Ray Waddle’s Journal

I  keep running into people who denounce every translation of the Bible that has ever come out since the King James Version. That’s 400 years of condemnation.

One old friend is especially vocal in defense of the King James Bible. Does he ever actually read it? No. He hasn’t looked at it in half a century. He sees nothing inconsistent in that. What matters is what the King James stands for. It’s the gold standard, the bulwark of religious integrity and beauty, our bridge to the unimpeachable past. Every time people tinker with the old words, he says, it takes us that much further from solid ground and moral truth.

Such is the power of the King James Bible. It represents everything that is reverent, holy and fading from the scene.

A new book, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, by British writer Adam Nicolson (HarperCollins, $24.95), puts us in touch with the fascinating times that produced this magisterial Bible, and he argues why it won’t happen again.

It was in 1604 that the new English king, James Stuart of Scotland, organized a group of 50 scholars to start a new translation of the Bible, also called the Authorized Version. They aimed high. Their task was to produce a Bible that would embody English Protestantism, crowd out the rival English Bibles that stirred religious dissent, unify the nation and do their new monarch proud.

They could scarcely guess what a shadow their work would cast across nearly half a millennium.

Chances are you have a King James Bible in the house — perhaps as a family artifact, or a long-forgotten purchase, or as a reassuring presence on the shelf. It’s no longer the annual biggest-selling Bible (the New International Version usually holds the top spot now), but King James sales continue steady, mostly bought as gifts. (The first words of the King James Bible are like genetic information to most of us: “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.”)

Not so long ago, at least in the South, the world was divided between two Scripture translations — the King James Bible and the Revised Standard Version. A young person’s spiritual destiny was shaped by the Bible he or she received at confirmation, depending on the denomination.

The King James stood for tradition, the unaltered Word of God, the language spoken, perhaps, by Jesus himself. The Revised Standard Version, created after World War II to improve the readability and accuracy of the King James, represented openness to new scholarship and God’s unfolding presence in modern life. Cold-war conservatives condemned it as hopelessly liberal, if only for its translation of the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14: Striving for better accuracy, the RSV reads, “Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” The King James declares, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive ...”

Today, the number of Bible translations is in the hundreds. You can buy the Share Jesus Without Fear Bible, the Men of Color Study Bible, the Large Print Compact Snap Flap Bible. The array reflects the revving engines of consumerism, prosperity, niche marketing, culture wars, post-denominational tastes, new discoveries of ancient texts and, not least, worries about biblical illiteracy.

It’s a consumer-friendly scene. It’s also a cluttered scene. There are now books about how to choose a Bible. No wonder my friend is nostalgic for the Authorized Version. For nearly four centuries, the choice was so simple. Nevertheless, when it first came out in 1611, as God’s Secretaries reminds us, the King James Bible wasn’t exactly a best-selling Oprah pick.

Criticism rang out far and wide. Some complained the English of the new Bible was already 70 years out of date, too highminded. Puritans didn’t like it because it bore the name of the king who was persecuting them. When the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower and sailed to the New World, they took the Geneva Bible with them, not the King James.

Contrary to its inheritance, the King James Bible’s goal was not traditionalism. God’s Secretaries suggests the translators were gunning for something else, something associated with the religious ideals and political hopes of their own era — a sense of grandeur, a combination of simplicity and beauty, the immediate and the sublime, all at once. “Its great and majestic beauties, a conscious heightening of the word of God ... is a window on that moment of optimism, in which the light of understanding and the majesty of God could be united in a text to which the nation as a whole, Puritan and prelate, court and country, simple and educated, could subscribe,” Nicolson writes.

Grandeur is not exactly a top priority in an era of speed-dialing, reality TV and the lottery. Perhaps our best stab at such breathtaking ambition lately has been the World Wide Web, if not the Human Genome Project, or the Hummer.

The dictionary says grandeur signifies magnificence, nobility, splendor, style. These things are beyond modern reach, author Nicolson peevishly insists, especially in churches, where religious language today is either banal and therapeutic or angry and fundamentalist.

Surely he exaggerates. He ignores how difficult the King James Bible is to understand in many passages (it’s rated at 12th grade comprehension; virtually all other translations are 10th and below). And he overlooks the achievement of a recent translation like the New Revised Standard Version. But the grandeur problem remains. There isn’t enough of it these days. I think that’s what my irritated friend really misses — a sense of magnificence in the early 21st century, home of e-mail spam, long commutes and terrorism. There’s no point being nostalgic for monarchical times. But I hope grandeur will be part of the next Reformation, within reach of everybody, somehow catching the spirit that enchanted a roomful of English translators in the early 17th century.

Ray Waddle is a writer in Nashville. His book on the Psalms,
A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time (Upper Room Books) is out in January.