If you go to a bookshop today and buy yourself a copy of the
Authorized Version of the Bible (i.e. the ‘King James’ Bible), what you
are likely to walk out with is not what you may think. While advocates
of the Authorized Version often quote the year 1611 when referring to
this edition, almost every actual copy of the AV you are likely to see
today is actually derived from a later re-editing of the text done by Benjamin
Blayney in 1769.
Here’s an extract from the 1611 Bible:
The former treatise haue I made, O Theophilus, of al that Jesus began
both to doe and teach, Untill the day in which hee was taken up, after
that he through the holy Ghost had giuen commaundements unto the
Apostles, whom he had chosen. To whom also he shewed himselfe aliue
after his passion, by many infallible proofes, being seene of them
fourty dayes, and speaking of the things perteining to the kingdome of
God: And being assembled together with them, commanded them that they
should not depart from Hierusalem, but wait for the promise of the
Father, which, saith he, ye haue heard of me.
This old spelling is not what you find in most copies of the Bible
sold today. Blayney is the person who did most of the cleaning up into
something essentially resembling modern spelling. The King James text
has, in fact, been so re-edited on multiple occasions since its original
publication, and David Norton’s New Cambridge Paragraph
Bible is intended to be the latest step in this development,
bringing the original text into the 21st century.
This is, therefore, not a updated translation based on the
Authorized Version, like the late 19th century Revised Version was. This
is exactly the 1611 King James Version text with an editorial make-over,
essentially affecting spelling and punctuation only — meanwhile undoing
many small changes to the text which crept in over the centuries
following the first edition. Thus even the slip-ups of the 1611 version
are maintained (just as they are in Blayney’s recension): the Jews are
still celebrating Easter, and not Passover, in Acts 12:4; the Epistle to
the Hebrews still bears a title calling it the work of Paul; and the Comma
Johanneum is intact without so much as an additional footnote. 1
Corinthians 13 still talks of charity and not love, which
is not strictly an error but is something which subsequent translations
(including the RV) have usually altered.
Rather, what Norton has aimed to do is to produce a text which
reflects the original 1611 translation, but which uses modern spelling,
punctuation, and formatting. He has done almost exactly the work that
Blayney and his predecessors did, but in the 21st century and not the
18th. For instance, though spelling in Blayney’s time was a lot closer
to today’s usage than the original 1611 Bible, the usual AV text still
uses spellings like shew for show and publickly for
publicly. Norton has updated these instances and others.
Moreover, while Blayney and other editors of the text elected to make
corrections to the 1611 translators’ work where they thought they had
blundered, Norton’s text deliberately avoids such speculative amendments
and presents, as close as possible, the original text.
One example which Norton is seemingly fond of bringing up is Hosea
6:5. Previous editors decided that the AV’s translators meant to write
‘Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets’. Norton used the
printed text of the very first edition, the translators’ handwritten
annotations in a copy of the Bishops’ Bible, and knowledge of the
particular Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts used by the translators, to
conclude that they actually intended to write shewed
i.e. showed them by the prophets, and corrects the miscorrection
which has ended up in all subsequent editions.
It is thus quite interesting to go through the parts of the
Authorized Version which one knows well and see how they have changed
from the original translators’ intentions, and how Norton has restored
them. For instance, it is well-known that the translators of the
Authorized Version wrote their Bible in a register that was archaic even
for the time. But they were apparently prone to slip into modernisms,
and in some places in Norton’s edition, we find that they were actually
less linguistically conservative than Blayney, who seemingly tried to
cover for them when they slipped up and used a more modern form of
words. Thus in the Ecclesiasticus 51:23–4 of Blayney we read ‘Draw near
unto me, ye unlearned, and dwell in the house of learning.
Wherefore are ye slow, and what say ye to these
things, seeing your souls are very thirsty?’ (emphasis mine),
grammatically correctly using the archaic subjective form of you.
But this is clearly an instance where the 1611 translators failed to
keep up the use of forms that were falling out of use in their time, for
in Norton we read you for all these yes — and, indeed, in
the original printing too.
On the whole, as I will describe later, I cannot recommend this bible
strongly enough to someone wanting to buy a copy of the Authorized
Version today. I do have one quibble, though.
A modernization too far
Norton’s task, as he describes it in the preface, was to produce an
edition of the AV which is as close as possible to the original 1611
version and the translators’ intentions therein, but with three changes:
modernization of spelling; introduction of quotation marks around
reported speech; and the formatting of the text into
paragraphs based on the sense of the words.
Under the rubric of spelling updates, however, Norton has made one
group of changes with which I strongly disagree, because I would class
it instead as a grammatical, not orthographic change: Norton has updated
the inflection of various strong
verbs to conform to their modern paradigms instead of the older ones
used in the original next and the Blayney recension. Thus brake
becomes broke, sware becomes swore, etc.
Norton writes in his introduction:
The removal of obsolete and inconsistent spellings, old-fashioned
punctuation and cumbersome presentation will be more obvious than the
changes to readings. Spelling is the most important issue, especially
because it may appear that the King James Bible no longer sounds quite
like itself. Where in current texts, Jesus ‘spake’ to the multitude, in
The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible he ‘spoke’. The word is
the same but the sound is different. Now, in 1611 spelling varied
freely. One notable aspect of this variation involves forms that we
would think would have to be pronounced differently, for instance
‘murderer’ and ‘murtherer’ (Num. 35:18 and 19). Similarly, a word might
be treated as aspirated according to the printer’s convenience, as in
Ezek. 40:42, ‘a cubite and an halfe long, and a cubite & a halfe
broad’. Such variations in close proximity strongly suggest that the
1611 spelling cannot be taken as a reliable guide to pronunciation, and
that therefore editors should ignore apparent changes of sound in
modernising the spelling.
He goes on to say that his text ‘keeps the modernisation within
strict limits: spellings may be modernized, but words and grammatical
forms cannot be changed.’
Now, in the cases of murderer and a/an half I can
sympathize with Norton’s argument that the pronunciation in practice may
have been different from the written form.
With the strong verbs, however, I do not think this holds sway. There is
ample historical evidence that spake comes down from an Old
English sp(r)æc, sp(r)ecan (still preserved in German
sprach for instance), that went down through Middle
English spak and into Early Modern English as
spake, and that this form followed a regular phonetic development
from [spæːk] to [spaːk], then being raised through the Great Vowel
Shift to [spɛːk] and [speːk] and then finally diphthongized to the
modern [spe͜ɪ̆k]. Spoke [spəʊk] pays no part in this regular and
purely phonetic development and is best classed as a new inflection. It
is true that several such verbs have so shifted from a to
o — but this is not a general, language-wide phonetic change. It
is a family of new inflections of a particular family of verbs, which
emerged only in the 16th century — not long before the King James
translators themselves began work.
Thus when Norton writes ‘the word is the same but the sound is
different’, he is correct that it is the same lemma, pointing
to the same collection of meanings, which appears under the same
dictionary entry. But the inflectional paradigm has most definitely
changed in a way that goes beyond the spelling, and the spelling (marked
still in use as ‘archaic, dialect, or poetic’ by the OED)
spake best reflects the natural descendent; and the same goes for
the other verbs so affected. There is no reason for anything other than
absolute certainty that the pronunciations with a, still
recognizable today by every speaker of English, were what the
translators of 1611 intended when they chose the older spellings, and
therefore I very much wish that Norton had retained the older forms. I
take particular exception to the forms spokest and brokest
which are essentially neo-archaisms, since thou was already
hardly ever used in common speech by the time the new forms with
o took firm hold.
Those who are really bothered by this, however, can simply remember
to consistently pronounce these words in the old way despite the
spelling.
Conclusion: A
should-be new standard text
The back-story for the development of the NCPB is that
Cambridge’s printing plates for their copies of the Authorized Versions
of the Bible were getting worn and needed replacement and thus the Bible
would have to be re-typeset, so they began to consider what (if any)
changes they should make in the new version. That led to them
commissioning this re-edited text, which was presumably supposed to take
the place of the 1769 Blayney text in subsequent Cambridge editions.
But … it hasn’t. If you buy the ordinary ‘King James Bible’ from
Cambridge, what you still get is the Blayney text. It’s not clear why
this is, because by rights Norton’s recension ought to be the new
standard. You have to buy this text under the special title of the
New Cambridge Paragraph Bible which doesn’t make it
immediately clear that this is a King James edition. If you buy a copy
of the Book of Common Prayer, the epistles, gospels, and
other lections are printed there according to the Blayney text.
As the Queen’s Printer, the Cambridge University Press which
commissioned this edition is in a privileged position in that it could,
in theory, enforce the use of Norton’s version by all other British
publishers of the King James Bible; and, given its obviously
closer resemblance to the true text of the Bible that was
authorized that would be an entirely proper use of its power to
control editions for quality. Outside of the UK, the new standard text
would likely not catch on quite so easily because the Blayney edition
has the advantage of being out of copyright and thus royalty-free for
publishers. But the new text is so clearly superior from the viewpoint
of comprehensibility that it seems strange to keep the old one around at
all, especially as the most prominent edition; and I’m certain that,
were the NCPB more widely distributed within the UK, the
American publishers would soon catch up with it.
The Authorized Version is, in Norton’s version as in any other, a
true treasure of the Christian faith and the English language — but
Norton’s work has blown the dust off this masterpiece of prose and made
it more of a pleasure to read than ever. I only wish it were more widely
known.
Norton, David (ed.) The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible (With the
Apocrypha): King James Version (2005, rev. 2011). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-76284-7.