The King James Bible in Cultural Context

Translating the Bible into English in the early modern period was a continuing and cumulative process. The King James translators of 1611 said in a frequently quoted passage from their preface to the reader, "we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one; . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one." They referred to the fact that there had already been a series of translations stretching from those of the exiled William Tyndale and his colleague Miles Coverdale in the 1520s and 1530s to the Great Bible of 1539—the first official translation after the separation of the Church of England from the jurisdiction of the papacy in Rome—to the Bishops' Bible of 1568. During the sixteenth century there had also appeared the unofficial but hugely popular Geneva Bible of 1560, the work of English Protestant exiles abroad during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I. The King James translators consulted these translations as well as the Rheims New Testament of 1582, the work of Catholic exiles abroad during the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. Behind them all were the translations of the followers of the theologian John Wycliffe in the late fourteenth century. The King James Bible was the climax of a long period of scholarly activity, and it has, in turn, had an extraordinarily long life as a foundational religious and literary text. It is the quintessential English book.

Among the many publications marking the 400th anniversary of the appearance of the King James translation are several that stress its literary and cultural impact in fresh and provocative ways. Naomi Tadmor's The Social Universe of the English Bible shows that a succession of English translators used then current English terms to represent ancient Hebrew activities and ideas and thereby domesticated and naturalized biblical institutions and social practices. The effect was not only to legitimate certain features of late medieval and early modern English society, but also to help shape their historical development. Inasmuch as modern English arose in the period of these biblical translations beginning with the fourteenth-century Wycliffite-manuscript bibles, the language became rich with biblical concepts and idioms. These were acceptable partly because they were understood to be descriptive of long-familiar features of English life. In the case of the English local community, for example, the concept of neighborliness was of central importance. This was natural, since most people spent their lives within a very limited geographical sphere. The Hebrew word for a fellow human being (re'a) was consistently translated as neighbor, a word that in the original Anglo-Saxon meant someone who lived nearby. Biblical injunctions to love one's neighbor reinforced and redefined a key relationship. Translators, including those of the King James Bible, thus "helped to underpin contemporary norms of Christian neighbourliness and endow them with fresh significance." In the English Book of Common Prayer, vernacular catechisms, and official public documents, a distinctive communalism, at the same time biblical and native...