The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
commemorative plaques of the famous dead. Out of those you can pick examples from many whose work and life had been shaped by the King James Bible: William Blake, Sir Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther King, Florence Nightingale, Handel, William Shakespeare, William Wilberforce . . .
In that service I heard one of the dozens of cathedral and college choirs which up and down the land on most days of the week sing a religious service as their predecessors did for more than a thousand years. The arches meeting in the high Gothic stone ceiling rang with the affirmation of a religion triumphant still in some parts of the world, beleaguered, disdained or ignored in others, but here in the singing, its resonance still evident. What began with a flourish of trumpets in 1611 calling together our island tribes became a global orchestra of sounds and themes, now rising, now fading, but for many the soul goes marching on.
Ten years after the King James Bible was published, the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America. They found and they founded a New World. It became a great democracy. It was a world based on the book, the Word of God. And America propagates its faith like no other people has ever done. The Gideon Society alone places 60 million new Bibles a year in over 181 countries and many Americans pray their way into the theatres of war and peace and the work and play of their daily lives.
Even in England, now seen to be at an ebb tide of formal Christianity, this book can still arouse passionate eloquence. It is accepted that the two greatest speeches in the House of Commons, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey, were by Christians and rifted with the King James Bible. Those were by Winston Churchill in 1940, just after the outbreak of the Second World War, and by William Wilberforce when he made his first speech for the ending of the slave trade in 1789. The parliamentary tradition is not dead. On 9 December 2009, David Simpson, the Member of Parliament for the Northern Ireland constituency of Upper Bann, demanded a debate, calling on the government to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible.
‘The great Winston Churchill,’ he said, ‘noted that the scholars who produced it had forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.’ David Simpson went on:
It is not only our literature and language that has been influenced by the King James Bible. It has had an extraordinary beneficial influence upon political and constitutional affairs. It was the Bible of Milton and the Protectorate, later it was the Bible of the Glorious Revolution, which gave us constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. It was the Bible of Whitefield and the Wesleys, that saved the realm from the brutality and blood of the French Revolution. It was the Bible carried by the founding fathers of the United States that helped to force that land and give the world that great democratic powerhouse . . .
Hospitals were built and charities created as a result of its influence. The hungry were fed, the sick nursed, the poor given shelter . . . lives that lay in ruins were made whole and souls that were held in bondage were set at liberty.
The anthem was taken up by other speakers, most notably Dr William McCrea, MP for South Antrim, who quoted from John Wesley: ‘Oh, give me that Book! At any price give me the Book of God. Let me be a man of one Book.’ Dr McCrea continued: ‘It has been burned but there is not the smell of fire about it. It has been buried but no man has ever kept it in the grave . . . This book sets men free . . .’
How and why did such a book come to be written? With what was that core so fire-filled that it became the sun to a solar system of human life? How did what was asserted to be the Word of God become the key which unlocked so many doors of history, Christian, non-Christian, even anti-Christian?
The writing of this book is a story that begins in blood, fear, murder and acts of high courage by dedicated scribes who lived and died to see the Scriptures in English. And the finest of those scribes and martyrs to the Word was William Tyndale.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ROAD TO 1611
William Tyndale, born in 1494, martyred in 1536, has a good claim to be both the founder of the King James Bible and the father of the English language. As a man he provoked awe and protective affection from those who knew him; fear and hatred from those who hunted him down to silence him.
His life’s work was to translate the Bible into English. It was an obsession which, like many of the tunnel-visioned and unsleeping obsessions of the very great, was seeded when he was young. When he was ten, and already knew Latin, we are told, as well as English, he read that King Athelstane, Alfred the Great’s grandson, had some of the Scriptures translated into English. From whatever mysterious force, this fact seized on him. From then on, this became the life purpose of this brilliant boy, who went to Oxford University when he was twelve. He had to translate the Scriptures into English, it was his vocation, and from this sole purpose he never faltered.
He made himself master of the languages necessary to fulfil his mission: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian. He was acknowledged by his peers to be outstandingly accomplished in all of them. As for his English, it reads like a rare, perhaps transcendent gift. Even those who dismiss Christianity concede that Tyndale’s words and sentences form much of the basic structure, grandeur and memorability of the English tongue.
His translation of the New Testament came out in 1525. It was the first printed Bible in English. Technology, as so often, energised and restructured society’s view of its possibilities. Fortune, timing, favoured his cause. So much else did not. In his short life he was mostly penurious, often hungry, isolated, hounded, vilified and cruelly, deliberately, misrepresented. Tyndale lived a life which would have done credit to an Apostle. He laid down his life to put what he thought of as soul-saving words on to the English tongue for the benefit of the common people.
He was a Roman Catholic whose work would become a beacon for Protestants of all denominations all over the world. He was a defender of the divinity of the King who persecuted him, planned his assassination and tried by whatever means to wipe his work off the face of the earth.
He was a quiet, fervent scholar whose voice shook the almighty Holy Roman Empire, rattled the gilded cage of Henry VIII and goaded the corrupted papacy into a panic of revenge. Tyndale is the keystone of the King James Version of the Bible which was published seventy-five years after he was burned at the stake.
But he was not the first. The way had been paved before him.
In 1382, another Oxford scholar, John Wycliffe, had organised the first version of the Bible in English. He was not a translator but a brilliant intellectual general whose battle plan was to wrest the Bible from the Latinists and make it available in English. We tend to think of medieval Oxford as the elite and exclusive battery farm for tame clerics and lawyers who would go on to do the bidding of the authoritarian Church and state. It was in Oxford that they were plumped up for the privileged slots waiting for them after university. But there were among them independent and courageous young men who had minds willing to be tested. And within that smaller cluster of questioning young men there were those who rebelled against the authority of a Church which decreed that the Bible must be in Latin.
Wycliffe, a major philosopher and theologian, was critical of what he saw as the materialism, impiety and dictatorial management of the Roman Catholic Church of which he was a member. Wycliffe, too, had his precursors, notably John Ball whose plain fundamentalist Christianity had helped drive on the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 which had all but toppled the Church and the aristocracy. And before John Ball there had been other attempts to put at least some small part of the Scriptures into the language of the people who made up the overwhelming majority of the congregation but whose voice was not heard. In the eighth century the Venerable Bede translated St John’s Gospel into English, but alas it is lost. King Alfred the Great in the ninth century had the Gospels translated and may himself have worked on them. Certain Psalms and favoured passages had been rendered into English a little later but they were sporadic and modest efforts.
John Wycliffe’s project was on a different scale. He invited the finest Latin scholars in Oxford to translate St Jerome’s Latin masterwork into English. This was completed and published in 1382, precisely 1,000 years