointed the
fifty-four best Bible scholars of the realm to make the new version. They
were to sit in six companies of nine each, two at Oxford, two at
Cambridge, and two at Westminster. The names of only forty-seven of them
have come down to us, and it is not known whether the other seven were
ever appointed, or in what way their names have been lost. It must be said
for the King that the only principle of selection was scholarship, and
when those six groups of men met they were men of the very first rank,
with no peers outside their own numbers--with one exception, and that
exception is of some passing interest. Hugh Broughton was probably the
foremost Hebrew scholar of England, perhaps of the world, at the time, and
apparently he was not appointed on the committee. Chiefly, it seems to
have been because he was a man of ungovernable temper and utterly unfitted
to work with others. Failure to appoint him, however, bit and rankled, and
the only keen and sharp criticism that was passed on the version in its
own day was by Hugh Broughton. He sent word to the King, after it was
completed, that as for himself he would rather be rent to pieces by wild
horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of
the Bible on the poor people. That was so manifestly pique, however, that
it is only to be regretted that the translation did not have the benefit
of his great Hebrew knowledge. John Selden, at his prime in that day,
voiced the feeling of most scholars of the times, that the new translation
was the best in the world and best gave the sense of the original.
We do not know much of the personnel of the company. Their names would
mean very little to us at this distance. All were clergymen except one.
There were bishops, college principals, university fellows, and rectors.
Dr. Reynolds, who suggested it in the first place, was a member, though he
did not live to see the work finished. This Dr. Reynolds, by the way, was
party to a most curious episode. He had been an ardent Roman Catholic, and
he had a brother who was an equally ardent Protestant. They argued with
each other so earnestly that each convinced the other; the Roman Catholic
became a Protestant, and the Protestant became a Roman Catholic! Dr.
Lancelot Andrewes, chairman of one of the two companies that met at
Westminster, was probably the most learned man in England. They said of
him that if he had been present at the tower of Babel he could have
interpreted for all the tongues present. The only trouble was that the
world lacked learning enough to know how learned he was. His company had
the first part of the Old Testament, and the simple dignity of the style
they used shows how scholarship and simplicity go easily together. Most
people would consider that the least satisfactory part of the work is the
second section, running from I Chronicles to Ecclesiastes. A convert from
another faith, who learned to read the Bible in English, once expressed to
a friend of my own his feeling that except for the Psalms and parts of
Job, there seemed to be here a distinct letting-down of the dignity of the
translation. There is good excuse for this, if it is so, for two leading
members of the company who had that section in charge, both eminent
Cambridge scholars, died very early in the work, and their places were not
filled. The third company, sitting at Oxford, were peculiarly strong, and
had for their portion the hardest part of the Old Testament--all the
prophetical writings. But they did their part with finest skill. The
fourth company, sitting at Cambridge, had the Apocrypha, the books which
lie between the Old and the New Testaments for the most part, or else are
supplemental to certain Old Testament books. Their work was rather hastily
and certainly poorly done, and has been dropped out of most editions. The
fifth company, sitting at Oxford, with great Greek scholars on it, took
the Gospels, the Acts, and the Revelation. This company had in it the one
layman, Sir Henry Savile, then the greatest Greek scholar in England. It
is the same Sir Henry Savile who heard, on his death-bed in 1621, that
James had with his own hands torn from the Journal of Parliament the pages
which bore the protest in favor of free speech in Parliament. Hearing it,
the faithful scholar prayed to die, saying: "I am ready to depart, the
rather that having lived in good times I foresee worse." The sixth company
met at Westminster and translated the New Testament epistles.