It always amuses me when I run across a sincere and devout Christian Fundamentalist who believes that the King James Version of the Holy Bible is the one and only way of looking at Christian sacred texts. To hear them talk, one would think that God personally dictated the Bible to his royal servant James in Shakespearean English. For these poor people, the idea of retranslating from original source languages of the scriptures, hearing about idiomatic evolution in languages, looking at modern archeological discoveries of ancient copies of the writings, and considering unbiased scholarship on cultural contexts are all heretical acts. They say "God said it (to King James); I believe it; and that's that." I've even seen bumper stickers conveying that sentiment.
Paul Harvey was in town this past week to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. I don't know about my younger readers, but my older readers will no doubt remember Harvey's short radio broadcasts where he told true stories about things to make us think, always ending with the line, "And that's the rest of the story."
Well, sometimes I feel like Paul Harvey, trying to tell my students and others the "rest of the story" about their well-intended, but factually questionable beliefs. Let me tell you a little more about King James and the great Bible translation.
First of all, a little historical background is in order. As everyone remembers, the Protestant Reformation began in 1511 when Martin Luther posted his theses on his church door. Luther and other reformers believed that, contrary to papal doctrine, the Bible contained all things necessary to eternal salvation; consequently, they thought that the common people should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves in a language they understood. So, reformers started translating the Bible into their normal languages, usually working directly from the Latin version (the Bible was originally in Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek—the Latin version was a translation by St. Jerome finished in 405 A.D.). Naturally, the Church in Rome was not happy about this unauthorized translating, and several people got into big trouble, most notably William Tyndale, the English translator who was burned at the stake for "heresy" in 1536.
Well, once Henry VIII got involved in religion and took England down the reformation path in 1533, faith and worship in England became a perilous game for the rest of the century. On Henry's death in 1547, his nine-year-old son became Edward VI, but the young king died at age 16 in 1553. England's twenty years of Protestantism wasn't enough to stop the mutual religious arrests and executions as Edward's Catholic half sister assumed the throne as queen; thousands were persecuted and nearly 300 were burned at the stake for the "heresy" of being Protestants during Mary's brief reign. After her death, her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth assumed the throne and reigned from 1558 to 1603 and it was the Catholics' turn to be persecuted. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, another religious problem arose, and that was the growing number of adherents to the more ascetic form of Protestantism known as Calvinism and especially the Puritans.
Elizabeth was succeeded by her cousin, James I of Scotland, who became James VI of England. Upon his arrival in London, he was immediately faced by religious conflicts in England because of the Puritans, who were refusing to abide by Anglican religious practice. So, in 1604, he met with Puritan representatives at the Hampton Court Conference; while refusing the Puritans' demands in general, he did agree to their request to have a new official translation of the Bible done. Thus, the "King James Version" was authorized.
Now, the "KJV" was not really a great work of Biblical scholarship. Certainly it was poetic, but the translations left a little to be desired. James agreed to the new translation, though, because the then-"official" version of the Bible, the "Bishops' Bible," was not very popular with the people; the biblical best-seller of the day was the Geneva Bible, a translation done in Geneva by Puritan refugees from the reign of the Catholic Mary. James (and most of the English bishops) didn't like the Geneva Bible because of its Presbyterian leanings and its use of explanatory footnotes, which they found "offensive."James wanted the translation to be non-controversial, to reflect traditional beliefs about ordained clergy, and to be free of the Calvinist ideas of the Puritans. He gave the KJV translators specific instructions, including:
• The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit.So, while the translators looked at the Hebrew and Greek texts, what they wrote was filtered by previous translations, ecclesiastical tradition, and English cultural tradition. And, once the KJV was completed in 1611, it was slow to be accepted by the English people, who still continued to prefer the Geneva Bible. It wasn't until after the English Civil War and the Restoration in 1661 that the Geneva Bible became a symbol of the now-rejected Puritan era, and people began to use the KJV.
• The Old Ecclesiastical Words to be kept, viz. the Word Church not to be translated Congregation &c.
• No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the Text.
• These translations to be used when they agree better with the Text than the Bishops Bible: Tyndale's, Matthew's, Coverdale's, Whitchurch's, Geneva.
The KJV was formally edited and revised four times; what we know today as the KJV was actually the revision of 1769. I guess after God went to all that trouble to dictate His Bible to James VI, he had to whisper some final edits in the ear of George III (or perhaps they were a hallucination from one of George's bouts with porphyria).
That's the story of the translation of the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, also known as the King James Version.
Now, though, it's time for my Paul Harvey-esque "rest of the story."
James's sexual orientation was so widely known that Sir Walter Raleigh joked about it in public saying "King Elizabeth" had been succeeded by "Queen James."—Catherine D. Bowen, The Lion and the Throne
James, the married father of eight, had a long and historically well-documented history of preferring men to women in the royal bedchamber. From the time he was thirteen and king of Scotland, he took up with the French nobleman Esmé Stewart, eventually making him the first Duke of Lennox. Reports of the time said James was "in such love with him as in the open sight of the people oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him."
In England, he developed a relationship with Robert Carr, who was noted for his "handsome appearance as well as his limited intelligence," eventually making him the first Earl of Somerset. When Carr wanted to marry a married woman, the king arranged for the divorce and annulment. Their relationship cooled considerably when the earl began to prefer the company of his wife to that of the king.
About that time, the king met George Villiers, who was said to be exceptionally handsome, intelligent and honest. The king knighted Villiers, and then eight years later created him as first Duke of Buckingham; Villiers was the first commoner in over a century to have been created a duke. Their relationship was widely known, even by the queen, who had a friendship with Villiers and they carried on a lot of written correspondence. When the king finally died in 1625, the Duke of Buckingham was at his side.
So, there you have the rest of the story: the King James Version was the world's first gay Bible.
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