We left Luther sweating in the crowded room at Worms, where he had taken his historic stand before the Holy Roman Emperor, the princes of Germany, and their assembled wise men and courtiers. What now?
Had he been left to sort things out for himself, it is unlikely that Luther would have lasted the year. Surely some authority would have arrested, tried, and executed him. Luther had received a safe-conduct from Charles, which the young emperor meant to honor. But once Luther reached Wittenberg, if he did, all bets would be off as to his continued freedom or even continued existence. Frederick the Wise, therefore, sent Luther word that he should expect to be intercepted soon after leaving Worms in the company of his armed guards and would, in effect, be kidnapped by an unidentified band of horsemen, training their bows on Luther’s guards. The interlopers appeared according to plan and took off with Luther, whither no one knew. In all likelihood, Luther himself did not know where he was being taken. The story went round—recounted with varying levels of hysteria—that Luther had been kidnapped by unidentified men and taken to parts unknown. Thereafter, he might as well have dropped off the Earth. No one knew if he was still alive or where he was or under whose constraints, not an uncommon fate for an annoying heretic.
After a lengthy ride, made more arduous by the twists and turns of the “kidnappers,” who were determined not to be followed, Luther was brought to his hiding place, an out-of-the-way castle called the Wartburg, high in the forested hills overlooking the town of Eisenach. It was to be his “prison” for several months. While there, Luther was closely confined, since it was essential that he not be seen by casual visitors or passersby. While he grew his hair to eliminate his tonsure and a beard to further disguise himself, the increasingly grumpy guest was often reduced to spending long periods in the small room that had been assigned to him. Thus deprived of exercise, he developed a painful case of constipation, which he wrote about to friends in vivid descriptions. He was given the name Junker George, “Junker” indicating a man of noble rank; his only, and very occasional, conversations were with two of Frederick’s trusted friends. His drinking increased as did his waistline. “I sit here idle and drunk all day long,” he complained in one letter.
Though Luther never doubted the wisdom of Frederick’s precautions, this remarkable level of inactivity might have led to permanent physical and psychological damage—except that Luther soon stumbled upon an all-consuming project: the translation of the whole of the Bible from its original languages into idiomatic German. Such a project would be exceedingly daunting to almost anyone in any age, but there were excellent reasons in the year 1522 for judging that the task would prove utterly impossible.
For starters, the entire library of scholarly aids available to us was then lacking. Besides the very recent publication of Erasmus’s intercolumnar texts of the New Testament, there was no published assistance of any kind. There were of course many editions ofJerome’s Vulgate in the Latin of the late fourth century AD, but more and more educated readers were coming to doubt its trustworthiness. There were no reliable dictionaries of either ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament, or Hebrew, the language of almost all of the Old Testament. The science of textual analysis would not get under way much before the nineteenth century, and in any case there was nowhere to be found a reliable collection of ancient manuscripts (certainly not outside the papal library, which was hardly available to Luther).
German was at this time barely a language in the sense that we would today assume. There was high German and low German, and there were a large number of dialects, Saxon, Bavarian, Hanoverian, Swabian, and the Schwyzerdütsch of the Swiss being only the most common. There was no German literary language, no written examples of classic masterpieces that could serve as models of style and substance. German was, like most European vernaculars beyond the Italian models of Dante and Boccaccio, still a language coming into being. Of course, it was spoken everywhere—in one form or another—by ordinary, unliterary folk without shame or inhibition. But writers and professors, lawyers and princes, if they wished their words to be understood clearly and definitively, still spoke and wrote in Latin. Luther had already broken with this convention by occasionally publishing in German. But the Bible? Even the innovative Erasmus had published his New Testament in Greek, Jerome’s late Latin, and his own more pristine classical Latin, but not in any vernacular. No attempt had been made to translate the Bible into German since a group of unidentified scholars had made a translation into Middle High German in the fourteenth century, a translation of the Vulgate only, certainly not of the Hebrew or the Greek. Like Wyclif’s first translation into English in the same period, it follows the Vulgate with a painfully literal awkwardness.
Three months or so into his new project, Martin Luther had finished his historic translation of the New Testament. He had not simply translated the Christian scriptures; he had invented literary German. He did this by peopling the books of the New Testament with ordinary Germans, speaking as colorfully as they did in real life. Such language was hardly unknown to Luther, who enjoyed the frank concreteness of German vocabulary and often availed himself of it in public and private. He had chosen the German that the imperial Saxon court used in official business with its unlettered subjects, which was also the form of German that he and the largest plurality of Germans were familiar with. But he swiftly transformed the rigidities of this official legalese by mixing it with the earthy German of daily intercourse. As he himself tells us, he listened to “the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops.” More than this, the translator exhibited a thrillingly expressive ease that harkened back to the traditions of medieval mystics and poets. As would soon become evident in his inspiring hymns, Luther was himself a genuine German poet, even a composer with a natural feeling for the rhythms of speech and the melodies of phrases.
In making his translation accessible to the man and the woman in the street, he translated the coinage of the ancient world into its Germanic equivalents: the shekel became the Silberling, the Greek drachma and the Roman denarius became the groschen. He did the same with measures and titles, the Roman centurion turning into a Hauptmann. Wherever possible, he employed the alliteratively striking phrases of the common people: Geld und Gut (gold and goods), Land und Leute (country and countrymen), Stecken und Stab (stick and staff), Dornen und Disteln (thorns and thistles). Using the German language’s tendency to heap words on words in new combinations, he enriched the language with his own evocative new combinations, such as Gottseligkeit (God’s happiness, or salvation).
Once set in type and printed, the translation was received like rain in a desert. A shocked Johannes Cochlaeus, who had been present at Worms and would remain one of Luther’s fiercest and most unyielding opponents, had to admit: “Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the Gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.” The condescending Cochlaeus was one doctor of divinity who had no interest in debating theological points with women and other “ignorant persons.” The distance between traditional, academic Romanists like Cochlaeus and on-the-ground Germanic evangelists, such as seemed to be sprouting up everywhere, shows itself here as virtually unbridgeable.
A far more considered and balanced assessment of Luther’s achievement was made in the nineteenth century by the great Swiss Presbyterian scholar Philip Schaff: “The richest fruit of Luther’s leisure in the Wartburg, and the most important and useful work of his whole life, is the translation of the New Testament, by which he brought the teaching and example of Christ and the Apostles to the mind and heart of the Germans in life-like reproduction. It was a republication of the gospel. He made the Bible the people’s book in church, school, and house. If he had done nothing else, he would be one of the greatest benefactors of the German-speaking race.”
But for all the astonishing literary triumph of Luther’s translation, did he go too far in setting these ancient (and quite various) texts in a then-modern German context? Did he on occasion even mistranslate in order to push his own theological agenda? A fair answer to each of these questions must be: “Sometimes, yes.”
Each translator (of even far simpler texts than the New Testament) is inevitably faced with the problem that a concept familiar, even taken for granted, in one language is unfamiliar in another. (One of the most compelling educational reasons for studying a language other than one’s own is the familiarization it offers with alien ways of thinking and perceiving.) Luther’s Germanicization of the New Testament progressed so far that the distance between sixteenth-century Germany and first-century Palestine was all but erased. Let one especially extreme example serve my point.
In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, just after his sensational Hymn to Love (Chapter 13), he devotes a long passage to one of his recurrent headaches: the “speaking in tongues” that had become a feature of some Christian assemblies. “Speaking in tongues” actually meant speaking nonsense, since no one could understand the speaker, but some Christians were certain that their supposedly mystical babbling was a gift of the Spirit. Paul, trying to avoid an outright confrontation with these folk, suggests that there isn’t much point to speaking in tongues if no one understands what you’re saying: “Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me” (1 Cor 14:11). To a Greek speaker like Paul, the meaning of the word “barbarian” was pellucid. Greeks had long ago invented the word because they in their monumental superiority thought that non–Greek speakers spoke nonsensical baby talk (“bar-bar-bar”). Only the commodious Greek language could express all human thought.12
The Romans, in their turn, thought that all non-Romans—except the Greeks, whom they feared might be their intellectual (though not their administrative) superiors—spoke inferior languages that no Roman (or Greek) needed to know. This is why we know thatJesus and Pontius Pilate spoke Greek together; Pilate, the Roman official, would hardly have bothered to learn Aramaic, let alone Hebrew. To the Romans the ultimate barbarians were the uncivilized Germans, who lived beyond the Rhine and the Danube, hunted like savages, and were always threatening to invade Roman territory.13
So how does Luther translate “barbarian” into German? Where the word “barbarian” occurs in Paul’s letter, Luther supplies in his German translation the word undeutsch (not-German)! So the barbarians have become those who are not German. The assumption of the translator is that his audience will perceive anything not-German as inferior, as appositely barbarous. In supplying undeutsch, Luther cancels out long swaths of history and leaves in their place only an unwarranted sense of national superiority. Here is a rather determinative clue that the European Reformation does not lie solely in the blindness and blunders of Rome but also in the very large collective ego of the northern Europeans, whose resentment against those who were always assumed to be their cultural superiors is now reaching its boiling point.
Far more serious, however, is Luther’s purposive mistranslation of a far more central Pauline text, Romans 3:28, which reads in the King James Version: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” To the word “faith” Luther attached the word “alone,” which does not appear in the text of the Bible, thus changing the meaning of Paul’s statement (allein durch den Glauben, “alone by faith” in the German word order) for the sake of backing up his own professed faith. But this misstatement also cancels out the entire point of the Letter of James—“by works a man is justified and not by faith only” (James 2:24)—which Luther derided anyway as “an epistle of straw.” So, the true Christian can pick and choose among the inspired writings.
Nor did our translator stop there: “If your papist makes much useless fuss about the word ‘sola,’ ‘allein,’ tell him at once: Doctor Martin Luther will have it so, and says: Papist and donkey are the same thing”—and then goes on at some length, full of insulting invective and embarrassing egotism.
It would take Luther more than a decade to finish his translation of the Old Testament, which would be published in its complete version only in 1534, long after he had returned in safety to Wittenberg. In translating the New Testament, Luther had relied for his Greek text on Erasmus’s second edition. For his Hebrew, he was fortunate in having the definitive Masoretic text, which had first been published in Brescia less than three decades before he began his great task. Nonetheless, Luther’s most troublesome challenge came in his attempt to translate the linguistic subtleties of the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Job. Luther’s Hebrew was several degrees less secure than his Greek, but the truth is that a translator needs a thorough familiarity with—and deep love of—his own language much more than he needs the same for the language he means to translate. And though Luther had a growing group of learned advisers, including several rabbis, to help him through the Hebrew texts, he never stopped amending his translations, correctingmisprints, improving phrases, and heightening the melody and even the symmetry of his work.
Despite the ban on Luther’s Bible throughout several large German-speaking lands, such as Saxony, Bavaria, and Austria, Hans Lufft, the Wittenberg printer, sold about a hundred thousand copies in the first forty years that the complete text was in circulation. This was a staggering number for a book at this time and suggests that the text was read by millions. The huge number of reprints made by other printers is inestimable. Though this trade in Bibles made fortunes for many, Luther never collected so much as aPfennig, nor did he wish to receive any monetary reimbursement.
William Tyndale, born about 1494, was an ordained priest who had studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, arriving first at Oxford at the age of twelve and earning his master’s degree by the age of nineteen or twenty. Contemporary comment on him inevitably stresses his extraordinary skill at languages. He came under the influence of the continental reformers—Luther and those who soon followed Luther—by reading their published works, widely (if surreptitiously) circulated thanks to the new urban phenomenon ofprinting presses.
He began to translate the New Testament into English, using Erasmus’s text. And Tyndale’s English was the exquisitely clarified, ringing English of the West Midlands, especially the Malvern Hills, Gloucestershire, the Cotswold scarp, the Vale of Berkeley, and the ancient Forest of Dean, all within tramping distance of musical Wales to the west and the Shakespeare family’s Stratford-upon-Avon to the east. In studying Tyndale’s choice of words the reader is repeatedly confronted by his elegant simplicity, for, as Proverbs has it, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Though the gradual rise in dignity of the vernacular languages and the ever-wider dissemination of printing presses were encouraging more widespread literacy, it was still true that a translator of Tyndale’s ambition wrote preeminently not for readers but for hearers of the fitly spoken word.
Tyndale found himself more and more exasperated at the sodden ignorance of his fellow priests. An English bishop who surveyed his Gloucester clergy a decade or so after Tyndale’s time would find that of 311 churchmen 168 were unable to recite all ten commandments and thirty-one couldn’t say for sure whose commandments they were. Forty churchmen were unable to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in full in English, nor would they speculate as to who the author of the prayer might be.
In one encounter with a fellow priest, Tyndale kept insisting on the authority of the Bible rather than that of the pope. His frustrated interlocutor exclaimed finally that we’d all be “better without God’s law than the pope’s!” To this Tyndale replied in the most famous sentence attached to his name: “I defy the pope and all his laws, and if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.” Though in its essence this is close to the far more pacific sentiment expressed nearly two centuries earlier by Wyclif about the ability of even simple souls to read the Bible, it also glows with the combativeness that we necessarily associate with the outraged exchanges of the sixteenth century. And this combativeness will continue to power exchanges on both sides of the issues. If you meant to translate the Bible into a vernacular, and especially into English, you could no longer expect to die in your bed.
Tyndale was not in the dark about the danger he was placing himself in. The very existence of an unrepentant and unchastised rebel only encouraged others to rebel. Since never in all of human history have those in power willingly and graciously ceded that power to others, Europe was becoming a powder-keg society, in which new explosions might be expected anywhere, at any time. Eternal vigilance and aggressive response were quickly becoming the order of the day.
In autumn 1523 Tyndale journeyed to London to seek the patronage of its bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, a learned humanist associated with critics of the church such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, then Speaker of the House of Commons. Tyndale met with a cold reception from Tunstall, who was also an intimate of the young king and Lord Keeper of his Privy Seal and who smelled in Tyndale not the playfully ironic detachment of fellow humanists, but the sharp odor of the true zealot. Both More and Tunstall, after all, were already engaged in providing Henry with verbal weapons in the royal attack against Luther—for which the pope awarded Henry the title “Defender of the Faith,” a title still claimed by British monarchs.
Luther had already called Henry “a pig, a dolt, and a liar.” Henry had already replied that Luther was “an ape, a drunkard, and a lousy little friar.” Gentlemen did not then confine themselves to logical argument. Defenders of the faith felt no constraints upon their pens or their tongues in the face of opposing argument. And as these ever more acrimonious verbal conflagrations were joined, bonfires of Luther’s writings, as well as of Wyclif’s increasingly archaic translations, were being lit across the land.
Half a year after his unrewarding encounter with Bishop Tunstall, Tyndale sailed for the continent, never to return to his native land. In Wittenberg he may have met with Luther, then settled himself in Cologne, a precarious choice, where he completed his great translation of the New Testament into English. Tyndale’s plan was to print a first edition of six thousand copies at Cologne, but he was tipped off in the nick of time that the printer’s shop was about to be raided, after which he slipped off to the more staunchly Lutheran precincts of Worms, where in late 1525 the New Testament in modern English was finally printed, bound, and shipped to England, concealed amid cases of grain, fabric, and other dry goods.
Many volumes were confiscated, but in the course of the ensuing years thousands more made their way to the hands of English readers. Henry VIII could not allow such treasonous activities to pass unremarked. Many public burnings were arranged for seized copies of Tyndale’s defiant work. Thomas More was set the task of defending the status quo against the revolutionary incursions of this pestiferous translation, “so corrupted and changed,” according to More, “from the good and wholesome doctrine of Christ” that it had been deformed into “a clean contrary thing.”
What especially irritated More was that by translation alone Tyndale had won the battle of competing theologies. The Greek word ekklesia, which was always translated into English as “church,” Tyndale translated as “congregation.” The Greek wordpresbyteros,always translated as “priest,” Tyndale translated as “senior” and in later editions as “elder.” Now, after the long expanse of time that separates us from this controversy, we may say without fear of contradiction that Tyndale was right and More wrong. The ancient church was simply a congregation, not a hierarchy. Each local congregation was likely to have a resident elder, someone who had been witness to the life of Jesus, not in any sense a member of a hieratic order, for which Greek had quite another word (hieros).
Many other words that had been assigned theologically technical meanings by the medieval church had only plain, open meanings when read in the original Greek. So the word that had been translated as “penance,” suggesting a reference to the church’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance, Tyndale translated as “repentance,” suggesting not a sacrament but an interior attitude. Similarly, the word normally translated as “confess” Tyndale translated as “acknowledge.” For the word usually translated as “grace” (or “gratia” in the Latin Vulgate), Tyndale rightly used “favor,” at least by implication endangering the hierarchy’s cherished doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, supposedly born “full of grace” (gratia plena) and therefore without stain of original sin. Most daringly perhaps, he translated the wonderful Greek word agape, not by the then-conventional (and Latinate) English word “charity,” but simply as “love.”
Tyndale issued a defense (Answer unto Sir Thomas More) in response to which the normally considered More published perhaps his least considered work (Confutation of Tyndale), describing Tyndale as “discharging a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth.” He was, claimed More, the son of Satan. Not that Tyndale was incapable of his own intemperance: in the margins of his translation, he had printed his “pestilent glosses,” as Henry termed them, accusing the pope, for instance, of defying scripture by cursing “whom God curseth not” and asserting that “bishops and abbots desire no better tenants” than whores and that the pope would be happy to increase his revenues by levying a tax on the business of prostitution. Many such glosses were unnecessarily combative and sometimes mean-spirited, even when they were not absolutely untruthful.
Doughty Tyndale spent years on the Continent, living hand to mouth and moving from one place to another so as to avoid detection and capture. As More and his minions (as well as the—somewhat less persevering—agents of the pope) pursued him and diplomatic relations between England and the continental powers were often in flux, no place was safe for long. Despite his fugitive status, Tyndale managed to perfect his knowledge of ancient Hebrew and to translate into English the first fourteen books of the Old Testament from Genesis through Second Chronicles.
At last, in 1535 a fanatical, disreputable Englishman, Henry Phillips, one of those inveterate privateering secret agents who pop up through history, discovered where Tyndale was lodging—in rooms in Antwerp, which had previously provided the translator safe haven. Pretending to befriend Tyndale, Phillips identified him to the Antwerp authorities and collaborated in his capture. Tyndale was cornered in a narrow lane while in conversation with Phillips, who—Judas-style—“pointed with his finger over Tyndale’s head” so the arresting officers “might see who to take.” Tyndale offered no resistance, and the imperial officers “pitied to see his simplicity.”
Imprisoned in the cold, damp dungeon of Vilvoorde Castle, north of Brussels, Tyndale suffered horribly for nearly a year and a half. We have his letter to the prison’s governor, begging for warmer clothes and a lamp. “But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew bible, grammar, and dictionary, that I may continue with my work. In return I pray every good may come to you, consistent with the salvation of your soul.” Tyndale had already completed his translation of the Torah (or Five Books of Moses). Thanks to the “clemency” of the governor, he was able to complete his translations from Joshua through Second Chronicles, an amazing accomplishment. He had fallen in love with the Hebrew language and found many similarities between it and his plainspoken native tongue: “The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word.”
In August 1536, Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a church court, defrocked as a priest, and turned over to the state for burning. One of his two prosecutors, Ruwart Tapper, a theologian at the University of Louvain, remarked: “It doesn’t matter whether those we execute are really guilty or not. What matters is that the people are terrified by our trials.” Tyndale may not have been executed till October 6. Out of pity, he was strangled with a chain before his corpse was burned in the prison yard of the castle. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”
The king for whom Tyndale prayed was Henry VIII. After showing initial promise as an artistic intellectual, Henry proved to be one of the worst kings the English have ever had, a Tudor Stalin who sent to the gallows anyone who displeased him, including two of his six wives and many of his most loyal and devoted servants, including, once he had embarked on his endless rounds of marrying, his fast friend Thomas More. As Henry’s lord chancellor (1529–1532), More had helped organize the hunt for Tyndale, though by the time Tyndale was executed, More had already lost his head. The older Henry became, the more arbitrary and irrational he grew and the more he was feared by anyone who had to have anything to do with him. This aging, gorging athlete grew so fat that he could be moved only by machinery or the efforts of many muscular attendants. After his death in 1547, his casket is said to have exploded, dripping putrid fat everywhere—as fitting an end as Tyndale’s prayerful one.
What Tyndale prayed for was that his king, once his eyes were open, would support the reformation of the English Church. As we all know, Henry did this—sort of. But there was to be no royal enlightenment. His motives were entirely selfish and supremely egotistical. He did not believe in reformation, only in his own superiority.
Henry was succeeded by his three “legitimate” but fruitless children in turn, after which the Tudors were no more. Scotland’s James VI, son of the executed Mary Queen of Scots and descendant of Henry’s sister Margaret, ascended the English throne in 1603 as James I, the first of the Stuart kings. James, though not as ominous a figure as Henry, was no royal paragon. A crusty, suspicious Scotsman, he wore so many layers of padded clothing (for fear of being surprised and stabbed) that he waddled like a duck. His Scottish experience had left him with a loathing for all things Presbyterian and, especially, Puritan. He was glad to bid farewell to many of these annoyances when the Puritans headed off to North America on a ship called the Mayflower. He thought the English parliament, like anything that smacked of democracy, a nuisance that, unfortunately, “I cannot get rid of.” His relationship to the translation of the Bible that bears his name is more tenuous than is usually assumed.
At the beginning of 1604, the first full year of his reign, James assembled a group of churchmen at Hampton Court Palace. During the course of their three-day conference, which proved inconclusive on most matters, a “new translation of the Bible” was proposed. James approved the proposal for such a Bible, dedicated to him as head of the (relatively new) monarchical national church. Surely, he assumed, it would not include Tyndale’s “pestilent glosses.”
It would not. The marginal notes would be confined to citations of parallel texts and occasional references to unresolved ambiguities in the language of the original. Fifty-four eminent scholars worked on the translation, apportioned among six “companies,” each assigned a specific set of biblical books. Though all had been appointed by the monarch to their various academic posts, they were also overseen by bishops with safely predictable theological opinions. Ekklesia would be translated as “church,” not as “congregation,” episkopos as “bishop” (really just a shortened Anglo-Saxon rendering of the Greek word), not given its less mysterious municipal meaning of “overseer, inspector, superintendent.” Agape would be translated not as “love” but as “charity.”
Despite these conservative touches, the finished product would not be in any sense a new translation. The instructions provided to the translators specifically pointed them toward consulting existing translations. They consulted even the Douai-Reims, the existing Roman Catholic translation. What emerged at the end of all their work was a translation that was as accurate as they could make it but also fashioned to be spoken “trippingly on the tongue” and received by the ear with “a temperance that may give it smoothness,” as Hamlet says in his advice to the players. As a result, countless phrases of the KJV have entwined themselves permanently into our language—from “In the beginning” to “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Numerous longer expressions—such as “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat”—scan as smoothly as lines of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter.
The translators worked without recompense from the king or from anyone else—and they worked so diligently for the eight years of the undertaking that the neglected Lady Margaret, wife of Sir Henry Savile, warden of Merton College and one of the most diligent overseers of the process of translation, was heard to lament, “I would I were a book too.”
Though James had virtually nothing to do with the effort, the extravagant dedication to him as “the principal mover and author of this work” seemed almost to place the British monarch but a step lower than God himself, the prime mover and author of all life. The theory of the divine right of kings, then coming to enjoy general acclaim and enthusiastically endorsed by James and many of his fellow princes, has long since lost its allure, even in the royal house of England. Beyond the Isle of Britain, even among dis-established Anglican churches throughout the world, no one today would dream of taking the theory seriously. Nor, for that matter, would any Anglican beyond Britain take seriously the claim of the monarch to be head of the church.
Many perfectly orthodox and serious Christians now resist even the once universal doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, though it is also true that American fundamentalists cling to the KJV to this day, even if their Pilgrim ancestors used the translation only because they had no printing presses for composing more agreeable editions of the Bible. To locate whole societies of those who would kill because of perceived mistranslation (or because of the rending of some equally cherished religious principle), we today would need to journey beyond the borders of the Christian world altogether. And for this we can all whisper Deo gratias. Or perhaps less grandly, hominibus gratias.
But even after so many centuries of continuing political upheavals around the globe and mind-boggling cultural transformations throughout the Western world, the KJV remains. Indeed, it has more printed copies to its name than any other book ever published—and more than 80 percent of its text must be credited to that inspired and doomed priest, William Tyndale. “Yes verily,” as Paul, quoting Psalm 19, reminded the Romans, “their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.”