Setting the Stage: Transcript

Includes Steven Galbraith, co-curator of the Folger Manifold Greatness exhibition and Andrew W. Mellon curator of books at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and 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 of Corpus Christi College, and Julian Reid, archivist of Corpus Christi and Merton Colleges, among the curators of the Bodleian Library Manifold Greatness exhibition at the University of Oxford.

STEVEN GALBRAITH: We thought about the fact that so many people have a connection to the King James Bible, but may not know a lot about it and its creation.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN: It was a book that was in almost every home. You could count on a family, if they had one book, that was probably it. I’d also like people to get a sense of the breadth and complexity of the influence of this Bible on English-speaking cultures for the last four hundred years.

JULIAN REID: How we shaped the project was a gradual process of looking at what material was available. And then how we were going to put those in context of both what came before the King James Bible, what led up to it, and what has happened since.

HELEN MOORE: We decided to attempt to celebrate the King James Bible, whilst at the same time, bringing to a new audience a knowledge of the processes that went into its making.

DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: Late medieval England was the only place in Europe where you couldn’t read the Bible in your own language. And that was official. It’s because the church in England had banned it.

GALBRAITH: The church didn’t want the Bible translated into English. They felt that there needed to be an intermediary between the reader and the scripture. In England, there’s a man named William Tyndale and he’s a religious reformer. He’s one of the major figures of the English Protestant Reformation. And he very much wants to translate the Bible into English.

HAMLIN: William Tyndale was a remarkable man. Probably, it’s safe to say he’s the most remarkable in the history of English Bible translation, given how much he achieved on his own at a time when translating the Bible wasn’t just difficult, but dangerous. Some people have said that as much as 80 percent of the King James Version comes right out of William Tyndale.

MACCULLOCH: I think what we need to do with this exhibition is to show people just how important this book is. And that it’s a book which doesn’t stand alone. It’s there in a great tradition.

REID: ...that the King James Bible didn’t suddenly burst onto the world miraculously inspired, or that it was something completely new. It was actually part of a long process of translation.

MOORE: I would like visitors to be reminded of the enduring legacy of the King James Bible. But I think I would also like them to feel that they had learned something very new about the way in which the translation was made.

HAMLIN: There’s a lot of misunderstanding and mystery connected with it. And we do actually know a fair bit about how it was put together. And I think it would be useful for people to know.

MACCULLOCH: What remains when you’ve said all that is that the King James Bible gives you an extraordinary sense of this depth of history. The beauty of the language, the sonorous prose, this is what makes the King James Bible still important.

GALBRAITH: The legacy of the King James Bible is actually too huge to articulate in a brief sentence or two, because its influence is sort of astronomical.

HAMLIN: It influenced English-speaking writers, not just in Britain and America, but all over the world, everybody from John Milton in Paradise Lost to Charles Schultz in A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s the King James Bible.