When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible

Four centuries ago this year, a book was published which I think

is the greatest work of English prose ever written.

The words flow, and the meaning is true to the Greek.

What more could you ask of a translation?

Today, I know a lot of people consider it

old-fashioned, impenetrable,

from a turbulent but now largely forgotten age.

Nothing is more political in this period than religion, and the Bible is at the heart of it.

It has sold billions of copies since it was published in 1611.

We shall read the word of God as we find it in the second epistle of Paul to the Corinthians...

But in 2011, many reject it in favour of something more modern.

Some people call it the Authorised Version of the Bible,

but it's better known by its nickname...

the King James Bible.

My name is Adam Nicolson.

I was first persuaded to look into the King James Bible when I was

working as the so-called official historian of the Millennium Dome.

I hated every moment of this taste of national politics.

But it gave me surprising insights into the making of this great and powerful book.

17th century England was a chaotic, violent, often bureaucratic place,

the most unlikely beginnings for a book that would change the world,

so how did they make it happen?

In this programme, I look back to a world of religious pomp and majesty.

If immense seriousness and linguistic skill,

fraught with religious and political passions,

to show how and why it produced the greatest book of all time.

It's true the King James Bible is an old book.

At 400 years old, it's from a very different era,

so how can it still be the best translation around?

To my mind, its beauty and strength come precisely

from the extraordinary moment in which it was made.

In 1603, James, King of Scotland, succeeded to the throne of England as James I.

PEOPLE CHEER AND POLICE SIRENS WAIL

He saw this new country as a glittering jewel,

a peach of a kingdom juicy with promise.

At its core was the grandeur of Westminster Abbey.

Here you sense the royalness of God and the godliness of kings.

James was not just King of England.

He was also head of the Church of England.

He once said he had about him "sparkles of the divinity",

as if the clothes he was wearing were sequined with godliness.

This is the heart of the Abbey, packed with English Kings,

and there is no doubt here

that God and the Crown are intimately bound together.

This would have been James's dream.

He saw himself as the summit of a great religious pyramid.

The bishops were below him and then the priests.

Together, they upheld his authority in churches up and down the country.

But all was not well in this royal paradise.

Not everyone shared James's glorious vision of Church and State.

For some, it was a living hell.

And it was out of this turmoil and torment

that I believe the seeds of a great and lasting Bible would be sown.

You can still feel some of that tension on the bleak, muddy banks

of the Humber Estuary.

It was here in the 17th century that a radical sect attempted to

flee England on board a coal ship to Holland.

They were opposed to the established Church and so had set up separate, independent congregations.

But according to historian Nick Bunker,

it was a move that could be seen

as a rejection of royal government itself.

The authorities were making it quite clear to them

that if they continued to function

with their own independent congregations,

then they could expect possibly prison sentences or even worse,

so they really had no alternative but to find a place of refuge somewhere else.

Around 80 women and children were on board a local barge

waiting to go out to the Dutch ship that would take them to Holland.

Now, the problem was the tides are treacherous, the wind can change and

the mudflats go out about half a mile out into the estuary as we are now.

What happened was that the barge got stuck in the mud, and so

the women and children on board were forced to stay there overnight.

At the same time, there were a group of men who had gathered on the seashore.

The following day, the Dutch craft sent small boats down to the beach where we are now.

The men were able to get onto the Dutch ship,

but the women and children in the barge were stuck in the mud and they were arrested.

So, were they subversives?

Anti-King, anti-Church?

No, but they were certainly very unhappy indeed with the official Church of England.

They said it was unlawful, they said it was anti-Christian.

They used language that could be regarded as seditious, and by sedition I mean it could

be regarded as directly challenging the authority of the crown, which, of course, was a capital crime.

The disaster on the mudflat here dramatised every great question of the age.

Which mattered more -

your private soul or a well-governed society?

Freedom or order?

Where did the ultimate authority lie?

Was it with the word of God or with the King?

This was a religious age, deeply divided about the path to salvation.

The separatists saw church hierarchy and the splendour James so loved

as a threat to their immortal souls,

the road to eternal damnation.

They were not alone.

Across the country, thousands of other Protestants, called Puritans,

also believed the established Church of England to be in direct violation

of God's word in the Holy Scriptures.

I've come to the 17th century Langley Chapel in Shropshire with Stephen Tomkins.

He's chronicled the history of Christianity,

and this is one of England's best-preserved Puritan churches.

Well, this place is a perfect illustration, isn't it, of what Puritans wanted from a church?

The plainness, the stripping away of all Catholicism, the stripping away

of anything that might distract people from focusing on the word.

And when you say Puritanism, what does that word really mean?

Puritans were simply people who were not satisfied

with how far the Reformation had yet come in England.

Yes, they had got rid of the vast majority of what they thought of as

Catholicism, but there would be still last niggling remnants,

so, for example, the priests

were still supposed to wear some of the traditional robes for church.

People were still supposed to kneel to receive communion,

which Puritans thought was a superstitious Catholic ritual,

like Confirmation,

there's no Confirmation in the Bible, so Puritans says that has to go.

And so you get rid of all that all of those kind of toys,

all the furniture of religion, and you're left with the Bible.

That's right, there are no ornaments to distract,

no stained glass to look at.

You could hardly call this an altar, it's just more like a family table.

All the focus is on the word being read from the Bible and then expounded by the preacher.

And you have to sit on these extraordinarily uncomfortable pews

with hardly any room to get your bum on it.

Yeah, there's no concession made at all, is there? You're expecting your congregation to have endurance.

The religious divisions in society threatened to undermine James's authority as king.

He desperately needed to find a way to bind the two sides together.

At the request of the Puritans, he agreed to a conference

where all the outstanding issues could be discussed.

Better to keep the moderate Puritans on side than leave them to stir up dissent out of view.

This is where the idea of the King James Bible would be born.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

"And the earth was without form, and void

"and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

That's the incredible music of the King James Version, but try this, written in 2003.

First off, nothing. No light, no time, no substance, no matter.

Second off, God starts it all up and WHAP!

Stuff everywhere!

You couldn't really get two things further apart than that.

Less than a year after his coronation,

James summoned the rival factions to a conference

at the extravagantly impressive Hampton Court Palace outside London.

The moderate Puritan delegates and the bishops knew each other well.

This was a meeting of rivals, not enemies.

Still, each side must have hoped for concessions from the King.

How would he play it?

I got a taste of James's tactics

from the chief curator at Hampton Court, Lucy Worsley.

So this is the setup or something like it

for the great conference in early 1604?

Yep, we've got the red velvet chair for King James, we've got benches for the bishops,

and this lonely humble form here is for the poor, poor Puritans.

The focus of it all is the throne.

Yes, so show a little respect, please.

I know that I have to approach him on my knees.

Bishops, Puritans, everyone, on their knees with my hands clasped.

Total submission to royal authority and not looking him in the face.

-Mm-hm. Very important.

-Withdrawal in reverse, don't I?

Still not looking him in the eye like that.

-Quite right, and never turn your back on the King and never cross your arms in his presence.

-God forbid!

He has gathered around him a lot of the bishops and deacons of the Church.

He has a pre-meeting with just the bishops, and the Bishops at first think,

"This is great, he's saying he likes the Church of England.

"It's a good thing."

Then towards the end of his speech, he says, "But you know,

"if a man has the pox for 40 years, he still needs to be cured,"

and the bishops go, "Is he saying we've got the pox in our church?"

Actually he is, he's questioning them and challenging them.

On the second day, he gets rid of all but two of the bishops

and has the four Puritans in to sit on this sad little bench there.

They're described as being like plaintiffs, as if they've done something wrong.

The King, he gave them a really hard time.

He fired questions off at them like a machinegun, and he didn't like the answers either.

So James is being rude to both sides of the Church and making both sides feel uncomfortable.

Yes, definitely, he's a clever man, he's dividing and ruling,

he's stirring things up.

If he doesn't like what somebody says, he'll toss out some really crude insults.

He'll say, "I give a turd for your argument!"

It was a very bad tempered meeting.

James was insulting bishop and Puritan alike.

But I wonder if this wasn't quite canny, a sort of divide and rule by

even-handed humiliation and a tactic to keep every card in James's hands.

James was a seasoned operator.

He knew that the only real solution was some kind of compromise.

He wasn't going to countenance anything that threatened the backing of the bishops.

But he couldn't quite afford to shut out the Puritans, either.

His intuitive political skills are revealed in the official record of the conference.

A 17th century copy is held at Trinity College in Cambridge.

I looked at it with one of Hampton Court's curators, Brett Doleman.

I think throughout this you will see that James is keen on discussion, but

he's also keen that we don't get into the area where we are talking about reform of the Church hierarchies.

He very much sees the bishops, who extreme Puritans want to get rid of,

as being, part of the cement

for his own royal authority, his supremacy over the Church.

It's here in this book that we see him saying on two occasions, "No bishop, no king,"

which means that for him there shouldn't be any real reforms, certainly not for the sake of reform.

And how does the new translation of the Bible emerge from this complex political landscape?

What is it that a Bible will do for him?

Well, quite late on in the second day,

one of the Puritans suggests that there might be a new translation of

the Bible, because those which were allowed

in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, he says, were corrupt

and not answerable to the truth of the original.

James leaps on this idea,

and that's the genesis for the Authorised Version

right there in this account of the Hampton Court Conference.

So all that's needed is a King's Bible for a King's Church?

Yes, and James understands that a new authorised version of the Bible will add to his own supremacy

and back up his view of what the Church of England should be.

James wanted England to be a peaceful and balanced society

and saw a new translation of the Bible as a key ingredient of that.

But there was already a string of English Bibles, so why wouldn't any of them be good enough for the King?

Cambridge University Library is home to some of the oldest editions

of the English Bible, Bibles that pre-date the King James version.

Including the grandfather of all English Bibles by the great Protestant martyr William Tyndale.

He was a genius.

We owe many of the all-time great phrases in English to his translation -

"eat, drink and be merry", "rise and shine",

"salt of the earth", "bald as a coot".

But as Lori Anne Ferrell, a specialist on the translations, explained, James had problems

with the seditious tone of many of Tyndale's words.

Well, we can look here,

I think theologically we can see a swipe at the Church.

A rather large and very important swipe at the Church in Matthew 16:18,

where Jesus is said to have said,

"You are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church,"

that very famous line always used to uphold the power of the papacy.

Here, Tyndale has it translated this,

"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my congregation."

It sounds almost absurd, you can't really build a congregation, can you?

I mean, that is so...propagandist.

What it could be saying, simply, is the Pope does not make the Church,

nor do the priests, it's the congregation.

But you can assume that James reading that would throw up his hands.

Well, he famously said, "No bishop, no king."

I think he likes... all kings like the structure of the institutional Church.

'Any assault on Church structure - and as head of that Church,

'on the King's authority - was clearly unacceptable.'

'There was an alternative Bible James could have considered.'

Now, here we have the 1560s Geneva Bible.

'It had been translated by English Protestant refugees in Geneva, one of the centres of the Reformation.'

Look how worn out it is. Look, it's already...

'But the problem was that this Bible contained equally treasonable annotations.'

What he probably doesn't like is the characterisation, especially in the Old Testament, of kings as tyrants.

For example, the story of Herod, one of the notes to Matthew 2:20 says,

"God hath infinite means to preserve them from the rage of tyrants."

Not the rage of Herod, the rage of tyrants.

And James would have felt that he was lumped together in that, would he?

There's a king club, I think, or there's a way of thinking about yourself as a king

that transcends being lumped with bad kings.

James wasn't the first monarch to baulk at this sort of language.

35 years earlier, Elizabeth I ordered a translation designed to buttress the crown.

This is the Elizabethan Bishops' Bible. My god!

It weighs as much as a bishop! It's the size of an Elizabethan bishop.

-Tell me about that.

-Well, to begin with, it weighs more than I do,

and look what we have here, a spectacularly young Elizabeth.

This is state proclamation and the word of God completely fused.

What's wrong with the Bishops' Bible?

Well, it was just bad!

Even churches didn't purchase it.

There's a lot of bad translating.

There's some real clunkers in here.

Here's an example, it's Ecclesiastes 11:1.

Why don't you read it?

This is actually a very famous biblical verse,

but it sounds completely incomprehensible in this version.

"Lay thy bread upon wet faces and so shalt thou find it after many days".

Well, I think it does try to translate "Cast thy bread upon the waters", which is meant to mean

"give to the poor",

because it will return to you in some good form later.

Right, unfortunately on their face. It seems to me that there's an issue

here with the translation of the notion of surfaces, but "Lay thy bread upon wet faces" does not sing.

It does, and it's not memorable.

Well, it's for the wrong reasons!

The Bishop's Bible had one thing going for it...

its politics were closest to James's.

Trouble is, no-one was reading it.

James realised there was no choice but to order a new translation, one that people would read,

that underlined his divine authority, but did not alienate the people who were his subjects.

But how to reconcile these conflicting needs?

The library also houses a document which reveals how James went about it.

It's a stringent set of rules drawn up for the new translation.

The commission for the new Bible

was the only concession given to the Puritans at Hampton Court.

They lost on every other issue.

And what I see in the rules is attempts to control

the particular points that were close to the hearts of Puritans.

There are several that are relevant to this.

The first of the rules is that the ordinary Bible read in churches, commonly called the Bishop's Bible,

is to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.

No marginal notes at all to be affixed but only for the explanation

of Hebrew or Greek words.

And the old Ecclesiastical words to be kept,

and the examples that given.

are "church" instead of "congregation".

Another that is used is "baptise" instead of "wash".

So there's a conscious choice there.

And what is that choice? What does it represent?

The Greek "baptiso" simply means to plunge something into water,

so "wash" would be one way of rendering that,

whereas "baptise" has a kind of liturgical association,

and the Puritans didn't like that,

and the same is true, the word behind church, "ecclesia",

it simply means a gathering of like-minded people,

so they wanted that translated "congregation",

because the word "church" was so tied up with the existing establishment,

with bishops and all that, that they wanted nothing to do with it.

So Bishop's Bible, no Puritan words, no Puritan marginal notes.

Do you think the Puritans were sold a dummy here?

In a sense they were, in that they were brought in believing that this was their great chance.

And in the end, well not in the end, in the beginning,

the rules effectively strangled their ambitions.

These early decisions about translating individual words

would dictate the future beliefs of the Church of England.

It would remain ceremonial...

sacramental...

hierarchical, very different from the Puritan model.

So why did the Puritans not simply walk away?

Well, don't forget, the new translation was still their idea.

And they did leave their mark, as we shall see.

But what's fascinating is the idea

of a set of rules for what is meant to be, after all, God's own words.

There's no hint in these rules of any divine inspiration

or any thought of God coming down and somehow telling the translators

what to do, nor even any suggestion

of prayerfulness of people needing to be in the right frame of mind.

These are the exact instructions of royal officials to be followed to the letter.

All that was left now was to choose who would follow these rules.

Surprisingly, James's plan was to appoint not one translator

but an entire army of them!

A committee no less, of more than 50 translators.

A pint of Doom Bar, please.

'Today, the idea that a committee is the best way

'to produce a masterpiece sounds more like a recipe for disaster.'

In 1999, I was given the job of writing the history of the Millennium Dome.

It was meant to be the great single expression of British national consciousness.

It turned out to be a second-rate mixture of funfair, trade show and

propaganda for the already rather tarnished idea of Cool Britannia.

It was one of the worst years of my life,

full of competing egos and manoeuvring politicians,

and every one of them trying to get what they wanted out of the Dome.

And that was not entirely unlike James's great project for a new Bible.

He, too, wanted it to be a grand political statement,

and a centrepiece of national life,

and all driven along by some powerful and passionate people.

Of course the new Bible was to be about God rather than about the world.

But how did the King James Bible avoid the same fate?

How did it steer clear of the muddle, the mediocrity and the speciousness of the Dome?

How did the Jacobeans get it so right?

Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples knew not

that it was Jesus, and he said unto them,

"Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find".

Now that's a moment from the King James version, full of the sense

of the miraculous, of the disciples meeting Jesus after the crucifixion.

Now this is what some 20th century translators made of the same moment.

"There stood Jesus on the beach, but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.

He said "Shoot the net to starboard and you'll make a catch".

For me, about as much atmosphere as a 1930s bathing party!

There's no getting away from the levels of bureaucracy involved in the translation process.

Around 50 translators were to be appointed

to work in six separate sub-committees, or companies, as they were called.

If the word company conjures up ideas of shareholders,

targets, reporting systems, that's entirely right.

In James's time, the model would have been

the joint stock trading companies, the Levant or East India Company,

set up to share risk and establish broad-based businesses in the new foreign markets.

That pooling of many resources,

in pursuit of a single enterprise, was exactly what James had in mind.

But when did a committee ever produce a good idea, let alone a masterpiece?

OK, I think we're ready to get started this afternoon.

Today, most Biblical translations are still done by committee.

There's three main Hebrew words to be considered.

"Eved" is the most general, broad term that's typically rendered servant and sometimes slave.

And for women who are in servitude, typically "Shifrah" and "Ama".

All right thank you now...

More surprising is that it seems many great literary works

in Jacobean England were also done in this way.

What we have been discovering in the world of Shakespeare scholarship,

for example, is that Shakespeare is not a scholarly genius,

but he's often collaborative.

People work to deadlines and teams are the creatures that achieve deadlines.

So just as in the theatres, a play was required a month from now,

and it's a case of "you write out Act One and I'll do Act Two,"

so the same kind of collaborative thinking goes quite naturally into the making of the King James Bible.

There is an impulse to find a presiding genius who is behind the translation and there isn't one.

The committees did it.

So who exactly were the translators?

And were they in it for the love of scripture?

The translators represented a full cross-section of Jacobean England,

or at least the part of it where court, politics, church and scholarship all met.

But they were a pretty motley crew.

Chief among the translators was a bishop and establishment man, Lancelot Andrews.

He was a brilliant linguist, remembered also for his ruthless pursuit of Puritan radicals.

Oh, yes, and he blew £3,000

on an extravagant party for his benefactor, the King.

There were some cynical court politicians among them,

like Henry Savile, who made a huge fortune for himself milking colleges in Oxford and at Eton.

Or James Montague, Editor of the Kings Collected Works, and an obsequious, flattering man.

There were adventurers, like John Layfield, who'd been on a wild buccaneering trip to the Caribbean

where he fought the Spanish, and may well have been the first Englishman to have eaten a pineapple.

There were fierce preachers like George Abbot, who once arrested an entire church full of students

because they hadn't taken their hats off when he came in.

And there was a drunk, Richard Dutch Thompson,

who it was said never went to bed one night sober,

and was translating the fabulously obscene epigrams

of the Latin poet, Martial, while doing Exodus in the daytime.

For me, one of the reasons the King James Bible is so great,

is that its translators were not genial, cloistered clergymen in

their grey V-necks, they were fully engaged with the whole width and depth of their world.

And perhaps that is why the King James Bible is so good, because its translators were not.

But it was important that another sort of translator was also involved.

Puritans needed to be central to the process, because with them onboard,

no Puritan could claim that this was not his Bible.

Sam Ward taught here at Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge.

He was a very different type of translator but an equally complex character.

We're lucky that his crabbed, personal diary has survived.

It reveals the very troubled mind of a Puritan.

The problems could be major or minor.

Among the minor problems he felt he faced in his

own life and being Godly, was his over indulgence in eating.

There's a rather marvellous entry where he talks about,

"Also my intemperance in eating too many plums."

-And sometimes it got rather worse than that?

-It could get worse.

There are a few references to what he calls often adulterous dreams.

And there's one particular entry when he refers to, "Oh, the grievous sins in T College,"

which was Trinity College,

"In which a woman was carried from chamber to chamber in the night-time."

And then he goes on, and this is very personal of course, "My adulterous dream that night!"

It's fascinating, isn't it, because it's like a form of moral rigor,

not allowing the sloppiness of one's life to go by unseen, but to make everything known.

Yes, there's a bringing to the surface.

One might almost refer to psychoanalysis, in which everything has to be brought up.

If you start here, then you're going to be acutely interested in

absolute clarity of understanding in making sure you really know what you're dealing with, that in fact,

you couldn't think of a better training for a translator than this?

Yes, and it begins at the level of the extremely personal.

By attending so precisely, almost like a detective, to every moment,

you are probably getting as close

as a human being can to some notion of the holy and the true.

For me, the essence of the King James Bible lies precisely

in the coming together of these two mentalities,

the enriched, supremely well-stocked mind of people like Lancelot Andrews,

and the clarifying rigorous light of Puritanism, the fusing of the two wings of the Church of England.

Considered like this, it would have been inconceivable that the project

should have been put in the hands of any one individual.

The only mind that could have produced the King James Bible was the mind of England itself.

So what exactly did it achieve?

Why is the King James Bible so great?

"Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said,

'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word'"

A famous verse of the King James version,

full of its simplicity and dignity, and compare that to this rather wordy 18th century version.

"Oh, God, thy promise to me is amply fulfilled.

"I now quit the post of human life with satisfaction and joy."

There are many reasons why the King James translation is so good,

but I believe one of them is undoubtedly James himself.

The traditional view of James is of a lustful, extravagant,

weak Scotsman, addicted to the divine and absolute right of kings.

But he had great virtues, too,

particularly in his early years on the English throne.

James was a very clever man.

He's the only person ever to have sat on the English throne

who had his works collected in a single handsome volume.

And that's him up there giving them to the University of Oxford.

Intellectual, highly articulate, obsessed with language.

This rare coming together of wordiness and monarchy created

the perfect conditions for a great and kingly translation of the Bible.

There's no doubt this Bible was a political project.

But it was much more than that.

James encouraged rigorous scholarship.

This is the library at Merton College, Oxford,

where one of the translators, Henry Savile, worked.

What I'm struck by

is the thoroughness of these 17th century scholars.

Now this, I think, is a grammar of Hebrew?

What you've done for me, very helpfully actually,

is set this book down the wrong way.

Even in the period it was called the left-hand book

because you need to turn it that way, and work for us,

as it were, from back to front and from right to left when reading what

is, in this case, a grammar of the Syriac or Chaldean Semitic language.

It's a grammar that would simply help scholars like Savile

and the other translators understand those early Hebrew witnesses.

How good were they at it?

I mean, how good was Savile's scholarship, say?

Can one see anything?

This, in fact, is a very good example of some of the best evidence

we have that Savile actually knew what he was reading,

because you can see him making Hebrew,

or Chaldea to be strict about it, annotations in the margin.

So that really does show us that many of these men were,

for the standards of their day, very much up to speed with Oriental languages, as they called them.

I don't think I've ever seen any evidence that is clearer than this of how careful they were.

It is not a casual political project this.

This is a deeply scholarly enterprise.

Absolutely, and it's the common denominator that actually helps to create the umbrella

under which James assembled a rather diverse group of people in terms of Church politics.

There was a very good reason why the translators should be obsessed by precision.

Their task was to transmit into English what they considered to be divinely inspired, the Word of God.

And you couldn't be cavalier with that.

Total fidelity to the original, total transmission to the people.

That was the mountain they were faced with.

Nearly all the documents recording their discussions have disappeared.

But in the 20th century, a special copy of the Bishop's Bible,

the principle text used by the translators, was found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford,

where it had been lurking, unnoticed, for centuries.

It contained notes made as they worked on improving the meaning of specific passages.

I looked at a famous verse from the Book of Luke,

which tells the story of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist.

The original text, the printed text, says, "Elizabeth's time came

"that she should be delivered and she brought forth a son."

And what do they do to it? How do they enrich that?

Well, whereas "Elizabeth's" is the first word in the Bishop's Bible,

the word "now" is placed in the margin,

so it becomes "Now Elizabeth's time came."

And where does "now" come from?

Well, it's one of those words that exists in Greek that means that the action is moving on.

Normally it's not translated because English isn't a language

in which you have to keep saying "and next and next and after that."

But if by saying "now" we do get this sort of sudden surge of vitality?

Absolutely, and that that meaning is rooted in the Greek text.

It's both more faithful and it gives the sense of drama

that you articulate in the way you read the phrase.

So now we have "a time came" crossed out and he's replaced it with two things then.

Yes, now the first time, it's replaced with "was fulfilled."

-And what was wrong with that?

-Well, nothing was wrong with it.

Much is right with it, in that the Greek word 'pletho', as in plethora,

means filled, so it's an improvement

on the original text in terms of faithfulness to the Greek.

But they've rejected "was fulfilled"

and replaced it with "full time came"?

It's a wonderful phrase, and that notion of full time is a phrase

invented by these translators, and is actually a literal translation,

because the Greek says "full time".

But its also very brilliant metaphorical thing, that it's the time of her fullness, her pregnancy,

and the time of her fulfilment as the mother of John the Baptist.

There is a kind of, you know, multiplicity packed in there,

but without any strain, there's no straining of the language.

Absolutely, so the words flow, which is what you need when you're

reading it aloud, and the density of meaning is true to the Greek.

What more could you ask of a translation?

Nothing is more important in the 17th century world than getting the words of the Bible right.

And the translators address that partly through the seriousness of their scholarship and partly

through the absolute clarity of the language they use, something vital for the Puritan wing of the church.

But for me, there's a third element, the thing that makes the Bible sing in these translators' hands,

and that is the close and vivid attention they pay to the way the words sound.

It's possible to see first-hand just how much importance they placed on this aspect of the translation.

A copy of some notes taken during the final revision stage has survived.

It's held by Corpus Christi College in Oxford.

This is the President's lodgings in the college,

and it's one of the few rooms in England where we know for sure that the translation actually happened.

One of the committees met here.

Now the Bible that they were planning to make here was something

that had to be read in church every Sunday,

something which would reach the people through their ears.

The ear is the key organ in this whole story.

And so when it came to that final revising committee, the way in which

the editors worked was that someone would read out the suggestion,

and others sitting around would listen to it,

and if it didn't work for the ear, then it didn't work for them.

And there is one particular moment in these notes, made by one of the scholars,

which sings out to me, there's a word in there which absolutely radiates.

Something that reveals a central quality of the King James Bible.

The verse they're working on says,

"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever."

But one of the scholars objects,

and he says it should say,

"Yesterday and today, the same, and forever."

A slight tinkering with the word order, no more than that,

but the interesting thing is his justification for it,

and he's talking in Latin

because that's how scholars spoke to each other then, and he says,

"Si hoc modo verba collocentur..."

"If the words are arranged in this way..."

and then he goes into a mixture of Greek and Latin,

HE SPEAKS LATIN AND GREEK

"..the sentence will be more majestic."

Majestic.

It's the only time that word appears in the notes,

but it is a central quality of what these men were about.

As well as scholarly rigor, and all that Puritan clarity,

they also need this kingly grandeur,

a royal music, a greatness overarching the whole translation.

For me, this sense of majesty is one of the reasons

for the lasting appeal of the King James Bible.

The language is dense with a kind of verbal sumptuousness which flows effortlessly from the translators.

And I think that's in large part down to the period in which they lived.

This is Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

It was completed in the same year the Bible was published, 1611,

for James's Secretary of State, Robert Cecil.

Its furnishings are rich and lavish, just like the King James Bible.

But they are illuminated by the pure, clear light of the windows,

a fusion of old and new, which is typical of the age.

The Great Hall is a very, very ancient type of interior.

In the early 17th century, it's more than 1,000 years old in grand English domestic buildings,

but it's covered with this thick cosmetic cream of highly fashionable ornament.

So you have here these two elements of the Jacobean world,

the antique and the antic, it's classical, juxtaposed to each other.

So what is it? If you look at one of these screens, what do you get?

I mean, when I look at it I get huge substance, fatness,

a great, dense bit of stuff.

Yes, exactly. It's covered in ornament.

It's a huge piece of furniture rising up nearly 40 feet in the air,

and covered in fine, decorative ornament.

Well, it's not exactly fine.

It looks absolutely chunky to me.

It's not 18th-century, Chippendale-y delicacy, is it?

It's socking, great, bearded hermaphrodites.

It's a very medieval kind of classicism

in the sense that it's taking classical forms and ornamenting them as fantasy.

This is delighting, basically, in the opulence of, the possibilities of ornament,

covering every surface in carving, making everything as fussy as possible.

Are they engaging with all this medievalism because they think that, somehow, value is in the old?

They do see value in the old. It's a very interesting question.

We see value in novelty and we pursue it.

They love novelty too, but they saw novelty as being tempered by the past

and they often reinvented the past and created novelty through that reinvention.

The language of Hatfield IS the language of the King James Bible

and nowhere is that sensibility better displayed than in the first edition of the finished work.

It's incredibly exciting for me to see this, I've never seen it before.

It's an amazingly rich thing.

I don't think I've ever seen such a rich 17th-century binding as this,

covered all over in this gold filigree with Cecil's arms there.

No title on the spine at all, just more of that decoration.

This is THE book.

Its sheer size and ornament

shows that this is a really important object.

Even in the way it's produced,

you can see this love of antiquity. This Gothic typeface is saying,

"I am rooting myself in the authority of the past."

It's a little bit like the Great Hall.

You have the Great Hall as this antique element,

the essential element of a great house being reproduced,

but covered in other decoration

and made to look up-to-date in other ways.

Now, if we turn to particular passages,

I think you can see how some of these qualities come through

in the way they translated

the text itself.

Now, this is a famous verse.

When Tyndale translated that passage, he wrote,

"Now we see in a glass, even in a dark speaking,

"but then shall we see face to face."

Well, it's very difficult to know what that means.

But when the King James people took it up, they wrote,

"For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."

Much simpler, much grander, much more godly, in fact.

It's beautifully clear language, isn't it?

It's clear but it also has this slow, majestic music running through it.

And I think something of the things that we see in this house are kind of displayed grandeur,

an absolutely overt majestic quality to the spaces.

That's in that language, too.

It's a very nice idea, that somehow the house expresses the same ideals,

celebrating its royalty, regality, power.

And also at the heart of it, the link of the church and state to the godliness that this Bible expresses.

In tracing the story of how the King James Bible was made,

I have discovered many of the reasons why it became such a success.

The precision and rigour of its scholarship...

..the richness and depth of meaning in its words...

the sheer music it brings to the listener's ear.

But these achievements alone do not explain why, for over four centuries,

English speakers have continued to choose this translation above all others.

What is it about this version that has such a long-lasting appeal?

Conveying the mystery of the divine is the greatest of all challenges to language of any kind.

The unfathomable nature of God, and of the ultimate facts of existence, are, by definition, unreachable.

So when life deals its heaviest blows, where do you turn?

Not long ago, I was talking to a fisherman whose son had died here, off the coast of the Outer Hebrides.

He was just 24.

His father told me to read Psalm 77, saying, in effect, that I would find there

everything he could ever think or feel about what had happened.

"Will the Lord cast off forever?

"And will He be favourable no more?

"Is his mercy clean gone forever?

"Doth his promise fail forever more?

"Thy way is in the sea

"and thy path is in the great waters and thy footsteps are not known."

These words aren't about consolation, or the muffling of experience by religion.

They're a statement of the cruelty of life and the unknowable purpose of God's universe.

There is something miraculous about this, a poem written in the Near East in the Bronze Age,

translated in England 400 years ago, still embodying some of the deepest

and most powerful meanings that human beings can summon.

But did the 17th-century world recognise this as a masterpiece?

And more importantly for James, did it secure his ultimate ambition -

to be king at the heart of one, united country?

There must have been high hopes for the King James Bible when it was finally published in 1611,

but it turned out to be a spectacular failure.

The actual printing of the Bible was something of a disaster.

Numerous inaccuracies crept into the text at this stage.

This is a page from an edition published in 1631,

which was called the Wicked Bible,

because the printer left out rather a crucial word from the seventh commandment,

and it now reads, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

More significant was the Bible's total failure to achieve James's ambition

of uniting the two sides of England's religious divide.

30 years after it was published, the country descended into outright civil war.

Puritan and parliamentarian

against bishop and king.

James's son, Charles I, was beheaded.

England became a republic with no place for a royal Bible.

It was left gathering dust.

So the question is, why did its fortunes change?

Today, in most Anglican churches, such as St Margaret's,

the parish church of the Houses of Parliament, you will find the King James Bible.

At the end of the Civil War and with the restoration of the monarchy, everything changed.

The King James Bible became revered as something from before that age of violence and trauma.

It stood for monarchy and continuity, a symbol of a kingdom that had always been God's country.

It was this that finally allowed it to unite everyone,

from radical Protestant to those in love with ceremony.

It set the basis for today's Church of England.

What's more, it entered the consciousness of the nation.

Week after week, decade after decade, for century after century,

this book was read in church, at school, at home.

Its down to earth vocabulary fed our love of the real and concrete.

The way in which it was written meant its listeners

were always at home with the grand and the visionary.

For me, the ability to keep both feet firmly on the ground

while aspiring for something beyond ourselves represents the best of us as a nation.

And I would say that long exposure to the language of the King James Bible

is responsible for much of that.

But what of James himself?

What would he have made of his great legacy?

For a King who thought of himself as sparkling with divinity, this is a pretty modest little plaque.

But maybe James could console himself with the idea

that the Bible he commissioned is his real and lasting monument.

It became the most important book in the English speaking world.

Perhaps the greatest book ever written in English.

I'm no churchgoer, but I'm not an atheist either.

I'm drawn just as much to all the richness of ceremony as to the holiness of the plain and simple.

But with this Bible, there's no need to choose between them.

Both are absorbed in it, and that is why its words are still alive,

why they're still a vehicle for meaning when little else can be.

And for me, that is the miracle of the King James Bible.

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