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By Mary Chilton Callaway

Celebrating the King James Bible in this 400th anniversary year offers an opportunity to reflect on the central place of translation in Christianity. The first Christians read their Scriptures not in the original Hebrew, but in a Greek translation. Except for a few Aramaic words, such as Abba and the cry on the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabbactani, we have Jesus’ words only in Greek translation. All the uproar about which translation of the Lord’s Prayer we use is curious, because we don’t have the original. In fact, we have two different translations of Jesus’ prayer, Matthew 6: 9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. In Aramaic there is a single word that can mean either debt or wrong-doing, but there is no such word in Greek. Matthew chose the Greek word for debt, while Luke went with wrong-doing. So even our liturgical fumbling over debtors and trespassers is a reminder that translation is at the heart of Christianity. Perhaps that is a theological truth. John’s Gospel, after all, describes the Incarnation as a translation of the divine Word into the discourse of human flesh.

The KJV has become such a hallowed book that it is sometimes easy to forget that it is not strictly speaking the Bible, but a translation of the Bible into the language of sixteenth century England. One way to honor its 400th anniversary is to reflect on the rich brew of religion and politics that produced it. The story must begin some hundred years before the KJV, when in 1525 Oxford scholar and churchman William Tyndale, believing that Christians should be nourished by the word of God, published the New Testament in his own English translation. It was a bombshell. Translating the Bible had been outlawed in England since 1409. (Tyndale was so committed to his work that he had moved to Germany to do it.) Further, by translating from a Greek New Testament that had just been printed in Europe, rather than the traditional Latin of St. Jerome, Tyndale challenged church authority. The Bishop of London called Tyndale’s New Testament in English “erroneous and naughty.” Henry VIII called it “pestiferous” and ordered all copies seized and burned. Tyndale responded that, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than thou dost!” He was burned at the stake ten years later, praying as he died, “O Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” His prayer was answered a few short years after he was martyred. At the urging of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, King Henry VIII allowed the completion of Tyndale’s Bible by his assistant Miles Coverdale, and within three years of Tyndale’s death, a Bible in English was published with the King’s license.

Tyndale’s Bible, completed by Coverdale, was in a way the first draft of the KJV. James I directed his six committees (Companies) of translators not to produce a new translation, but to revise the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, based on Tyndale, which was then on the lectern in every parish church. The lively yet elevated style of the KJV is basically Tyndale’s. It was born of his preference for the straightforward Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of the common people and his almost literal translation of biblical Hebrew’s simple syntax and strong cadences. Examples are: earth thou art, and to earth thou shalt return; the voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau; the Lord make his face shine upon thee and be merciful to thee. From his 1525 New Testament a few examples are: the way, the truth and the life; the last shall be first; in sheep’s clothing; eat, drink and be merry; death, where is thy sting; the powers that be; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak; go, and do thou likewise; and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. As David Daniell wrote in his magisterial study The Bible in English (Yale, 2003), “He translated into a register just above common speech, allied in its clarity to proverbs. It is a language which still speaks directly to the heart.”

The KJV was published when English was only a few hundred years old, and was evolving rapidly. Some of its uses, like thee and thou, were already on the way out in English speech. Yet this book has shaped our language and inspired new literary masterpieces for four centuries. Like the Book of Common Prayer (1549), the KJV still evokes an intimate conversation with God. As Christians celebrate this “monument of English prose” and its indelible effects on Western culture, Anglicans might do well to model their via media. That would mean cherishing the KJV as a permanent treasure while also understanding it to be a translation of the Bible. If Tyndale were alive today, he would surely be working on a new one.

Dr. Mary Chilton Callaway is associate professor of biblical studies at Fordham University in New York. Dr. Callaway was a co-leader of The Story of the King James Version Bible, a Discovery class series held at Trinity Wall Street in Spring 2011.