The King James Bible (1611) and early bibles (full discussion)

[Music] I'm hailey Moore I'm a fellow at Corpus Christi and Oxford and I'm Gordon Campbell I'm fellow hidden release on studies at University of Leicester and we both share an enthusiasm for the King James Bible I was one of the curators for the bonding library's King James Bible exhibition in 2011 which celebrated 400 years of publication of the King James Bible and I once wrote a book on the King James Bible a few years ago and for the last seven years I've worked for a Museum of the Bible in Washington DC and it's a delight to come here to London to see your newly restored and King James Bible in in all its glory it's open here at the title page which is an engraving by Cornelius pearl from Antwerp the title page is immediately striking in its architectural structure and it's alliance of key light in ography from the old and the New Testaments so it's flanking the central panel you have Moses on one side and Aaron on the other and in the corners you have the four writers of the gospel above the panel with the title you have the lamb one of the figurations of Christ in psychology and then underneath the pelican feeding its young which is always very appealing to me because that is also the symbol of Corpus Christi College we have a pelican in our front quad but rather more cleverly it's feeding its young from its own blood the image of the crucifixion that doesn't sound like a very appetizing to me now can you identify the people well as my children have discovered as we'd be tramping around various and sites during the course of the summer in Italy the quickest way to identify the Gospel writers is through the animals that they're associated with so in the top right hand corner we have sent mark with his mother benign looking lion which anyone who's been to Venice and seen so much the people recognized the Lions that they're in a square in Venice down on the right John with the eagle which you should do because Eagles can stare into the Sun and Luke with his ox and then Matthew up here in the corner this is a very interesting page for many reasons at the top there are a few letters in Hebrew they spell the word that is was written at the time is Jehovah and we now tend to say Yahweh you can tell that this is not a forgery because over the H the second letter from the right there supposed to be a dot and in forged copies there's always a dot and in real copies there's not a dot so that's the father yahwah and then the the dog represents the holy spirit and then the the lamb represents the son it's the first time Trinity has has appeared on the on the title page in terms of Moses and Aaron they had only appeared on two very obscure Bibles in in Luva a deeply Catholic place and it's interesting to ask why not Moses but why Aaron here appears here and the answer is that he's a priest and the King James spoke and King James himself thought that the Bible should not be read by just anybody that it should be understood through the mediation of prease and that's why Aaron is here it never happened before anythin they've never been paired in England but subsequently in Anglican churches in the 17th century there were many Church paintings painted paintings in the churches that that showed the same pairing of Moses and Aaron there are a couple of other things st. st. Peter is here and he's holding the keys the chap who did this was a Catholic of course in the Bible's Coverdale for example each of the Apostles kept the seventies there are many keys all over the place this Bible reversed oddly enough to the Catholic notion of st. Peter as the keeper of the keys we think of it as the Catholic notion but in fact in the Bible the keys are given to be two pieces so it's simply being being true to that and you're not that interesting difference between this type of page and earlier type of pages in English is that there is no mark features here yes famously the great Bible featured title page with Henry the 8th dispensing the largesse of translation to the people which is famously interpreted as an expression of hierarchy and order in the kingdom and there's a prison down in the bottom right-hand corner where all those who failed to observe obedience and decorum are going to be put and they're all shouting vive Trek's these wonderful banners but there's no Manik here and another interesting point is that this is not signaled on pages a Bible that is authorized it says it is appointed to be read in churches so though this is called the authorized version and it doesn't declare itself to be so so many people prefer to call it the King James Bible rather than the authorized version and fascinatingly when it was first printed it was often referred to as the new translation the idea of its being King James Bible was a Scottish invention never said where it was actually thought of as King James is Bible because King James of course was King James the sick of Scotland and so it is to the Scots that we have the idea that this is this is the Bible of King James rather than just as it was typically referred to at the time initiative as the new translation hmm you think tell from my name that I'm of Scottish ancestry so I take the view that all good things are invented in Scotland stolen by the English and then sold to the Americans and after the sentence is the story of the King James Bible it did the the initial idea of a new translation arose in Scotland in 1601 when the Church of Scotland commend the met and James was there and they decided to have a new translation of the Bible what happened was it was referred to a subcommittee and were still waiting for that subcommittee to report but when James two years later became King of England the idea was still in his head and as a result when it was proposed this was the Bible that emerged from from the proposal and one of the interesting things is that when it was proposed at the Hampton Court conference in 1604 it was to a certain extent and afterthought the the delegation of what's called the Puritan partly probably party probably better called the the godly section of the Church of England to oppressing for reform in the matters vestments and ceremony hadn't necessarily come demanding a new translation of the Bible but it was the one of the proposals that they put forward its that proposals attributed to John Reynolds soon as then president of Corpus Christi and not a particularly adept politician it's fair to say he was a scholar of Greek and Hebrew not a man who probably has shopping list of things he wanted from the king and the king seized on this idea that there there being a new translation and it could be said to be one of his most astute political decision kewpie because rather than having two warring parties in the church he managed to combine the two parties together one of the remarkable things about the translation is how for a few decades at least it loves the boil of ecclesiastical contention anymore because that contention has spilled out necessarily in the 1630s and led to the civil war but for a couple of decades and certainly for a very difficult four years after his accession the people who could have created a lot of trouble for by arguing with one another enforcing or holding back the church from further reform were were very gainfully employed and in making a new transformation of the Bible so one of the important things about this Bible it's not a sectarian Bible yes and there had previously been a certain rhetorical sectarianism hovering over the translations of the Bible if you like the idea that the Geneva Bible was favored by private readers and possibly even more reformed elements of the church and the bishops Bibles read in churches so the more the authorized version says they do themselves to be and so that if you like it could I would to say necessarily that it was a plan but it was a very canny piece we just gotta Sh politicking if you like thanks the fact that it's in English this evening he had to read people whispered behind James's back that he could speak Scots and Latin and French but he couldn't speak English and here he was becoming head of the Church of England and what better way to illustrate his English credentials than translation of the Bible into English when he was involved with a Bible in Scotland the first printing of the the Geneva Bible in Scotland the preface was not in English it was in Scots because he was playing to his Scottish mass at that stage there there's not a word of Scots in this it's resolutely English because he was the head of the Church of England and his primary intention around 1630 1604 was to further the idea of Union rules yes absolutely buddy kingdoms there were two editions of this Bible in 1611 we don't know when they were published but we know that one known as the he Bible and great he Bible was published first and a second edition published in the same year and and reprinted for two lawyers was called the great XI Bible this does not reflect a single difference between them there there are hundreds and hundreds of differences but it's the one we can all we can all remember and it refers to passage in in with Ruth 350 and it says in this and he went into the city well this is about Ruth and Boas and the difficulty is the context makes quite clear that she went into the city so we've got the Hebrew saying one thing for the Hebrews majority text saying one thing and the Bible saying for the other so it's a point of contention among the translators it's clear that after the first edition was published that the minority opinion prevailed and the second edition of this Bible says and she went into the city as it happens the bibliothèque the Hebraic a stop guard and iNSYS records that minority reading in the Hebrew so it's it's not it's not the illegitimate but it is a minority reading while we're here looking at the text of the Bible it's very interesting to see that the King James Bible was printed in black letter which allows it visually very much and in double columns with the authorized the being authorized Church Bibles or the 16th century which is also used black letter which was typically the typeface used a legal document listen sample the Geneva Bible on the other hand had been printed in Roman type which is much more readable to us now and certainly probably even at the time and it had used long lines and also had been the first English translation to use verses to help navigate this copy is in an original 17th century binding which is being restored that's very interesting when it was sold in 1611 it was souls at price of 30 shillings but it was sold in unbound sheets so whoever purchased it in the since then had to take it to the binder to have it bound and that initial binding is what survives to this very day that's not very common in these Bibles and it's pleasing to see it indeed just this little hole here is where the book would have been chained to move in order to stop people walking off with it though the book of this weight it would be quite a challenge but that would be that's typical of a book that's being at some point in a change library where a chain would go from the shelf to the book and to stop it being moved around and another interesting thing about the binding question is that you will find copies of the 1611 Bible it's a file that mix sheets from the he and the she publicist so as we saw earlier in tips every copy is unique we can divide things into editions but when you're looking at them as well you've always got to be aware that the sheets may have been different in different copies from the same Edition that's also relevance to the King James Bible process because one of our best witnesses to how the Bible was translated is a copy of the bishops Bible that was printed in 1602 years now in the London library which records in the margins the discussions of the six companies or committees that translated the Bible and analysis has only been partial so far on the 1602 oddly and copy of that bishops Bible and but it it looks as though the sheets have been put together in one copy from different committees so the annotations don't reflect the thought of any one of the six companies who translated at the Bible but are a mixture mm-hmm several of them there's a good DPhil thesis to be written on that piece this is an interesting page from the the Song of Solomon the translators were forbidden notes King James didn't like notes and they being academics and therefore naturally devious found ways around this prohibition so if you look at this chapter chapter five and the little head note at the beginning that summarizes what's in Chapter says Christ awaketh the church with his calling the church having a taste of Christ's love is sick of love in other words a Christian theological commentary has been smuggled in via the notes so controlling the readers understanding of it and the world love is a very important in the formation and also the afterlife of the King James Bible yeah because it famously uses the word charity just some 1 Corinthians 13 in verses that in the English tradition stemming from Tyndall had used the much more English word love indeed the translators of course were speaking in Latin yeah that was the language of the universities then and when you're speaking in Latin keratosis the Latin word charity seems sort of natural and love sounds like a teenager's word yes so so giving it dignity if they reverted to the whole to Catholic tradition if you like of calling it charity and I think it's in the douay-rheims version has charity doesn't it so it is often thought that the King James Bible introduced charity their attitude yes that is quite often cited as being the archetypal resonance and language of the King James Bible in fact it is Latin it and for thee though the douay-rheims New Testament was translated too late to be used by the translators but it is what context at the same the New Testament the New Testament was used as emerges in the translators notes the Old Testament was published to late although the translators preface is clearly aware of the doing Bible that the translators weren't yes yes there's a very curious thing when one examines the page and the the black letter type is interspersed with small bits in in Romans so the the singing it says in large letters of birds in small ones and in little further down and a lost place a little further down in the secret places and places is is very small these are words that alt in Hebrew but have been supplied to make sense of the sentences in other words there they're reasonable inferences from the rest of the sentences and you can tell from this that they're relatively unimportant what happens when King James Bibles are reprinted now in the 21st century is that these supplied words are printed in italics as a result they look like the most important words in the Bible when exactly the opposite is true they are the inferences that are there so that you can make sense of the sentences the ubiquitous presence of what are called decorated capitals which is a very common feature of the printed books for the first letter of a new chapter would use a decorated capital like that sometimes the very Capitals are decorated with little illustrations and the printing of the King James Bible didn't discriminate very attentively between pagan and Christian or judeo-christian matter in terms of how the decorated capitals which chosen if we go to the game for Gospel of Matthew for example we see a very splendid wood decoration that depicts Neptune even with his Trident which has no conceivable relation to what's actually happening in the text and possibly even more scandalously the beginning of Romans has a woodcut featuring Daphne turning into a laurel as a consequence a purpose to play Apollo one of the most famous of classical stories from the Ovid's metamorphoses that would have been very well-known to every single school boy who's gone through grammar school and nobody quite knows how these pagan illustrations found their way into the Bible and David Norton makes the very plausible guess that because Robert Barker a king's printer but the lessons different Bibles so obviously got this commission was printing very very many Bibles all at the same time and very rapidly the if you like simply what was available in the printing shop was used to fill out the page make it look beautiful it's indisputable that they given these and which cuts give a very pleasant look to the page but there is clearly a certain disjunction with this on the other hand I'm rather pleased by it because the translators who's gone or speaking in Latin with one another were very learning classicists they did not perceive a distinction between a few likely areas of knowledge that we might seem to be completing nowadays for example between what we call the humanities or sciences or between classical and Christian learning so one of the toughest latest John Spencer for example has copies of his Greek books of drama that he's annotated and when the general meeting met in 1610 to finalize the text of the Bible they freely made reference to the use of Greek in classical context as well as biblical ones in order to help them to solve it how to make a translation so from this but one can read both the narrative of this slightly chaotic printing of the King James 1611 as we saw from the he and she bibles also from the fact that possibly that engraved title page was lost or damaged in the print shop because it doesn't appear after the first few additions and so we have a narrative chaotic printing but we also have a narrative that really captures the sense of of the blended and holistic and deeply curious learning of the Bible Translators who brought all of their resources in geometry mathematics botany early entomology and Latin and Greek literature to bear on their translation so he's actually very apt that we should find Neptune and Daphne buried here amongst the text of the Bible the 1611 King James Bible also includes a fascinating set of genealogists that go from Adam to the Virgin Mary that were produced by John speed who had a license to add in his genealogies maps of the Holy Land which is why they appear he his descendants later to be bought out of that right actually at some considerable expense so these are if you like and accretion to the Bible that connect it with the outside world because don't speed was a historian and a cartographer and he was very connected he was a member of the merchant Taylor's company and was very connected with the merchant Taylor's interest in trade and travel and of course the Middle East of the eastern Mediterranean is the Lucas not only of the biblical events but also a lot of commercial interest at the time so it is no accident this is a very long technology as you can see that John speeds map of the Holy Land [Music] yeah there's very very strong visual resemblance to the mapping that he was also doing of English cities of England and of the if you like the kind of the wider cultural and geographical of topographical context that was of extreme interest to scholars because of the lightt shared more biblical history but also of course to merchants as well and speed was greatly praised by the merchants traders company for his work as an historian and as a graphic and rightly so rightly saying their genealogy ends with Jesus as martyrs yes yeah it has to deal with the virgin birth which it does tracing his consent by law and by nature and by law by nature is a way of avoiding the awkwardness of Joseph not being his father except in law this is the second title page in the 1611 King James Bible which is called the New Testament very different in style as you can see and it depicts the twelve tribes of Israel on the left balance stuff but in vain meat fashioned by the disciples on the right hand side the this is the title page that gets shifted to the beginning of later editions and we used as the title page for the whole but once the anthropic graving stops using okay we're now going to have a look at the bishops Bible the King James Version was not a fresh translation it was the revision of the previous Bible the the bishops Bible so-called because many of the translators either word bishops or were later to become bishops it editorially was quite weak in that there was no system of panels checking each other's work basically a busy bishop went home of an evening and instead of having a gin and tonic undertook a bit of translation and it was sent to the printer and as a result of that sometimes it's it's rather literal there is an idiom in in Hebrew that refers to the surface of the water it survives in Greek and indeed in English you can talk about the surface of the water as its as its face and the verse that we know from King James caster of bread upon the waters was translated here in the book of ecclesiastes by a very weary Bishop as lay thy bread upon wet faces and it's literally quite correct but it's also completely incomprehensible and that kind of error occurred rather too often in this Bible that it's one of the many reasons why the King James Bible is a superior bit it's editorially much more scrupulous people checked each other's work and all those those literal isms disappeared let's take a look now at the Geneva Bible now the Geneva Bible is the Bible that would have been known to Shakespeare for example as he was growing up and it has a very strong influence on the King James Bible indeed Myles Smith in the translators practice quotes from the Geneva Bible then quoting from the translation that he has just that he's actually introducing and so the longevity of Geneva carries on long into the 17th century now Geneva Bible is fascinating talk so cool because it was translated by marian exiles in geneva many of them people from oxford protestants who had fled during Mary's reign and indeed it was some funded by the Bodley family who Thomas body later founded the Bodley and libraries so there are many deep connections if you like again between Bible translation and the mercantile community as we saw with the King James model but also with if you like political religious upheaval and also with the the fragility of academic posts in that time if you like you could be moved in and out of your fellowship or your presidency of the college at the whim of the monarch has the religious presences at the times changed backwards and forwards so the Geneva Bible was translated my exile in Geneva in the middle of the sixteenth century and it was quickly very popular it had verses for example one of the reasons why it adopted the system of using biblical verses was because the annotation the studying what the godly called searching in the scriptures was very very important to the godly mindset and if you have verses you can navigate and you can write concordances you can write scriptural study notes and all of a sudden you've got a way of using your Bible or in groups in private and for the purposes of vernacular study so this is a Bible that very much took itself out of institutional in ecclesiastical contexts into people's hands into people's homes it was very often printed in much smaller formats than this and very often bound up with matters such as concordances or maps of the Holy Land it became if you like a kind of sort of a sort of package of sort of teaching resources or self educating resources in Christianity and on the title page of this Geneva Bible we also have declare that it has most profitable annotations now the profitable was again one of those aspects of Puritanism that was very very dear to their hearts the idea that you could gain spiritual profit benefit richness nurturing food nourishment from searching and studying the Scriptures is an integral part of reformed thinking living and behaving they were also fascinated by if you like the culture of the Old Testament word me and some people who attended Sunday school may remember as I do building models of the Temple of Solomon do you read in Lausanne no it's not and it's fascinating I remember that from my childhood when I first saw a Geneva Bible I realized why I've been doing that because there are illustrations here for example after the location of the Garden of Eden there are illustrations of what the Temple of Solomon was meant to look like illustrations of here we are some of the artifacts of Hebrew religion and this if you like cultural amplification and annotation of the Bible was integral to the godly way of reading and so here we have just a just opened this page at random to enter found all of these annotations this that appear alongside the Geneva and even one of these little pointing devices that you see very very often in early modern books of all kinds where the reader is possible missile just put little soberly on post-it note thank you take note of this so just there are many examples in this copy actually authored this is a copy that was clearly read attentively individual this is a very early copy printed in Geneva 1560 to Venice but of course it later became an English Bible and it was printed by the Kings printer of the Queen's printer under elizabeth alongside that the bishops Bible and after the accession of James was treated badly the Kings printer the the annotation is reflective of Geneva thinking and there was a side of Geneva that wasn't altogether friendly to monarchs and one of the things that James disliked about this Bible was the annotation which he thought was insufficiently respectful of monarchy there's a good example here in at the end of the first chapter of Exodus it's the story of the midwives you may recall that pharaoh orders the midwives to kill all the male Jewish babies as they're born and after a lapse of time he has the midwives in to ask how they're getting on with their genocide and they say that they have been unable to oblige because Jewish women are built differently from Egyptian women and that their loins are much slippery and by the time they arrived to attend birth the baby was gone the whole time I was gone wrong already as a result of which they they weren't able to kill the babies now as an excuse that's in the dog ate my homework category but the interesting part is the adaptation in the Geneva Bible which says talking about the midwives their disobedience here in was lawful but their dissembling was was evil so you're not allowed to tell a lie does something is wrong but disobeying the Pharaoh the king was all right and James took deep exception to this the thought of disobeying a monarch in any circumstance was to him utterly unacceptable and he loved the Bible without these feasts the these notes that subverted the monarchy in his view and I know annotator and took the opposite view was clearly an attack they too who enjoyed this moment there's a little one of these little hand signals to verse 17 says the midwives did not as the king of Egypt commanded them but preferred a life for many children and you can also see the politics of Geneva operative yes yes with the running header here is this Israel oppressed and people of a reformed Sensibility were very very attentive to intermissions of tyranny Protestants in the continent had been persecuted particularly in the Low Countries during the mid 16th century and so a very alive to any of the exactions as they know them of tyranny and oppression so the annotations and that what you call the para textual material the material that surrounds the rubrics at the beginning of the chapter the annotations the running heads are all expressing a form of political of theological resistance to rulers because the the mindset was that rulers are inherently disposed to oppression this to tyranny and that they need to that that midwives and Protestants need to stand up to tyranny there are some signs of haste in this - there's a capital M there that that's backwards there are many examples of that kind of thing in in the King James Bible the word and a nd is on 28 occasions in King James comes out as a UD because an N is just a you upside down and it all went haywire it's the most common misprint of course Bible translation has always been controversial and here we have a 1541 copy of the great Bible the one that has that famous title page of Henry the eighth dispensing his largesse to the people and commanding their obedience famously in 2 chronicles there was a little crime of a king inserted for again political religious polemical ends in that one of the crimes of jerking his abominations as the translations as it was added to the heat to the Hebrew text that he commanded carved images to be held up and that is a fairly blatant piece of Perlis politicking with the biblical text and of course Protestants and Catholics argued about many things throughout the whole of the sixteenth century one of the things they argued about most vociferously and probably with some small duty notional degree of enjoyment for those of them who were academics was the translation of the Bible and of course when it became evident that that that had been flagrantly inserted as a tyrannical crime in the new to old in the Old Testament the traffic lenses slept on that as an example of a heinous kind of politicizing of the Bible now the the Bible is a as a book is a Christian invention of life antiquity Jews had traditionally kept their Bible on scrolls and scrolls don't have an obvious order they're simply they slaughtered in two separate cases but the Christians use the Codex for whatever reason which enabled books to be bound together early Christian Bibles were large things they were meant for institutional for ecclesiastical use and for a long time there were no Bibles that were meant for individuals the process whereby that happened began with collections of the Gospels or sometimes the Gospels and Psalms and this is a splendid 11th century example of the Gospels being brought together magnificently Illustrated for the benefit of a private owner and it's a very early example of that happening in terms of a complete Bible there is a form of Bible called called the Paris Bibles that were published in the 12th or 13th century that were for private donors this is a 13th century example magnificently gilded I mean the illustrations are absolutely fabulous then the print is long as I say print it's written by hand but it has the regularity of titans and astonishing thing obviously owned by wealthy voters who could afford to Commission such a book but this was the beginning of private ownership of the Bible which didn't come into its own until the printing press made mass production of Bibles available in the early 16th century you

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Keywords: King James Bible, University of Oxford, Geneva Bible, Wadham College

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Length: 41min 22sec (2482 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018