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Bible Study
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Title: The Origins of the King James Bible
Source: Smithsonian
URL Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart ... -james-bible-180956949/?no-ist
Published: Oct 17, 2015
Author: Erin Blakemore
Post Date: 2015-10-17 05:19:05 by Willie Green
Keywords: None
Views: 26443
Comments: 83

A handwritten draft of the world's most famous bible has been discovered in England

When an archive yields an unexpected discovery, it's usually cause for celebration. But when that discovery involves the world's most famous bible, scholarly excitement mounts to ecstastic levels. The earliest known draft of the King James Bible has been unearthed at the University of Cambridge, writes Jennifer Schuessler for The New York Times, and it’s being lauded as a critical find for historians.

The draft was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an American scholar conduct in the Cambridge archives. It contains the handwriting of dozens of authors, dating from 1604 to 1608. That handwriting is a crucial find, Schuessler writes, because it reveals how they translated and assembled the text.

"There's a strong desire to see the King James Bible as a uniform object, and a belief that it's great because of its collaborative nature," Miller tells Schuessler. "It was incredibly collaborative, but it was done in a much more complicated, nuanced, and at times individualistic way than we've ever really had good evidence to believe."

Forty-seven translators and scholars produced the King James Bible, which was first published in 1611. The project dates back to 1604, when King James I decided a new version could help consolidate political power, writes NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagartay. A popular Puritan bible had downplayed the divine right of kings — greatly offending James — and James manipulated different Christian sects until they agreed to produce a different translation.

The result became an incredible, long-lasting success. The King James Bible has influenced language, literature and culture for more than 400 years. In the Times Literary Supplement, Miller writes that his discovery suggests that the text may be "far more a patchwork of individual translations — the product of individual translators and individual companies working in individual ways — than has ever been properly recognized." Perhaps there is always more to discover after all.

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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 16.

#1. To: Willie Green (#0) (Edited)

This doesn't surprise me.

The myth the KJB as a work done equally by committee (companies) always seemed shaky to me, even going so far as to dub the committee as The Translators. In real life, you more often have individual contributors to committee work doing a lot more of the work. And dominant personalities tend to leave their marks on committee work. And that is what these notes indicate.

Not all KJB translators were created equal. And some were more motivated to do the work.

A popular Puritan bible had downplayed the divine right of kings — greatly offending James — and James manipulated different Christian sects until they agreed to produce a different translation.

They downplay the popularity and ubiquity of the Calvin's Geneva Bible. It contained footnotes about tyrant kings who lose their divine right to rule (as it was considered in the monarchical era). Our Founders, many of them subversive Presbyterian Puritan types, overwhelmingly used the Geneva Bible. And you read echoes of this tyrant-loses-divine-mandate-to-rule in period pieces like the Declaration of Independence and other writings. King James produced his bible with one requirement: no (subversive) footnotes. He was too late and revolutionary fervor in America continued to be stoked until the American Revolution during the reign of George III.

The KJB had a deliberate political motive behind it. So did the footnotes attached to the Geneva Bible.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-10-17   8:45:15 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: TooConservative (#1)

And all of the well-known earlier English translations of the Bible: Douay-Rheims, Geneva, Bishops', KJV, relied very heavily on Tyndale as the guts of their work.

The later translators all used Tyndale as the base, and then compared their work to his. A massive percentage of the Geneva, KJV and the other Bibles is really Tyndale.

It would be far more truthful to say that Tyndale is the source of the English Bible, and the Geneva, King James, Bishops and others were editors who amended and embellished 10 or 15% of it.

Because that's really the truth.

At Douay, and at Geneva, and in the committees, they did not really translate the Bible. What they really did was take Tyndale's translation and compare it to their own work, and then emend and edit Tyndale.

Vicomte13  posted on  2015-10-17   9:48:29 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: Vicomte13 (#2)

A massive percentage of the Geneva, KJV and the other Bibles is really Tyndale.

Even NIV and NKJV borrow readings from the Tyndale. This is especially true of foundational verses, the ones that people often memorize. It is interesting to trace the readings of the various versions. For all that they brag about their pedigree from the Alexandrian texts, they often rely on quotes of English translations of the Vulgate using Byzantine manuscripts in support.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-10-17   17:25:51 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: TooConservative (#3) (Edited)

It's true of the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles too. Bishop Challoner, in the mid-1700s, carefully edited the Douai-Rheims Bible to reflect the KJV language as close as theology would bear...which is almost entirely, and the KJV itself is about 80% Tyndale.

As for the Orthodox, they have used Protestant and Catholic English Bibles for most of their history.

Only recently have "Orthodox" Bibles been translated. The biggest seller is the "Orthodox Study Bible", the New Testament of which is the NKJV, which is about 75% Tyndale.

If you pick up a Bible in English, between 75% and 95% of the words you read are Tyndale's translation. The Bible in English is really the Bible of Tyndale, as edited by later committees. The supermajority of every English Bible translation of any importance is Tyndale. That's just a fact.

And considering that Tyndale died at the orders of Henry VIII for having made the translation, there is a certain authority to be had from the seal of a martyr's blood.

Vicomte13  posted on  2015-10-18   14:11:31 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: Vicomte13 (#4)

So Vic, which Bible do you personally use?

Stoner  posted on  2015-10-18   20:05:53 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: Stoner (#5)

So Vic, which Bible do you personally use?

I personally use several, for different purposes.

When I am, myself, trying to study the Law of God - something that I think is important because God lavished so much attention to it, I use a mechanical translation of the Hebrew Massoretic Text. I also take a lot of time with the Hebrew pictographs, which I have to mostly decode myself, because there does not exist a translation based on the pictographs.

For the English of the Old Testament, I use a mechanical translation and I look at the pictographs - when I am reading for my own purposes, to know and to understand (as opposed to the purpose of trying to discuss things with others).

When it comes to the New Testament, my preference is to place three things side by side: the Greek text (in either the Alexandrine, Byzantine or Texts Receipts format, as long as there is an indication where they differ). I want to actually see the Greek, because I am very untrusting of the bias of translators.

Then I look at the Vulgate Latin side by side with the Greek. I don't speak Greek, so I have to rely on translations. I don't speak Latin either, but I do speak French, and can read Spanish, and had four years of Latin. I can't read Latin like a novel, but when side-by-side with the Greek, or ANY English translation, I can read the Latin almost like French.

I like the Latin because it is only partly a translation. It was a living language of half of the Christian world at the time of Christ. The Scriptural documents are written in Greek (at least probably they were - some things might have been written in Latin), but they were all written within the Roman Empire, and the Greco-Roman culture was a culture. Latin was not some faraway distant-future language to Greek, in the way that Greek, Latin and English all are to Old Testament Hebrew, or English is to New Testament Greek.

Bilingualism between Latin and Greek was the norm among educated people of the Empire, and Christianity was spread all over the Latin half of the Empire during the lives of the Apostles also. So, while the New Testament was (probably) originally composed in Greek in the Greek-speaking East, parts of it were composed in Greek, or perhaps even in Latin, from Rome. And while WE see Greek and Latin as very different, a closer read by a discerning mind familiar with the languages realizes that much of the differences appear to be from differences in spelling - that at the roots of pronunciation some letters shift, but that the languages are closer than they appear. Zeus, deus, and theos appear to be three every different words, but three people speaking the same letters with a speech impediment or an accent could produce any of those words. They're not really different words - they're different pronunciations of the same root word. Greek and Latin are cousin languages.

So when Jerome, a Roman in the Greek-speaking Roman East, was translating the Greek Scriptures into Latin, he was doing so as a native speaker of both languages, both of which were the languages of one empire, of which he was a very well-educated citizen, and it was the same Empire that had killed Christ and persecuted the Apostles. So Jerome knew very well the idioms, and the mindset, and the structures and legal concepts of the Empire. He wasn't translating something distant and foreign. He was doing the equivalent of taking Washington's letters and translating them into modern English, as a modern American within the culture understanding the reference points.

It's not a little deal to me. It means, to me, that Jerome's selections of idioms are certainly to be correct, and modern translators' choices that differ with Jerome are almost certain to be wrong...because Jerome was a Roman with native fluency of both languages, while any modern translator has only book knowledge of the Roman empire, culture, idiom or either the Latin or ancient Greek language.

Jerome had access to much better manuscripts also.

So, the Vulgate is the best source for translation issues.

I've read the Bible so many times that I'm not going through trying to learn and understand what is in there. Rather, I focus on "hard sayings" and things I find difficult. And in almost all of those cases, I find that the difficulty arises in the English. The Latin, Greek or Hebrew make sense. In such cases, I simply dismiss all of the English translations and go with the Hebrew, Greek or Latin. Where the Latin conflicts with some translations from the Greek, this is because the modern English translator is using a different manuscript than Jerome. I consider Jerome to be far more authoritative than any modern, for the reasons I've already given, so where Jerome differs from, say, the Nesle Aland text or the Textus Receptus or the Alexandrine Texts, I assume that Jerome was working from the most authoritative sources, while moderns work from fragments and assorted artifacts.

In other words, the Latin is definitive.

Where the Greek LXX and the Massoretic Text differ, I generally assume that the issue is a matter of manuscript differences, but I find the LXX to be more persuasive than the Massoretic Text - HOWEVER, you can't use the LXX for pictographs, so the Massoretic Text cannot be ignored.

Because the issues upon which I focus are very technical, I have several different texts open at once.

If I'm just READING the Bible, just to read it, then I still use the Mechanical Translation for the Torah, The Orthodox Study Bible for the rest of the Old Testament, and the Eastern Orthodox Bible for the New Testament.

I do this because the Mechanical Translation is the most precisely accurate, the Orthodox Study Bible is the only translation of the LXX for the rest of the Old Testament, and the Greek Orthodox translation of the Greek in the EOB is simply superior in terms of accuracy, in part because the Greek Orthodox simply don't have the long and complicated Reformation era bickering and tensions, and so don't have an English-language tradition to defend. Catholics and Protestants are partisans of particular translations for historical reasons, and I find no value in those historical reasons. The Greeks, I find, simply want to accurately convey the exact meanings in English, and the EOB does a better job of that for the New Testament than any other translation, IMHO.

So, when I personally use the Bible, for my purposes, that's what I do.

But when I am discussing the Bible with other people, the text I use is generally the KJV. That's because most of the people with whom I am discussing things are Protestants, and they automatically distrust me and anything I have to say because I'm a Catholic. I know this, so I use the KJV to discuss things using the text that some of them claim is inspired, but that none of them reject.

It doesn't make any difference to me, really, because the discussions I have with other people are not about the details that fascinate me, but about politics and morality as presented in Scripture. And for that purpose, the KJV is superlative, given that it was written by extremely conservative people of a very Catholic tradition (though Protestants) in an age of faith, and is written in a style that sounds very authoritative to minds easily bent by archaic British English.

I'm always happy to use the KJV, because the KJV is much less vague and more direct on the points I think are more important than more modern hedged versions.

So in these arguments I'm always pleased to go "KJV Only".

Vicomte13  posted on  2015-10-19   1:03:59 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#16. To: Vicomte13 (#7)

" I personally use several, for different purposes. "

Thanks for the reply Vic. You are educated enough to use all the versions you discussed.

I guess I will just stick with the KJV. I would guess that I cannot go wrong with that. I have considered acquiring a copy of The Torah. Just for curiosity. I assume it is available in english.

Stoner  posted on  2015-10-19   13:25:39 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


Replies to Comment # 16.

#20. To: Stoner (#16)

I have considered acquiring a copy of The Torah. Just for curiosity. I assume it is available in english.

You already have the Torah.

The Torah is Genesis + Exodus + Leviticus + Numbers + Deuteronomy. The first five "books" of your KJV is the Torah.

Perhaps you meant the Talmud. Don't bother. It's 26 volumes long - a veritable encyclopedia of Jewish law. And what it mostly consists of is endless detailed discussions and debates about stuff that is mostly in Leviticus.

The oldest part of the Talmud, the Mishnah, was written closest in time to Jesus, but it's still hundreds of years later.

To know what Judaism was in the First Century, the best source outside of the New Testament is Josephus. Get his complete works.

You will find them tedious and boring, and very long.

Vicomte13  posted on  2015-10-19 14:30:22 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


End Trace Mode for Comment # 16.

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