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In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture, by Alister McGrath, Doubleday, 328 pp.; $24.95
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, Simon & Schuster, 366 pp.; $26
The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God's Words, by Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem, Broadman & Holman, 377 pp.; $19.99, paper
The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is now only one among many Scripture translations widely available to readers of English. Although sales of the KJV in the United States are topped only by sales of the New International Version (NIV), the status of the KJV as the overwhelmingly dominant translation has been fading for at least a century, heralding the end of a well-defined historical epoch that lasted from about the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century.
It was an era decisively marked by the assumption, often unspoken, that the Bible in English was simply the version first published in 1611 by order of King James I. This assumption meant that when readers or hearers of Scripture came to the end of the 23rd Psalm, they expected to find, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." It was immaterial that at least one alternative rendering had remained more popular in England and America for at least a generation after 1611 (the Geneva Bible's "Doubtless kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall remain a long season in the house of the Lord"). Nor did it register that several translations produced at about the same time were favored by significant groups of English speakers. Regardless, most English readers would have heard something amiss in any alternative, like the Douai-Rheims version of 1582 ("And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days").
The three books noticed in this review testify in different ways to how significant it was in British and American life for the KJV to prevail so widely and so long. Alister McGrath's In the Beginning and Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters join a long line of volumes treating the circumstances leading to the KJV, the nature of the translation itself, and the effects of this version on the English language and Anglo-American culture. If neither volume is likely to replace F. F. Bruce's indispensable History of the Bible in English (3d edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), both are still attractive volumes. Together they explain why, in the well-considered assertions of Debora Shuger, "The Bible remained the central cultural text in England" as "it continued to generate knowledge and narrative" and as it "operated as … the site where the disciplines converge."
There is some overlap between the books by McGrath and Bobrick, but it is an edifying redundancy. Both are especially good on the importance of pre-KJV translations, particularly William Tyndale's first complete New Testament of 1526. They also show how much the KJV translators were influenced by the Geneva Bible (first published by English exiles in 1560), an extremely popular version eventually undone by its extensive, violently anti-monarchical notes. (The desire to get those notes out of circulation was one of the main reasons that James I agreed in 1604 to commission a new translation.)
Both books also comment on an unfortunate precedent set by the Geneva Bible, which was the first English-language version published with verse divisions. Segmenting the text like this—a practice that has thankfully been overcome in many recent translations—may have been a boon for checking references, but it was otherwise a disaster; it encouraged prooftexting, obscured the integrity of narratives, and dismembered cohesive discourses under the control of the inspired authors into fragments manipulated by uninspired readers. Among many other riches, the two studies also reveal the roots of Sunday morning confusion over public recitation of the Lord's Prayer arising from differing results from Tyndale ("forgive us our trespasses") and his successor Miles Coverdale ("forgive us our debts") in rendering Matthew 6:12.
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