The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Latin, which had been the monopolist, suffered rather badly in transition to the vernacular. So greatly nationalistic did some scholars become in the second half of the seventeenth century that they attempted to eliminate Latin altogether. The new passion for English – cleverly spotted and exploited by Henry V – is just one, though a very powerful, example of a country or a people (as happened with Afro-Americans) defining itself by how it spoke and what it spoke.

  So we get Sir John Cheke (1514 – 57), the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, a man appointed to uphold and defend the classical inheritance – Greek and Latin – attempting to eliminate both. He translated Matthew and Mark and avoided the Latin ‘centurion’ (he replaced it by ‘hundreder’ though this did not catch on); nor did his term ‘mooned’ replace ‘lunatic’. He failed to replace the Latin ‘crucified’ with his English ‘crossed’ and we can all be thankful that his ‘wizards’ did not dislodge ‘wise men’. Still, he is a fine, though failed, example of someone who wanted to clear out the cupboard of all inherited goods and spices. Just for balance, the Roman Catholic translation into English – the Douay-Rheims version – kept as strong a Latinate feeling and vocabulary as possible and the result creaks.

  On the whole, 93 per cent of words used in the King James Bible, according to Alister McGrath, are native English. This included the retention of what were already becoming archaisms: ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ have been mentioned, although ‘you’ was coming in at that time. This also applied to verbs: ‘sayest’, ‘giveth’, although ‘gives’ was replacing it. Englishness was the benchmark. The older translation and formulations gave it gravitas.

  As a book designed to be read aloud, it is reader-proof. Children’s voices pipe it shyly in their high clear tones and pick up the music. Adults, however cautious, always feel the urge to step up to the lectern and be at their best and find the rhythmic truth in the ancient, so well and widely heard words. Those who are carried away by their readings in church or assembly from the prophets and the Gospels can fire on seven cylinders and find salvation in a set of syllables. It came out of a time of ardent reborn faith as well as passionate reborn language.

  It might entertain you to see what a linguistic scholar makes of the verses. This is very specialised but shows the range of interests this book can provoke. It is from a pamphlet by Dr Lane Cooper, called ‘Certain Rhythms in the English Bible’ first published by Cornell University Press in 1952.

  ‘If preachers, orators and writers would spend a little time noting the rhythms of [the Authorised Version] they would grow discontented with the sentences that please them now. Consider, for instance, the effect of the long row of dactyls in this sentence: “who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the law revealed?” or the change from iambus to dactyl in the sentence “the sun to rule by day; for his mercy ruleth for ever”.’ As one example of the use of anapaests, Dr Cooper cites: ‘My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew.’ Finally observe the use of cretic feet in the translation of James i,19: ‘swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath’.

  It is a formidably excavated underpinning to what most readers see as a fluid run of easy sentences. But perhaps it is the lack of that learned sub-stratum which makes all subsequent translation sound flat and tame by comparison.

  We tend to think of the Bible in holy terms – initially putting aside the violence between brothers, the lust, rape and slaughter, the unchristian vengeance of Jehovah. Nor do we call to mind ‘coarse’ language. But it has been found fault with, in its time. Dr Thomas Bowdler, who so successfully ‘cleaned up’ Shakespeare and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, gave us a word, a rather derogatory word, to ‘bowdlerise’, meaning to cut what he saw as matter offensive to ladies.

  The influence on orators has been mentioned, most especially on the call to unity of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the call to action in Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’ To see, in Old Testament prophecy, was to foretell that something would indeed happen, as Isaiah said in the prophecy on which Dr King drew so heavily for that justly famous speech.

  The spirituals, too, found their basic justification in the King James Version, in Paul to the Ephesians ‘speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord’. ‘Spiritual song’ was used in both black and white congregations. The term ‘Negro Spiritual’ first appears in print in the 1860s by which time slaves had made the form their own, not only in their take on the words and stories from the King James Version, or in the way they intermeshed Methodism with African music, but by the passion and longing and urgency of their sung praise and prayers.

  David Crystal is described on his latest book cover as ‘the world’s greatest authority on the English language’. He writes that the King James Version has ‘contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatics or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source’. He cites Lord Macaulay advising Lady Holland in 1831: ‘a person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the bible at his finger ends.’ He also says, which has appeared in this book but bears repeating for such a source, that ‘the good style of the English language has been so influenced by the Bible because of the public presence it had in the 17th century and has had ever since.’ A language bred from and carried by a faith.

  In his latest book, Begat, Professor Crystal takes a few dozen of the best known idioms and demonstrates how they have not only kept their old value but bred, or begat, variations which themselves have entered the language. These idioms have, in fact, been and continue to be a resource for phrasemakers who might have little or no awareness of the spring they come from, let alone the context which gave them their original enduring power. And sometimes they bend and twist the quotation, employing half here and an inversion there without knowing it, let alone acknowledging it: but it’s fun and it adds to the word-hoard. The phrases have not only stayed in the minds and the faith of those anchored to the Bible but they have sailed free, roved widely, often wildly.

  To take a few examples from Begat. From Genesis ‘be fruitful and multiply’, Crystal’s research brings us, among others, ‘Be Fruitful’ – the National Gardening Association urging its readers to eat more fruit every day: a dietary instruction. ‘Be fruitful and flourish’ – from the New York Times (2008), consumers urged to be fruitful but can sales multiply. On evolution – ‘Be fruitful and divide’; and pop groups – ‘Be fruitful and multiply (your fan base)’. And there’s a recent novel called Be Fruitful and Multi-Lie. There are more: they just multiply.

  ‘Let there be light’ is another: it’s been a film, several songs, a television arts programme, the motto of a university, an episode of Sex and the City, and most useful for advertising eye-surgery. An oil find in Israel generated ‘let there be light crude’; in Ghana, ‘let there be light off the grid’. It is perverted frequently: of airline delays, ‘Let there be flight’; of boxing, ‘let there be fight’. There’s ‘let there be height’ and ‘blight’, even, for a vampire show, ‘let there be fright’ .

  ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is an example which is rarely used correctly but widely appropriated – as ‘Brother’s Keeper’ in dozens of episodes of television series; as My Brother’s Keeper in three films and in two pop songs and albums; Dakin Williams’s biography of his brother Tennessee Williams is called His Brother’s Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams. There’s ‘Her Brother’s Keeper’ and Our Brothers’ Keepers Foundation for HIV/AIDS; and the internet scourings of David Crystal have turned up yet more – My Mother’s Keeper (a book by the daughter of Bette Davis); and many articles – ‘Am I My Br
other’s Goalkeeper?’ and ‘Am I My Brother’s Gatekeeper?’ ‘Am I My Bookkeeper’s Keeper?’ And Crystal refers to the joke about the ape in the zoo reading Darwin: ‘Am I my keeper’s brother?’

  And how many Ten Commandments, or at any rate Commandments, do we have? (The ‘Nine Commandments of Travel Writing’, The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women.) And how many ‘shalt nots’: ‘Thou shalt not kill, except in a popular video game’; ‘thou shalt not upload’. While ‘thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’ slithers into headlines such as ‘Don’t take Che’s name in vain’; ‘US military don’t take names in vain.’ On we go with ‘A Coat of Many Colours’, ‘How Are the Mighty Fallen!’, ‘Nothing new under the sun’, ‘Be horribly afraid’, ‘Sowing seeds’.

  Are there phrases from any of the subsequent versions of the Bible, those which have made a takeover bid for the King James Version, which will dance so usefully through the centuries and give such pleasure? Where are the modern imprints’ equivalence of the King James’s language, with its wonderful flexibility, its seductive ability to pun and frolic and enlighten in gossip and literature, on the internet, in modern technology and in playground witticisms? Is this not evidence for the durable nature of the King James Version? And if some verses seem a bit difficult now and then a little explanation will clear that up, while regular reading or listening will turn the ‘difficulties’ into phrases to be cherished.

  As a disseminator of Protestantism, the King James Version has been without equal. As a hoarder and breeder of language, it is without parallel in our culture. Why has its begetter, the Church of England, abandoned it?

  The cries go up that the new translations are simpler to understand and that Christianity in certain countries, especially in the United Kingdom, is on an inevitable decline due to a multitude of causes and therefore drastic renovations were needed. In my view one cause of the decline is the retreat from the words of the King James Version. Do we tolerate (save for schoolchildren) the dilution and simplification of the words of Shakespeare? People say there is more holiness in a theatre now than in a church and that is largely because the words spoken are the words written, whatever century they came out of.

  Not so in our churches now with rare exceptions. We appear to have thrown the King James Bible away on the bonfire of populism. The chief argument is that it is ‘difficult to understand nowadays’. Some of it is difficult, but not much, and it is not difficult to explain or to teach. It was always a little difficult and in that difficulty was one of its strengths: it showed seriousness, it expressed depths of meaning, it provoked thought.

  The best of what we are – Protestant or not – was grounded in this book. In assemblies and like occasions it was a symbol of community and a reminder of the survival and formation of who and what we are. Surely it has earned a unique place and can be reclaimed as a national book without upsetting others?

  And it was written in a language of beauty that is our bedrock. Perhaps the real reason that the Protestant Church here is in decline is that it is now lost for words.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BIBLE ITSELF AS LITERATURE

  The King James Bible is the book which has most deeply branded English literature, its prose, its poetry and its songs. From Milton to Toni Morrison to John Steinbeck, John Donne to T.S. Eliot, Dryden to James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Coleridge, Kipling to Cormac McCarthy and John Updike. It is as present as a watermark in the vocabulary, and in the patterns and rhythms of daily speech. ‘You are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech,’ says Professor Higgins to the uneducated cockney girl Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, ‘your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible: don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.’

  And the most pervasive of these three is the Bible. Albert Stansborough Cook, the Professor of English Language and Literature at Yale University, wrote: ‘No other book has so penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible. What Homer was to the Greeks and the Koran to the Arabs, that – or something not unlike it – the Bible has become to the English.’ The Victorian historian Froude wrote: ‘it is a literature in itself; and from a fellow historian Lord Macaulay: ‘if everything else in our language should perish, this book alone would suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.’ Praised and plundered, it became the concept by which for centuries many speakers of English defined their written identity. It gave authority to their language. It has survived parody, ridicule and neglect.

  The King James Version is a magnificent work of literature. For some, the religious messages of the prophets, the Apostles, the psalmists are of lesser significance than the sound and song of the words themselves. The crucial fact that it was a Bible designed to be read aloud, a Bible which came from preachers, has given it a tone which rises seamlessly from the page to the tongue. It is worth quoting once more: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’

  For a people without science to conceive of such a magnificent metaphor and plant it at the opening of their Holy Book, to call it Genesis and have it translated into such sentences, is to be marvelled at.

  And from the Old Testament to the New. John opens his Gospel with the lines: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. . . . And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us . . .’

  It is not unintelligent (in the context of the time) to see the beginning of life in a breath, to see that there is a relationship between all things, to see a journey from breath to flesh and, in those times, to see a supreme figure initiating all this and, by extension, ruling over it.

  We still do not know the origin of matter or the origin of life. Why the soot and sand which is the fundamental dust of the universe turns into our particular planet remains a mystery. It may well be a mystery that physics will eventually solve and mystics be for ever unable to produce convincing evidence, but as a parallel explanation the Bible often has a certain genius made memorable by the poetry of the language.

  The poetry in the Bible for me is at its finest in the Beatitudes as laid out in the Gospel according to St Matthew, already quoted. And then there are the Psalms, themselves poems and ever since begetters of more poems. Psalm 23 used to be known of by heart by much of the nation.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

  Or from Revelation, chapter 21:And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

  And he that sat upon the throne s
aid, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

  For centuries the Bible was the essential, often the only book in the house, and it would be read aloud. These were the houses of the literate and better educated or self-educated, but their numbers were extensive and their effect on education, common speech and authorship was great.

  Alister McGrath, in his book In the Beginning has written about this impact and points out that the King James Version’s ‘ability to establish and consolidate norms of written and spoken English . . . became one of the most important yet unintended functions of the King James Bible and gave it power, quite literally, to change the English world . . . to make standard one literary language’. It was published in a land rich in dialects and for many it must have seemed just another variant, albeit privileged and rather antique. But persistent usage, its association with the faith which was firmly held to by many and respected by others, made it the standard. ‘It is unnecessary to praise the Authorised Version of the English Bible,’ wrote the literary historian Professor Saintsbury, ‘because of the mastery which its language has attained over the whole course of English literature.’

  Above all the King James Version was an enterprise devoted to God. Like much else in the past – the art of ancient Egypt, the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the mosques and minarets of Islam – its primary dynamic was not directed towards this world but to another. It is a feature of all these that their value in later times – as art, architecture, literature – is an unexpected consequence. Maybe the nature and quality of faith can enable the imagination to reach more deeply into what might be called, by scientists as well as artists, the mystery of things.