At the liberal arts college where I teach Renaissance literature, few of my students seem to practice any organized religion. For some, even the names Adam and Eve prompt only vague recognition. So when I assigned bits of the King James Bible last spring, I was surprised by the fascination it inspired.
My students marveled at how its language was used by 17th-century writers, appearing in daring poetry and polemics against retrograde social norms. They were perhaps even more impressed by the history behind the text: how some 50 mostly forgotten academics created a book that bridged chasms of geography, gender, race and class as the default English Bible for Protestants for hundreds of years.
We were ahead of the curve. These past few months, more Americans have been discussing the King James Bible — just not for the right reasons. In June, Texas moved forward with a plan to make passages from the King James required reading for public school students. Despite some notable defenses, the plan has caught major flak for its dubious constitutionality and mandated curriculum. I won’t try to redeem it here.
But I do thank Texas for putting the King James back onto our cultural radar. The text is a master class in collaboration, close attention to language and ideological humility. It’s exactly the book we need now, in our lonely, laconic times.
As with all great things, the King James Bible began at a conference. (At least this one was at a palace.) The 1604 meeting came soon after James VI of Scotland assumed England’s throne. Born to a Catholic mother but raised by hard-line Protestants, James hoped to be something of a religious unifier. He met with representatives of two feuding factions within the Church of England: high churchmen and Puritans. Most of the Puritans’ ideas for religious reform were shot down — except for one. James agreed to authorize a new translation of the Bible.
Unlike most “great books” in English, the King James Bible was undertaken not by an individual author but by six companies, or committees, of idiosyncratic men. One of these men, John Overall, was so fluent in Latin that speaking English left him sapped. Another, the virulently learned Lancelot Andrewes, gave sermons in English that drew huge crowds. Descriptions like this one in Genesis, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” sparkle with his signature sheen of parallelism and theatrical cadence.
Other translators achieved eloquent majesty of their own. One of my favorite passages is the paean to human perseverance in Psalm 30: “For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
By some measures, the translators made for a homogenous group — white, male, Christian, scholars, and nearly all clerics to boot. But the companies included other kinds of diversity. The former dean of Westminster was in the room alongside country parsons. Puritans and high churchmen teamed up. The group even reached beyond Protestantism for help, at a time when Catholics were very much on the outs.
Theoretically, each translator was to work through all of his company’s assigned books. This meant scrutinizing the original Hebrew or Greek text, early commentaries and other translations to hybridize their various strengths. Eventually, committee members reconvened to settle on a version everyone could live with, picking over the verbal banquet like a family at Thanksgiving dinner. They then passed their work on to other companies for feedback — and consulted outside experts as needed — before submitting a final draft.
The entire process required a certain openness to ambiguity. As the cleric and translator Miles Smith notes in the 1611 preface to the King James, many Hebrew and Greek words have multiple English counterparts. Some of these alternatives are included in the margins. Others were debated by the translators. One translator recorded substitutes for the verb “understood” (“ephronoun”) in Paul’s famous phrase, “I understood as a child”: “I cared as a child,” “I had a child’s mind,” “I imagined as a child,” “I was affected as a child.” These possibilities were considered by the supercommittee that reviewed the finished King James by reading it aloud. Whenever a concern arose, recitation paused until the disagreement could be sorted out.
All of this took nearly a decade. The result, however, was an impressively accurate translation that, almost incidentally, is also extremely beautiful. As Smith wrote in the preface, the King James Bible “openeth the window, to let in the light.” The text illuminates more than the 17th-century mind: Elizabeth Cady Stanton riffed on the King James in the Woman’s Bible published in the 1890s; Lincoln echoed its rhythms in the Gettysburg Address; and Martin Luther King Jr. reorchestrated them in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Although it’s no longer the default Protestant Bible, and although our age is a more secular, perhaps even post-literate era, I’m heartened by how the King James still resonates with readers. For starters, the story of how dozens of individuals painstakingly crafted the Bible by working together is a powerful counterpoint to the artificial intelligence tools making it easier to farm out the work of thinking, writing and socializing than ever before.
Several weeks ago, an M.I.T. committee on A.I. reported that the school has experienced “decreased attendance at office hours, reduced participation in online discussions and, as we heard anecdotally, a drop in in-person study groups in dorms, libraries and other study spaces.” Academic conferences rumble with murmurs about students whose reluctance to peer-edit papers is matched only by their willingness to submit ones confabulated by Claude. And some of my own students have mentioned the challenge of staying motivated in seminar when friends at other institutions — and certain peers — are whizzing through work alone.
To vindicate cooperative intellectual struggle in the abstract is difficult. Thankfully, the King James Bible provides some concrete help. It brings the byways and benefits of such effort into vivid relief. Indeed, the book’s most enduring lesson is that intellectual endeavor needn’t be a solo, much less screen-siloed, affair. Quite the opposite. It gains meaning and nuance from time spent with other humans, around the same table, steering differences — in identity and opinion — through the straits of an equally human text.
Pasquale S. Toscano is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College.
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