Review of Bible – The Story of the King James Version by Gordon Campbell

Feeling enthusiastic about writing this review, I emailed David Marr and said:

I was wondering if I could trouble you for a brief comment about Patrick White and the King James Version that I could include in my piece? It seems to my amateur’s eye that The Tree of Man and Voss at the very least contain a self-conscious echo of the rhythms of KJV prose. I would even venture to say that The Tree of Man echoes the narratives of the latter half of the book of Genesis. Would this be wide of the mark?

This was going to be my scoop: the Australian connection. A great deal has been written about the influence of the 1611 Bible on the West without referencing antipodean literature. Very kindly, Marr replied. But the reply from White’s biographer wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. Marr said

Patrick was never shy of listing his influences but I can’t remember him ever citing the Bible.

And he went on to explain that, even so, that if you wanted to write a creation epic such as The Tree of Man, you could scarcely avoid drawing on the ‘epic simplicity’ of the King James. There just aren’t that many models for epic in our culture. But at the same time, it would be hard for a writer to cite the Bible as an influence because it would sound a little like you were shaping your own prose to be heard as if it were the Word of God.

That is to say: it just isn’t particularly newsworthy to proclaim that the KJV Bible has had an influence on the literature of English-speaking authors from the mid seventeenth century till the mid twentieth including of course Australian ones. It was the bible of English speakers for more than three centuries, until competitors emerged at the end of the twentieth century.

Since that time, if the KJV has had an influence over writers it is because they deliberately and consciously sought it out. For example, Helen Garner spent months reading the King James in preparation for writing her novel Cosmo Cosmolino. But for the generation of Patrick White and for centuries before him, the KJV was part of the language itself. That we have spent so much effort pointing this out on the 400th anniversary of its publication says perhaps more about our contemporary cultural amnesia than anything else.

This is my chief problem with Gordon Campbell’s book Bible – The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011. It is a beautifully produced and thoroughly researched book that is itself a lovely object to hold. It is meant to serve as a companion to the Oxford University Press’s King James Version – 400 Year Anniversary Edition. This is a role it serves admirably, by acting as a storehouse of interesting facts about the commissioning, translation, publication and even printing of the KJV. It might be best characterised as an ‘affectionate biography’ of the KJV. But it lacks a thesis beyond the observation that the KJV has been very important in the life and language of English-speaking peoples.

Campbell is very good on tracing the complicated path of reprints, new editions and new formats. He retells the story of the ‘Wicked Bible’, so –called because in this edition the printers mysteriously left the ‘not’ out of the seventh commandment, such that it read ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. Unsurprisingly, there are only a handful of this edition that have survived the horrified reaction of the publishers.

Campbell is also able to reveal a good deal about the reception history of the KJV. A romanticised vision of the KJV might think of it as constantly revered by English-speaking peoples. In the eighteenth century, for example, the KJV had many detractors on the grounds that its language was ‘obsolete and uncouth’. They had a point. What could ‘In measure when it shooteth forth, thou wilt debate with it: he stayeth his rough wind in the day of the East wind’ (Is 27:8) possibly mean, just to cite one example. It was also the case that scholars had begun to notice inconsistencies and infelicities in the translation of the Hebrew and Greek text; and to point out that the so-called ‘Textus Receptus’, the form of the original language text from which the translators had worked, had been proven to be inaccurate at many points by the discovery of new manuscripts.

That the KJV resisted these attacks and became so dominant for so long was not the result of its superb prose style but as a result of the way in which for so many people it conveyed spiritual truth. It was the language of their spiritual birth. One of Campbell’s great strengths is that he understands belief and believers and does not patronise them. He grasps that the greatness of the KJV lies not in its literary style and its influence on authors of novels, but in its role as the sacred book of the English-speaking peoples. Unlike many commentators, he is even-handed with regard to those contemporary Christian groups who are ‘King James only’.

The story that Campbell tells is told just as well by David Daniell in his 2003 book The Bible in English: History and Influence (New Haven: Yale). The advantage of Daniell’s book is that it is not merely the story of the King James Version but of the Bible in English in its many versions. As Campbell recognises, the KJV transmits and refracts the influence of the translations that went before it – most especially the work of the remarkable and brave William Tyndale who was martyred in 1534. The story of the KJV is really a part of a larger and more significant story – the story of how the English-speaking peoples came to hear the Scriptures in the language of their heart, and the story of how so many of these people came to know a spiritual transformation in the hearing of these words.