Authorized Version

Authorized King James Version of the Bible 1611

Dialect of the translation not the colloquial speech of the English people.

§ 3. I do not propose any inquiry into its fidelity, simply as a presentation of the doctrinal precepts of Christianity, both because the general accuracy of the version is so well established, that it is hardly questioned by those who are most zealous for a revision of its dialect. Its relations to our literature and the social and moral interests of the English family, considered simply as a composition, are however, a subject well worthy of examination. In the first place, then, the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or, indeed, at any other period, the actual current book-language nor the colloquial speech of the English people. This is a point of much importance, because the contrary opinion has been almost universally taken for granted; and hence very mistaken views have been, and still are, entertained. respecting the true relations of the diction of that version to the national tongue. It was an assemblage of the best forms of expression applicable to the communication of religious truth that then existed, or had existed in any and all the successive stages through which English had passed in its entire history. Fuller, indeed, informs us that when a boy he was told by a day-labourer of Northamptonshire that the version in question agreed nearly with the dialect of his country; but, though it may have more closely resembled the language of that shire, and though it certainly most nearly approximated to the popular speech in those parts of the realm where English was best spoken,¹ yet, when it appeared, it was by no means regarded as an embodiment of the every-day language of the time. On the contrary, its archaisms, its rejection of the Latinisms of the Rhemish Romanist version, and its elevation above the vulgarisms of the market and the kitchen, were assailed by the same objections which are urged against it at the present moment.

Difference between the position of Luther and that of the revisers of the English Bible.

§ 4. The position of the revisers and of their public was entirely different from that of Luther and the German people when the great Reformer undertook the task of giving his countrymen the Bible in their own tongue; and, accordingly, very different principles were properly adopted by the German and the English translators. German Bibles indeed existed before Luther, but they were too strongly marked with dialectic peculiarities--too incorrect and too much tinctured with Romish opinion--to serve even as the foundation of a revision; and they had not been widely enough circulated to have diffused among the people any familiar acquaintance with the contents of the sacred volume. The aim of Luther was to give to the high and the low of Teutonic race access to the authority on which he based his doctrines, in a form for the first time generally intelligible, and scrupulously faithful to the original text. He had before him no repository of a sacred, and yet universally understood, phraseology; and, as a teacher of the people, he could make himself comprehended only by using the dialect which was the familiar every-day speech of the largest portion of the people of his native land. Hence, as he says himself, he composed the phraseology he adopted out of the living vocabulary which he heard employed around him, in the street, the market, the field, and the workshop, and formed a diction out of elements common to the speech of the whole Germanic race. The translation of Luther was, no doubt, most readily intelligible in the provinces where he had acquired his own vernacular; but it was so thoroughly idiomatic, so penetrated with the fundamental spirit of the Teutonic speech, that it soon obtained a wide circulation, and was easily understood in provinces whose popular dialect appeared to be very discrepant from that of Luther. Low-German retranslations of this version, indeed, were published, but they did not long continue in use; and for nearly three centuries Luther's text has been the only one employed in religious teaching in Protestant Germany, however widely the local speech may differ from it. To secure its first introduction to masses ignorant of the Bible and without a consecrated dialect, it was necessary that it should be clothed in words most readily intelligible to those whom Luther desired to reach; but, that extreme familiarity of diction is not a permanent necessity in religious instruction, is shown by the fact that that version, and with it the High-German dialect, have become almost the sole vehicle for the dissemination of Protestant Christianity wherever any branch of the Teutonic tongue is spoken.

Not only is the High-German translation universally read, but, with few exceptions, pulpit and catechetical instruction is conveyed in High German throughout the Platt-Deutsch or Low-German provinces; and we learn from Kohl that even in the Friesic districts, where classical German is almost a foreign tongue, the peasantry both comprehend the High German of their pastors, and habitually employ its vocabulary themselves in relation to all religious topics, though not able to converse in it fluently on other subjects.

Authorized version of the Bible founded upon previous translations.

§ 5. The translators, or rather the revisers, of the English Bible of 1611 and the British people stood, as I have said, in a totally different relation to each other. These translators were not the teachers of a new doctrine: the public they addressed were not neophytes or strangers to the contents or the phraseology of the volume now again to be spread before them. England had been Protestant, already, for almost three-fourths of a century; and there were comparatively few of the English people who had not been taught the precepts of that faith, and made familiar with its oracles in their very cradles, through the translations of Tyndale, Coverdale, and others, which were made the basis, and furnished the staple, of the new recension. Hence the doctrines and the diction of the New Testament, which they found nearly unchanged in that recension, had become almost a part of their very consciousness; and there was no occasion to exchange, for a more common or a more artificial speech, the forms of words in which they had already learned whatever of most sacred Protestantism and the Protestant Bible had to teach. Wycliffe and his school in the fourteenth, Tyndale early in the sixteenth, Coverdale, Cranmer, the Genevan, and other translators at a later period in the same century, had gradually built up a consecrated diction, which, though not, as it certainly was not, composed of a vulgar vocabulary, was, nevertheless, in that religious age, as perfectly intelligible to every English Protestant as the words of the nursery and the fireside.

In fact, with here and there an exception, the difference between Tyndale's New Testament and that of 1611 is scarcely greater than is found between any two manuscript copies of most modern works which have undergone frequent transcription; and Tyndale's, Cranmer's, the Bishop's, the Genevan, and the standard version coincide so nearly with each other, both in sense and in phraseology, that we may hear whole chapters of any of them read without noticing that they deviate from the text to which we have always been accustomed. When, then, we study our Testaments, we are in most cases perusing the identical words penned by the martyr Tyndale nearly three hundred and fifty years ago; and hitherto the language of English Protestant faith and doctrine may fairly be said to have undergone no change.

Dialect of these translations not that of the secular literature of their times.

§ 6. I remarked that the dialect of the authorized version was not the popular English of the time, but simply a revision of older translations. It is almost equally true that the diction of Wycliffe and of Tyndale was not that of the secular literature of their times. The language of Wycliffe's Testament differs nearly as much from even the religious prose writings of his contemporary and follower, Chaucer, as does that of our own Bible from the best models of literary composition in the present day; and it is still a more remarkable and important fact, that the style which Wycliffe himself employs in his controversial and other original works, is a very different one from that in which he clothed his translation. This circumstance seems to give some countenance to the declaration of Sir Thomas More, otherwise improbable, that there existed English Bibles long before Wycliffe; and hence we might suppose that his labours and those of his school were confined to the revision of still earlier versions. But although English paraphrases, mostly metrical, of different parts of the Bible were executed at the very commencement of our literature, yet there is no sufficient ground to believe that there were any prose translations of such extent and fidelity as to serve for a basis of revision; and the oldest known complete translation of the Old Testament, the earlier text in the late Oxford edition of the Wycliffe versions, has very much the aspect of a first essay.

This, down to the twentieth verse of the third chapter of Baruch, is believed to have been the work of Nicolas de Hereford, a coadjutor of Wycliffe--the remainder of the Old Testament, and the whole of the New, having been, as there is good cause to believe, translated by Wycliffe himself.² Purvey's recension, executed very soon after, is a great improvement upon Hereford, who closely followed the Latinisms of the Vulgate; but Purvey founded his diction upon that of Wycliffe, and the philological difference between the two is by no means important.

Influence of Wycliffe's and Tyndale's versions upon the English language.

§ 7. The difference between the version of Wycliffe and that of Tyndale was occasioned partly by the change of the language in the course of two centuries, and partly by the difference of the texts from which they translated; and from these two causes the discrepancies between the two versions are much greater than those between Tyndale's, which was completed in 1526, and the standard version which appeared only eighty-five years later. But, nevertheless, the influence of Wycliffe upon Tyndale is too palpable to be mistaken, and it cannot be disguised by grammatical differences, which are the most important points of discrepancy between them. If we reduce the orthography of both to the same standard, conform the inflections of the fourteenth to those of the sixteenth century, and make the other changes which would suggest themselves to an Englishman translating from the Greek instead of from the Vulgate, we shall find a much greater resemblance between the two versions than a similar process would produce between secular authors of the periods to which they belong. Tyndale is merely a full-grown Wycliffe, and his recension of the New Testament is just what his great predecessor would have made it, had he awaked again to see the dawn of that glorious day of which his own life and labours kindled the morning twilight. Not only does Tyndale retain the general grammatical structure of the older version, but most of its felicitous verbal combinations, and, what is more remarkable, he preserves even the rhythmic flow of its periods, which is again repeated in the recension of 1611. Wycliffe, then, must be considered as having originated the diction and phraseology which for five [six+] centuries have constituted the consecrated dialect of the English speech; and Tyndale as having given to it that finish and perfection which have so admirably adapted it to the expression of religious doctrine and sentiment, and to the narration of the remarkable series of historical facts which are recorded in the Christian Scriptures.³ If we compare Tyndale's New Testament with the works of his contemporaries, Lord Berners and Sir Thomas More, or the authorized version with the prose of Shakespeare, and Raleigh, and Bacon, or other writers of the same date, we shall find very nearly, if not quite as great a difference in all the essentials of their diction, as between the authorized version and the best written narratives or theological discussions of the present day. But, in spite of this diversity, the language of the authorized version, as a religious dialect, is and always has been very familiar to the English people; and I do not hesitate to avow my conviction that, if any body of scholars, of competent Greek and Hebrew learning, were now to undertake, not a revision of the existing version, but a new translation founded on the principle of employing the current phraseology of the day, it would be found much less intelligible to the mass of English speaking people than the standard version at this moment is. If the Bible is less understood than it was at earlier periods, which I by no means believe, it is because it is less studied; and the true remedy is, not to lower its tone to a debased standard of intelligence, but to educate the understandings of the English people up to the comprehension of the purest and most idiomatic forms of expression which belong to their mother-tongue.

Formation of our English Sacred dialect.

§ 8. The general result of a comparison between the diction of the English Bible and that of the secular literature of England is, that we have had, from the very dawn of our literature, a sacred and a profane dialect, the former eminently native, idiomatic, vernacular, and permanent, the latter composite, heterogeneous, irregular, and fluctuating; the one pure, natural, and expressive, the other mixed, and comparatively distorted and conventional.

It is unfortunate that the unwise economy which has been too often observed in reprinting the Scriptures should have, in the common editions, omitted the Translators' Address to the Reader; though it must be allowed that that address by no means acknowledges the full extent of the obligations which the revisers were under to earlier labourers in the same field. The reason of this silence was that the older translations were in every man's hands, and the fact that the new edition was but an adaptation of them was too notorious to need to be stated in detail; but it is nevertheless singular that not one of the former English versions should have been referred to by name. The revisers content themselves with this general statement: "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, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath beene our endeavour, that our marke." And most successful were they in attaining to that mark, in embodying in their revision the result of the labors of many generations and of hundreds of scholars, and in making it a summing-up of the linguistic equations solved in three centuries of Biblical exposition, an anthology of all the beauties developed in the language during its whole historical existence.

Such is the general history and character of the received version. But what are its relations, past and present, to the language of which it is the purest and most beautiful example. I have said its dictionwas not the colloquial or literary dialect of any period of the English language. It is even now scarcely further removed from the current phraseology of life and of books than it was two hundred years since. The subsequent movement of the English speech has not been in a right line of recession from the scriptural dialect. It has been rather a curve of revolution around it. Were it not carrying the metaphor too far, I would say it is an elliptical curve, and that the speech of England has now been brought by it much nearer to that great solar centre, that focus of genial warmth and cheerful light, than it was a century ago, when hundreds of words in its vocabulary, now as familiar as the alphabet, were complained of as strange or obsolete.⁴ In fact the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general English tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean?

There is one important distinction between the dialect of the Scriptures, considered as an exposition of a theology, and that of a science or profession. The sciences, all secular knowledges, in fact, are mutable and progressive, and of course, as they change and advance, their nomenclature must vary in the same proportion. The doctrine of the Bible, on the other hand, is a thing fixed and unchangeable; and when it has once found a fitting expression in the words of a given language, there is in general no reason why those words should not continue to be used, so long as the language of which they form a part continues to exist. There are many words in the English Bible which are strictly technical, and never were employed as a part of the common dialect, or for any other purpose than the particular use to which they are consecrated in that volume; there are others which belong both to the appropriate expression of religious doctrine and to the speech of common life, and, of these latter, some very few have become obsolete, so far as their popular, every-day use is concerned; but they still retain in religious phraseology the signification they possessed when introduced into the English translation.

Now the same thing is true with reference to all other knowledges which possess special nomenclatures. There are in law, medicine, chemistry, the mechanical arts, many words always exclusively appropriated to the service of those arts; others, once familiar and common, but which non longer form a part of the general vocabulary of the language, and which are at present restricted to scientific and professional use; and here the phraseology of the Scriptures, and that of other special studies, stand in precisely the same relations to the common language of the people. Each has, and always must have, a special dialect, because it is a specialty itself, and has numerous ideas not common to any other department of human thought and action. And not only is this true of the language of science and of art, but of the dialect which belongs to all the higher workings of the intellect. No man acquainted with both great literature and life supposes that the speech of the personages of Shakespeare's tragedies, or of the actors in Milton's great epic, was the actual colloquial phraseology of their times; and it is as absurd to object to the language of the Scriptures, because it is not the language of the street, as to criticise Shakespeare and Milton, because their human and superhuman heroes speak in the artificial dialect of poetry, and not in the tones of vulgar humanity.

Objections to a revision of the English Bible.

§ 9. To attempt a new translation of the Bible, in the hope of finding within the compass of the English language a clearer, a more appropriate, or a more forcible diction than that of the standard version, is to betray an ignorance of the capabilities of our native speech with which it would be in vain to reason, and I suppose no scholars, whose opinions are entitled to respect, seriously propose anything beyond a revision which should limit itself to the correction of ascertained errors, the introduction of greater uniformity of expression, and the substitution of modern words for such as have become obsolete, or so changed in meaning as to convey to the unlearned a mistaken impression.

The most general objection to any present attempt at revision has been well stated by Trench, namely, that "we are not as yet in any respect prepared for it; the Greek and the English which should enable us to bring this to a successful end might, it is to be feared, be wanting alike." In fact, I doubt whether any impartial scholar has ever examined any of the modern attempts at revision without finding more changes for the worse than for the better, and there is one particular in which, so far as I have looked into them, they all sin alike. I refer to the use of the tenses. Revisers have attempted to establish a parity between the tenses of the Greek and English verbs which can hardly be made out, and so far as is this carried in some of them, as, for example, in the Gospel of John, as revised by five English clergymen, by far the most judicious modern recension known to me, that an American cannot help suspecting that the tenses are coming to have in England a force which they have not now in the United States, and never heretofore have had in English literature.

In a lecture on the principles of translation I laid down the rule that a translator ought to adopt a dialect belonging to that period in the history of his own language when its vocabulary and its grammar were in the condition most nearly corresponding to those of his original. Now, when the version of Wycliffe appeared, English was in a state of growth and formation, and the same observation applies, though with less force, to the period of Tyndale. The Greek of the New Testament, on the other hand, was in a state of resolution. It had become less artificial in structure than the classical dialect, more approximated to modern syntactical construction, and the two languages, by development on the one hand, decay on the other, had been brought in the sixteenth century to a certain similarity of condition. Besides, the New Testament Greek was under the same necessity as Early English, of borrowing or inventing a considerable number of new terms and phrases to express the new ideas which Christianity had ingrafted on the Jewish theology; of creating, in fact, a special sacred phraseology; and hence there is very naturally a closer resemblance between the religious dialect of English, as framed by the Reformers, and that of the New Testament, than between the common literary style of England and the Greek of the classic ages. It will generally be found that the passages of the received version whose diction is most purely Saxon are not only most forcible in expression, but also the most faithful transcripts of the text, and that a Latinized style is seldom employed without loss of beauty of language, and at the same time of exactness in correspondence.⁵ Whatever questions may be raised respecting the accuracy with which particular passages are rendered, there seems to be no difference of opinion among scholars really learned in the English tongue as to the exceeding appropriateness of the style of the authorized version; and the attempt to bring down that style to the standard of to-day is as great an absurdity, and implies as mistaken views of the true character and office of human language, and especially of our maternal speech, as would be displayed by translating the comedies of Shakespeare into the dialect of the popular farces of the season.

Early English specially appropriate to the translation of the Bible.

§ 10. There is another consideration, the force of which can hardly be fully apparent except to persons familiar with philological pursuits, and especially with the Scriptural languages, and with Early English. The subjects of the Testaments, Old and New, are taken from very primitive and inartificial life. With the exception of the writings of Paul, and in a less degree Luke, there is little evidence of literary culture, or of a wide and varied range of thought, in their authors. They narrate plain facts, and they promulgate doctrines, profound indeed, but addressed less to the speculative and discursive, than to the moral and spiritual faculties; and hence, whatever may have been the capabilities of Hebrew and of classical Greek for other purposes, the vocabulary of the whole Bible is narrow in extent, and extremely simple in character. Now, in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the development of our religious dialect was completed, the English mind, and the English language, were generally in a state of culture much more analogous to that of the people and the tongues of Palestine than they have been at any other subsequent period. Two centuries later the native speech had been greatly subtilized, if not refined. Good vernacular words had been supplanted by foreign intruders, comprehensive ideas and their vocabulary had been split up into artificially discriminated thoughts, and a corresponding multitude of terms. The language in fact had become too copious, and too specific, to have any true correspondences with so simple and inartificial a diction as that of the Christian Scriptures. Had the Bible then for the first time appeared in an English dress, the translators would have been perplexed and confounded with the multitude of terms, each expressing a fragment, few the whole, of the meaning of the original words for which they must stand; and whereas, three hundred years ago, but one good translation was possible, the eighteenth century might have produced a dozen, none altogether good, but none much worse than another. We may learn from a paragraph in Trench what a different vocabulary the Bible would have displayed, if it had been first executed or thoroughly revised at that period. One commentator, he says, thought the phrase "clean escaped" a very low expression; another would reject "straightway, haply, twain, athirst, wax (in the sense of grow), lack, ensample, jeopardy, garner, passion," as obsolete; while the author of a new translation condemns as clownish, barbarous, base, hard, technical, misapplied, or new-coined, such words as beguile, boisterous, lineage, perseverance, potentate, remit, shorn, swerved, vigilant, unloose, unction, vocation, and hundreds of others now altogether approved and familiar.