The King James Translator's Commission
[The following is taken, in part, from Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible]
To call the King James Bible a “translation” is a bit misleading. It was more of a compilation, though accuracy was closely observed. The translators were allowed to enhance the text as they saw fit, and they did so, according to the aesthetic of the times (remembering this was the age of Shakespeare).
The times were alive, effervescent. The late Elizabethan age was an age of linguistic sizzle. And the Translators were all Elizabethans, all passionately literate. This aesthetic (or sound) could only enhance the beauty and magnificence that was already there in the folds of Scripture. It had the ability to make beautiful even more beautiful. The way God himself is beautiful. It is still and always a matter of divine election. The men, the times, the king.
The King James translators had all been weaned on the Elizabethan sonnet. They had all seen Hamlet [except for the Puritans, who hated the playhouse]. The late Elizabethan age sustained a powerful linguistic vitality that no age has been able to boast since. And this was the aesthetic through which the King James translators sifted every word. The English imagination was, and remains, aural. It expressed itself in sound, and the culture was tuned for it.
According to the rules of translation, the King James translators were to use the 1568 Bishop’s Bible as a base, or a template. They were to refer as well to certain previously published English translations: The William Tyndale Bible (1534), The Coverdale Bible (1535), The Matthew’s Bible (1537), The Geneva Bible (1560), and The Bishop’s Bible (1568). The translators were to extract the best lines from these sources, and shape them into a seamless whole.
The translators did not attempt to impose a voice or any sense of style upon the translation. They felt that beauty lay nested in the original Hebrew and Greek texts, and they submitted themselves accordingly. Their task, as they saw it, was to coax it forward, to draw it out. And yet, as any miner or archeologist understands, to do this kind of precision work, to finesse this kind of detail, you need the right tools. The Translators had the right tools, but more than that, the tools they had were well calibrated. Also, the Rules of Translation included nothing about sonority or style. The Translators were left to their own instincts as to the sound it made.
Literary Guidelines
Their commission was to render a sparkling jewel, and with an English voice. They were to transmit, not innovate. They were to submit to the original text. They did not create. They did not assume. They invented nothing. They were not authors. The role of the King James Translators was more of a secretarial role. And they understood.
It was not an elitist agenda, as Christianity had once been. Unity doesn’t work that way.
Majestie was to be dispersed, by means of the Scriptures. It was to be the connective tissue that held a people together. Or so was the desire of the dreamer/priest king. If the Scriptures were hoarded in days past, and they were, the effort was now to open what was sealed shut, and allow all people access, and at all levels of culture. The Scriptures were to be prepared for the poorly or noneducated, tuned to the pitch of the general listener, to set their sights, as William Tyndale said originally, as low as “the ploughboy.” And yet they never intended it to sound like London streetspeak.
For simplicity and majestie to come together as thoroughly as it did in the final approved text is perhaps the greater miracle of the enterprise. In aiming for this simplicity, they did not think to bring God down, but to raise the English up, and specifically as that same English submitted to the original text (Greek and Hebrew manuscripts). It opened things up.
Suddenly God was accessible. Majestie was not so distant. No longer hidden or obscured, he seemed to genuinely care. Worship was no longer the remote procession of mystical events. The ploughboy was now the participant in the liturgy, no longer a mere spectator, or worse, an alien. The English translations that preceded the King James Bible tuned the people, made them susceptible to a verbal God.
The Translator’s task then was to make English godly, to make it richer, to enhance its deep basses, to bring them forward and without losing the immediacy and simplicity. This was a poet’s dominion perhaps, and yet there was not a poet among them. The text before them demanded things that academic text or popular literature could not demand.
It was a literary spirit that governed culture, a spirit of the word, a profoundly English spirit that had risen to its zenith in the age of Elizabeth. The well-defined Golden Age was an age of prosperity, of educational florescence, of unprecedented greatness for the island. The lion’s share was in the language itself.
It was under these conditions that the King James Bible came into being. These are also the conditions that made it unrepeatable and timeless. It is a treasure that not only remains alive and vibrant, but it is part of our inheritance that should be protected. The King James Bible represents what is excellent about our linguistic past. In a swiftly moving culture such as our own, a culture that has little time to wait or to sing, in an age of information where rhapsody is held suspect, where explanation is more important than sustaining the impenetrable mystery of God, the King James Bible remains a vital presence among all English translations.
