INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The two greatest influences on the shaping of the English language are the works of William Shakespeare and the English translation of the Bible that appeared in 1611. The King James Bible—named for the British king who ordered the production of a fresh translation in 1604—is both a religious and literary classic. Literary scholars have heaped praise upon it. Nineteenth-century writers and literary critics acclaimed it as the “noblest monument of English prose.” In a series of lectures at Cambridge University during the First World War, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch declared that the King James Bible was “the very greatest” literary achievement in the English language. The only possible challenger for this title came from the complete works of Shakespeare. His audience had no quarrel with this judgment. It was the accepted wisdom of the age.
The King James Bible was a landmark in the history of the English language, and an inspiration to poets, dramatists, artists, and politicians. The influence of this work has been incalculable. For many years, it was the only English translation of the Bible available. Many families could afford only one book—a Bible, in whose pages parents recorded the births of their children, and found solace at their deaths. Countless youngsters learned to read by mouthing the words they found in the only book their family possessed—the King James Bible. Many learned biblical passages by heart, and found that their written and spoken English was shaped by the language and imagery of this Bible. Without the King James Bible, there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim's Progress, no Handel's Messiah, no Negro spirituals, and no Gettysburg Address. These, and innumerable other works, were inspired by the language of this Bible. Without this Bible, the culture of the English-speaking world would have been immeasurably impoverished. The King James Bible played no small part in shaping English literary nationalism, by asserting the supremacy of the English language as a means of conveying religious truths.
Yet the Bible is far more than a work of literature. For Christians—the world's largest religious grouping—the Bible tells the story of the creation of the world by God, and its redemption through Jesus Christ. The Bible speaks words of hope in the face of suffering and death. It tells of a New Jerusalem, in which pain, sorrow, and death are things of the past. Until the Bible was translated, many English-speaking Christians had to rely on their clergy to tell them about such things. The King James Bible allowed them to read them for themselves, and shaped the contours of English-speaking Christianity in a period of unprecedented expansion and growth, as the great missionary undertakings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries got under way. The ideas, language, and images of the churches of Africa and Australasia were deeply shaped by an English translation of the Bible that had been prepared centuries earlier.
The importance of the Bible went far beyond personal religious devotion and faith. It was central to the life of Western European society in a way that we cannot begin to imagine today. The story is often told of the great economic historian Jack Fisher, who was being pestered by a student for a reading list on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century economic history. Exasperated, Fisher finally gave his definitive answer: “If you really want to understand this period, go away and read the Bible.” Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Bible was seen as a social, economic, and political text. Those seeking to overthrow the English monarchy and those wanting to retain it both sought support from the same Bible. The Bible came to be seen as the foundation of every aspect of English culture, linking monarch and church, time and eternity.
The lives of countless men and women since then have been changed and molded by the King James Bible. Refugees from England, fleeing religious persecution in the seventeenth century, brought copies with them. It would be their encouragement on the long and dangerous voyage to the Americas, and their guide as they settled in the New World. Prisoners in English jails found solace in reciting biblical verses they had learned by heart, in the words chosen by the translators assembled by King James. The King James Bible became part of the everyday world of generations of English-speaking peoples, spread across the world. It can be argued that, until the end of the First World War, the King James Bible was seen, not simply as the most important English translation of the Bible, but as one of the finest literary works in the English language. It did not follow literary trends; it established them.
So how did this remarkable translation come to be written? What led to the production of this monument in the development of the English language? The full answer to this question is as fascinating as it is complex, and involves the Byzantine politics of Tudor and Jacobean England, the hopes and fears of English monarchs and would-be archbishops, and the surge of confidence and pride in England and its national language under “Good Queen Bess.” To answer this question is to throw open the doors of a lost world—a world that was being transformed by the new technology of printing, in much the way that today's world has been changed by the Internet. As we prepare to tell the story of the greatest English Bible ever produced, we must close our eyes to our own world—a world in which books are plentiful, relatively inexpensive, and readily available, and in which English Bibles can be bought at any local bookstore and read, and enter another, very different universe.
Our story opens with a new invention that changed the face of Europe forever…
