THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND A LANGUAGE FOR THE WORLD

Johannes Gutenberg had launched a new age of information when he perfected the printing press. That he might never have got the job done without the financial backing of his sometime partner Johann Fust is indicative of the entrepreneurial dynamism that characterized the later Middle Ages. The feudal system was on the wane and an emergent middle class made of aspirant merchants and inventors, on the make and in pursuit of new money, was on the rise. Those new men had risen from among the world of the poor and the ways and means of their recent ancestors hung about them like a lingering scent, of the soil, of the sea and of the mine. Among themselves the poor – and so the new middle class to whom they had so recently given birth – spoke English to each other; the nobles above them, and the academic churchmen, spoke Latin and French. For hundreds of years the Bible had existed only in Greek, and then Latin, and so was in effect an audio book for most – strictly for listening to. Any poor man – or woman, or child – wanting the word of God had no alternative but to sit in church and hear it recited by another.

Gutenberg had begun to change all that in 1455 with the printing of his Bible. It was in Latin, right enough, but it had shown how copies of a printed text might be for the many instead of the few. Up came the middle class, and among other things they wanted to read the word of God for themselves, so that as the sixteenth century progressed there was more and more demand for translations of the Bible into the languages they actually spoke in their homes, being the vernacular.

Gutenberg had had a hand in it, and so too had Martin Luther, that turbulent priest of Wittenberg. He had nailed his ninety-five theses to a door and then someone took them down and printed them for general circulation. The rest of his ideas were printed as well, and so the Reformation had been born. A central plank of that movement – that revolution – had been about encouraging every person to read the Bible for himself, for herself.
Taken together, the printing press and the Reformation taught Protestants to read, that each might save his own soul by making a direct and personal connection with the Almighty.

English theologian John Wycliffe had overseen a translation of the Bible into English that was completed by 1384. Luther translated the Bible into German in 1522, and then four years later William Tyndale offered a version of the New Testament, based heavily on Luther’s, in English. The first full Bible in English was the work of ecclesiastical reformer Myles Coverdale, in 1535. Among the most beloved translations into English was the Geneva Bible, and Coverdale had a leading hand in that one as well. It would be the favourite of figures including Shakespeare, John Donne and John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678.

Among all those lights, a greater illumination yet was made by the Bible commissioned by King James VI and I in 1604 and completed in 1611. He was no sooner on the throne, in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth than he was being harangued by Catholic and Protestant alike and all creeds in between. All wanted reassurance, if not dominance, at court and in the land. Among other ambitions he had for his Bible, James hoped it would be as oil on troubled water. Furthermore the Geneva Bible had all manner of marginal notes, some of which might be interpreted as undermining royal authority, and he planned to excise those too.

The resultant King James Version is also, and most importantly, a foundation for the English language spoken today. It is littered throughout with turns of phrase coined for that Bible that are with us still: out of the mouths of babes… fought the good fight … do we see eye to eye?.. signs of the times … the powers that be … rise and shine … a fly in the ointment… a thorn in the side… a man after his own heart … the apple of his eye.

The moment worth imagining in a story of the world was in Stationers’ Hall, close by St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, and the premises then (1610) of the Worshipful Company of Stationers. There and then began the reading aloud of the finished work. The KJV would be read in every church and so it was necessary, vital, to ensure it sounded right, that its rhythms and cadences would lift hearts and souls. There in that hall its verses rose and rang. Its language sounds archaic now but resonates as it did then. It is a translation of great simplicity based throughout around a structure of ten syllables and the de-dum-de-dum iambic rhythm familiar to Shakespeare. That reading in Stationers’ Hall, after the moment of its beginning, would take most of a year.

English is the language of the world, of the Internet, and its most important founds are in and of the KJV. Its idioms are there in popular songs, its stories were the inspiration for more novels than might be counted, from Moby Dick to The Old Man and the Sea. Beyond the England of its birth its influence travelled aboard the ships of empire to India and Africa. Like no other, it was the book that changed the world.