I’ve mentioned hearing as well as reading. It’s easy to forget that when the 1611 Bible was first published it was not yet a volume that everyone could be expected to own. Like its Reformed predecessors, Tyndale’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible””and unlike its Catholic parallel, the Rheims/Douai version””it was meant to be read aloud. And that means that it was meant to be part of an event, a shared experience. Gathered as a Christian community, the parish would listen, in the context of praise, reflection and instruction, to Scripture being read: it provided the picture of a whole renewed universe within which all the other activities made sense. It would not be immediately intelligible by any means, but it marked out the territory of God’s work of grace. It affirmed, with St Paul in II Corinthians, that the landscape of the world was illuminated by the new and radical act of God in Jesus Christ, so that the standards of this world and society were shown to be under judgement; yet it also affirmed that this illumination was something it took time to get used to, time to find words for, and that the clay pots of custom and ritual were both necessary and problematic ”“ and that this was simply how human beings heard and echoed the Word. ”˜How can man preach Thy eternal Word?’ asked George Herbert a couple of decades after 1611; ”˜he is a brittle, crazy glass.’ But, as that great poem of Herbert’s goes on to claim, even in fragile material God’s story can be sealed and printed, and the light come through.
So to celebrate the Bible of 1611 is not to genuflect before a timeless masterpiece, to salute a perfect translation; the translators would have been both baffled and embarrassed by any such idea. It is to recognize the absolute seriousness with which they sought to find in our language words that would pass on to us hearers and readers in the English tongue the almost unbearable weight of divine intelligence and love pressing down on those who first encountered it and tried to embody it in writing…
Read it all(my emphasis).
Thanks for this. Dr. Philip Harrold of Trinity School for Ministry presented a most interesting paper at St. Andrew’s, Highland Park, Pittsburgh, last Friday evening as a part of our observance of the 400th of the KJV. Folks might be interested:
[url=http://revbmrobison.blogspot.com/2011/11/st-andrews-lecture-2011_12.html]St. Andrew’s Lecture 2011[/url]
Bruce Robison
How sad that the KJV has virtually disappeared from Anglican and Episcopal Churches. It is without peer for public reading during services and for memorizing texts. Lessons and Carols using any other translation just sounds pedestrian.
This kind of speech is ++RW at his best. I especially appreciated his stress on how the AV/KJV was intended to be read aloud and in the context of worship. It was meant to be heard, and not just seen, which does indeed make a profound though subtle difference. So does the liturgical and communal context in which Scripture is heard. The fact is that the elegant cadences of the KJV make for more memorable hearing than the plainer Greek original text of the New Testament.
We too easily forget that most of the Bible was written by communities of faith for other communities of faith, not simply by inspired individuals for other individuals who study God’s Word diligently on their own in solitude. Or as 2 Peter 1:21-22 puts it, Holy Scripture is not intended for “private interpretation.”
Although in 1611, English society was becoming increasingly literate and educated, the fact remains that many people were illiterate then, and not all who could read could afford to buy a Bible of their own, as became common much later. Scholars have only recently started to realize how very differently written texts function in a predominantly oral culture, which was certainly the case throughout the biblical period and for many centuries after the New Testament books were completed. No wonder that in ++Cranmer’s beloved collect for this past Sunday, we give thanks for the precious divine gift of the Scriptures and pray for the grace to so “HEAR them, read, mark, and inwardly digest them,” that we may embrace the wondrous gift of eternal life in Christ.
Thanks to Bruce Robison+ for posting the link to Dr. Phil Harrold’s fine lecture on the KJV at St. Andrew’s, Pittsburgh.
David Handy+
P.S. I’m glad Kendall highlighted in bold that part at the end of the excerpt. The translators did indeed approach their sacred task with tremendous seriousness and reverence, as is only fitting. However, ++RW’s phrase about the “[i]almost unbearable weight[/i]” of the message being conveyed and translated reminds me of what a noted Anglican Bible translator of the mid-20th century testified concerning his experience. I’m speaking of J. B. Phillips+, who initially tried his hand at a fresh rendering of the NT when he found that youth in his London parish had trouble making sense of the KJV.
Fr. Phillips said that in translating Acts he felt like an electrician who was trying to rewire a house, without the power being turned off! A marvelous image.
David Handy+
#2, you’ll still hear it read aloud in 1928 PB parishes.