Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [87]
Updating the Bible
On September 30th of 1952, two million people in over three thousand communities in the United States and Canada attended meetings celebrating the appearance of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Within eight weeks, over 1,600,000 copies were sold; the total a year later was 2,300,000, and it was still on the best-seller lists. The publishers, Thomas Nelson & Sons, have spent a million dollars on a promotional campaign. The Revised Standard Version is “authorized”; that is, the National Council of the Churches of Christ, which includes all the major Protestant denominations, was in charge of the committee of Biblical scholars that prepared it, and most of the denominations have authorized its use in their churches. The committee, headed by Dean Luther A. Weigle of the Yale Divinity School, spent fifteen years on the task. They encountered many and great problems of scholarship, of interpretation, of archaeology, theology, philology, and English usage, but the greatest problem was a competitor that has been in the field for over three centuries and has been fatal to the ambitions of all contenders up to now. This was, of course, the King James Version. Although Dean Weigle’s committee was instructed to revise not the King James but a revision of it made in 1901, the American Standard Version, they well understood which was the champion they had to beat. For the King James Version has long occupied a unique place in both the culture and the religion of English-speaking peoples.
In January, 1604, King James I summoned the leading divines of the Church of England to a conference at Hampton Court Palace to settle matters in dispute between the High Church and the Puritan factions. The dispute was not resolved, and James’s successor was to lose his head in consequence, but the conference bore rich and unexpected fruit. One of the Puritans’ grievances was that the authorized English Bible was not true to the original; Dr. John Reynolds, a leading Puritan and the president of Corpus Christi College, proposed a new translation. An ardent scholar and theologian, James accepted the proposal with enthusiasm and appointed fifty-four scholars, from Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. The work was begun in 1607 and completed in the incredibly short space of four years. In 1611, the result, The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly translated out of the Originall tongues & with the former translations diligently compared and reuised by his Maiesties speciall Commandement. Appointed to be read in Churches, came off the press. The King James Version is probably the greatest translation ever made. It is certainly “The Noblest Monument of English Prose,” as the late John Livingston Lowes called his essay on the subject. “Its phraseology,” he wrote, “has become part and parcel of our common tongue....Its rhythms and cadences, its turns of speech, its familiar imagery, its very words are woven into the texture of our literature....The English of the Bible...is characterized not merely by a homely vigor and pithiness of phrase but also a singular nobility of diction and by a rhythmic quality which is, I think, unrivalled in its beauty.”
The King James Bible came at the end of the Elizabethan age, between Shakespeare and Milton, when Englishmen were using words more passionately, richly, vigorously, wittily, and sublimely than ever before or since. Although none of the divines and scholars who made it were literary men, their language was touched with genius—the genius of a period when style was the common property of educated men rather than an individual achievement. It also came at a time when Englishmen were intensely concerned with religion. “Theology rules there,” Grotius wrote of England in 1613. In the King James Bible, the artistic