God's Secretaries again

Essentially, for all the extravagance of the king and parliament's voluble assertion of its ancient rights, peace reigned. In diocese after diocese in England, the records show that neither Catholics nor extreme Puritans were being hunted down. Pax and Concordia reigned rather sleepily over the country and, on the whole, in quiet corners, without much inter-vention or harassment, English men and women were getting on with their lives and their religion. Revolution, martyrdom, the heroism of exile — these hardly featured in the landscape. The country was relatively fat on a series of good harvests, pursuing its interests, in many ways sharing a common idea of what was good: a Christian, orderly commonwealth. As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment. That is not how it looks from America. For Americans, the spring and summer of z6o8 burns in the history of religious belief and the struggle for freedom of conscience as the months in which those Separatists who would later sail for New Ply-mouth on the Mayflower, known to us (but never to them) as the Pilgrim Fathers, finally gave up the struggle of living in England, unable to tolerate its oppressions any longer, and left, after great travails, for the freedoms of Amsterdam and then Leiden. How can this be explained? How can one of the most pacific moments in English history be the source of something which, in retrospect, looks like one of its greatest ruptures? It is, in part, a question of scale and of perspective. From the point of view of the English establishment, the events in the small agricultural communities around Scrooby and Gainsborough, on the borders
of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, were no more than minor irritations at the outer edge of their concerns. There was a tiny cell of radical thinking here — with strong Cambridge connec-tions, a stream of fire-breathing preachers coming north from the university city — wedded to all those extreme Puritan beliefs which the broadly tolerant English Church and state felt unable to accommodate. The Separatists' model was the ancient church of Antioch, in which there had been neither bishop nor clergy of any kind, and which was ruled 'by the Spirit', manifesting itself through the congregation. It was the congregation that appointed and ordained its own pastors, teachers, lay elders and deacons. In these gatherings, often in stables and outhouses, away from the sight of the church authorities, the priesthood of all believers was a living reality. Their services might last four hours, much of which was spent in prayer, often extempore, with no help from any prayer book, an unregulated, private spirit guiding the prophesyings of the faithful. Anyone, whether artisan or peasant, could expound the meaning of the scriptures. They held as their guiding sign the words of St Peter to all members of the church: But yee are a chosen generation, a royall Priest-hood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that yee should shewe forth the praises of him, who hath called you out of darknes into his marueilous light.' The accompanying note in the Geneva Bible, which the Scrooby Separatists would have read, makes it quite clear. People like them, it reassured them, were God's elect. They were the true believers and the rest of the world, who clearly did not attend as closely as they did to the very word of God, would be damned to hell. 'And lest any man should doubt whether he is chosen or not, the apostle calls us back to the voice of the gospel sounding both in our ears and minds.' Listen to the words of the Bible and you will be saved. Nothing else is necessary. It is that singularity of conviction which drove the Puritan and pilgrim experience. Of course, those words of Peter's carry an explosively subversive charge.

and.... an association I never thought of:
 that preservation of his teeth at a time when the English, awash with sugar from their new slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean, were embarking on their long career of oral decay.

also...

The idea, in fact, was not to make a new translation, Smith maintained, but to make 'out of many good ones, one principal good one'. And that was their triumph: a polished collation, a refinement of a century's translating, a book that became both clear and rich. Of course, what they delivered to Robert Barker was not entirely good. The Hebrew and particularly the Greek texts the were working from were not the most accurate, even by tl-standards of their own time. Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor as the head of the church in Geneva, had prepared an edition of the New Testament some forty years earlier based on a more ancient and less corrupt manuscript. The English scholars were still a little adrift on tenses in Hebrew, while koine, the form of rubbed down and difficult Greek in which the New Testament is written, so unlike the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, still held mysteries for them, which only later translations would correct. And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6: I i —13 :
O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (1 speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged. Even though Tyndale's effort was even more opaque, this is clearly a translation done by people who didn't really understand what they were translating, and in those circumstances rhythmic language and interesting vocabulary can do very little to save the situation. As modern translations make clear, Paul is asking the Corinthians, as a father might ask his children, to be more open with him, since he feels he has been open with them him-self, but no one would have divined that simple meaning from the muddle which (at least in this instance) the Jacobean Translators served up.
Some form of text was handed over to Robert Barker, 'Printer to the King's Most Excellent Maiestie', perhaps an annotated version of the Bishops' Bible, perhaps a manuscript. What was said to be the 'manuscript copy of the Bible' was sold twice in the seventeenth century, once to Cambridge University Press, once to a firm of London printers, but has now disappeared. According to one romantic theory, it was burnt in the Great Fire of London. Barker's printshop began to apply its own level of chaos to the production process. It seems to have been a sort of anarchy. Either two editions were produced one after another; or both at the same time and sheets from each edition were bound together in single volumes. As a result no copy of the 161 z Bible is like any other. And they were riddled with mistakes. The Translators had intended that any word inserted to improve the sense should be printed in a different face. In fact, that principle became confused early on and if a word is in italics in the printed Bible, there is often no telling if it is in the original Greek or Hebrew or not. Marginal references to other relevant parts of the Bible are highly inaccurate, particularly in the Psalms, where references are made to the numbering system used in the Vulgate, not the numbering system in this Bible itself. Calmly elegant Bibles in Roman typefaces had been in pro-duction in France and Switzerland for decades. This Bible, look-ing back to an imagined antiquity before the modern age, was given a heavy, antique feel with its dense blackletter typeface, a `Gothic', non-Roman typeface, and a certain airlessness on the page. It may be that because the Geneva Bibles were printed in open and accessible Roman type, and the Bishops' Bible, which this was intended to replace, had itself been in blackletter, that Barker made this retrograde decision. Although editions of the King James Bible were appearing in Roman type within a few years, blackletter editions continued to be printed and sold, well into the first years of the eighteenth century. Even at its birth, this was sold as the Bible of Old England. And it was littered with misprints, `hoopes' for `hookes', 'she' for 'he', three whole lines simply repeated in Exodus, and alarm-ingly 'Judas' for 'Jesus' in one of the Gospels. None of these was quite so catastrophic as a misprint that would appear in a 163 I edition, the so-called Wicked Bible, which failed to put the word `not' in Exodus 2o:14, giving the reading 'Thou shalt commit adultery', but the degree of muddle is scarcely what a modern scholarly text would tolerate. When, finally, in the nineteenth century, Dr F. Scrivener, a scholar working to modern standards, attempted to collate all the editions of the King James Bible then in circulation, he found more than 24,000 variations between them. The curious fact is that no one such thing as `The King James Bible' — agreed, consistent and whole — has ever existed.

The book crept out into the public arena. Being only a revision of earlier translations, and not a new work, there was no need for it to be entered in the Stationers' Register, which recorded only new publications and so, in addition to this most famous book having no agreed text, it also has no publication date. Nor is it known how many were printed of the first big folio edition for use in churches. When the first state Bible, the so-called Great Bible, was issued in 1540, 20,000 copies were run off, more than enough to provide one for every parish church in England, costing 1 o shillings each, 12 shillings bound. For the King James Bible, though, there is no record of either print-run or price. Everything that could have been done for it had been done. Something approaching three hundred and fifty scholar years had been devoted to its excellence; the Crown and state church had given it their imprimatur; a laudatory preface and dedication, by permission, to the king, had been included. Any publisher would have hoped for the most enormous success. They didn't get it. Some critics thought its dependence on a kind of English which seemed sixty or seventy years out of date (although its English was in fact a form no one had ever spoken) made it ridiculous and bogus. Hugh Broughton, a cantankerous and aggressive Puritan Hebrew scholar, who had wanted to be part of the great committee, sending papers and suggestions to Bancroft, but barred because of his incivility, lambasted the translation for its errors and its slavish following of the old Bishops' Bible. In the opening words of his Preface, Miles Smith had predicted such a reaction. `Zeale to promote the common good', he had begun — and there is no phrase which encapsulates more Precisely the ideals of the project — 'findeth but cold intertainment in the world.' Broughton castigated the Translators. Their understanding of Hebrew was inadequate; where they had stumbled on something worthwhile, they had usually relegated it to the margins. These worldly divines, he said, were interested only in promotion in the church and crawl-ing to royal authority. Blasphemy, most damnable corruptions, intolerable deceit and vile imposture were terms scarcely bad enough to describe the depths of their degeneracy. 'The late Bible', he wrote, was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is ill done. Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches . . . The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt. Not that Broughton was in any way bitter; these accusations were, he said, not 'the dictates of passion, but the just resentment of a zealous mind'. The Geneva Bible continued to hold its position in English affections, at least partly because it was so useful for its notes and appendices, a guidebook to the world of the divine. It con-tinued to flood off the presses: a folio and a quarto in 1611, another folio in 1612, three quartos in 1614, two more in 1615 and a folio in 1616. Then, in 1616, the king put a halt to it, or at least attempted to: no more editions of the Geneva Bible were to be printed. The King James Bible (henceforth known as the Authorised Version, although no document authorising its use by the king, Council or anyone else survived the 1619 Whitehall fire) was to become, by order, the only English Bible. But the appetite for the Geneva text could not be so easily denied. Presses in Amsterdam and Dort started to roll, producing Geneva Bibles for the English market well into the 163os. All too significantly, Robert Barker, printer to the king, a chaotic man who would end up in debtors' prison, bought up the Dutch Geneva editions, added a title page with the fraudulent date 1599 clearly stamped on it, and flogged them to a ready market. The King James Bible languished on the side, a royal project, whose language it seemed was not the language of the people.
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Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Even more strangely, given the sanctity with which the text of the King James Bible has been regarded in later ages, the very people who might have championed it continued to use the Geneva Bible. Lancelot Andrewes nearly always took his sermon texts from the Geneva. Even William Laud, the most anti-Calvinist bishop in the church, quoted from the Geneva. Most extraordinarily of all, Miles Smith, in the Preface to the new translation, quotes from the very Geneva Bible which it was, in part, intended to replace. And in the Separatist congregations in Amsterdam, Leiden and eventually on the Mayflower, it was of course the Geneva Bible they took with them. Geneva Bibles continued to be printed until 1644, and only after the Restoration in 166o did the King James Bible, hallowed now as something that had its origins before the great rupture of the Civil War, redolent of monarchy and antiquity, come t take its place as the Bible itself, the national text and the symb of England as God's country. In America, a slightly different process occurred, but with the same effect. Calvinist Christianity is inherently fissive. Its emphasis on the primacy of a vengeful God constantly throws into doubt the validity of worldly government, and its repeated emphasis on the difference between the elect, who would be saved, and the rest, who would be damned, is no basis on which to found a nation. These radically disruptive ideas are the repeated threnody of the Geneva Bible, the food and fuel on which the whole phenomenon of Separatism and the emergence of the Pilgrim Fathers was based. As the American settlements widened and deepened, and their political processes matured, the need for a separatist gospel ebbed. The relationship of ,Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists' Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America. But the translation's lifeblood had been inclus-iveness, it was drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanc-tioned authority, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be treasured by Americans as much as by the British as one of their national texts.
The churches and biblical scholarship have, by and large, aba doned the frame of mind which created this translation. T social structures which gave rise to it — rigid hierarchies; a lo of majesty; subservience; an association of power with glory have all gone. The belief in the historical and authentic truth the scriptures, particularly the Gospels, has been largely aba doned, even by the religious. The ferocious intolerances of ti pre-liberal world have been left behind — it is inconceivable nc that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country — and perhaps as a result of that Chang
perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion. There is no modern language that can encompass the realities which the Jacobeans accepted as normal. Modern religious rhetoric is dilute and ineffectual, and where it isn't, it seems mad and aberrational. It is an appalling fact that the manner of speech which approaches most nearly to the language of these Jacobean divines comes from the mouths of murderous fundamentalists. When asked by a reporter in October 2001 if he was responsible for the anthrax attacks then occurring in the United States, Osama bin Laden answered: 'These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Leb-anon, Iraq, Palestine and everywhere.' That is the kind of remark which would not have raised an eyebrow in Jacobean England. This is not to suggest that the Translators of the King James Bible would have approved of religious terrorism. They certainly wouldn't; their reactions to 5 November prove that. Even so, there is something that connects the God-shaped mentality of Jacobean England more intimately with the world of modern Muslim fundamentalists than with our own softened, liberal tolerance. These men, and their Bible, exist on the other side of a gulf, which can be labelled liberal, secular, democratic modernity. We do not live in the same world. It is impossible now to experience in an English church the enveloping amalgam of tradition, intelligence, beauty, clarity of purpose, intensity of conviction and plangent, heart-gripping godliness which is the experience of page after page of the King James Bible. Nothing in our culture can match its breadth, depth and universality, unless, curiously enough, it is something that was written at exactly the same time and in almost exactly the same place: the great tragedies of Shakespeare. That is no chance effect. Shakespeare's great tragedies and the King James Bible are each other's mirror-twin. Both emerge from the ambitions and terrors of the Jacobean world.