“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.”
These are the familiar words from the Twenty-third Psalm as they come to us from the King James Version of the Bible. The psalmist comforts us with words of such profound faith, and the translation sings in its poetry and its lyricism.
The Bible I use in the pulpit each Sunday is a New Revised Standard Version, the most accurate translation of the original Hebrew and Greek currently available. But, for as accurate as the NRSV is, it lacks the poetry of the KJV. The NRSV’s translation of Psalm 23 is correct, but dry:
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.”
The KJV is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, and with the celebration has come renewed interest in the text. It was England’s King James I who decreed in 1604 that the Bible should be available in the English language and then assembled a team of scholars who worked the next seven years preparing what we now know as the King James Bible.
The work was fraught with challenges. There was the difficult task of going through ancient texts and translating from the original Hebrew and Greek. Even more challenging was overcoming the conviction that Latin was the only appropriate language for the Bible since Latin was the language of the church. William Tyndale had tried to translate the Bible into English a century before and was burned at the stake for heresy.
It isn’t surprising that the KJV sounds so wonderfully Shakespearean — it was produced when Shakespeare was in his glory. The translators worked to make the KJV lyrical and elegant, powerful and yet musical. In his engaging history of how the KJV came to be, God’s Secretaries, Adam Nicolson observed, “the Bible was appointed to be read in churches… and so its meaning had to be carried on a heard rhythm, it had to appeal to what T. S. Eliot later called the ‘auditory imagination’, and that ‘feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.’”
For as glorious as the language is, the weakness of the KJV is the translation itself. The group that produced the Bible worked from manuscripts that were often not at all accurate, and their knowledge of the languages was well short of mastery. As Nicolson put it, “this is clearly a translation done by people who didn’t really understand what they were translating.”
Masterful, lyrical language is wonderful and certainly has its place, and so we should sing out Happy Birthday to the KJV. But the greater legacy of the KJV beyond its language is its attempt, even with its flaws, to discern as accurately as possible the word of God. Scholars continue this work today so that you and I can know more completely the word of God to help us understand more fully the will of God.
Grace & peace,
Pastor Skip
