The long, Intricate communion between the English language and the Bible continues. It began a thousand years ago. About 950, the priest Aldred wrote an Anglo-Saxon paraphrase, in Northumbrian dialect, between the lines of the Latin text of the great Lindisfarne Gospels—a sumptuous manuscript written about 700. This is the first fragment of English translation to have come down to us. In the late tenth century, there appeared in Wessex the first independent version of the Gospels in English. One hears, in this rough assay, something of the cadence that was to mold the language: “Nu ic asende mine aengel beforan thinre ansyne.” By the year 1000, Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, had translated a considerable part of the Old Testament.
The Norman Conquest brought further progress to a sharp halt. Not until about 1250 does the story take up again, and then only with the Psalter. But in the first half of the fourteenth century, in a prose Psalter attributed to one Richard Rolle, we take a leap forward: “Have mercy of me, God, for man trad me, al day the fyghtygne troublede me … In God I schal prevse my wordes, in God I hopede.” The language was now at the threshold of the necessary eloquence.
In 1382–1383, John Wyclif completed his rendering of the Bible into English. The text used was, by modern standards, corrupt, being a late unscholarly version of the Vulgate. Moreover, there were glaring discrepancies in style between the work of Wyclif and that of his collaborators. But the revised Wyclif Bible of 1400 is the first of the major English Scriptures. For all its archaicism, we can turn to it with a sense of recognition. Here is a passage from Isaiah (35:5-6): “Thanne the iyen of blynde men schulen be openyd, and the eeris of deef men schulen be opyn. Thanne a crokid man schal skippe as an hert, and the tunge of doumbe men schal be openyd; for whi watris ben brokun out in desert, and stremes in wildirnesse.” The Authorized Version will make one superb improvement: “and the tongue of the dumb sing.” But when it replaces a crooked man skipping by a lame man leaping, the advantage seems to lie with Wyclif.
Between Wyclif and the Bible of 1611 come the invention of printing and the genius of one man who, more than any other, put his mark on the development of English. Between 1454 and 1500, some 125 editions of the Latin Vulgate were issued from diverse presses. A century after Wyclif had set down his text, much of it was available in print in Caxton’s Golden Legend (1483). And in 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam called for the right of private individuals to read Scripture in their own common language: “I wish that the plowman might sing parts of them at his plow and the weaver at his shuttle, and that the traveler might beguile with their narration the weariness of his way.” For those who spoke English, William Tyndale was to make this possible. Working under extreme peril and the harassment of Catholic agents, Tyndale translated some books of the Old Testament and the whole of the New. Thus the first printed English New Testament appeared in Worms in 1525. Eleven years later, Tyndale paid with his life; he was burned at the stake after having been betrayed by one of his intimates into the hands of the Spaniards. But his work was done, and it altered enduringly the sensibility of the English mind and the cadence of the language.
Tyndale’s Bible is the first of our scholarly texts: the old Testament is founded on the Hebrew, and the New Testament is a translation from the Greek, as edited by Erasmus in 1516 and 1522. But it is more. Even beyond Shakespeare, Tyndale molded the governing forms of English style. The modern English Bible is, to a great extent, a mere modification of his work. Sixty percent of the text of the Authorized Version had reached its final shape in Tyndale. Of the 287 words in the Sermon on the Mount in the King James (or Authorized) Version, 242 are from Tyndale. And how lasting has been their splendor:
No man can serve two masters. For either he shall hate the one and love the other: or else he shall lean to the one and despise the other: ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore, I say unto you, be not careful for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more worth than meat, and the body more of value than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither reap, nor yet carry into the barns: and yet your heavenly father feedeth them.
Tyndale’s style is more spare and sinewy than was that of his contemporaries. Where the King James alters Tyndale, it usually adds: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are laden,” writes Tyndale, “and I will ease you.” The AV reads: “Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The rhythm is more stately, but the sequence is less exact: “easing” follows more justly on “laden.”
Tyndale set down the basic usages of English biblical translation. He varies the English where Hebrew or Greek uses a single, repeated formula. Luke, for example, always says something that Tyndale closely rendered as “it came to pass.” But Tyndale also translated this narrative formula by “it happened,” “it fortuned,” “it chanced,” “it followed.” In Matthew 18:33, the Greek uses a single word (the verb ele-eo). Tyndale uses two: “Thou shouldest have had compassion on thy fellow, even as I had pity on thee.” Tyndale’s liking for awkward inversion—“brought they,” “went Jesus”—probably reflects the influence of Luther’s German. But elsewhere he draws richly on words of Latin and French origin, a famous example being the use of to minister, where to serve would do as well. In fact, it may have been from Tyndale that Shakespeare derived his tactic of sharp juxtapositions between Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic words and Latinate leviathans (“the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”).
It is with Tyndale that the English Bible attains the rather paradoxical glory of being more eloquent than some of the Hebrew and most of the Greek original. Where translation diminishes a text, it traduces; where it surmounts the original while yet being loyal to it, it transfigures.
In 1535–1536, Miles Coverdale issued an English Bible based mainly on Tyndale, with additional readings from the Vulgate and the German. As Tyndale had not completed the Old Testament, Coverdale’s is, strictly regarded, the first complete English Bible in print. Though it leans heavily on Tyndale’s genius, Coverdale’s version is less radical in its theology. Scholars agree, moreover, that Coverdale’s ease and fluency of manner gave to the King James many of its ample rhythms. Coverdale acts as a bridge between the austere beat of Tyndale and the plenitude of the Authorized Version. In Hebrews 1:8 (an example which I owe, like much of this summary, to Sir Frederic Kenyon’s Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts), Tyndale renders: “But unto the sonne he sayth: God thy seate shall be for ever and ever. The cepter of thy kyngdom is a right cepter.” Coverdale reads “endureth for ever and ever” and keeps the whole one sentence. At once, the shape seems to broaden and grow more ceremonious.
Between Coverdale and the King James occurred several short but notable steps: the Great Bible of 1539–1541 (essentially Cover-dale using a better Vulgate text); the famous Geneva Bible, issued by English Calvinists in 1560 and 1576, extracts from which served Cromwell’s soldiers as a pocket Bible; the Bishops’ Bible, an official revision of the Great Bible, published in 1568; and the Douai Bible, which English Catholics issued in France in 1582 and 1609 (and on which President Kennedy took his oath of office). Of these, the Geneva and the Douai contributed most to the AV. In the passage from Hebrews, for instance, it is the Geneva Bible that replaces seat by throne and makes of the right cepter a sceptre of righteousness. From the exaggerated Latinity of the Douai Bible, the King James derived some of its sonorous technical and ecclesiastic terms. But the Bible of 1611 is essentially Tyndale and Coverdale revised. By 1535, the major work had been done.
We must bear this in mind when approaching the AV. Its language is not really that of the Jacobean scholars and churchmen who compiled it. It is slightly archaic, as if the editors had wished to give to Scripture a lofty strangeness. Yet at the same time, it was produced at that moment in which the English language lived in singular excellence and vitality. Where the editors of 1604–1611 chose to improve on their predecessors, they did so with the instrument of Spenser, Hooker, Sidney, Florio, Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, and Donne.
The King James is the only great thing in this world ever done by a committee. Divided into six panels—two at Westminster and two each at Oxford and Cambridge—some fifty linguists and divines collaborated on the final text. There were notables among them: Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Thomson (renowned both as linguist and drunkard), Thomas Holland, and Richard Brett, reputed to know Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. There are many reasons for the supremacy of the AV: progress in the interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek meanings; the plurality of judgment brought to bear on every word; the tradition of previous English texts. Yet there is much about the King James that still seems wondrous. Countless times, one marvels at the felicity of phrase and the evenness of tone—the more striking in view of the number of editors involved. It is truly as if tongues of fire had spoken.
No other work has played a comparable role in determining the habits of feeling and imagination of the English-speaking world. None has done as much to ingrain in the English sensibility uses of speech which we feel to be, in some central way, native to the language. Wherever English prose has a natural excellence, whether in Swift or George Eliot or Lincoln, there sounds inside it the regal simplicity, the alternance of Anglo-Saxon and Latin, the graphic imagery and narrative pace of the King James. If only the Bible of 1611 and a dictionary survived, the English language would stand in no mortal danger.
But we must remember two facts. Philologically, the text on which the AV is based is primitive. Only sixteen years after the publication of the King James, the Codex Alexandrinus reached England. Soon the limits of historical awareness moved back to the fourth century. The discovery of the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus made possible the establishment of a Bible text greatly superior to anything the Jacobeans could have envisaged. Secondly, the poetic, deliberately archaic language of the AV meant that the work would, by force of time, grow increasingly remote from current speech. Thus the need for future revision was implicit in the very genius of the King James. The surprising fact is not that such revisions should have been made but that none has challenged the pre-eminence of the Authorized Version.
Two new translations appeared in England in 1729 and 1768. An American version by Rodolphus Dickinson was published in Boston in 1833. It is remembered, somewhat uncharitably, for its rendering of Luke 1:41: “And it happened, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the embryo was joyfully agitated.” Noah Webster’s Bible, issued the same year, was sounder and a number of its readings have been retained by modern scholars.
But the real history of modern biblical translation begins with the Revised New Testament of 1881, followed by the American Standard Version in 1901. In nearly six thousand readings, the Greek text underlying these revisions differs from that available to the Jacobean divines. Roughly a quarter of these differences imply a change of meaning. After the turn of the century, three further translations require mention: James Moffatt’s (1913), Msgr. Ronald Knox’s Bible (1945), and the Revised Standard Version of 1946. But the last had scarcely been issued when the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls gave dramatic proof that new textual problems and opportunities will continue to face the biblical scholar.
The latest response to these problems now lies before us. It is the New Testament of the New English Bible (NEB). It is the work of an eminent body of English and Scottish ecclesiastics and scholars who have met in common labor since January 1948. Undertaken in a Protestant but nonsectarian vein and published under the joint imprint of the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, the NEB sets out to provide “a faithful rendering of the best available Greek text into the current speech of our own time, and a rendering which should harvest the gains of recent biblical scholarship.” This is not “another revision of the Authorized Version but a genuinely new translation” using the idioms of contemporary English. In contrast to the revisers of 1881, the present translators, like their Jacobean forebears, make no effort to render the same Greek word everywhere in the same way. Their constant aim is fluency, clarity, and accuracy of interpretation. How far has it been achieved?
There is only one way of finding out: one must set certain passages of the NEB beside previous translations, particularly the AV, and compare. It is a pedestrian method, but there is no other. I shall look first at three passages illustrative for their familiar power of poetic beauty, then at two in which there are difficulties of comprehension.
Here is the King James version of Matthew 26:38–41:
Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.
And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, 0 my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.
And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Knox alters to conform more closely with the Vulgate and to stress the Catholic values. The cup becomes a chalice, and the grammar of Christ—“only as thy will is, not as mine is”—is severely Latin (non sicut ego volo, sed sicut tu).
Now here is the NEB:
“My heart is ready to break with grief. Stop here, and stay awake with me.” He went on a little, fell on his face in prayer, and said, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt.” He came to the disciples and found them asleep; and he said to Peter, “What! Could none of you stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake, and pray that you may be spared the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
In this instance, the King James carries the day. The soul sorrowful “even unto death” is much superior to the modern version both in weight and meaning. Stop and pass me by are flat colloquialisms. Stay awake is somewhat closer to the original text, but watch has the more intense connotation of vigilance in the hour of supreme danger. And surely temptation is a finer rendering than test (the Greek, peirasmos, allows either translation).
Let us consider next Luke 21:25–28; first in the Authorized Version:
And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;
Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.
Knox differs perceptibly: “men’s hearts will be dried up with fear … the very powers of heaven will rock … lift up your heads; it means that the time draws near for your deliverance.”
And now the NEB:
Portents will appear in sun, moon, and stars. On earth nations will stand helpless, not knowing which way to turn from the roar and surge of the sea; men will faint with terror at the thought of all that is coming upon the world; for the celestial powers will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming on a cloud with great power and glory. When all this begins to happen, stand upright and hold your heads high, because your liberation is near.
Here the new version has distinct advantages. Like Knox, it makes Christ’s prophecy assured rather than conditional (will instead of shall), and it has an appropriate swift pace, as if expectation were bringing the event to the very horizon. “Faint with terror,” on the other hand, is mildly Victorian, and I think Knox’s “the very powers of heaven will rock” (virtutes caelorum movebuntur) the most graphic of the three. But the real problem lies in the last phrase. Three translations are proposed: redemption, deliverance, liberation. Which shall it be? The Greek (apolutroo) can signify any or each. The Vulgate chooses redemptio. Does Jesus mean deliverance from Roman power, spiritual redemption, or both? I am not scholar or theologian enough to judge; but deliverance seems to me best, as it allows more aptly than liberation for either a secular or transcendental emphasis.
Revelation is a text notorious for its demands on imaginative translation. Here is how the Jacobeans read Revelation 6:12-13:
… and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
Moffatt simplifies to a plain sackcloth and the stars drop like unripe figs when the tree is shaken by a gale. But he makes the red moon full (following the Vulgate). The NEB contracts yet further:
And there was a violent earthquake; the sun turned black as a funeral pall and the moon all red as blood; the stars in the sky fell to the earth, like figs shaken down by a gale.
I can see that this is a clearer version; but it loses the precise vision of the original. The Apocalypse was seen through the eyes of a man familiar with desert sandstorms, with sackcloth woven thickly of hair, and familiar also with the loss of unripened figs when the desert wind strikes. The essential quality of Revelation is its down-to-earth approach to the transcendent. In this passage, the NEB seems to miss the flavor.
Let me conclude by looking at two examples which offer some crux of meaning. In I Corinthians 7:39, Paul declares that a widow is “at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (AV). Just what does that mean? Knox is no help: “so long as she marries in the Lord.” Moffatt proceeds boldly: “only, it must be a Christian.” His support, presumably, is II Corinthians 6:14: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” The NEB reads: “provided the marriage is within the Lord’s fellowship.” This seems to me most ingenious: it communicates the spirit of the injunction without betraying the letter.
Finally, let us look at the close of Philippians 3 in the King James:
for our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ;
Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.
The archaic language (conversation) and the gnarled syntax make for heavy going. Knox simplifies to “our true home in heaven” and renders configuratum corpori claritatis as “the image of his glorified body.” Now the NEB:
We, by contrast, are citizens of heaven, and from heaven we expect our deliverer to come, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transfigure the body belonging to our humble state, and give it a form like that of his own resplendent body, by the very power which enables him to make all things subject to himself.
This is, perhaps, a little too brisk, and one regrets the loss of vile body. But transfigure is beautifully to the point and the crux of politeuma is resolved: it does imply citizenship. Neither Knox’s home nor Moffatt’s quaint colony of heaven is as close.
For a tentative judgment, I would say that the New Testament of the New English Bible is generally preferable to Moffatt, many of whose readings are idiosyncratic. It lacks much of the stylistic felicity of Knox, but is, of course, far more reliable, since it can go beyond the often dubious sanction of the Vulgate. So far as study of the Greek text and of its linguistic nuances is concerned, the NEB is now the most authoritative version available. Moreover, its fluency, colloquialism, and willingness to enlarge by paraphrase make for a most lucid narrative. This, as the Preface states, is truly a translation for those not previously familiar with the Bible.
At the same time, it is doubtful whether the NEB will win for itself anything of the place still held commandingly by the AV. Being founded wholly on current speech, the NEB is often flat. It uses too many words that have present meaning but will not, I think, acquire future resonance. Often their shallow modernity jars: “liberal-minded,” “my friends” (for brethren), “loophole,” “frustration” (in the current psychological sense), “environment” (with a psycho-sociological nuance), “pack our baggage,” “affairs” (for deeds or acts). It happens that English, as now spoken in England, is in a rather flat and diminished state. There is much propriety but little savor. Yet the translators of the NEB have been unwilling to draw on the richness and zest of American English, where they would often have found modern but spirited equivalents of Jacobean usage. The result is that the style of the NEB suffers from an irritating mixture of coyness and colloquialism.
But taken as a whole, this new translation is a fine achievement. I can think of none better to keep next to one’s King James to check the sense of the Greek or resolve obscurities created by the archaic speech and convoluted syntax of the Jacobean divines. The NEB is a lucid, erudite page boy, carrying the train of its majestic ancestor and, by an occasional discreet tug, showing the right road.