The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of
C >>
Cleland Boyd McAfee >> The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version ofScanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
THE GREATEST
ENGLISH CLASSIC
A STUDY OF THE
KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE
AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LIFE
AND LITERATURE
BY
CLELAND BOYD McAFEE, D.D.
CONTENTS
LECTURE
PREFACE
I. PREPARING THE WAY--THE ENGLISH BIBLE BEFORE KING JAMES
II. THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES VERSION; ITS CHARACTERISTICS
III. THE KING JAMES VERSION As ENGLISH LITERATURE
IV. THE INFLUENCE OF THE KING JAMES VERSION ON
ENGLISH LITERATURE
V. THE KING JAMES VERSION--ITS INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH
AND AMERICAN HISTORY
VI. THE BIBLE IN THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
PREFACE
THE lectures included in this volume were
prepared at the request of the Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences, and were delivered
in the early part of 1912, under its
auspices. They were suggested by the tercentenary
of the King James version of the Bible. The
plan adopted led to a restatement of the history
which prepared for the version, and of that which
produced it. It was natural next to point out its
principal characteristics as a piece of literature.
Two lectures followed, noting its influence on
literature and on history. The course closed with
a statement and argument regarding the place
of the Bible in the life of to-day.
The reception accorded the lectures at the time
of their public delivery, and the discussion which
ensued upon some of the points raised, encourage
the hope that they may be more widely useful.
It is a pleasure to assign to Dr. Franklin W.
Hooper, director of the Institute, whatever credit
the work may merit. Certainly it would not
have been undertaken without his kindly urgency.
CLELAND BOYD McAFEE.
Brooklyn, New York, May, 1912.
THE GREATEST
ENGLISH CLASSIC
LECTURE I
PREPARING THE WAY--THE ENGLISH BIBLE BEFORE KING JAMES
THERE are three great Book-religions--
Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.
Other religions have their sacred writings,
but they do not hold them in the same regard as
do these three. Buddhism and Confucianism
count their books rather records of their faith
than rules for it, history rather than authoritative
sources of belief. The three great Book-religions
yield a measure of authority to their
sacred books which would be utterly foreign to
the thought of other faiths.
Yet among the three named are two very distinct
attitudes. To the Mohammedan the language
as well as the matter of the Koran is
sacred. He will not permit its translation. Its
original Arabic is the only authoritative tongue
in which it can speak. It has been translated
into other tongues, but always by adherents of
other faiths, never by its own believers. The
Hebrew and the Christian, on the other hand,
but notably the Christian, have persistently
sought to make their Bible speak all languages at
all times.
It is a curious fact that a Book written in one
tongue should have come to its largest power in
other languages than its own. The Bible means
more to-day in German and French and English
than it does in Hebrew and Chaldaic and Greek--
more even than it ever meant in those languages.
There is nothing just like that in literary history.
It is as though Shakespeare should after a while
become negligible for most readers in English,
and be a master of thought in Chinese and Hindustani,
or in some language yet unborn.
We owe this persistent effort to make the Bible
speak the language of the times to a conviction
that the particular language used is not the
great thing, that there is something in it which
gives it power and value in any tongue. No book
was ever translated so often. Men who have
known it in its earliest tongues have realized that
their fellows would not learn these earliest
tongues, and they have set out to make it speak
the tongue their fellows did know. Some have
protested that there is impiety in making it
speak the current tongue, and have insisted that
men should learn the earliest speech, or at least
accept their knowledge of the Book from those
who did know it. But they have never stopped
the movement. They have only delayed it.
The first movement to make the Scripture
speak the current tongue appeared nearly three
centuries before Christ. Most of the Old Testament
then existed in Hebrew. But the Jews had
scattered widely. Many had gathered in Egypt
where Alexander the Great had founded the city
that bears his name. At one time a third of the
population of the city was Jewish. Many of
the people were passionately loyal to their old
religion and its Sacred Book. But the current
tongue there and through most of the civilized
world was Greek, and not Hebrew. As always,
there were some who felt that the Book and its
original language were inseparable. Others revealed
the disposition of which we spoke a moment
ago, and set out to make the Book speak
the current tongue. For one hundred and fifty
years the work went on, and what we call the
Septuagint was completed. There is a pretty
little story which tells how the version got its
name, which means the Seventy--that King
Ptolemy Philadelphus, interested in collecting all
sacred books, gathered seventy Hebrew scholars,
sent them to the island of Pharos, shut them up
in seventy rooms for seventy days, each making
a translation from the Hebrew into the Greek.
When they came out, behold, their translations
were all exactly alike! Several difficulties appear
in that story, one of which is that seventy men
should have made the same mistakes without
depending on each other. In addition, it is not
historically supported, and the fact seems to be
that the Septuagint was a long and slow growth,
issuing from the impulse to make the Sacred
Book speak the familiar tongue. And, though
it was a Greek translation, it virtually displaced
the original, as the English Bible has virtually
displaced the Hebrew and Greek to-day. The
Septuagint was the Old Testament which Paul
used. Of one hundred and sixty-eight direct
quotations from the Old Testament in the New
nearly all are from the Greek version--from the
translation, and not from the original.
We owe still more to translation. While there
is accumulating evidence that there was spoken
in Palestine at that time a colloquial Greek, with
which most people would be familiar, it is yet
probable that our Lord spoke neither Greek
nor Hebrew currently, but Aramaic. He knew
the Hebrew Scriptures, of course, as any well-
trained lad did; but most of His words have come
down to us in translation. His name, for example,
to His Hebrew mother, was not Jesus, but
Joshua; and Jesus is the translation of the Hebrew
Joshua into Greek. We have His words as they
were translated by His disciples into the Greek,
in which the New Testament was originally written.
By the time the writing of the New Testament
was completed, say one hundred years after
Christ, while Greek was still current speech, the
Roman Empire was so dominant that the common
people were talking Latin almost as much
as Greek, and gradually, because political power
was behind it, the Latin gained on the Greek,
and became virtually the speech of the common
people. The movement to make the Bible talk
the language of the time appeared again. It is
impossible to say now when the first translations
into Latin were made. Certainly there were
some within two centuries after Christ, and by
250 A.D. a whole Bible in Latin was in circulation
in the Roman Empire. The translation
of the New Testament was from the Greek, of
course, but so was that of the Old Testament,
and the Latin versions of the Old Testament
were, therefore, translations of a translation.
There were so many of these versions, and
they were so unequal in value, that there was
natural demand for a Latin translation that
should be authoritative. So came into being
what we call the Vulgate, whose very name indicates
the desire to get the Bible into the vulgar
or common tongue. Jerome began by revising
the earlier Latin translations, but ended by going
back of all translations to the original Greek,
and back of the Septuagint to the original Hebrew
wherever he could do so. Fourteen years he
labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine,
to do his work the better. Barely four
hundred years (404 A.D.) after the birth of
Christ his Latin version appeared. It met a
storm of protest for its effort to go back of
the Septuagint, so dominant had the translation
become. Jerome fought for it, and his version
won the day, and became the authoritative Latin
translation of the Bible.
For seven or eight centuries it held its sway
as the current version nearest to the tongue of
the people. Latin had become the accepted
tongue of the church. There was little general
culture, there was little general acquaintance
with the Bible except among the educated.
During all that time there was no real room for
a further translation. One of the writers[1] says:
"Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible
in the mother tongue; while the illiterate majority
were in no condition to feel the want of
such a book, the educated minority would be
averse to so great and revolutionary a change."
When a man cannot read any writing it really
does not matter to him whether books are in
current speech or not, and the majority of the
people for those seven or eight centuries could
read nothing at all. Those who could read anything
were apt to be able to read the Latin.
[1] Hoare, Evolution of the English Bible, p. 39.
These centuries added to the conviction of
many that the Bible ought not to become too
common, that it should not be read by everybody,
that it required a certain amount of learning
to make it safe reading. They came to feel
that it is as important to have an authoritative
interpretation of the Bible as to have the Bible
itself. When the movement began to make it
speak the new English tongue, it provoked the
most violent opposition. Latin had been good
enough for a millennium; why cheapen the Bible
by a translation? There had grown up a feeling
that Jerome himself had been inspired. He had
been canonized, and half the references to him
in that time speak of him as the inspired translator.
Criticism of his version was counted as
impious and profane as criticisms of the original
text could possibly have been. It is one of the
ironies of history that the version for which
Jerome had to fight, and which was counted a
piece of impiety itself, actually became the
ground on which men stood when they fought
against another version, counting anything else
but this very version an impious intrusion!
How early the movement for an English Bible
began, it is impossible now to say. Certainly
just before 700 A.D., that first singer of the English
tongue, Caedmon, had learned to paraphrase
the Bible. We may recall the Venerable Bede's
charming story of him, and how he came by his
power of interpretation. Bede himself was a
child when Caedmon died, and the romance of
the story makes it one of the finest in our literature.
Caedmon was a peasant, a farm laborer
in Northumbria working on the lands of the great
Abbey at Whitby. Already he had passed middle
life, and no spark of genius had flashed in
him. He loved to go to the festive gatherings
and hear the others sing their improvised poems;
but, when the harp came around to him in due
course, he would leave the room, for be could not
sing. One night when he had slipped away
from the group in shame and had made his
rounds of the horses and cattle under his care,
he fell asleep in the stable building, and heard
a voice in his sleep bidding him sing. When he
declared he could not, the voice still bade him
sing. "What shall I sing?" he asked. "Sing
the first beginning of created things." And
the words came to him; and, still dreaming, he
sang his first hymn to the Creator. In the
morning he told his story, and the Lady Abbess
found that he had the divine gift. The monks
had but to translate to him bits of the Bible
out of the Latin, which he did not understand,
into his familiar Anglo-Saxon tongue, and he
would cast it into the rugged Saxon measures
which could be sung by the common people.
So far as we can tell, it was so, that the Bible
story became current in Anglo-Saxon speech.
Bede himself certainly put the Gospel of John
into Anglo-Saxon. At the Bodleian Library, at
Oxford, there is a manuscript of nearly twenty
thousand lines, the metrical version of the
Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an
Augustinian monk named Orm, and so called
the Ormulum. There were other metrical versions
of various parts of the Bible. Midway
between Bede and Orm came Langland's
poem, "The Vision of Piers Plowman,"
which paraphrased so much of the Scripture.
Yet the fact is that until the last quarter of
the fourteenth century there was no prose version
of the Bible in the English language. Indeed,
there was only coming to be an English
language. It was gradually emerging, taking
definite shape and form, so that it could be
distinguished from the earlier Norman French,
Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in which so much of
it is rooted.
As soon as the language grew definite enough,
it was inevitable that two things should come
to pass. First, that some men would attempt
to make a colloquial version of the Bible; and,
secondly, that others would oppose it. One can
count with all confidence on these two groups
of men, marching through history like the
animals into the ark, two and two. Some men
propose, others oppose. They are built on
those lines.
We are more concerned with the men who made
the versions; but we must think a moment of
the others. One of his contemporaries, Knighton,
may speak for all in his saying of Wiclif,
that he had, to be sure, translated the Gospel
into the Anglic tongue, but that it had thereby
been made vulgar by him, and more open to the
reading of laymen and women than it usually
is to the knowledge of lettered and intelligent
clergy, and "thus the pearl is cast abroad and
trodden under the feet of swine"; and, that we
may not be in doubt who are the swine, he adds:
"The jewel of the Church is turned into the
common sport of the people."
But two strong impulses drive thoughtful
men to any effort that will secure wide knowledge
of the Bible. One is their love of the Bible and
their belief in it; but the other, dominant then
and now, is a sense of the need of their own
time. It cannot be too strongly urged that the
two great pioneers of English Bible translation,
Wiclif and Tindale, more than a century apart,
were chiefly moved to their work by social conditions.
No one could read the literature of
the times of which we are speaking without
smiling at our assumption that we are the first
who have cared for social needs. We talk about
the past as the age of the individual, and the
present as the social age. Our fathers, we say,
cared only to be saved themselves, and had no
concern for the evils of society. They believed
in rescuing one here and another there, while
we have come to see the wisdom of correcting
the conditions that ruin men, and so saving men
in the mass. There must be some basis of
truth for that, since we say it so confidently;
but it can be much over-accented. There were
many of our fathers, and of our grandfathers,
who were mightily concerned with the mass of
people, and looked as carefully as we do for a
corrective of social evils. Wiclif, in the late
fourteenth century, and Tindale, in the early
sixteenth, were two such men. The first English
translations of the Bible were fruits of the
social impulse.
Wiclif was impressed with the chasm that
was growing between the church and the people,
and felt that a wider and fuller knowledge
of the Bible would be helpful for the closing of
the chasm. It is a familiar remark of Miss
Jane Addams that the cure for the evils of
democracy is more democracy. Wiclif believed
that the cure for the evils of religion is more
religion, more intelligent religion. He found a
considerable feeling that the best things in
religion ought to be kept from most people,
since they could not be trusted to understand
them. His own feeling was that the best things
in religion are exactly the things most people
ought to know most about; that people had better
handle the Bible carelessly, mistakenly, than
be shut out from it by any means whatever.
We owe the first English translation to a faith
that the Bible is a book of emancipation for the
mind and for the political life.
John Wiclif himself was a scholar of Oxford,
master of that famous Balliol College which
has had such a list of distinguished masters.
He was an adviser of Edward III. Twenty
years after his death a younger contemporary
(W. Thorpe) said that "he was considered by
many to be the most holy of all the men of his
age. He was of emaciated frame, spare, and
well nigh destitute of strength. He was absolutely
blameless in his conduct." And even
that same Knighton who accused him of casting
the Church's pearl before swine says that in
philosophy "he came to be reckoned inferior
to none of his time."
But it was not at Oxford that he came to know
common life so well and to sense the need for
a new social influence. He came nearer to it
when he was rector of the parish at Lutterworth.
As scholar and rector he set going the
two great movements which leave his name in
history. One was his securing, training, and
sending out a band of itinerant preachers or
"poor priests" to gather the people in fields
and byways and to preach the simple truths
of the Christian religion. They were unpaid,
and lived by the kindness of the common people.
They came to be called Lollards, though
the origin of the name is obscure. Their followers
received the same name. A few years
after Wiclif's death an enemy bitterly observed
that if you met any two men one was sure to
be a Lollard. It was the "first time in English
history that an appeal had been made to the
people instead of the scholars." Religion was
to be made rather a matter of practical life than
of dogma or of ritual. The "poor priests" in
their cheap brown robes became a mighty religious
force, and evoked opposition from the
Church powers. A generation after Wiclif's
death they had become a mighty political force
in the controversy between the King and the
Pope. As late as 1521 five hundred Lollards
were arrested in London by the bishop.[1] Wiclif's
purpose, however, was to reach and help the
common people with the simpler, and therefore
the most fundamental, truths of religion.
[1] Muir, Our Grand Old Bible, p. 14.
The other movement which marks Wiclif's
name concerns us more; but it was connected
with the first. He set out to give the common
people the full text of the Bible for their common
use, and to encourage them not only in reading
it, if already they could read, but in learning to
read that they might read it. Tennyson
compares the village of Lutterworth to that of
Bethlehem, on the ground that if Christ, the
Word of God, was born at Bethlehem, the Word
of Life was born again at Lutterworth.[1] The
translation was from the Vulgate, and Wiclif
probably did little of the actual work himself,
yet it is all his work. And in 1382, more than
five centuries ago, there appeared the first complete
English version of the Bible. Wiclif made
it the people's Book, and the English people were
the first of the modern nations to whom the
Bible as a whole was given in their own familiar
tongue. Once it got into their hands they have
never let it be taken entirely away.
[1] "Not least art thou, thou little Bethlehem
In Judah, for in thee the Lord was born;
Nor thou in Britain, little Lutterworth,
Least, for in thee the word was born again."
--Sir John Oldcastle.
Of course, all this was before the days of
printing, and copies were made by hand only.
Yet there were very many of them. One hundred
and fifty manuscripts, in whole or in part,
are extant still, a score of them of the original
version, the others of the revision at once undertaken
by John Purvey, Wiclif's disciple. The
copies belonging to Edward VI. and Queen
Elizabeth are both still in existence, and both
show much use. Twenty years after it was
completed copies were counted very valuable,
though they were very numerous. It was not
uncommon for a single complete manuscript
copy of the Wiclif version to be sold for one
hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, and
Foxe, whose Book of Martyrs we used to read as
children, tells that a load of hay was given
for the use of a New Testament one hour a day.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence
of this gift to the English people. It constitutes
the standard of Middle English. Chaucer and
Wiclif stood side by side. It is true that
Chaucer himself accepted Wiclif's teaching, and
some of the wise men think that the "parson"
of whom he speaks so finely as one who taught
the lore of Christ and His apostles twelve, but
first followed it himself, was Wiclif. But the version
had far more than literary influence; it had
tremendous power in keeping alive in England
that spirit of free inquiry which is the only safeguard
of free institutions. Here was the entire
source of the Christian faith available for the
judgment of common men, and they became at
once judges of religious and political dogma.
Dr. Ladd thinks it was not the reading of the
Bible which produced the Reformation; it was
the Reformation itself which procured the reading
of the Bible.[1] But Dr. Rashdall and Professor
Pollard and others are right when they
insist that the English Reformation received less
from Luther than from the secret reading of the
Scripture over the whole country. What we
call the English spirit of free inquiry was fostered
and developed by Wiclif and his Lollards
with the English Scripture in their hands. Out
of it has grown as out of no other one root the
freedom of the English and American people.
[1] What Is the Bible?, p. 45.
This work of Wiclif deserves the time we have
given it because it asserted a principle for the
English people. There was much yet to be
done before entire freedom was gained. At
Oxford, in the Convocation of 1408, it was
solemnly voted: "We decree and ordain that
no man hereafter by his own authority translate
any text of the Scripture into English, or
any other tongue, by way of a book, pamphlet,
or other treatise; but that no man read any
such book, pamphlet, or treatise now lately composed
in the time of John Wiclif ... until the
said translation be approved by the orderly of
the place." But it was too late. It is always
too late to overtake a liberating idea once it
gets free. Tolstoi tells of Batenkoff, the Russian
nihilist, that after he was seized and confined
in his cell he was heard to laugh loudly;
and, when they asked him the cause of his mirth,
he said that he could not fail to be amused at
the absurdity of the situation. "They have
caught me," he said, "and shut me up here;
but my ideas are out yonder in the streets and
in the fields, absolutely free. They cannot
overtake them." It was already too late,
twenty years after Wiclif's version was available,
to stop the English people in their search
for religious truth.
In the century just after the Wiclif translation,
two great events occurred which bore
heavily on the spread of the Bible. One was
the revival of learning, which made popular
again the study of the classics and the classical
languages. Critical and exact Greek scholarship
became again a possibility. Remember that
Wiclif did not know Greek nor Hebrew, did not
need to know them to be the foremost scholar
of Oxford in the fourteenth century. Even as
late as 1502 there was no professor of Greek at
the proud University of Erfurt when Luther was
a student there. It was after he became a
doctor of divinity and a university professor
that he learned Greek in order to be a better
Bible student, and his young friend Philip
Melancthon was the first to teach Greek in
the University.[1] But under the influence of
Erasmus and his kind, with their new insistence
on classical learning, there came necessarily a
new appraisal of the Vulgate as a translation
of the original Bible. For a thousand years
there had been no new study of the original
Bible languages in Europe. The Latin of the
Vulgate had become as sacred as the Book itself.
But the revival of learning threw scholarship
back on the sources of the text. Erasmus
and others published versions of the Greek
Testament which were disturbing to the Vulgate
as a final version.
[1] McGiffert, Martin Luther.
The other great event of that same century
was the invention of printing with movable