Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [89]
For the next two and a half centuries, the King James Version (K.J.V. for short) was the Bible to English-speaking people. Close to a hundred complete or partial translations were made during this time, but none was either authorized or widely used. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, archaeology and Biblical scholarship had made such progress that the Church of England appointed an interdenominational committee of scholars to revise K.J.V. The heaviest changes were made in the New Testament, for the K.J.V. translators had used a Greek text established by Beza, Stephanus, and Erasmus and based on late and inaccurate medieval manuscripts; much older manuscripts, some going back to the third century, were now available, and the Victorian scholars Hort and Westcost had established from them a text that differed in 5,788 instances from the Beza-Stephanus-Erasmus text. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was essentially the tenth-century “Masoretic” text used by the K.J.V. translators, but since 1611 a number of important Greek versions, some from the fourth century, had come to light.
Thus when the nineteenth-century revisionists began their fifteen-year task, in 1870, they had an enormous advantage in scholarly knowledge over their speedier predecessors. This, it turned out, was not enough. When they brought out their New Testament, it was the publishing sensation of the century; despite an advance sale of a million, long lines formed in front of English bookstores on that day of publication; two Chicago newspapers got the full text by cable and ran it as a serial; three million copies were sold the first year. K.J.V. had won acceptance slowly, but the 1885 revision went up like a rocket—and came down like one. The men who made K.J.V. were both scholars and stylists; their Victorian successors, living in a more specialized age, were only scholars. Literal accuracy, rather than beauty or even sense, was their aim, to achieve which they adopted such absurd translating rules as always using the same English word for a given Greek or Hebrew word regardless of context, and sticking to the word order of the original. The result often read like an interlinear “trot.” After the excitement had died down, the public returned to K.J.V. In 1901, the American Standard Version, an authorized adaptation of the 1885 English version, appeared. Although more successful, this also failed to replace K.J.V.
The Revised Standard Version (R.S.V.) was undertaken partly because Biblical scholarship has made enormous progress since 1900. Since then, a vast number of Greek papyri have been unearthed in Egypt. Some, among them the Chester Beatty papyri, are fragments of very early Biblical manuscripts. Most of them are business documents, private letters, wills, and other records of everyday life that, according to the R.S.V. scholars, “prove that ‘Biblical Greek’ was really the spoken vernacular of the first century A.D.—not the classical Greek which the King James translators assumed it to be.” Even more important was the discovery of some Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts believed to date back to the time of Christ, or a full thousand years before the earliest hitherto known examples. A Bedouin shepherd looking for a lost goat in a cave on the shores of the Dead Sea came on some parchment scrolls that turned out to contain the complete text of Isaiah and a commentary on Habakkuk. Hundreds of other fragments of ancient scrolls were later found in the same cave.