Eat, drink and be merry: This may be oldest draft of the King James Bible
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Version 0 of 1. The King James Bible, the most widely read book in the English language — from which such phrases as “a man after his own heart” emerged — is as storied as it is elusive. Now, a historian claims to have found the oldest known draft of the book in an obscure archive at the University of Cambridge. The manuscript was hidden among the papers of Samuel Ward, one of the men commissioned by King James I to translate a new version of the Christian text into English in the early 17th century. Jeffrey Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, chanced upon the 400-year-old notebook while doing research on biblical verses. Describing his discovery in the Times Literary Supplement, Miller said the notebook is not just the earliest draft ever found, but it is also the only surviving draft written in the hand of one of the original translators. “Ward’s draft alone bears all the signs of having been a first draft, just as it alone can be definitively said to be in the hand of one of the King James translators themselves,” Miller wrote. The King James Bible, first published in 1611, is one of the most influential and popular books in English literature. It spawned a long list of common phrases and figures of speech, such as “out of the mouths of babes,” “at their wits’ end” and “eat, drink and be merry.” Even so, few documents survive from its translation. “I think it is a fascinating discovery, and wholly credible,” said Jason BeDuhn, a professor of the comparative study of religions at Northern Arizona University. “The more we can learn about the process by which the King James Bible was produced, the more realistic our assessment of its merits becomes.” King James tasked teams of translators in London, Cambridge and Oxford to write an English version of the Bible that would better reflect the principles of the Church of England. Ward was part of one of those teams in Cambridge. He later became master of Sidney Sussex, one of the colleges within the University of Cambridge, and his scholarly papers ended up in the school’s archives. In the 1980s, the notebook in question, called MS Ward B, had been labeled as a “verse-by-verse biblical commentary” with “Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.” But when Miller examined the text, he discovered that it actually contained notes and translations of parts of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is excluded from many versions today. “This discovery helps us recapture the human side of the translation process,” BeDuhn said. “I especially like Professor Miller’s description of Ward trying out phrasing, crossing it out and trying something else. This is the real work of translation caught in the act.” According to Miller, Ward’s notes show that he indeed grappled with the language of certain verses in the Apocrypha — for example, 1 Esdras 6:32. In the 16th-century Bishops’ Bible, the previous version authorized by the English Church of England, the verse describes a declaration of King Darius, which states that anyone found disobeying his decrees “of his own goods should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged.” “Proposing a revision to the front half of the passage, Ward at first began, ‘A tre,’ but then crossed it out,” Miller explained. “No, ‘out of h,’ he started writing on second thought, but then crossed that out, too. At last, he reverted back to the more straightforward construction with which he had abortively begun, which also more closely mirrors the Greek of the passage: ‘a tree should be taken out of his possession.’ ” It seems that Ward’s suggestions were disregarded. The King James translation would ultimately read “out of his own house should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged.” The newly discovered notebook is not only the earliest known draft of any part of the King James Bible, it’s also the only known surviving draft of any part of the King James Apocrypha. Even so, Miller sees its legacy on a broader scale: “It points the way to a fuller, more complex understanding than ever before of the process by which the [King James Bible], the most widely read work in English of all time, came to be,” he wrote. — Live Science The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds Images: The Gospel of Judas Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past |