OF all the many English translations of the Bible, not one has ever succeeded in disputing the supremacy of the King James, commonly known as the authorized version. In it, truly, if it be permissible to employ a phrase which has become almost banal by repetition, is to be found the "well of English undefined." There the glorious simplicity, the majesty, and the exquisite cadences of the English tongue gather into thundering volume or fade into stately narration. As a translation, too, it is difficult to surpass. Many scholars, and not a few who were not scholars, have striven to emulate it, but what the former have given with one hand, they have usually taken away with the other, while as for the latter, it may be said of them, in the words of the preacher, "of making many books there is no end."
The revisers of 1611 worked, manifestly, under obvious disadvantages. They had not the superb collation of texts which was the opportunity of the revisers of 1885. The mysteries of κοιυή that bastard solloquial Greek tongue of the Mediterranean, with its boatman's idioms, were unsuspected by them; neither were they alive to the full force of the eastern dress of the book, which has induced a famous scholar of today to declare that "the hands are the hands of a Greek, but the voice is the voice of Israel." Still, to them the manuscripts were perhaps less a collection of Greek texts to be mastered, and more the voice of God speaking to His people. Religion was a very real thing to the world in those days. The children of the men who had crowded round the great chained Bibles in St. Paul's, and had seen the fires blazing in Smithfield, themselves remembered the "fury" of Antwerp and the day of St. Bartholomew, and had watched the beacons leaping from hill-top to hill-top with the news that the Armada was at sea.
It was thus the King James version came into being, and readers who lightly discard it for translations made today in a hurry, would do well to remember that, though these translations may be less archaic, they are not necessarily more faithful; and that the earnest striving to master something which seems difficult may lead to a truer perception of the spiritual meaning of the text than the perusal of a slipshod translation, whose very inaccuracies avoid the difficulties of the original, and whose delusive simplicity only illustrates anew the fact that nothing worth having can be gained without effort.
