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1994-02-11
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strangest misconceptions by its absence. It is indeed long, contro-
versial, and pedantic, but this very fact is significant. And with all
its faults, it says some things about the version and its makers and
their aims that still greatly need to be said, indeed, that must be said,
if the readers of the version are to be given the protection and guidance
that they deserve and that its makers provided for them.
For they will accept this guidance and protection from no one else.
It is idle for any modern to attempt to correct these misapprehensions;
his efforts will only be resented or ignored. But if the King James Bible
itself can be shown to say to its adherents the very things they most need
to know about their version, it will be possible for them to benefit by
them without embarrassment or inconsistency. All the more necessary, it
would seem, for restoring the great Preface, or at least the essential
parts of it, to its rightful place in the "Authorized Bible."
What are some of the views held by the habitual readers of the King
James Bible about it? Let me answer out of my own recent correspondence
and experience, being careful not to exaggerate or distort, but to set down
only what self-constituted champions of King James have actually written
over or under their own signatures.
First of all must come the widespread belief that the King James
Bible is "the original." This is probably the prevailing impression
of those who use it, but it has been most definitely and repeatedly
expressed by a distinguished journalist in his paper, the North China
Daily News. In an article published in the News in 1926 the editor
steadily refers to the King James Version as "the original." We
cannot doubt that this cultivated Englishmen actually believes the
King James Version to be the original English Bible. For him the
illustrious services of Bible translators and revisers from William
Tyndale to Matthew Parker simply do not exist. That these men
produced 19/20ths of what now stands in the King James Version has
no force for him. Indeed, he definitely denies them and all their
words when he steadily and publicly, in print, in an editorial
article in his own newspaper, describes the King James Version over
and over again as the "original."
It is no matter that you and I know that this is far from true. For
these people will not give up so cherished a view for any say-so of ours.
On the contrary, it would only serve to set them more rigidly in it. To
whom then would they look with some willingness to learn? To the King
James Bible itself. If its original Preface were once more offered to
them, as it was offered to the first readers of that version, and as its
makers intended it to be offered to all its readers, they could hardly
refuse to listen.
And, indeed, the people who hold these fantastic ideas are not so
much to blame for them as the publishers and printers who have so steadily
deprived them of the protection from such egregious mistakes which the King
James Preface so amply and ably provided. They could not have gone so
absurdly wrong if they had found in the Preface of their King James these
words which the makers of that version meant to have them find there:
"Truly (good Christian 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, not justly to be excepted against."
Not only do most readers of the King James Version suppose it to be
the original English Bible; they are actually unconscious that there is
any more ultimate form of the Bible to translate or consult. A leading
layman, in one of our most intellectual communions, has told me that he
always supposed the modern translations of the Bible were made from the
King James Version, and not long ago a newspaper paragraph, with the
commanding endorsement of the Associated Press, explicitly made that
assertion. The same idea appeared in the New Republic as recently as
April of last year. What can save these untrained, well-meaning people
from the idea that the King James Bible is the "original"? Nothing
but the statements of its own Preface.
"If you ask what they [the Translators] had before them," says the
Preface, "truly it was the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek
of the New ... If truth be to be tried by these tongues, then whence
should a Translation be made but out of them? These tongues therefore,
the Scriptures we say in those tongues, we set before us to translate,
being the tongues wherein God was pleased to speak to his Church by his
Prophets and Apostles ... Neither, to be short, were we the first that
fell in hand with translating the Scripture into English, and consequently
destitute of former helps, ..."
These are just the things that the modern reader of King James
needs to know, and that the Translators intended him to know. Why
should they be kept from him? A few months ago the New York Times
and the Literary Digest united in offering the strange intelligence
that "the King James Version was compiled from the only six original
papyri extant in 1611." What more can possibly be said?
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