The
King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a
masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent
phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.
But
now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of
Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important
new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest
known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of
the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.
The
notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan
Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University
in New Jersey, who announced his research on Wednesday in an article in
The Times Literary Supplement.
While
the notebook has yet to be examined by other scholars, experts who have
reviewed Professor Miller’s research called it perhaps the most
significant archival find relating to the King James Bible in decades.
David Norton,
an emeritus professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New
Zealand and the author of several books about the King James Bible,
called it “a major discovery” — if not quite equal to finding a draft of
one of Shakespeare’s plays, “getting on up there.”
Gordon Campbell,
a fellow in Renaissance studies at the University of Leicester and a
consultant for the planned Museum of the Bible in Washington, said the
new manuscript shed fresh light on how the King James translators
actually did their work, as opposed to how they had been told to do it.
Studying
the creation of the King James Bible “is like working with a jigsaw
puzzle where 90 percent of the pieces are missing,” Mr. Campbell said.
“You can arrange the surviving pieces as you wish, but then you find
something new and you realize you put it together the wrong way.”
The
King James Bible, published in 1611, was produced by six teams of
translators, known as “companies,” in London, Oxford and Cambridge, who
were charged with creating an authorized version that would support the
Church of England against the Puritan influence seen in some earlier
translations. Along with Shakespeare’s First Folio
of 1623, it is one of the most influential books in the history of
English and the wellspring of common phrases like “salt of the earth,”
“drop in the bucket” and “fight the good fight,” to name only a few.
While
some records of the committee that supervised the overall translation
survive, only three manuscripts of the text itself have been known to
exist until now. The Bodleian Library at Oxford owns nearly complete
drafts of the Old Testament and the Gospels, in the form of corrected
pages of the Bishops’ Bible,
a 16th-century translation that the King James teams used as a base
text. Lambeth Palace Library in London has a partial draft of the New
Testament epistles.
Professor
Miller discovered the manuscript last fall, when he was in the archives
at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators and, later, the college’s master. He was hoping to find an unknown letter, which he did.
“I thought that would be my great discovery,” he recalled.
But
he also came across an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern
paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum and filled with
some 70 pages of Ward’s nearly indecipherable handwriting.
The
notebook had been cataloged in the 1980s as a “verse-by-verse biblical
commentary” with “Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.” But as
Professor Miller tried to puzzle out which passages of the Bible it
concerned, he realized what it was: a draft of parts of the King James
Version of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is left out of many editions, particularly in the United States.
“There
was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment,” Professor
Miller said. “But then comes the more laborious process of making sure
you are 100 percent correct.”
The
draft, Professor Miller argues, dates from between 1604, when the King
James Bible was commissioned, and 1608, when the six teams were asked to
send their work to the general committee for review. Unlike the other
surviving drafts, which scholars date to later parts of the process, it
shows an individual translator’s initial puzzling over aspects of the
Greek text of the Apocrypha, indicating the reasoning behind his
translation choices, with reference to Hebrew and Latin as well.
“You
can actually see the way Greek, Latin and Hebrew are all feeding into
what will become the most widely read work of English literature of all
time,” Professor Miller said. “It gets you so close to the thought
process, it’s incredible.”
The
draft, he argues, also complicates one long-cherished aspect of the
“mythos,” as he put it, surrounding the King James: that it was a
collaborative project through and through.
The
companies were charged with doing their work as a group, rather than
subdividing it by assigning individual books to individual translators,
as was the case with the Bishops’ Bible. But the Ward notebook,
Professor Miller said, suggests “beyond a reasonable doubt” that at
least some of the companies ignored the instructions and divided up the
work among individuals, at least initially.
Further,
he said, the notebook contains a complete draft for the book of the
Apocrypha known as 1 Esdras, but then, after a run of blank pages, only a
partial manuscript for the book known as the Wisdom of Solomon,
suggesting that Ward picked up the slack for another translator.
“Some
of them, being typical academics, either fell down on the job or just
decided not to do it,” Professor Miller said, with a laugh. “It really
testifies to the human element of this kind of great undertaking.”
In
recent years, scholars have chipped away at the idea of Shakespeare’s
plays as the product of an isolated genius, emphasizing instead the intensely collaborative
nature of Elizabethan theater. Professor Miller said that the origins
of the other great monument of 17th-century English literature is due
for a similar reconsideration.
“There’s
a strong desire to see the King James Bible as a uniform object, and a
belief that it’s great because of its collaborative nature,” Professor
Miller said.
“It was
incredibly collaborative,” he continued. “But it was done in a much
more complicated, nuanced, and at times individualistic way than we’ve
ever really had good evidence to believe.”
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