The Good Book

Gordon Campbell, commemorating four hundred years of the King James Version of the Bible, calls his history of the remarkably durable translation an "affectionate biography." It's the kind of book that, even putting religious differences aside, seems bound to make people unhappy—too scholarly and technical for some, too compact and breezy for others; but Campbell, a Renaissance specialist from Britain, assumes the task with cheerful good humor. The result resembles one of those rambling genealogies compiled by a family member, with lots of historical background, a sprinkling of favorite stories, and a hodgepodge of assorted lore.

In 1604, during the struggle for religious power following Queen Elizabeth's death, James i convened a three-day conference at Hampton Court palace where Puritans called for a new translation of the Bible. James consented, and six "companies" or committees were charged with producing their respective sections of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. These men, led in large part by the brilliant high-churchman Lancelot Andrewes, possessed a staggering degree of learning. As Campbell writes, "it would be difficult now to bring together a group of more than fifty scholars with the range of languages and knowledge of other disciplines that characterized the KJV translators." From Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic to Latin and modern European languages (in addition to a few others such as Syriac and Arabic), the company members brought an immense wealth of knowledge to bear on the manuscripts available at the time.

Yet their official purpose, as stated in their preface, "was not to make a new translation . . . but to make a good one better"—the "good one," being the English version of 1568 known as the Bishops' Bible, itself descended from the Geneva Bible (1560), the Great Bible (1539), and the Matthew Bible (1537). All of these English versions depended heavily on the work of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale. In revising the Bishops' Bible, the translators favored simple, widely understood language, often choosing monosyllabic Old English over longer Latinate terms. At the same time the characteristic ye, thee, and thou of the King James Version, along with even remoter-sounding constructions like the which (as in "the same hour, in the which Jesus said," John 4:53), indicate, as Campbell puts it, the translators' "conservatism and slightly out-of-touch language" in comparison with most seventeenth-century speakers. On the whole, when deciding questions of vocabulary, usage, or syntax, the companies attempted to produce a text suited for reading aloud, whether in churches or homes.

After its first publication in 1611, the KJV had a complicated printing history highlighted by several famous errors. The "Wicked Bible" of 1631 omitted the word not from the commandment forbidding adultery, and the "Vinegar Bible" (1716) printed above Luke chapter 20, containing the parable of the vineyard, the heading "the parable of the vinegar." Printing Bibles was a lucrative business, so lawsuits and even sabotage (as appears likely in the case of the "Wicked Bible") heightened the confusion. It wasn't until Benjamin Blayney's edition of 1769 that the King James Version we know today truly began to emerge. Early editions of the KJV, like those of the Great Bible, the Matthew Bible, and others, contained elaborate title pages, and Campbell provides useful descriptions and analyses of this iconography alongside the reproductions.

The seamless fit of phrases from the KJV into countless Protestant sermons—to say nothing of our everyday speech—suggests that the version, in accordance with the translators' hopes, is indeed pleasing to the ear. But on the question of the literary value of the KJV Campbell remains skeptical, answering conventional praise for its noble language by pointing out that the translators sought "literal accuracy rather than majesty." The dispute persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and surfaced recently in newspaper articles about the quater-centenary. For every T. H. Huxley or Thomas Babington Macaulay eager to champion what Huxley called the "exquisite beauties of mere literary form...