Illuminating the History of the Bible

Translation

The Life and Legacy of William Tyndale

Tyndale’s work to translate the Bible into English reminds us that the Bible has a history written in blood.

It’s fair to say that no single individual has left a more indelible mark on the language of the English Bible than William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536). He was the first to translate the Bible into English from the original languages (the Wycliffe Bible was from Latin). He completed two editions of the New Testament and got as far as 2 Chronicles (and Jonah) in the Old Testament. By one estimate, as much as 80 percent of the wording of the King James Version is Tyndale’s. He was, by all accounts, a superb translator and his concern was always to give the Bible to the people. As one biographer says, “One key to Tyndale’s genius is that his ear for how people spoke was so good. The English he was using was not the language of the scribe or lawyer or schoolmaster; it really was, at base, the spoken language of the people.”1David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 356.

But he was also not afraid to innovate. He coined many English words including “anathema,” “godly,” “Passover,” and “fisherman.” He is also responsible for such famous biblical lines as “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) and “fight the good fight” (1 Tim. 6:12) and he gave us “Jehovah” for the personal name of God in the Old Testament.

Preparation

Not much is known about Tyndale’s youth. Our first real record of him comes from his time at Oxford, where he began his training at age fourteen. This was on the younger side, but also not especially unusual for the time. The university was still small by today’s standards with only several thousand students, but it was growing in influence. The printing press was still new and printed textbooks were available but rare. Students typically borrowed, bought, or had a new copy made of their textbooks. Importantly, the memory of John Wycliffe still loomed large at Oxford. More than that, the tide of the Reformation was just beginning to hit the English shores. A German monk named Martin Luther would soon make a deep impression on Tyndale’s theology.

Painting of William Tyndale. Wikimedia

It was said of Tyndale’s time in Oxford that he was “brought up from a child in the university of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts as especially in the knowledge of the scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted.” Along with this devotion, he was intellectually gifted. He would later be praised by another scholar for mastering eight languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and, of course, English.

A series of events that would shape his future occurred just as the young Tyndale finished his master’s degree. The first was the publication of Erasmus’s Greek-Latin New Testament that came off the press in 1516. This new edition met a growing interest in the Bible in its original languages. Nowhere would that interest be more significant than in Germany where, a year later, Luther nailed his 95 theses in a challenge to the Catholic church’s teaching on indulgences (1517). Five years after that, in 1522, Luther published his German New Testament—the first translated from the Greek and an edition that would become Tyndale’s model for an English counterpart.

After finishing school, Tyndale returned to his home in Gloucestershire, England to become a tutor. It was during this time that he was ordained as a priest and began to preach in the surrounding churches. What marked his preaching was his emphasis on the Scriptures. But the people were not used to this, nor were they well acquainted with the Bible. His preaching was so unusual that he was warned that, if he kept it up, it would eventually cost him his life—a prescient warning in hindsight.

But Tyndale persisted for, as he wrote later, he “perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to [es]stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text … which thing only moved me to translate the New Testament.” Already, he began to see the need for the Bible in the language of the people.

It was also during this time that he had his most famous encounter. He met a “learned man” who told him that “we were better without God’s law than the pope’s” to which he famously replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws” and “If God spare my life ere many year, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

Rejection in London

As predicted, not everyone liked Tyndale’s preaching and he soon found himself with enemies who began to threaten his patron. So, he left Gloucestershire for London with hopes of securing the support and necessary license-to-print from the Bishop of London to publish a Bible in English from the original languages. By this time, he had already produced several translations of Greek classical works as a sort of proof-of-concept and he probably began his New Testament while in London. But it was to no avail.

After a year of failed attempts to secure a meeting with the bishop, Tyndale came to see that England was not welcome to his ideas. As he would say later, he came to see “not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.” He left for Europe in 1524.

The time in London was not a waste, however. While there, he established crucial connections with a group of merchants who supported him and would continue to do so.2David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. They would prove key to his success. As one writer says of them,

The merchants of London, mainly in the cloth and tailoring industries, were firmly entrenched in the Lollard movement first set in motion by John Wycliffe 150 years earlier, a movement which now was in touch with the German Lutherans and which, in defiance of English Church law, was crying out for a new translation of the Scriptures. Such men as these were to provide the finance and shipping that were crucial to the success of the enterprise, and that is how, in 1525, Tyndale found himself in Cologne and in the printing house of Peter Quentell.3W. R. Cooper, “Introduction,” The New Testament: 1526 Tyndale Bible, Original Spelling Edition (London: British Library, 2020), ix.

It is in Cologne that he first begins to print his New Testament.

The First Print Run

Printing began in 1525, but was interrupted when the printshop was raided by authorities. He seems to have reached only to Mark and, today, only part of Matthew survives in a single copy. But the door had cracked. For the first time in English, Matthew 7:7 read, “Ask and it shall be given you: Seek and ye shall find: Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

Tyndale did not give up. He fled up the Rhine River to Worms—the same city where Luther had defended his own theology just five years before. There Tyndale started again, and this time succeeded. His second edition stands as the first complete English New Testament translated from Greek. Besides this, several features helped make it a success: it was small, attractive, and affordable.

It was half the size of his first attempt and a bound copy might cost just five days’ wages for a skilled laborer.4At 3s. 4d. using the the National Archives currency converter Contrast that with a few centuries before, when a complete Latin Bible might cost fifteen years’ salary for the same man. A century before Tyndale, a copy of Wycliffe’s English Bible might still cost around two year’s wages.5For these prices, see Cooper, “Introduction,” xiv–xv. For the first time, the ordinary Englishman had a Bible he could understand—and afford.

Matthew 1 in Tyndale’s 1525 (left) and 1526 (right) editions. The color was added by the owner. Images are not to scale. British Library G.12179 and C.188.a.17.

Thousands were smuggled to England and sold and it was immediately condemned by the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall—the same bishop who had previously refused to host him. In October, Tunstall sent out a prohibition of the book, calling it “that pestiferous and most pernicious poison dispersed throughout all our dioceses of London in great number.” He had it burned at St. Paul’s Cathedral, an occasion at which he preached the sermon. Today, only three copies survive.

Capture

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible. In 1531 he spoke to a friend of his poverty, his exile, his hunger, thirst, cold, danger, and absence from friends—all which he did with the hope to “do honour to God, true service to my prince, and pleasure to his command.”6Daniell, Tyndale, 213.

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible.

But he remained undeterred. During this time, he published several theological works and finished his translation of the Pentateuch, published in 1530. But the opposition only grew. His most famous critic was Sir Thomas More who wrote no less than nine volumes against Tyndale, totaling nearly half a million words!7Daniell, Bible, 149.

By November 1534, Tyndale had finished a second edition of his New Testament in Antwerp where he was then living—still in exile from England. Like most Bible translators, especially in this new era of vernacular translations, revision started almost before finishing. Work on his Old Testament continued as well. He was, by this point, very Lutheran in his theology and is on record attacking the Catholic church’s theology, which he saw as nullifying the role of grace in salvation.

But his work would soon be interrupted for good. In 1535, a young man named Henry Phillips, who had left England in disgrace after gambling away his father’s money, feigned friendship and interest in Tyndale and his work. In a turn eerily reminiscent of Judas’s betrayal, he turned him over to the authorities for money. On May 21, 1531 Phillips tricked Tyndale into leaving his house and Tyndale was seized in an alleyway. He was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels. The charge was being a Lutheran. The sentence was death. During his year in prison, Tyndale was interrogated by the local Catholic theological experts, the goal being to solicit a confession to save his soul from hell.

Vilvoorde Castle from an early engraving. Image source

As winter approached, he wrote what is his last and only surviving letter. Today, it is all that remains in his own handwriting. He writes,

I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh [nasal inflammation], which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings.

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.

But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen

As he prepares for death, Tyndale’s chief desire was still to get the Bible into English. What is especially remarkable about this letter is that, at the time he wrote it, he had no reason from the circumstances to be hopeful about his life’s work. His books were being burned, his house had been raided, the new Bishop of London was harsher than Tunstall. David Daniell says of this time that a “heavy curtain hung before him, through which he could see little or nothing.”8Daniell, Bible, 156.

One can’t help but think of the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews of whom it is said, in Tyndale’s own version, “They all died in faith, and received not the promises: but saw them afar off, and believed them, and saluted them: and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13).

Early in October, he was brought out, a chain placed on his neck. He was strangled first and then burned, but not before crying out his final prayer, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

The depiction of Tyndale’s death from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Wikimedia

Legacy

His legacy was immense. We have already noted his contribution to the English language and to subsequent English translations. But perhaps most remarkably, it was within months of is death that his friend John Rogers printed, for the first time, a complete English Bible with all of Tyndale’s translation work: not only his New Testament and Pentateuch, but also his work through 2 Chronicles that many thought was lost during his arrest.

The initials “W.T.” at the end of the Old Testament in the “Matthew Bible” (1537). Image source

More remarkable still is that a copy of Rogers’s Bible, printed under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew,” was sent to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer sent it on to King Henry VIII’s viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, with an endorsement saying, “I like it better than any other translation heretofore made.” From there, it was shown to the king and, amazingly, approved for use in England. Cromwell wanted a copy in every English parish.

In less than a year after his death, Tyndale’s dying words were answered. His own translation would be in the hands of the people in a Bible with his own initials stamped in large letters at the end of the Old Testament. The Lord had indeed opened the king’s eyes.

Conclusion

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible. Even listening to a copy being read could be punished by death in the flames. Today, our easy access to dozens of English translations can lead us to take the English Bible for granted. We can argue so much about the “best” translation that we fail to appreciate the fact that we have any at all. But, if the lesson of Tyndale’s life needs to be learned today, it is not the first time.

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible.

In 1570, John Foxe made the same point. He wrote in his Book of Martyrs about how the zeal for the Bible in the time before Tyndale should be a spur to Christians in his. “The fervent zeal of those Christian days seemed much superior to these our days and times, as manifestly may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing; also by their expenses and charges in buying of books in English … some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul in English.” The lesson then is the same as today: “To see their travails, their earnest seekings, their burning zeal, their readings, their watching, their sweet assemblies … may make us now in these days of free possession, to blush for shame.”

If the “free possession” of the Scriptures was a reason to appreciate the Bible in Foxe’s day, how much more should it be one in ours?

The content of this article is also available as a video lecture. King Henry’s viceregent was Thomas Cromwell not Oliver Cromwell as an earlier version of this article said.

Notes

Seven Common Misconceptions about the King James Bible

The most widely read English Bible translation has sprouted a series of fictions about it. It’s time to prune them.

Finding praise for the 1611 King James Bible (KJB) is not hard. It is “the single most influential book in the English language and arguably the greatest work ever completed by a committee” according to Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones in their edited book marking the 400th anniversary of the KJB. Showing just how influential it has been on our language, renowned linguist David Crystal traces hundreds of expressions it cemented into the English mind while Angelica Duran, English professor at Purdue, has edited a book arguing that the KJB transcends English, rising to the level of a key text in world literature and achieving a global impact.

All this praise is warranted. But when a book blossoms into such a literary lotus, myths also begin to sprout. Grains of truth rendering them plausible grow into weeds of fiction. Blocking the light of contrary facts and pilfering life-giving nuance, truth eventually withers. The following are seven myths about the KJB that now need pruning.

Myth 1: The KJB isn’t copyrighted

Many claim the KJB is not copyrighted and can be reproduced freely. Through American eyes the KJB is “public domain” (see, for example, the work of Roger Syn and Jason Cohn), but it was printed under patent to the royal printer or “crown copyright,” with permissions later extended to the university presses at Cambridge and Oxford. Since the copyright has never lapsed in the UK, its unenforceability in the US reflects not an absence of copyright but rather a disregard of the KJB’s creators. Roger Syn explains that after the Revolutionary War, “English patents were disregarded. This caused the Authorised Version – still protected by royal patents – to enter the public domain outside the United Kingdom.”1Roger Syn, “Enforcement of Copyright in the Bible and Religious Works,” Regent University Law Review 14.1 (2001–2002): 12. The copyright at Cambridge University Press requires the abbreviation “KJV” following all citations, which cannot exceed 500 verses or 25 percent of a document. You can learn more on the enduring KJB copyright here. 

Myth 2: The KJB was a new translation

Some deem the KJB a new translation—an original language text, freshly translated on blank pages from the original languages. In fact, the translators actually worked on unbound pages of the Bishops’ Bible. The first rule of their procedures commanded that this text “be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”

Miles Smith’s preface to the KJB was clear on this point too: “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.” Samuel Ward, one of the revisers, reported that “caution was given that an entirely new version was not to be furnished, but an old version, long received by the Church, to be purged from all blemishes and faults.”

Existing quarries were mined for lexical gold. Rule 14 required using five prior Bibles “where they agree better with the text than the Bishops’ Bible.” The KJB preface records digging “out of many good” Bibles to make “one principal good one,” thereby rendering “better” what prior translators had “left so good.” They were now “building on their foundation that went before us,” being helped by their labors, which could now be “rubbed and polished.” The “former translations” were “diligently compared and revised” as the very title page boasts of its “newly translated” work. The KJB is thus best understood as a thorough revision of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible, carefully rendering the original languages and mining prior Bibles for verbal ore.

The King James Bible is best understood as a thorough revision, carefully rendering the original languages and mining prior Bibles for verbal ore.

Myth 3: The text of the KJB has never changed

It’s not uncommon for King James readers to assume their KJB is textually identical to the 1611, except for spelling. This isn’t true. Frederick Scrivener, a major scholar of the KJB, concluded from his study that “numberless and not inconsiderable departures” from the 1611 abound in modern editions, mostly “deliberate changes, introduced silently and without authority” by unnamed men. He listed over fifty pages of variations from the 1611 edition that had been adopted by later editions and that he retained. He also gives more than twenty pages of variations from the 1611 that he rejected in his own edition of the KJB. David Norton’s more recent study of the textual history of the KJB scrupulously lists over 150 pages of variant readings supporting his updated edition.

Most changes to the original text were made in 1629, 1638, 1762, and 1769 editions, others in hundreds of humbler editions. These alterations are extremely minor compared to differences between distinct translations (say, KJB vs. NKJV) and so, they shouldn’t be exaggerated.

At the same time, they shouldn’t be minimized either. D. A. Waite, for example, did this when he compared an audio version of the Old Scofield Reference Bible and a 1611 facsimile, and said he heard only 421 changes. Setting aside changes of form, he claimed there were only 136 changes of “substance” from 1611 to today.2D. A. Waite, Defending the King James Bible, 3rd ed. (Old Paths, 2006), 4–5. A pastor in North Carolina called for a recount; using the same two editions in print, he enumerated over 2,000. Waite’s count was reportedly updated some but still gets repeated. 

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Myth 4: The translators spoke in unison

Some treat the KJB as its architects’ united opinion. If one suggests that alterations are needed to the KJB the response today is sometimes, “Why contradict so many brilliant scholars?” But we should not imagine that all the translators reached some sort of consensus in a large meeting room. Instead, the KJB is the result of three broad stages of work. 

  1. The Bible was divided, in 1604, among six companies, one at Westminster, one at Cambridge, and one at Oxford (a Greek and Hebrew team at each). Some of these subdivided. Individuals were to bring personal drafts to meetings where a company’s eight or nine men worked over selections. Review was then to take place through other companies and appointed overseers, with input from outside consultants. 
  2. Twelve men made veto revisions in a “general meeting” at Stationers’ Hall in 1610. 
  3. Several final editors added para-textual material and finishing touches.

An elaborate process of cross-checking was envisioned, but scholars still debate the amount completed. Most agree that some was skipped. The translators met in small groups in tiny rooms; they never met all together. Further, the KJB ultimately reflects, not unanimous votes, but veto decisions. Rules 9–10 explained that, where differences remained, they would be settled “at the general meeting” (step two of the process). 

The translators’ handwritten revisions in a 1602 Bishops’ Bible. Bodleian Library Arch. A b.18

For example, in Luke 2:22, the translators’ base text read “her purification,” explaining why Mary brought Jesus to the temple, without any notes. Virtually all the textual data read “their” purification (including either Joseph or Jesus in the purification). Greek texts at the time differed. A manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford shows a back-and-forth between reviewers.

At Luke 2:22, this manuscript shows that “her” is first crossed out in the text, “their” written above, and then “her” is again added to the margin. This proposed revision and note got crossed out. Then “her” stood in the text and “their” in the margin. This revision too was overturned. The KJB ended where it began: “her” in the text and nothing in the margin. Documentary evidence vividly challenges any assumption that the translators always agreed.

Myth 5: Little is known about the KJB’s formation

Some today think that loss of records has obscured the KJB’s formation. It’s true that data has been lost, but what remains is impressive. Bod. 1602, the manuscript just mentioned, records revisions to various texts assigned to four different companies. Another manuscript at Lambeth Palace (Ms. 98) records revisions to another company. More recently, Jeffery Miller has added Samuel Ward’s Apocrypha notes to this list of documentary evidence. This leaves us extant manuscript work from every company’s assigned text.

And this isn’t all. We also have sixteen contemporary accounts of the Hampton Court Conference where the idea for the KJB was first hatched; the receipt for the pages translators worked on; numerous correspondence about the translation, including letters from King James and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London; copies of the translators’ rules; lists of translators; library records of the translators’ borrowing helps; John Bois’s notes from stage two and his annotated Septuagint; and Samuel Ward’s summary report to the Synod of Dort (a draft of which remains in his own hand).

The garden at Hampton Court Palace, where the idea for the King James Bible was born. Stu Smith

And documents continue to multiply, as Nicholas Hardy of the University of Birmingham explains. As one of the premier KJB scholars today puts it, Shakespeare scholars only dream of having this kind of data about his plays. Likewise, Hamlin and Jones are right to say that, “Despite the peculiar popular legend that the translation of the KJB is shrouded in mystery, it isn’t. We know a great deal about it.”3Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, “Introduction: The King James Bible and Its Reception History,” in The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6. 

Myth 6: The KJB is a perfectly literal translation

Some assume the KJB is the most “literal” translation possible, rendering every word with exact precision. Generally speaking, the KJB is more literal than many more recent translations (although even here, Young’s certainly overtakes it). Further, the translators shunned one aspect of exactness which is known as “concordance.” Concordance is the consistent rendering of the same word from the original languages with the same English word whenever feasible. The KJB preface records that the translators instead celebrated verbal variety, untethered by “uniformity of phrasing,” or “ identity of words,” to make “verbal and unnecessary changings.” Alister McGrath illustrates this point using Romans 5:1–11, a text that exemplifies their linguistic liberties. In the KJB, Christians “rejoice” in hope, “glory” in tribulations, and “joy” in God: three distinct words all rendering the same Greek word. More on this myth here. 

Myth 7: The KJB is written in Old English

Finally, many Bible readers today think that the 1611 KJB is unreadable Old English. But, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the following historical stages in the English language: Old English until 1150, Middle English until 1500, Early Modern English until 1700. As a work of Early Modern English, the KJB is certainly still readable. That said, some grammatical forms are foreign. The obvious examples are pronouns like “thee/thou/thy” or “ye”; the possessives “thine/mine”; and verbs ending in -est (2nd person) and -eth (3rd person).

Further, Mark Ward rightly cautions readers to be on the lookout for dead words which have fallen out of the language now. He also laments that everyone trips over false friends, words that have dramatically changed their meaning since 1611. That said, if someone can read at a college level and is willing to learn unfamiliar grammar, most of the KJB is not impossible; it merely requires work. 

Conclusion

The KJB is read daily all over the world and is still, by one poll, the most read English Bible in America. Rightly so. It blooms to its greatest beauty when we regularly trim the myths that threaten to crowd it out. When not choked by myths, it provides a visual banquet on which our souls may feast.

Notes

Five Decisions Every Bible Translator Must Make

Knowing the hard decisions Bible translators face inspires gratitude for our Bibles and encourages us to read them.

A Bible translation is a major undertaking. A good one can take more than ten years to finish even when a full team is involved. Besides the translators, there is often a team of editors, proofreaders, publishers, printers, marketers, and more. Along the way, a translation committee has thousands of decisions to make, many of which go beyond the most obvious one of deciding how to translate any given word or phrase. Here are five decisions that every translator has to decide—whether their readers know it or not.

1. Who’s the audience?

The first decision is arguably the most important because it will determine many other decisions along the way. The first way to define a translation’s audience is, of course, based on what’s called the target language. A translation into German will have a German-speaking audience; a French translation will have French speakers, etc. Though target language is the most obvious form of this question, there is much more to it. Since some language groups like English are so vast and have so many translations already, translation teams often aim their work at a narrower set of readers.

American Bible readers are sometimes surprised to learn that major English translations usually result in an American edition and a separate British edition that has British spelling and, in some cases, different word choices. The ESV, for example, has both an Anglicized version and an American version. There is now even a Catholic edition that includes the Apocrypha.

In other cases, the choice is not about geography or theology, but reading level. The original NIV was designed to be especially readable, and so was designed for a seventh-grade reading level. But even that audience could be narrowed. That’s why it was revised in a special edition published in 1996 called the New International Reader’s Version or NIrV. It was aimed at a third-grade reading level with the hope of reaching children and readers whose first language isn’t English. This was accomplished by using smaller words and shorter sentences whenever possible.

Psalm 23:2 was changed from the NIV’s “He makes me lie down in green pastures” to “He lets me lie down in fields of green grass.” The Lord’s prayer became “Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored. May your kingdom come. May what you want to happen be done on earth as it is done in heaven” (Matt. 6:9–10). These small translation choices add up, but they are all the result of a much larger decision about who the audience is. It’s a choice every translator needs to make.

2. Will it be a fresh translation or a revision?

The example of the NIrV illustrates another question that translators have to answer and that is whether their work will be a new translation from the original languages or will instead use the originals to revise an existing translation. The original NIV, for example, was a fresh translation. It was not based on any prior English Bible. The NIrV, as we just saw, started with the NIV and then revised it. It was revised again in 2014.

English Bible readers are often surprised to learn that it’s this second approach that is by far the more common one historically. Completely new translations are a relative rarity. The reason is obvious to translators but probably not to most readers. It’s simple: translating the entire Bible is a massive undertaking. Starting from scratch increases the work exponentially. It’s much faster to start from something and change it than to work with nothing. Besides that, revising a well-known translation often gives the new one a much-needed boost in respect and authority.

The translators of the most famous English Bible—the King James—knew this well. That’s why in the original preface, they make clear that their work is a revision of previous English Bibles. Their expressed goal was not to “make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one,” but only “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” That tradition of revision continues right up to the present.

A special insert in the Chicago Tribune on May 22, 1881 printed the entire New Testament of the Revised Version. It took 92 compositors working 12 hours to produce all 118,000 words from a telegram from New York City.

In 1885, the King James itself was finally revised for the first time since 1611 in a major translation.1Dates given in this section are the date when the entire Bible was first published. In many cases, the publication of the New Testament preceded the Old by several years. The result was published to great fanfare as the Revised Version. This was then further revised by a team of scholars in North America and published as the American Standard Version in 1901. The Revised Version was again revised in 1952 as the Revised Standard Version and that, in turn, became the New Revised Standard Version of 1990. Even now, an update to the NRSV is set for release in 2022. A separate translation team went back to the Revised Standard Version in 2001, producing the English Standard Version.

Even this doesn’t tell the full story of revisions in the KJV lineage. Objections to translation choices in the RSV (like “young girl” instead of “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14) led to the revision of the ASV known as the New American Standard Bible published in 1971. The NASB itself received a major update in 1995 and now exists in two further revisions known as the NASB 2020 and the Legacy Standard Bible. So, the cycle continues with revision upon revision, each one claiming to improve on its predecessors. Only rarely does an English translation team start from scratch.

3. What text will it translate?

Mark 1:41 in Codex Bezae (5th c.), showing the reading with Jesus becoming indignant. British Library

Another question that follows closely on the last one is which Hebrew and Greek texts the translators will work from. Because our manuscripts of the Bible have differences and because some of these differences affect translation, translators must sometimes decide what text to translate. Does Jesus become “indignant” before healing a man in Mark 1:41 as the NIV 2011 has it, or does he have “compassion” as virtually all other English Bibles have? In this case, the NIV has (unwisely, in my opinion) chosen to follow the text found in a single Greek manuscript from the fifth century known as Codex Bezae. (The NIV does footnote the alternative reading.)

In Genesis 4:8, the English Standard Version, following the standard Hebrew text, says that “Cain spoke to Abel his brother” before killing him in the field but does not tell us what he said. But the Christian Standard Bible, follows the evidence of several ancient translations, including the Septuagint, so that Cain says to his brother, “Let’s go out to the field.”

In both Mark 1:41 and Genesis 4:8, the differences are not matters of translation philosophy but of text. In places where textual differences affect translation, translators must decide which text they think is the original and then translate that. Sometimes the choices are difficult, and these are places where Bibles will often alert the reader with a footnote. These decisions illustrate why the finely tuned skill of textual scholars is so important.

4. How will it handle culturally specific terms?

A fourth question that translators must wrestle with is how to handle terms that are specific to the time and culture of the Bible. Some of the most common ones are terms for weights and units of measurement. No English speaker knows what an ephah of flour is without help or how much a denarius could buy. And how long is a cubit or a span or a stadion? These are all terms found in the original languages, but translations handle them differently. In some cases, a translation may include a table of weights, measures, and monetary units at the back. The NIV and ESV have one after Revelation, for example. A translation may also explain these terms in footnotes. The ESV footnotes often tell the reader that a denarius is about a day’s wage in the first century.

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Another solution is to try to convert these terms into their closest modern equivalent. Paraphrases often take this route. The Living Bible, for example, starts the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:23 with a debtor who owes his master, not 10 thousand talents, but 10 million dollars. Later, he reveals his unforgiving heart by trying to collect on $2,000 instead of 100 denarii. The New Living Translation, the successor to the Living Bible, is less specific with “millions of dollars” and then later “thousands of dollars.” Both do a great job conveying the vast difference in amounts, but they must do so by sacrificing something from the original culture in the process.

And this is just the tip of the cultural iceberg. Beyond such ancient units of measurement, translators must deal with terms like “Leviathan,” “kinsman-redeemer,” “legion,” “centurion,” not to mention difficult terms for diseases, animals, plants, peoples, and places. Sometimes, translators are at a loss because the precise meaning of the original term is lost to us. At other times, they need to avoid anachronism as with biblical terms for skin ailments that do not actually refer to what we know as “leprosy” or Hansen’s disease. Perhaps future discoveries will clarify, but translators must work with what they have. So, they do the best they can. Their solution is often determined largely by the first question we mentioned: who is the audience?

5. How (much) will the translation explain itself?

Finally, many of these questions give rise to this last one which is how and how much the translators will try to explain their decisions to the reader. Most often, this happens through footnotes, but we have already seen other ways that translations can explain their work such as the table of weights and measures. There is also the introduction—but who reads that? (You should!)

Translators also have at their disposal features like headings, book introductions, maps, concordances, cross references, appendices and, of course, sometimes study notes. Such aids to the reader can be quite helpful and are found as far back as Bible translations go. It’s little wonder that the first English Bibles, produced by John Wycliffe and his followers in the 14th century, have them too.

The Wycliffe Bible oriented its readers with prologues, here showing the one for Mark (left) in Egerton MS 618 (c. 1390–1397), ff. 21v–22r. British Library.

The modern Bible that goes the furthest to explain itself is certainly the New English Translation or NET Bible. It was novel at the time, not only because it was provided freely online, but because the translators received mountains of online feedback from its first readers. Today, the NET Bible has over 60,000 translators’ notes, explaining virtually every decision made. The result is a Bible that “explains itself,” pulling the curtain back so to speak. Because of this, it has become something of a favorite among an unexpected audience: other Bible translators.

Appreciating Translators

These are just five decisions translators must make. There are also many decisions that translators don’t have to make because of the long history of the Bible in English. Things like the names and order of the biblical books as well as their division into chapters and verses are well established by tradition.

But that still leaves plenty of work to do besides the most important one which is actually putting Hebrew and Greek into another language. In some cases, one decision affects the others (such as audience) and at other times, decisions cause tension. If you revise a beloved translation too much, for example, you may lose your intended audience.

Our judgment of which translation is “best” should always take into account who the audience is.

Knowing this leaves us with two important lessons. The first is that our judgment of which translation is “best” should always take into account who the audience is. So many translation decisions are affected by this decision that any fair assessment of a new translation must begin by understanding that. Sometimes, your dislike for a given translation may reflect more the fact that you aren’t the intended audience than it does any failure on the translators’ part.

Second, the multitude of decisions translators face should give us a deep appreciation for good translations—and we have many in English. What we’ve covered here are just some of those that have to be made. We haven’t touched on matters like idioms, word order, word plays and other figures of speech, and more. But considering just these five decisions should make us very thankful for the Bibles we have and encourage us to do what every good translator wants us to do with the Bible and that’s to read it.

The ESV is a revision of the RSV not the RV as an earlier version of this article stated. It also wrongly called the New Living Translation the New Living Bible and the NET Bible the New English Bible.

Notes

  • 1
    Dates given in this section are the date when the entire Bible was first published. In many cases, the publication of the New Testament preceded the Old by several years.

The Most Important Bible Translation You’ve Never Heard of

Used by the Apostles and the early church, the Greek translations of the Old Testament may be the most important ever made.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Septuagint for the textual history of Scripture in both Hebrew and Greek and in both the Old and New Testament. It constituted a major part of the textual environment of second temple Judaism and early Christianity both in terms of number of copies and in the influence of those copies on other writers and scribes.  

Like most important things, the Septuagint is also complicated. It is notoriously difficult to define and has been the object of steady and strident debate since its inception right up to the present. The complexity explains why, even now, there is still no complete critical scholarly edition of the entire corpus. More than just establishing the text of the Septuagint itself, specialists continue to grapple with numerous parallel questions related, for example, to postclassical Greek, diaspora Judaism, and the history of Ptolemaic Egypt, among other areas.

This article will briefly introduce the Septuagint, beginning with the matter of origins before looking at translation style, textual development, and various ways in which the Septuagint weighs upon other areas of biblical scholarship.

Approaching Definition and Origins

It is helpful to keep in mind that—although one can purchase a physical or electronic copy today—in antiquity, the Septuagint was not actually one thing that existed as a distinct physical entity. In fact, it can be helpful to think of the term “Septuagint” as a catch-all label for a broad area of research in biblical texts and languages. But perhaps we can be a bit more specific.

Thinking About a Definition

The term “Septuagint” is typically used to refer to a collection of ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible along with other texts usually called the Apocrypha.

At a basic level, the term “Septuagint” is typically used to refer to a collection of ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible along with various other Jewish Greek texts that are now usually called the Apocrypha. The latter include writings such as Tobit, 1 Esdras, and Sirach, some of which were translations while others were originally written in Greek by Jewish authors. There are certainly worthy questions wrapped up with the Apocrypha—particularly related to the question of canon—but this article will focus instead upon the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible.

It is important to notice that the word “translations” in the last sentence is plural. It is all too easy to conceptualize the Septuagint as a standalone, single-volume hardback produced in its entirety by a single translation committee working with a shared philosophy, much like in the case of modern Bible translations. But doing so, intentionally or not, is a serious mistake. The variegated corpus of Greek texts (and their textual traditions) that make up what we now call the Septuagint were translated by different people, in different locations, at different times, for different purposes, often with different Hebrew texts, and in many cases more than once for a particular book.

At no point in antiquity, that we know of, was there any term used to identify those texts as a unified corpus distinct from the Hebrew “scriptures” (graphai, γραφαί) in general. Pinning down the details of each of those factors and considering how they affected the Bible’s production and development are ongoing tasks of Septuagint scholarship today.

Thinking About Origins

That being said, there is some consensus as to the origins of the earliest translation initiative. Scholars agree that the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) was the first part of the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek by Jews living in Hellenistic Egypt, probably in the middle or early part of the third century BC. Consensus on this point has become possible in part thanks to Patristic testimony, but even more so owing to scholarship that has managed to date the linguistic features of the Greek Pentateuch to that period.

Scholars are far less agreed about why the Greek Pentateuch was produced in the first place. To be sure, the centrality of the Pentateuch in Jewish life can explain why it was the first portion translated. An equally obvious factor was that, by the third century, the Jewish community in Egypt was fully Greek-speaking, and so naturally had a need for their Scripture in the language they used in everyday life, including their religious life.

It may have been in Jewish liturgical practice that the earliest translation from Hebrew occurred orally, gradually leading to certain generally accepted practices that were used later in the written versions. Translation itself was certainly not an unusual part of life in the multilingual context of Hellenistic Egypt, and there is good evidence that those who produced the Greek Pentateuch were either professional translators in the Ptolemaic administration themselves or consulted with those who were.

Although the main impetus for translating the Hebrew Bible was probably internal to the Jewish community, it is very possible that some external motivation also helped. One ancient account of external motivation appears in the Letter of Aristeas, a second-century document framed as an eyewitness account of why and how the Jews had produced the Greek Pentateuch. The Letter is now widely regarded as fictitious (and rightly so), but some scholars do find parts of the story credible. Any official government involvement in the project was probably not as grand as the royal invitation and fanfare portrayed in the Letter of Aristeas. But, given the kind of status the Jews enjoyed in Hellenistic society, Ptolemaic sponsorship of the translation project of some sort is possible, even if it was indirect.

Aside from the Pentateuch, there is little certainty as to when the rest of the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. Scholars generally recognize that most of the Historical Books and the Prophets, along with the Psalms, were translated by the mid-second century BC (see the Prologue to Sirach). Other books like Ecclesiastes, however, may not have been translated at all until well after the turn of the era.

Translation Styles and Development

To attempt to describe the translation style of the Septuagint as a whole is similar to trying to describe the climate of the entire North American continent. Saying anything useful really depends on what part you are looking at. Even so, to press the metaphor, there are some regions of the Septuagint that can be grouped together given the similarity of translational climate. We can identify three.

Three Main Translation Styles

First, scholars agree that the style of the Greek Pentateuch set a benchmark for later translation activity. As a general rule, the translation is conventional Greek that matches each Hebrew word in order. Not infrequently, however, a translator departed from Hebrew word order in favor of maintaining Greek conventions. But occasionally, representing the Hebrew source text was more important, though it is not always clear why.

The translators were native Greek speakers with a standard Hellenistic education and clear familiarity with the Hebrew Bible. So it’s rarely appropriate to attribute translation choices that seem odd to us to some lack of competency in Greek or familiarity with Scripture on the part of the translators. Numerous factors were involved simultaneously. The result in the Greek Pentateuch was an eclectic translation that was unpretentious but not without formality, creativity, and the occasional literary flair. The details of that style set a standard to which many later translators aspired, for example, in the Psalms and the Minor Prophets, and even in non-translated Jewish Greek works like Ezekiel the Tragedian.

Not all translators followed the tradition of the Greek Pentateuch. As early as the second century BC, another, more paraphrastic style emerged that was much less concerned to represent each Hebrew word in order with a close Greek equivalent. Books translated in this style include Job, Proverbs, and Isaiah, and their texts often differ from what we find in the Masoretic Text (MT) tradition of the Hebrew Bible known today.

Related

Shifts in word order and even relocation, omission, or addition of entire sentences are not uncommon, making it difficult to know whether the translator was working from a text like the MT and going his own way or translating basically word-for-word but with a Hebrew text different from anything we now know.

A third translation style also appeared, at least by the first century BC, with somewhat reversed tendencies that strove instead to represent every Hebrew word in order even more stringently than in the Greek Pentateuch. This tradition seems to have been part of a revision movement in which existing translations were modified in certain ways. Despite the more exacting approach, even this translation tradition was not entirely devoid of Greek linguistic style, and in time some books like Lamentations and Ruth were not revised with this mindset but actually translated that way from the start.

The Transmission and Development of the Corpus

Because the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible emerged gradually over three centuries rather than all at once, the copying and transmission of the written texts themselves influenced the production of later books as misunderstanding or disagreement occurred.

Of course, as texts were used and copied over time, unintentional changes appeared in the Greek manuscript traditions. These variants were introduced in several ways that will be familiar to those acquainted with New Testament textual criticism. Inadvertently skipping over part of the text in the copying process (known as parablepsis) occurred, as did simple misreading or mishearing, among other unwitting missteps.

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More significantly for the Septuagint corpus, however, are the intentional textual changes that occurred over time. This phenomenon was noted already as part of a translation style that grew out of textual revision often oriented towards a (proto-Masoretic) Hebrew text, the rationale for which is not always obvious. Some revision occurred at the level of wording. When that happened, the resulting text may or may not have differed significantly from the old Greek version, depending on how that original version itself was translated. The Old Greek version of Daniel was fairly paraphrastic, so its later revision involved substantial reworking. But the Old Greek version of Judges was closer to the style of the Greek Pentateuch, so its later revision was not nearly as thoroughgoing.

Other kinds of intentional revision involved broader changes in what might be called textual shape. In these cases, existing translations were expanded, abridged, or rearranged at a discourse level with minimal or even no reference to any known Hebrew source text. The book of Esther is a good example of this phenomenon, with two Greek versions that differ from each other, yet both contain six chapters additional to those found in the MT. Apart from the revisions already mentioned, the Greek tradition of Daniel also has significant additions compared with the MT. In these cases, at least, the additions to Esther and Daniel are now grouped with the Apocrypha.

The Importance of the Septuagint

Dr. Ross’s new book offers a beginner’s guide to the Septuagint and its importance.

To be sure, much more detail about the Septuagint could be (and elsewhere has been) spelled out. But it is more helpful at this point instead to broaden the scope and consider the importance of the Septuagint for biblical scholarship as a whole.

In keeping with the theme of the aims of this website and its institute, one of the major ways in which the Septuagint is of paramount importance is in establishing the text of Scripture. As already noted, one particularly important aspect of that discussion is the matter of Old Testament canon. For some time, there has been a tendency to situate the Apocrypha within a purported “Septuagint canon” that was larger and later informed the books found in Christian codices like Vaticanus. The issues involved are complex, but this approach is at odds with ancient testimony and lists (e.g., Josephus, Against Apion 1.37–42), none of which seem to recognize a canon broader than that of the Hebrew Bible.

Of course, in addition to informing the boundaries of the Old Testament, the Septuagint is also of paramount importance for establishing the text itself. Attentive Bible readers may have noticed the marginal comments or footnotes at various points stating that a modern translation of the Hebrew Bible has in fact adopted something from the Septuagint. At 1 Samuel 1:24, for example, modern translations like the ESV and NIV follow the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls in the main text so that Hannah takes young Samuel to the house of the Lord with a “three-year-old bull.” The footnotes alert the reader to the MT’s reading which has Hannah take “three bulls” instead. The Septuagint reading certainly makes better sense with the next verse.

In such cases, the Septuagint is judged by various means to have preserved a better reading. Making that judgment can be very difficult and involves something of an interpretive circle: Does the Septuagint differ from the MT at a particular point because the translator’s source text said something different there, or because the translator chose on that occasion not to represent his source text word for word? To arrive at an answer, we must have some understanding of how a given translator usually approaches his task. But, of course, to know what to expect of a translator assumes we can derive that expectation from a comparison of the Greek and Hebrew texts as we have them. These are difficult issues to settle and require great skill.

Last but certainly not least, the Septuagint also influenced the authors of the New Testament, who themselves read and knew Scripture in Greek (and often in Hebrew as well). As already noted, we should avoid thinking that the Septuagint existed in a way that Paul, for example, could have taken it off his shelf to look up a passage as he wrote. There was no “it”—no “Septuagint pew Bible” in any simplistic way.

There was Scripture, preserved in better or worse forms, in Greek. For that reason, the textual, linguistic, and even theological implications of the Septuagint for New Testament studies constitute a dense and important scholarly field of research. For example, there is ongoing debate within Septuagint scholarship as to the prevalence of theological tendencies manifested in the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible themselves.

The textual, linguistic, and even theological implications of the Septuagint for New Testament studies constitute an important field of research.

The same can be said about the nature and meaning of innumerable features of the language of the Septuagint. But, aside from grappling with such issues directly, New Testament scholars have the added complexity of asking whether and how the New Testament authors themselves might have read and understood the Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible, and what kind of influence that might have had—in textual form or vocabulary choice, for example—upon their interpretive posture and scriptural reasoning.

Conclusion

It should be clear by this point that the Septuagint is a broad and complex area of study. We should avoid oversimplifying it as we think about the textual history of the Bible, lest we come to unwarranted conclusions. Yet even so, with some guidance understanding, the Septuagint is not beyond the grasp of the typical person in the pew who wants to know more about the origins of Scripture. Alongside the Text & Canon Institute website, good resources exist to help people do just that.

Borrowing from the KJV Bank and Trust

Why we must steward and protect the trust people have in prominent Bible translations.

I want all good evangelical English Bible translations to be trusted and used by all good English-speaking evangelicals. And I think you should want this, too. It makes sense, then, to look to the most popular English Bible of all time for lessons in how a translation might win and keep Bible readers’ trust. That is, of course, the King James Version.

The KJV is the one ring to rule them all. There is no escaping its influence—on church history, on Bible translation, on the English language itself. But Rings of Power often get shrouded in hagiographic mist over time. According to a recent poll, 103% of English-speaking Christians believe that the KJV was created on the sixth day and brought over to America on the Mayflower on the seventh.

A huge number of English-speaking Christians still use and trust the King James.

Okay, that isn’t true. But this is: the most recent reliable poll found that 55% of American Bible readers are still reading the KJV. A huge number of English-speaking Christians still use and trust the King James.

And yet, there was when the King James was not. It had to be made by humans, just like today’s translations. There were no angel choirs singing in the sky at its birth (and the Pilgrims carried the Geneva Bible, not the KJV). The KJV had to achieve its status.

There are therefore a number of useful lessons we can learn about public trust in Bible translations from the human history of the excellent King James Version.

1. Plan for cavils and parles.

First, those who love good English Bible translations today—the ESV, CSB, NIV, NET, NLT, LEB, NKJV, and others—should take heart: even the venerable KJV once faced vituperative opposition.

It’s odd, actually, to read the KJV preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” because it opens in what might seem to us to be an unnecessarily defensive crouch. Its author, Myles Smith, is certain people will attack his and his fellow translators’ work. There isn’t much space to read between Smith’s rather dense lines, but I see there a resigned, elite-academic sigh. Smith has no idea he has helped forge the one ring. By sentence two, he is offering this biting prediction:

Cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one.1David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxvii–xxviii. Page numbers for future quotations of the preface will be given in parentheses.

The KJV translators foresaw the inane criticisms (“cavils”) they were about to face, and yet I can’t exactly point to them as examples of how to respond with grace—I don’t hear in Smith much noblesse oblige. He calls out his critics’ “absurdity,” “wickedness,” “envy,” and “malignity.” And listen to this cynical complaint:

He that meddleth with men’s religion in any part meddleth with their custom, nay, with their freehold [money-producing land]; and though they find no content in that which they have, yet they cannot abide to hear of altering [it]. (xix)

But I actually take some consolation from the mere fact that Smith felt he had to defend the KJV. The malicious treatment that current English Bible translators often get today is not an invention of the social media era. Apparently, it can be overcome.

The KJV translators do offer this constructive tip:

Being brought together to a parle [conference] face to face, we sooner compose our differences than by writings, which are endless. (xvii)

New Bible translations, if they are to be trusted, have to be ready to suffer slings and arrows from outraged Bible readers. And they have to win some of those people over with parles.

2. The KJV is the Septuagint of today.

A second lesson we can learn from the KJV translators comes from the insightful comments they make about one of the only Bible translations in history that is more famous than the KJV. This is the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek translation of the (Hebrew) Old Testament.

The lesson might go something like this: the trust people have in a prominent Bible translation must be carefully stewarded and protected.

The KJV translators were not overly enamored with the accuracy and quality of the Septuagint:

It is certain that that translation was not so sound and so perfect but that it needed in many places correction. (xxii)

They noted that the coming of the New Testament was a perfect time for God to fix the Septuagint’s problems. Whenever Jesus and the apostles quoted it, they could have adjusted it. But they often didn’t.

It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to them to take that which they found (the same being for the greatest part true and sufficient), rather than by making a new, in that new world and green age of the Church, to expose themselves to many exceptions and cavillations, as though they made a translation to serve their own turn. (xxii)

The KJV is the Septuagint of today. In general, the safest path to widespread trust is through it. The KJV established a tradition (begun by William Tyndale) of basically literal and beautifully literary translation choices, a tradition that has proven its utility over time.

In general, the safest path to widespread trust is through it.

While I happen to think that the New International Version is a fine work by fine scholars, and while I use the NIV frequently, it hasn’t hewed as closely to the KJV tradition as a few of the other major modern evangelical English Bible translations. I don’t think there is any kind of biblical requirement that we stick with precedent here; if Christians in your context trust the New International Version, then you have a new and useful tradition worth holding on to. But when it came time for a choice in my own congregation, I found that I was a member of the if-it-ain’t-broke school of Bible translation selection. We now use an English translation that is a more direct heir of the KJV—it was simply an easier sell in my circumstances to borrow from the KJV Bank & Trust.

3. Make the KJV translators thank you.

That, in fact, is very like what the KJV translators did in their day. Hence a third lesson: the KJV translators successfully replaced the work of their forebears without disdaining it.

I said earlier that Myles Smith wasn’t exactly gentle with his imagined critics. But he was nothing but gracious toward those who went before him in the work of English Bible translation.

As nothing is begun and perfected at the same time, and the latter thoughts are thought to be the wiser: so, if we building upon their foundation that went before us, and being helped by their labours, do endeavour to make that better which they left so good, no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us; they, we persuade ourselves, if they were alive, would thank us. (xxvii)

There are defenders of exclusive use of the King James Version who take even the gentlest question (Hasn’t English changed enough by now to make portions of the KJV unnecessarily difficult for today’s readers to understand?) as an affront. But it seems to me that if indeed it is time for the English-speaking church to replace the KJV in pulpits and other institutional contexts, pastors and others who must make this change would do well to speak well of the KJV—to refuse to let those defenders lay sole claim to its legacy.

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The KJV translators were not KJV-Only. It is actually those who wish to see the venerable King James revised who are most honoring the KJV tradition. The KJV itself wasn’t a fresh translation; it was a revision of the Bishop’s Bible, first released in 1568. The edition of the KJV that is now in the most common use was produced in 1769 (not 1611).

The KJV translators were revisers, and they were sensitive to the charge that revising a translation meant rejecting or even disrespecting that earlier work. They loaded up the metaphors to explain their revision work to non-specialists:

  • It took the work of both Gideon and of the men Ephraim to destroy Midian in Judges 8: both were called for. Likewise, translation and revision are both necessary. (xxvii)
  • Joash struck the ground three times in 2 Kings 13; he should have struck it more. (xxvii)
  • “Books of profane learning” such as Aristotle’s Ethics get translated and then revised—even multiple times. (xxvii)
  • Gold doesn’t stop being gold because it needs at times to be “rubbed and polished.” (xxvii)

They did not disdain the work of their forebears. We should not disdain theirs even as we the church begin to use KJV revisions and replacements.

Conclusion

Some aspects of the KJV’s rise to prominence are unrepeatable, especially 1) the tiny size of the English-speaking world at the time and 2) the fact that pretty well all of it was subject to the king who commissioned the translation. That will never happen again. I am convinced that there will never again be one ring to rule them all.

Instead we’ve got something not quite so stirring, though you can still try using a movie-trailer announcer voice to say it: multiple rings with complementary and overlapping powers.

It’s a bad idea, then, to take a Bible translation that people trust such as the KJV and cast it into Mount Doom. There is room for many rings. And we can have and use them if we learn some lessons about trust from the wise KJV translators.

Notes

  • 1
    David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxvii–xxviii. Page numbers for future quotations of the preface will be given in parentheses.

The Text & Canon Institute illuminates the history of the Bible through church resources, research, and mentoring.

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