I\u2019ve mentioned hearing as well as reading. It\u2019s 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\u2019s Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops\u2019 Bible\u201d\u201dand unlike its Catholic parallel, the Rheims\/Douai version\u201d\u201dit 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\u2019s 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 \u201d\u201c and that this was simply how human beings heard and echoed the Word. \u201d\u02dcHow can man preach Thy eternal Word?\u2019 asked George Herbert a couple of decades after 1611; \u201d\u02dche is a brittle, crazy glass.\u2019 But, as that great poem of Herbert\u2019s goes on to claim, even in fragile material God\u2019s story can be sealed and printed, and the light come through.<\/p>\n
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<\/b>…<\/p>\n