In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God (John 1:1KJV). And at the beginning in the cool of the evening God would walk and talk with Adam and Eve.
But Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s eternal law. All communication by direct words between God and man were cut off, sundered, terminated, cancelled, like a telegraph wire sliced. No more evening chats. God so loved mankind, however, that He sent His Son in person, the only being that could undertake this mission, to us to re-establish open communication with the Father. At first Christ spake shrouded in a pillar of fire and through the blood of emblematic sacrifices. But in the fullness of time Christ would be born a man and speak directly. From the mount of transfiguration God the Father Himself spoke thunderously, “HEAR YE HIM!” (Matthew 17:5 KJV)
As Paul in Hebrews 1:1-2 via the KJV expresses it,
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these days spoken unto us by His Son.”
But today’s woke society hardly takes all this seriously and jokes about the earthly Christ being of dour countenance and long of face and no fun at all. Well, it’s tearfully sad and no consolation, but the jokesters and jokers won’t be any fun at all when Christ returns in glory so blazing that their wisecracking segues into imploring mountains and tall buildings to fall upon them.
All smiles and holy laughter will be the glorious Christ when He welcomes His redeemed to heaven and eternity. But never is Christ our model for hee-haw, head-back, side-splitting, knee-slapping, belly-laugh, night-club laughter. Christ did not and never will send audiences into guffaws as comedians and many preachers now compete to do. He did not come to compete in joke-a-thons but in the contest with Satan for ownership of the world and us. The Beatitudes did not crack them up. His sermons and parables were not to evoke ripples of chuckling and chortling. The life of the world, He was not the life of the party. He came not to offer bacchanalia but blessings, as at the wedding in Cana when he miraculously transformed water into the fruit of the vine. Wealthy admirers sometimes mounted dinners at which He was the guest of honor, but He never responded with repartee and jokes. Parables and homilies, generic admonitions, rebukes, tearful predictions – yes. But jokes – no.
Christ came to explain the Bible and His Father’s character, not to argue or debate. Many were the hermetically sealed hermeneutics mouthed by the prideful award-winning Jewish lawyers to catch Him in His words. They couldn’t begin to. The provocateurs knew it, and dared not debate Him again. They could only kill Him, and only then joke and have a fun time. They joked but could not have the last word, not with Him whose Word was the beginning and the end.
No man ever spoke as Christ did, speaking fixed truth differently to different people. Elitist Nicodemus indulged the Savior with introductory flattery, but Christ cut him off with, “ye must be born again,” and, “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?” But with the saucy lady at the well, it was all bouncy chat, even mutual repartee, ending in His softly announcing that He was the Messiah and her accepting and then running back to her village to joyfully tell others. He spent hours miraculously feeding the hungry thousands as buildup to ensuing days of a running exchange with the materialist throng about the spiritual meanings of the miracle and His mission.
Christ’s spoken Word became His written word, the Bible, words which “testify of me” (John 5:39). Like manna to the Israelites, the Bible is one of His special gifts to us in our wilderness wanderings. Christ defeated Satan for control of the universe by quietly using the one liner from the Bible, “it is written.” However, it was from the Old Testament’s cornucopia of Messianic prophecies that Christ disclosed in detail Himself on the way to Emmaus.
Yet, with the one exception of the two tables of stone engraved by His own finger and handed directly to Moses (twice), Christ Himself never wrote anything. Christ left the writing of the Scriptures to His prophets like Isaiah and, later, apostles such as Paul and John. After the books of the Bible were written and then canonized, a controversial and long process, came the translations. In the fullness of time, English translations.
Of English godly translators of the Scriptures, William Tyndale remains for so many reasons the most notable, even the archetype. Tyndale was, I believe, as inspired by God as the biblical authors themselves. It was he, with Miles Coverdale, who at great risk translated and printed (overseas and smuggled into England) the first English version of the complete Bible, 1535. And to top it off there is currently even a Tyndale House Publishers selling an array of religious goods including yet another scholarly translation.
As was true of many of God’s servants of the era, Tyndale was martyred, and it was his legacy that was so influential. Because of bluntness comparable to an Elijah or John the Baptist, Tyndale sorely angered papists and Henry VIII alike. At age 42, in 1536, just a year after he and Coverdale had printed the first English translation, Tyndale, having fled from England to Belgium, was betrayed into the hands of papists who strangled him and then burned his body.
From the grave young Tyndale’s voice was heard and still is. It strongly influenced centuries of historic English Bibles, some published in England cautiously such as the Matthews (protective pseudonym for Coverdale), or openly (the Bishops’ and the Great Bible), and some outlawed (the Geneva Bible), and in due course the king-sponsored KJV itself, and then for 400 years the welter of revisions, varying in mode and faithfulness of rendering. Some recent KJV takeoffs have been more mocking than faithful, deleting all gender pronouns. The most recent have circled back to include gender designations but the wrong ones, unwittingly or deliberately Catholic, as in the Lord’s Prayer now reading “Our Mother which art in heaven.”
And the Catholic church, because of the mounting Protestant Reformation, characteristically metamorphosed from being a destructive force which had terminated Tyndale, to a pretty butterfly, known as the Counter Reformation. This opened up English translations of the Latin Vulgate, smothered with polemical and patristic notes, e.g. the Douay–Rheims Bible, 1610. And as we speak the many international i.e. nondenominational translations for which inflexible Catholic and flexible Protestant scholars are amiably collaborating at banks of computers and dragging-dropping different modules for different targeted ideologic markets, blandly bandying, as they put it in technical terms, formal equivalence (i.e. word-for-word) and dynamic equivalence (i.e. thought-for-thought) translation. Modular group-thought-for-inspired-thought always wins.
In its day, 1560, almost a century before the KJV, the Geneva Bible was the most beloved of all versions. Though not originally translated or printed in England, the Geneva version was cherished by Oliver Cromwell and his soldiers during the English Civil War, and during the brief Commonwealth of England, 1649-1653. And `twas the favorite in America where the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower brought it to New England in 1620. After independence, George Washington sponsored a new printing.
The Geneva was among the first to be printed anywhere and thus more widely available even in pocket form, modern serif Roman fonts rather than hard-to-read Teutonic heavy gothic, and the first English translation to use chapter and verse. Financed by expatriate doctrinaire English Puritan-dissenters in Geneva, who had fled England during Catholic “bloody Mary’s” reign, it was translated by refugee Coverdale et al with Tyndale’s legacy, under the sponsorship and protection of John Calvin.
However, when James Charles Stuart VI of Scotland was made King James I of England in 1603, from the beginning of his reign he was as angered by the Geneva Bible as Herod was by the prospect of a rival. For with its copious dissenting annotations, it undercut the divine right of kings and his being head of the state church, perks which all kings devoutly cherished.
So James, a thoroughly establishment Protestant, decreed his own translation. He appointed Archbishop Bancroft to oversee the project. At first skeptical of yet another translation, Bancroft threw himself into it and became a booster of a highest quality translation. And he was the principle selector of 47 of the most linguistically learned scholars, their chaplain, coach, assigning them to six committees, operating under a protocol mandating repeated hierarchical reviews. The archbishop, as a product of ecclesiasticism, issued guidelines which famously stipulated that “church” was to be used instead of the Geneva’s “congregation,” but not otherwise ejecting the Geneva as a model and, yes, inserting more grandeur. One of the translators wrote a long defensive preface, not now included in most KJV printings, that said their goal was to make previously good translations (unnamed) better. In 1769 the KJV underwent elimination of “wot,” and “wert,” standard in all printings since then, which still use “thee” and “thou.”
Well, fifteen years after the KJV was published, James openly labelled the Geneva Bible seditious though not heretical, and outlawed it in England and colonial America. So as James’s parochial pique is lost in history, it is the KJV that has prevailed, and is found even in hotel dresser drawers, courtesy of Gideons International.
The KJV is the most popular despite whirling drama and human machinations, and despite amassed factors not altogether valid, such as being authorized presumably by a king, inerrantly translated from the most inspired original texts, and, as some swear upon a stack of Bibles, is God’s favorite just as king David certainly was despite his faults. Not a fault but a divine insertion, a buried gem, the KJV contains, like all honest translations of all original manuscripts, stumbling blocks for those who have eyes but do not see.
Like many children of my era (1st half of the 20th century), selections from the KJV were what I was made to memorize by rote, just another parochial or Sabbath School school assignment that our young eyes saw but did not really see. But in old age I treasure the KJV for its familiar if still not always understood Tyndalean stately poetic grandeur, once the language of worship and prayer.
Grandeur is not wordiness but succinctness, sometimes buried in a cascade of succinct clauses, as in Ephesians 1. Grandeur includes graphic words, like, “he stinketh,” and “O wretched man that I am.” And those unexpectedly forthright words, like “yoke.” And words like “atonement” and “propitiation,” which to certain theologians connote legalism, thus their espousal of a paraphrase that is, analogous to the KJV’s bias, devoid of those words.
And KJV grandeur is poetry but not the modern kind that employs rhyme and rhythm, or only tropes and odd line lengths (“free verse”). To the KJV’s Old Testament’s famous way of repeating clauses in different words, must be added the less recognized immediate full repetition of words and even phrases, as in Isaiah 27:5, unique to the KJV,
“Let him take hold of my strength to make peace with me, and he shall make peace with me.”
And the way in the OT that God emerges irregularly and perhaps unpredictably as the speaker, who formally proclaims,
“I cause,” as in “I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth” (Isa 58:14), and “Behold, I have caused thine iniquities to pass from thee” (Zech 3:4).
And in the way the negative is expressed especially in the NT by using NOT as the pivotal element, e.g., “Think NOT that I have come to destroy the law” (Matt 5:17).
And despite the current contempt of it, I prefer the KJV’s characteristic use of “and” to start sentences. To me beginning conjunctions judiciously used aren’t vestigial and useless but signify an invisible matrix of related thought.
A genius polyglot, beginning sentence conjunctions and all, Tyndale is credited with ushering in the Elizabethan era of Shakespeare, the “king’s English.” A jumble of gibberish left behind by centuries of invaders, English was revolutionized by the influence of Tyndale no less than Moses polished the primitive written word of the scrolls and Scriptures. Thus English became the fully flowered, poetic, noble language worthy of God’s special gift to mankind, and the lingua franca of the world.
And a newfangled English is still the lingua franca, now driven by Coke, woke, and f-obscenities. Who’s Shakespeare? Tyndale? What’s the Bible? Some kind of Zen?
But God, whose words were from the beginning, and caused the beginning, and fixed for eternity, has caused this wonderous confluence of His spoken word and written word known as the Bible.
Amen.
