God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

  The ‘novelties’ Andrewes was referring to were the creation of an all-powerful and dominant papacy some thousand years before. Incense, and the other practices in his chapel, reeked of antiquity and showed the world, as Andrewes wrote to one Roman Catholic, that he and his chaplains and co-communicants were ‘the sons and successors of those ancient christians who in former times had used them’.

  A belief in the primitive is allied in Andrewes to a love of the royal. This is another foundation stone. One of the King James Bible’s most consistent driving forces is the idea of majesty. Its method and its voice are far more regal than demotic. Its archaic formulations, its consistent attention to a grand and heavily musical rhythm are the vehicles by which that majesty is infused into the body of the text. Its qualities are those of grace, stateliness, scale, power. There is no desire to please here; only a belief in the enormous and overwhelming divine authority, of which royal authority, ‘the powers that be’ as they translated the words of St Paul, was an adjunct and extension. James once told parliament that he had about him ‘sparkles of the divinity’. The Translators of the Bible clearly believed that and the majesty of their translation stems from its loyal belief in that divine-cum- regal authority.

  Andrewes was perfectly explicit about this in many of the long series of Christmas sermons he delivered at court. On Christmas Day 1620, Andrewes was at the height of his powers. He wore a small, pointed beard. Linen ruffs stood out at his neck and wrists and the sleeves of his cambric chimere ballooned over the pulpit balustrade. Each sleeve was as wide as his body. Carrying only his Bible, he began his sermon to the Jacobean court. The king sat before him, impatient and querulous as ever, his blue eyes bulbous, his cheeks as red as the silk of his doublet. (He may well have suffered from porphyria, a hereditary disease which makes the face go blotchy and has symptoms, at times, identical to those of drunkenness.) James had brought other men’s sermons to a halt in mid-flow, bored or irritated by them, coughing the preacher to silence. Andrewes stilled him with the story of the coming of the Magi:

  But heer come a troope of men of great Place, high account in their country: And withall, of great Learned men (their name gives them for no lesse). This (lo) falls somewhat proper to this Place and Presence, that will be glad to heare it…wealth, worth or wisedome shall hinder none, but they may have their parte in CHRIST’s birth, as well as those of low degree. It is not only Stella Gentium, but Stella Magorum: the Great Mens, the Wisemens Starr, this.

  You can imagine a little shuffling in the seats at this, confronting head on one of the Jacobean bogeys, that God and money, God and greatness, did not mix. But Andrewes went on: ‘Christ is not only for russet clokes, Shepheards and such; shewes himself to none but such. But even the Grandez, Great States such as these.’

  One can imagine, with that last phrase, Andrewes’s large, strong hand, the episcopal rings glittering on the fingers, sweeping out across his privileged congregation, the gesture a physical cousin of the verbal puns of which he was so fond. Surely ‘Great States such as these’ means not only the Magi he has been discussing for the last half an hour, but James, Anne, Charles, the dukes and earls, the Grandez arrayed below him?

  This is the context in which to read Andrewes’s most famous words. They were not famous at the time he spoke them, again in the Chapel Royal, at Christmas 1622, but they enjoyed a resurrection when in 1927 T. S. Eliot, entranced by the idea of a form of English religion whose language was both sensuous and exact, began a poem with a version of them. ‘It was no Summer Progresse’, the Bishop said, subtly, flatteringly, a royal reference for a royal audience.

  A cold comming they had of it, at this time of the yeare: just, the worst time of the yeare, to take a iourney, and specially a long iourney, in. The waies deep, the weather sharp, the daies short, the sunn farthest off in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.

  Everything you find in the great translation of the Bible prepared for James I is in those words: immediacy, dignity, a sense of deep, musical rhythm, an intuitive and poetic understanding of the connection between the present and the past, a tangible empathy, a precision, ‘an ordonnance’ to use Eliot’s word, a careful elaboration of arrangement and structure. The court audience would have known about the agonies of winter travel and would have grasped the implications of ‘no summer progress’, with its chastening hint of luxury now, seriousness then. (Some might have reflected that this solemn and ascetic figure had often enjoyed one or two days’ racing with the king at Newmarket and Royston.) The sermon, like the translation of the Bible, is shaped by learning (Andrewes is familiar with the workings of a modern Copernican solar system where in the course of each year the earth moves from its perigee to its apogee, nearer and further from the sun) but infused with an imaginative sympathy. There is an urgent sense not only that the Christmas story of the Magi is something which was as alive then as it had been 1,620 years before, but that the language itself is an adventure, that the story can be remade in the modern world.

  In 1608, according to royal instructions, Andrewes, as director of the first Westminster company, would have been bringing their work to a conclusion before sending it on to the final revising committee which the king’s instructions had long envisaged. There is a tiny fragment of evidence that Andrewes did not think much of his co-Translators. ‘Most of our company are negligent,’ he had written to the secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in late 1604. ‘Negligent’ is hardly the word that one has come to expect from this passionate age, or these brilliant men, or the vital and central importance of the task, a royal commission, a profound honour, attending to the fulcrum of the universe. But perhaps one can understand Andrewes using it. Of his company, there was John Overall, Dean of St Paul’s, whose beautiful wife Anne had just run off with Sir John Selby. It wouldn’t be surprising if Overall was a little distracted. The ancient Hadrian á Saravia, a royal favourite, was perhaps rather exhausted at seventy-three. John Layfield the adventurer was more a Greek than a Hebrew scholar. The eccentric Bedwell, and the drunk pornographer Thomson, were perhaps not entirely to be relied on. The others in his company—Tighe, Burleigh, King and Clarke—were more strait-laced, but the impression emerges from this brief remark of the busy, stretched and impatient dean. If most of his company were negligent, does that mean that Lancelot Andrewes himself was the translator of most of the opening books of the Bible?

  It is at least a possibility. In no other company was the director quite so dominant over his fellows; in no other were complaints made of the laziness of the majority; and in no other was there a man who was acknowledged as one of the great preachers of the age. If there is an author of the opening books of the Bible, was it Andrewes?

  Certainly, one has only to look at the first page of Genesis to see and feel in intimate detail something very like the mind of Andrewes at work. In the version of the Old Testament which the lonely Protestant martyr, William Tyndale, made in the 1530s, he began like this:

  In the beginnyng God created heauen and erth. The erth was voyde and emptye, and darcknesse was vpon the depe, & the spirite of God moued upon the water.

  As an opening, it is already dramatic and enormous, its resonant bass notes—void, empty, dark, deep—infused with a heroic directness and, despite their scale, simplicity. Tyndale was indebted to Luther’s translation, which to a large extent he copied, and this first modern English version is an extremely Protestant one, accessible, useful, clarifying, less interested in the grandeur of its music than the light it brings.

  The Geneva Bible, a far more sophisticated and professional job, performed by a small team of English Calvinists in Geneva in the late 1550s, had taken Tyndale’s bare bones and made something a little more fluent of them:

  In the beginning God created the heauen and the earth.

  And the earth was without form and void, and darknesse was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters.

  Andrewes takes those qualities, that openness, loses
none of it, and incorporates it into something larger, more three- dimensional, more operatic, making of these opening words what is in effect a baroque form:

  In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth.

  And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.

  These are slight and marvellous changes. Some are almost purely rhythmic. To say ‘the Heaven’ and ‘the Earth’, which he borrowed from the Genevans, allows an easier run than Tyndale’s harsher and more naked substantives. The commas after ‘Heauen’ and in the second verse are signs to pause in the reading of it, and the colon after ‘deep’ marks a slightly longer rest. In these slightest of ways, Andrewes introduces two new qualities to add to Tyndale’s: an aural fluency and the sense of ease which comes from that; and, allied to that ease, a pace of deliberate and magisterial slowness, no hurry here, pausing in its hugeness, those bass colours in the vocabulary matched by a heavy, soft drumming of the rhythm. It is as solemn and orderly as the beginning of a steady and majestic march.

  Of course there is more. Twice, Andrewes inserts the same beautiful phrase: ‘upon the face of the deep/upon the face of the waters’. There is a word which means ‘surface’ in the Hebrew but Tyndale had avoided any mention of it. ‘Surface’ is what a modern and flattened version such as the World English Bible chooses to say:

  Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.

  Why did Andrewes choose ‘face’ and not ‘surface’? At least partly because, in 1611, ‘surface’ was still a technical word, borrowed from the French. Its first appearance in English is in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French–English dictionary, where it is defined as ‘the superficies or vpper part’, and it was an explicit part of the king’s instructions that strange and inaccessible words were not to be used. Instead, ‘face’ has a rich, plain Englishness to it, and in using it Andrewes is more accurate than Tyndale (as is ‘waters’ in the plural). But it is also, in its physicality, more stirring. The spirit of God moving on the face of the waters has a mysterious and ghostly humanity to it which neither the modern translations nor Tyndale’s blankness can match. The face of the waters carries a subliminal suggestion that the face of God is reflected in them. That too is a baroque suggestion, a scene from Michelangelo or Blake. In this first, archaic darkness a connection already exists between God and his creation. The universe from the moment of its making is human and divine, almost as if, purely by this one lexical gesture, James’s Translators are foreshadowing the whole long story which will unfold from that first moment.

  But how did this feeling for enrichment, and a layered, dense, baroque sensibility, sit alongside those other contemporary demands for secretarial exactness and clarity? This could not be a Bible for the elite. If it was to play its role as the national irenicon, it had to bridge the categories of rich and clear. Fascinatingly, one can detect this double imperative work in precise detail.

  Ninety years before, Luther had produced a famous example of how not to do Bible translation:

  In Mark 14.4 the traitor Judas says Ut quid perditio ista unguenti facta est? If I followed those lemmings the literalists, I’d have to render that ‘Why was this waste of the ointment made?’ What kind of talk is that? Whoever talks about ‘making a waste of the ointment’? You make a mess not a waste, and anybody who heard you talking about making a waste would naturally think you were actually making something, when in fact you were unmaking it—though that still sounds pretty vague (nobody unmakes a waste either). What a real person would say, of course, is ‘What a waste!’

  Turn from this postcard from the front line of the Reformation to the words of the King James Bible, and what do you find? The King James Translators do exactly what Luther had described as absurd: they mimic precisely the form of the original. No searching for the language of mothers, or the man at the market stall. They acted, in other words, according to Calvin’s injunction, as God’s secretaries:

  There came a woman, hauing an Alabaster boxe of oyntment of spikenard very precious, and shee brake the boxe, and powred it on his head.

  And there were some that had indignation within themselues, and said, Why was this waste of the oyntment made?

  For it might haue bene solde for more then three hundred pence, and haue bene giuen to the poore: and they murmured against her.

  The New English Bible follows Luther: ‘Why this waste?’ they have the disgruntled apostles ask.

  God is in the details and it is worth looking a little more closely at exactly what is happening here. This is a particularly resonant and revealing passage about the way in which the King James Bible works. The private ritual of the woman with the spikenard is cloaked in an air of what can only be called holiness. Her bringing the oil of spikenard (an aromatic plant, sometimes identified with lavender) carries echoes of the Magi bringing their precious substances to the child in the stable, and the words these translators chose also carry forward-echoes of the Last Supper, now only hours away (‘and shee brake the boxe, and powred it on his head’, ‘Iesus tooke bread, and brake it’). This atmosphere of holiness is made to reside in the strange, formal, ritualised language of the seventeenth-century Bible (which also happens to be an intimately exact translation of the original). These heightened atmospherics are not there in Luther, nor in the twentieth-century version. ‘Why was this waste of the ointment made?’ is not only a beautiful line in English, subtle in its variations of dactylic and iambic rhythms, but it answers all Luther’s objections about the meaninglessness of something being made when in fact it was spilled. The spilling of the oil of spikenard was essential to the making of the ceremonial moment, the pre-anointing of Jesus for his gave.

  In this sentence, one can see the extraordinary phenomenon of the King James Bible conforming both to Protestant and to pre-Protestant ideas about the nature of Christianity. It is both clear and rich. It both makes an exact and almost literal translation of the original and infuses that translation with a sense of beauty and ceremony. It has that peculiarly Jacobean combination of light and richness, the huge windows illuminating the densely decorated room, the unfamiliar amalgam of the court–Puritan, both strict and grand. No one could fault the Translators in their meticulous attention to the detail of the original texts; and yet in doing so, more than any other English translators, they enshrined a high moment of Christian meaning. You only have to compare it with Tyndale, the English Lutheran, to see how far beyond Tyndale they took the atmospherics of the translation.

  There cam a woman with an alablaster [sic] boxe of oyntment, called narde, that was pure and costly, and she brake the boxe and powred it on his heed. There were some that disdayned in themselves, and sayde: what neded this waste of oyntment? For it myght have bene soolde for more then two houndred pens, and bene geven unto the povre. And they grudged agaynste her.

  Tyndale is flat and only half accurate. ‘What neded this waste of oyntment?’ is a lumpen sentence compared with ‘Why was this waste of the oyntment made?’ Tyndale’s version does not embrace the strange ambiguity of making something by wasting it which the Jacobean sentence conveys with economy, accuracy and its own form of resonant elegance. The King James Version steps beyond the question of liberalism versus gracefulness. It has plumbed and searched for the essence of the meaning and in that way is an exercise in passionate exactness. It doesn’t choose between the clear and the rich but makes its elucidation into a kind of richness. It is a sleight of hand, but this is the central paradox of the translation: the richness of the words somehow represents a substance that goes beyond mere words and that is its triumph.

  Eleven

  The Grace of

  the Fashion of It

  So likewise you, except ye vtter by the tongue words easie to be vnderstood, how shall it be knowen what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the aire.

 
1 Corinthians 14:9

  The king and Bancroft had decided, at the very beginning, that there should be ‘a generall meetinge, which is to be of the chiefe persons of each company, at ye ende of ye worke’. This was to be the great forum for unification, the binding and melding together of all fifty or so Translators’ efforts. By the end of 1608, arrangements were being made for the various manuscripts to be collected and gathered. The letter written on 5 December that year by William Eyre, fellow of Emmanuel, to James Ussher in Ireland mentioned to him that ‘Two of everie company are chosen to revise & conferr the whole at London’. The making of the King James Bible was now moving towards its culmination.

  But the gathering and collating went slowly, taking over a year before the twelve divines could gather in Stationers’ Hall in London to make the final decisions. It may in part have been a problem to do with money and payment. Except for those rewarded by a bishop with a living in a rural parish, none of the Translators had been paid until now and one or two of them were complaining.

  The Cambridge divines translating the Apocrypha (generally acknowledged to be the least satisfactory part of the work) had been led by Andrew Downes, professor of Greek at the university. He was a man ‘of an extraordinary tallness, with a long face and a ruddy complexion and a very quick eye’, who treated his students kindly, but could also turn irascible, stalking out of church one day in Cambridge when the congregation jeered at him for the inadequacy of his sermon. ‘He left, saying no one should see his face in the place again.’