Reconstructing the Process: Transcript

Includes Hannibal Hamlin, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and associate professor of English at The Ohio State University; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the Church, St. Cross College, Helen Moore, university lecturer in English and fellow at Corpus Christi College, and Julian Reid, Corpus Christi and Merton College archivist, among the curators of the Bodleian Library Manifold Greatness exhibition at the University of Oxford.

HELEN MOORE: The original idea of the translation of the King James Bible was very much as a scholarly enterprise. It’s sometimes sniffily been referred to as the first time a work of genius has been created by a committee.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN: There were about fifty translators in six companies, two each in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and then at Westminster. Each of the companies was assigned a particular portion of the Bible to translate.

MOORE: The process was structured by fifteen rules that were drawn up before the translation started. These involved matters such as the rendition of names, for example, and they were intended to assure consistency.

HAMLIN: And this may be something that people don’t realize. They were never attempting to completely start from scratch. They were quite explicit that they didn’t intend to do a new version. So a large amount of the King James Bible depends on earlier translations. But it also tells us something about how the translators of the King James worked. If it wasn’t broke, they didn’t fix it.

MOORE: And they translated for probably about four years.

HAMLIN: The full committee, going over the Bible meticulously, line by line, word by word, comparing their base text, which was the Bishops' Bible, with other English versions, with other versions in different languages, and then, also, of course, with the original languages, Hebrew and Greek.

MOORE: Earlier translations of the Bible had not been able to draw on quite such a depth and a range of learning in the ancient languages. Nor had they been able to establish the very effective committee structure of translation and revision that was laid down for the KJB.

HAMLIN: For many of us, we'd find this an exceptionally dull process. Week after week, month after month, year after year, this was the work of translation. Minute, meticulous, all of it aimed at producing the most accurate English Bible ever.

DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: What we can do to reconstruct the way in which the translation was done is to look at the papers which survived. It’s extraordinary, the detail we can see.

JULIAN REID: Lambeth Palace Epistles draft is one of the key items in the exhibition and is a manuscript containing, it’s lined into two columns. And one side has the translation. And the right-hand column is largely empty, but has spaces for comment. And it’s thought that this is the draft that came out of one of the companies, which was then circulated to the other companies for their approval or for their recommendations.

MOORE: One of the members was John Bois, who kept notes of the deliberations. We know from his notes, which were discovered in the 1950s, that the translators drew on their knowledge of classical literature. They debated with one another. They considered style and tone and rhetoric very, very carefully.

REID: We really get a sense of how they worked, because you can almost hear their voices. He annotates with initials of the various people who were present. So you can almost hear individuals. You can hear John Bois himself and Andrew Downes and John Harmar. And you can almost hear them sitting around the table and arguing and discussing points.

MOORE: And I would like people to feel a sense of wonder as they look at those records of exactly how the translation was done. As they look at the number of deletions, additions, and substitutions that were painstakingly worked over by the committees, and then by the revising committees, and then by the final editors.

REID: I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this has been a voyage of discovery for me. I was reasonably familiar with the King James Bible, but very ignorant about the people themselves and the process. So, discovering something about these people, who we may sometimes imagine to be rather similar to each other, rather stern, puritanical, deeply academic. And they actually come across as very human.