A charming old Scandinavian custom calls for the bride to wear a crown atop her head on her wedding day. Some of these cherished ornaments are very old and are passed on from mother to daughter with each successive generation of brides. This chapter seeks to address the “crown” of good translation, describing the beautiful elements that are enjoyed by ever new generations of Bible readers of various backgrounds. The Church, which the New Testament calls the Bride of Christ, likewise should pass on to succeeding generations not only the truth, but also the beauty of her biblical heritage to her spiritual daughters (and sons).
In the first chapter of this section of our book we propose to consider the beauty found in the King James tradition that is so old that it predates the 1611 King James Version itself.
First of all, though, we must answer the question, “What is beauty?” No easy answer presents itself. As the Scottish lady put it, “It’s better felt than telt!”
“Beauty,” my father used to say, “is in the eye of the beholder.” He was no doubt at least partly right. Our tastes in clothing, architecture, music, art, male or female attractiveness, are somewhat conditioned by cultural and ethnic background. Nevertheless, there are some things that seem to be accepted as universally beautiful.
Who does not thrill to a gorgeous glowing sunset, a burst of bluebonnets1 bedecking a hillside, the crashing waves of the sea against the shore, a sparkling snowscape, majestic purple mountains?
In the area of living creatures, who does not admire the grace of an Olympic athlete, the multi-colored plumage of a tropical bird, and the lovely markings on an exotic fish?
In the untold thousands of English-speaking churches—and that includes people from all the racial groups in the world (not merely European, but also African and Asian)—the vast majority of Bible-readers and Bible-lovers who have properly been exposed to the Authorized or King James Version have thrilled to the matchless cadences of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the rhapsodies of Isaiah, the Beatitudes, 1 Corinthians 13, and the songs in Revelation—to mention just a few. What is the origin of this beauty?
To hear some people talk one would think that Bible translators, especially those who did pioneer work in earlier days, pulled together some diverse and poorly written materials, and by dint of their own outstanding creativity produced “the Bible.”
Actually, most of the beauties of the Holy Bible are much deeper and older than any translation or famous version. In fact, we could call this chapter “Something Ancient” and not be wide of the mark.
Beauties from the Original
Dr. Milton C. Fisher of the Reformed Episcopal Seminary of Philadelphia, himself an accomplished communicator, agrees with that modern master of English style C. S. Lewis2 that most of the beautiful impact of the Authorized (King James) Version is really that of the contents of the Bible itself. Fisher writes:
Our aesthetic experience or reactions to reading stories from the Old and New Testaments depends very little upon the artistry of the translator. It is to the original text that the King James Version owes much of its “style”—its narrative power, its images and figures.3
The same can be said for the New King James in its retention of most of the beauty that still communicates in the end of the twentieth and dawn of the twenty-first centuries. (See Chapter 7, “Something Borrowed,” for this fascinating theme.)
The truth of Lewis’s and Fisher’s contention can be appreciated by those who have gained enough proficiency in Hebrew or Greek—or both—to enjoy reading the original texts. Others will have to accept this teaching by faith!
Since God is Himself the fountainhead of creativity and beauty, we should not be surprised that His Word is a reflection of that attribute, as Ecclesiastes 3:11 indicates.
The Hebrew Language
It is certainly no accident that the Hebrew language is ideal for conveying the type of literature that we find in the Old Testament.
Hebrew is a colorful, somewhat earthy tongue that is marvelously suitable for the narrative portions of the Bible such as Genesis through Esther. It is a story-teller’s medium par excellence, and it translates well into all sorts of languages. For example, Hebrew goes into English very nicely indeed—probably much better than into Latin. (Some may doubt this, but there are no ancient Roman Christians around to contest it!)
The poetic and wisdom literature, Job through Song of Songs, illustrates the poetic potential of Hebrew. Providentially, unlike English poetry, which traditionally depends so heavily on rhyme and meter, Hebrew rhymes its thoughts rather than its sounds. By this we mean that much of Hebrew poetry gets its color and light from repeating ideas in parallel lines with certain changes for variety. This is called “parallelism.” Fortunately, this form can be transmitted into any language without major changes.
The Aramaic Language
If you have ever admired a hand-lettered scroll of the Torah or a nicely printed edition of the Hebrew Bible, the form of these delightfully artistic licorice-black letters that you see is actually borrowed from the Aramaic, a lingua franca widely used in the ancient world. It is closely related to Hebrew.
From a biblical viewpoint, this language has several notable features. First and foremost, parts of God’s Word, chiefly in Daniel and Ezra, are in this tongue. It has very similar features to Hebrew, but with a bit more flexibility, especially in the use of participles.
A second important fact about this world language is that when the Jews returned from the Babylonian Captivity (sixth century B.C.), many no longer understood Hebrew, so the Bible had to be orally translated into Aramaic in the synagogue readings of the Old Testament. After the Romans drove the Jews out of Palestine (A.D. 138), it was deemed wise to put these oral paraphrases into writing. They were called Targums. Sometimes their readings will show up in the footnotes of the NKJV, such as at Genesis 4:15, Psalm 23:6, and Ezekiel 19:10.
Finally, Aramaic is the language in which Mary called Jesus home at suppertime, the language of the earliest church. As such, a few expressions from Aramaic occur in the New Testament.4
The Greek Language
Ancient Greek is ideal for communicating truth accurately. The Greeks loved to talk, to discuss, to argue, to philosophize. Their marvelous tongue, spoken in an unbroken stream for over three thousand years, developed precision of verb forms, particles, connectives, and a unique, highly developed usage of the definite article that facilitates the communication of many fine shades of thought.
This aspect of Greek is especially important in doctrinal sections such as Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The flow of thought in that book can be traced from start to finish by means of the little connectives, such as and, but, then, therefore, and others. These are retained in the NKJV as in the KJV (see Chapter 11).
Greek is also a beautiful language for literature. While the New Testament has far less of a purely literary approach than the Old, who can long remain blind to the beauties of the Beatitudes, of the Magnificat, of Romans 8, and the Books of Hebrews and James, for example?
In the case of the Old Testament also, the ancient Greek translation of it (still the official translation of the Greek-speaking church) was a vehicle to bring the truths and much of the beauty of the Hebrew Scriptures to a very wide potential readership. For Greek was destined to become the lingua franca of the Greco-Roman world, especially in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean basin. This version is called the Septuagint.
Splendors of the Septuagint
“Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy…” intones the little Sunday school girl reciting the books of the Old Testament. Without realizing it she is showing our debt to the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Called the “Septuagint” from the Latin word for seventy, this book was a milestone in translation history from any perspective. The very names of many of the books are from the Greek translation rather than from the original Hebrew.5 Genesis is Greek for beginning, Exodus for the way out, Deuteronomy means second law, and Numbers is the English translation of Arithmoi, the Septuagint’s title for the fourth Book of Moses.
What is the origin of this first major translation of the Old Testament into a world language? It was produced to fill a deeply felt need of the Jewish community in Alexandria of Egypt in the third and second centuries B.C. Hebrew was becoming less and less known by the majority of Jews, especially young people. What else could they have done to keep from slipping into total biblical ignorance and finally assimilation into the pagan Gentile world around them?
The traditions surrounding the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX) are more colorful than credible. The ruler Ptolemy II was said to desire a translation of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews for the famous library in Alexandria. According to one account, seventy Hebrew scholars came down to Egypt to put the Pentateuch into Greek (hence the name of the version). Tradition has it that each scholar retired to his private chamber to do the work. When all were finished, the different Greek manuscripts were said to be all identical—to a word!
The Pentateuch was carefully done, and the rest of the books with varying degrees of success. It is well worth noting that this first great step in the Bible for the world was generally a conservative, “formal-equivalence” (or “complete-equivalence,” see Chapter 11) type of translation.
Our Latin Legacy
“Latin is a dead language,
As dead as dead can be,
First it killed the Romans,
And now it’s killing me!”
This somewhat less than classical quatrain remains in my mind from the high school Latin play. It got a good laugh in the 1950s. The gist of the play, however, was that Latin is alive and well in Washington, D.C., among other places. Latin is also alive and well in a modified form in the English language. Fully sixty-five percent of our tongue is derived from Latin, either directly through early Christian missionaries to England, and later through scholarship, or indirectly through the Norman French invasion.6
Since Latin is a complex and highly inflected language (many endings to memorize!), we can’t expect English, which has dropped the similar complex structure of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English era, to keep much of the grammar and word order of the Latin Bible. And it doesn’t.
Though Greek was the common (koinē) tongue of ancient Rome even in the Imperial City (Paul’s letter to the church at Rome was in Greek, not Latin), a need soon grew up for God’s Word in Latin. Such early products were called the Old Latin.
However, since so many people knew some Greek, nearly everyone seemed to be making a Latin translation of the New Testament. Things became so confusing that Damasus, Bishop of Rome from 366 to 384, commissioned the scholar Hieronymus (St. Jerome) to make a standard version of God’s Word in Latin. This Bible, called the Vulgate, after fierce initial opposition (all Bibles receive opposition!) became the standard for Western Christendom for a whole millennium. Not a bad fulfillment of Jerome’s commission!
The King James translators were all Latin scholars. The notes of their meetings were kept, not in English, but in Latin! We are not surprised, then, that much Christian theological vocabulary is derived from the Latin, enshrined in the KJV and passed on to readers in the NKJV and some other Bibles.
Even someone who doesn’t read Latin is able to see something recognizable in the nouns we have italicized in 1 Corinthians 1:31: “Ex ipso autem vos estis in Christo Jesu, qui factus est sapientia nobis a Dei, et justitia, et sanctificatio, et redemptio…”
To those words we could add crux (cross), gloria, gratia (grace), praedestinatio, propitiatio, reconciliatio, resurrectio, Scriptura, spiritus, and many more.
Truly, even our basically Germanic English Bible is rich in lovely Latin roots.
So these are some of the various stocks—Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin—that have been hybridized to produce the exquisite flowering that eventually produced the majestic Tyndale—King James tradition.
Notes
1. The incomparable state flower of Texas!
2. C. S. Lewis, “The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version.” In Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper.
3. Milton C. Fisher, “The Pattern of Sound Words: An Essential Quality in Bible Translation,” unpublished review of the New King James Version.
4. Examples include abba, maranatha, and talitha, cumi.
5. The Jewish method of referring to the books of the Pentateuch is by their first few words in Hebrew.
6. For a fascinating account of the French, Latin, and other influences on English, see Robert Claiborne, Our Marvelous Native Tongue, especially chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 7, “The Verie Height,” is about Shakespeare and the King James Bible.