The Book of Books

In terms of the long-term effect, I think that the Bible has it. Shakespeare has been read and heard by millions: the Bible by hundreds of millions. Shakespeare – who was Bible-bottomed – has infiltrated the imagination of generations, but only relatively recently that of the masses of the people. The King James Bible worked its many effects for centuries, was read in churches and assemblies and in schools and on solemn and formal occasions all over Britain, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and scores of other countries. Moreover, for much of that time and for many people now, it was not only and not principally a book of fine words but the book of the great faith. Indeed, for millions along the way, it was the Word of God through His prophets and of Christ through His Apostles: language was seen as the subordinate clause of its impact.

By the time of Tyndale the English language was reaping a golden harvest. There was the rock of Anglo-Saxon – still the fundament – the subject-verb-object organisation often of monosyllables that again and again carry rich meaning in brief expression. ‘Let there be light’, or from Shakespeare, ‘To be or not to be’ – arguably the two best known quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare. There are thousands of others. Then there was the input of the Norse which freckled the language with tough words and hammered off the encrustations of Germanic grammar. Norman-French brought a bounty of new words and also words which ran alongside the old – ‘archer and bowman’ for instance, which give the language synonyms, slyness and subtlety, qualities embellished when the more fashionable French of Paris was adopted by the court in London.

In the early fifteenth century, the hero warrior king Henry V broke with the past and sent home his letters from the battlefields of France not as was customary in the language of the court (French) but in English. Chaucer had emerged, an instant success, as the new voice and father of English literature. Grammar schools began to teach English and halfway through the fourteenth century, the first of the York Mystery Plays was produced – in English – and had a heartening reception.

And the English dialects, the riot and confusion of English spellings were set on the road to coherence by two engines. The first was the Signet Office located in the still existing Great Hall of Parliament. Henry V decreed it should use English. But what English? The variety was profligate: there were dozens of words for church – kyrk, kric, cherche, chorche, schyrche, ssherch. Though it is hard to credit, there were 500 ways of spelling the word ‘through’ and over sixty ways to spell ‘she’, but so it was. ‘People’ went into dozens – ‘peple, pepul, pepulle, poepul, puple, pople . . .’. ‘Receive’ could be ‘rasaive, rassaif, rassave, resaf, resaive, resseyve . . .’.

The scribes of the Signet Office took it to the Chancery which was responsible for the paperwork which legislated for the kingdom. The twelve senior clerks, the Master of Chancery, and their twenty-four assistants or cursitors, and their clerks and sub-clerks got to work. The work was to regularise the language in such a way that the law of the land would be clear from coast to coast as it had been in Latin. Evidence in court had to have words widely understood and agreed on. Chancery decided that it would be ‘such’ and not ‘sich, sych, seche, swiche . . .’.

The second engine was the printing press: William Caxton, born about 1420, learned the craft in Bruges and came back to London where eventually he set up his press in 1476 and changed the way the world worked and was perceived. One of his first printings was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which has never been out of print since. By the end of the fifteenth century, English was the language of the state, and increasingly of the law and of literature. Ripe for any purpose. The last fortress it had to conquer was that of the self-appointed, or, as they believed, divinely ordained, keepers of the eternal Kingdom of God, the Roman Catholic Church.

And that Church, with the help of the crown, made it as difficult as it possibly could. The language of the Greatest Authority and His Representative on Earth was Latin and it belonged to them. The Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, with its radical call for equality based on biblical slogans, had captured the Tower of London, executed the Archbishop of Canterbury and very nearly toppled the court. This had frightened the establishment badly. The reaction was draconian. The English peasants were not to be armed with the Bible in their own tongue. This was presented as an aesthetic argument – the English language was too coarse and rude to be permitted to carry the Words of God which were already cast in lines of antique beauty.

As the Bible historian Alister McGrath points out: ‘In 1407 Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, banned the Bible in English. “We therefore legislate and ordain that nobody shall from this day forth translate any text of Holy Scripture on his own authority into English.” ’ Translating the Bible into English became a heresy punishable by death: usually death by being burned at the stake. Even as late as 1513, the Dean of St Paul’s was suspended just for translating the Lord’s Prayer into English.

Yet English would no longer be excluded. When it could legally be read or read aloud, as in the case of Chaucer, it was; when the Bible was banned in English, the Wycliffe translation found its voice in secret locations. The force was with it. One of Henry VIII’s advisers noted in 1527: ‘the universal people of this realm had great pleasure and gave themselves greatly to the reading of the vulgar English tongue.’ Yet in Oxford and Cambridge, even a hundred years later, 99 per cent of their libraries were in Latin.

So when the translation of Tyndale was printed abroad and smuggled in (often unbound in bales of cloth) there was hunger for it. William Malden recollected reading Tyndale’s New Testament in the late 1520s: ‘Divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford . . . where my father dwelt and I born and with him grew up, the said poor men bought the New Testament of Jesus Christ and on Sundays did sit reading in the lower end of the church and many would flock to hear their reading.’

What the King James Bible was to do was to provide a standard and a stability for what was considered to be the best possible English literary language. The 1611 translation, after a few uneasy years, became the book of English speakers. Its retention of certain already rather archaic forms – ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ – gave it an air of important antiquity, the stamp of ancestry, a sense of an emanation from a sacred past. ‘You’ had replaced ‘thou’ in educated speech in about 1575. And just as much of the greatest art in the world came about as an unexpected consequence of the religious purpose of those works, so the beauty of the King James Bible came as a by-product of the dedication to accuracy and the determination to do fullest justice to the words of the faith.

When Tyndale learned Hebrew, he said that he found a natural affinity between Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon and certainly the King James Bible is studded with English idioms taken from Hebrew idioms and given the genius touch of memorability. Here are a few. ‘To lick the dust’, ‘to fall flat on his face’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘to pour out one’s heart’, ‘the land of the living’, ‘under the sun’, ‘from time to time’, ‘pride goes before a fall’, ‘to rise and shine’, ‘a fly in the ointment’. And there are so many others, not only from Hebrew sources: ‘the mark of Cain’, ‘a mess of pottage’, ‘the fat of the land’, ‘flesh pots’, ‘to everything there is a season’, ‘the apple of his eye’, ‘how are the mighty fallen’, ‘the wisdom of Solomon’, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, ‘vanity of vanities’, ‘grind the faces of the poor’, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’, ‘no peace for the wicked’, ‘the parting of the ways’, ‘man cannot live by bread alone’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘cast your pearls before swine’, ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, ‘sign of the times’, ‘wars and rumours of wars’, ‘a law unto himself’, ‘through a glass darkly’, ‘lost sheep’, ‘I wash my hands of it’, ‘of making books there is no end’.

Latin, which had been the monopolist, suffered rather badly in transition to the vernacular. So greatly nationalistic did some scholars become in the second half of the seventeenth century that they attempted to eliminate Latin altogether. The new passion for English – cleverly spotted and exploited by Henry V – is just one, though a very powerful, example of a country or a people (as happened with Afro-Americans) defining itself by how it spoke and what it spoke.

So we get Sir John Cheke (1514 – 57), the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, a man appointed to uphold and defend the classical inheritance – Greek and Latin – attempting to eliminate both. He translated Matthew and Mark and avoided the Latin ‘centurion’ (he replaced it by ‘hundreder’ though this did not catch on); nor did his term ‘mooned’ replace ‘lunatic’. He failed to replace the Latin ‘crucified’ with his English ‘crossed’ and we can all be thankful that his ‘wizards’ did not dislodge ‘wise men’. Still, he is a fine, though failed, example of someone who wanted to clear out the cupboard of all inherited goods and spices. Just for balance, the Roman Catholic translation into English – the Douay-Rheims version – kept as strong a Latinate feeling and vocabulary as possible and the result creaks.

On the whole, 93 per cent of words used in the King James Bible, according to Alister McGrath, are native English. This included the retention of what were already becoming archaisms: ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ have been mentioned, although ‘you’ was coming in at that time. This also applied to verbs: ‘sayest’, ‘giveth’, although ‘gives’ was replacing it. Englishness was the benchmark. The older translation and formulations gave it gravitas.

As a book designed to be read aloud, it is reader-proof. Children’s voices pipe it shyly in their high clear tones and pick up the music. Adults, however cautious, always feel the urge to step up to the lectern and be at their best and find the rhythmic truth in the ancient, so well and widely heard words. Those who are carried away by their readings in church or assembly from the prophets and the Gospels can fire on seven cylinders and find salvation in a set of syllables. It came out of a time of ardent reborn faith as well as passionate reborn language.

It might entertain you to see what a linguistic scholar makes of the verses. This is very specialised but shows the range of interests this book can provoke. It is from a pamphlet by Dr Lane Cooper, called ‘Certain Rhythms in the English Bible’ first published by Cornell University Press in 1952.

‘If preachers, orators and writers would spend a little time noting the rhythms of [the Authorised Version] they would grow discontented with the sentences that please them now. Consider, for instance, the effect of the long row of dactyls in this sentence: “who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the law revealed?” or the change from iambus to dactyl in the sentence “the sun to rule by day; for his mercy ruleth for ever”.’ As one example of the use of anapaests, Dr Cooper cites: ‘My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew.’ Finally observe the use of cretic feet in the translation of James i,19: ‘swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath’.

We tend to think of the Bible in holy terms – initially putting aside the violence between brothers, the lust, rape and slaughter, the unchristian vengeance of Jehovah. Nor do we call to mind ‘coarse’ language. But it has been found fault with, in its time. Dr Thomas Bowdler, who so successfully ‘cleaned up’ Shakespeare and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, gave us a word, a rather derogatory word, to ‘bowdlerise’, meaning to cut what he saw as matter offensive to ladies.

The influence on orators has been mentioned, most especially on the call to unity of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the call to action in Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’ To see, in Old Testament prophecy, was to foretell that something would indeed happen, as Isaiah said in the prophecy on which Dr King drew so heavily for that justly famous speech.

The spirituals, too, found their basic justification in the King James Version, in Paul to the Ephesians ‘speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord’. ‘Spiritual song’ was used in both black and white congregations. The term ‘Negro Spiritual’ first appears in print in the 1860s by which time slaves had made the form their own, not only in their take on the words and stories from the King James Version, or in the way they intermeshed Methodism with African music, but by the passion and longing and urgency of their sung praise and prayers.

David Crystal is described on his latest book cover as ‘the world’s greatest authority on the English language’. He writes that the King James Version has ‘contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatics or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source’. He cites Lord Macaulay advising Lady Holland in 1831: ‘a person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the bible at his finger ends.’ He also says, which has appeared in this book but bears repeating for such a source, that ‘the good style of the English language has been so influenced by the Bible because of the public presence it had in the 17th century and has had ever since.’ A language bred from and carried by a faith.

In his latest book, Begat, Professor Crystal takes a few dozen of the best known idioms and demonstrates how they have not only kept their old value but bred, or begat, variations which themselves have entered the language. These idioms have, in fact, been and continue to be a resource for phrasemakers who might have little or no awareness of the spring they come from, let alone the context which gave them their original enduring power. And sometimes they bend and twist the quotation, employing half here and an inversion there without knowing it, let alone acknowledging it: but it’s fun and it adds to the word-hoard. The phrases have not only stayed in the minds and the faith of those anchored to the Bible but they have sailed free, roved widely, often wildly.

To take a few examples from Begat. From Genesis ‘be fruitful and multiply’, Crystal’s research brings us, among others, ‘Be Fruitful’ – the National Gardening Association urging its readers to eat more fruit every day: a dietary instruction. ‘Be fruitful and flourish’ – from the New York Times (2008), consumers urged to be fruitful but can sales multiply. On evolution – ‘Be fruitful and divide’; and pop groups – ‘Be fruitful and multiply (your fan base)’. And there’s a recent novel called Be Fruitful and Multi-Lie. There are more: they just multiply.

‘Let there be light’ is another: it’s been a film, several songs, a television arts programme, the motto of a university, an episode of Sex and the City, and most useful for advertising eye-surgery. An oil find in Israel generated ‘let there be light crude’; in Ghana, ‘let there be light off the grid’. It is perverted frequently: of airline delays, ‘Let there be flight’; of boxing, ‘let there be fight’. There’s ‘let there be height’ and ‘blight’, even, for a vampire show, ‘let there be fright’ .

‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is an example which is rarely used correctly but widely appropriated – as ‘Brother’s Keeper’ in dozens of episodes of television series; as My Brother’s Keeper in three films and in two pop songs and albums; Dakin Williams’s biography of his brother Tennessee Williams is called His Brother’s Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams. There’s ‘Her Brother’s Keeper’ and Our Brothers’ Keepers Foundation for HIV/AIDS; and the internet scourings of David Crystal have turned up yet more – My Mother’s Keeper (a book by the daughter of Bette Davis); and many articles – ‘Am I My Brother’s Goalkeeper?’ and ‘Am I My Brother’s Gatekeeper?’ ‘Am I My Bookkeeper’s Keeper?’ And Crystal refers to the joke about the ape in the zoo reading Darwin: ‘Am I my keeper’s brother?’

And how many Ten Commandments, or at any rate Commandments, do we have? (The ‘Nine Commandments of Travel Writing’, The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women.) And how many ‘shalt nots’: ‘Thou shalt not kill, except in a popular video game’; ‘thou shalt not upload’. While ‘thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’ slithers into headlines such as ‘Don’t take Che’s name in vain’; ‘US military don’t take names in vain.’ On we go with ‘A Coat of Many Colours’, ‘How Are the Mighty Fallen!’, ‘Nothing new under the sun’, ‘Be horribly afraid’, ‘Sowing seeds’.

Are there phrases from any of the subsequent versions of the Bible, those which have made a takeover bid for the King James Version, which will dance so usefully through the centuries and give such pleasure? Where are the modern imprints’ equivalence of the King James’s language, with its wonderful flexibility, its seductive ability to pun and frolic and enlighten in gossip and literature, on the internet, in modern technology and in playground witticisms? Is this not evidence for the durable nature of the King James Version? And if some verses seem a bit difficult now and then a little explanation will clear that up, while regular reading or listening will turn the ‘difficulties’ into phrases to be cherished.

The cries go up that the new translations are simpler to understand and that Christianity in certain countries, especially in the United Kingdom, is on an inevitable decline due to a multitude of causes and therefore drastic renovations were needed. In my view one cause of the decline is the retreat from the words of the King James Version. Do we tolerate (save for schoolchildren) the dilution and simplification of the words of Shakespeare? People say there is more holiness in a theatre now than in a church and that is largely because the words spoken are the words written, whatever century they came out of.

Not so in our churches now with rare exceptions. We appear to have thrown the King James Bible away on the bonfire of populism. The chief argument is that it is ‘difficult to understand nowadays’. Some of it is difficult, but not much, and it is not difficult to explain or to teach. It was always a little difficult and in that difficulty was one of its strengths: it showed seriousness, it expressed depths of meaning, it provoked thought.

The best of what we are – Protestant or not – was grounded in this book. In assemblies and like occasions it was a symbol of community and a reminder of the survival and formation of who and what we are. Surely it has earned a unique place and can be reclaimed as a national book without upsetting others?