Too Much Catholick

The Authorized Version of the Bible is, by and large, what English speakers mean when we say “the Bible.” We assert this in speech when we quote the Bible casually or even unconsciously: “Be fruitful and multiply”; “eat, drink, and be merry”; “a law unto themselves”; “death, where is thy sting?” The Bible in English is the English Bible as much as Richard III is Shakespeare’s Richard III. This is true even though lots of people, whether they are scholars or armchair medievalists, will have read a great deal about the “real” Richard; whatever they say about him, it will be understood as an implicit comparison (or contrast) with Shakespeare’s version. The Authorized Version occupies a similar place in our understanding of Scripture. It is a “standard text,” occupying in the English language the same place Luther’s Bible has in German. It is almost a force of nature, what Virginia Woolf in another context called “one of the anonymous productions of the race.”

The Authorized Bible, commissioned by King James I and published in 1611, took its place among other, more polemical English versions, but has since enjoyed a longevity unknown by any other translation. Its precursors, the Great Bible and Bishops’ Bible, were also official, indeed “authorized” for use in England, but the name stuck to the version that superseded them. While there is still some lingering academic interest in the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva Bible—and Myles Cover­dale’s Psalter holds on in the Book of Common Prayer—no other English Bible from the period is widely known, much less used, with the possible exception of the Douay–Rheims Bible.

Scores of essays have been written—some very unconvincingly—about the value of the Authorized Edition on purely literary grounds. While its value on these terms may be admitted, it has been inflated. Its language is perhaps only good English because centuries of masters have treated it as such, but that fact and influence remains unavoidable. Its sacral, hieratic language can be disputed in places, and its rhetorical effect may be overblown simply because of its age, but its place in the proverbial sphere of our language, from Handel down to Wode­house, is undeniable. Its greatest value, I think, is the mere historical fact of its longstanding use, its stability as a text. On that count it has no parallel and nothing even close to a second. It is the Bible read out by generations of English speakers and is likely the single greatest literary influence on the great novelists and historians of the last four centuries. It is, beyond dispute, the most read book in English.

Catholic readers tend to fall into two or three camps with regard to the Authorized Version. Some cannot be bothered, or otherwise lack familiarity, but even they would probably be able to quote or recognize some of its language—“valley of the shadow of death”—or they at least assume they know about it, much in the way one assumes that he keeps up with local news because he is living in the area. These Catholics will probably best know the Authorized, or “King James,” Bible as the Protestant Bible, and may be vaguely aware that it is somehow mistranslated or is missing books. Americans will undoubtedly associate it with Baptists, a Southern accent, and the puzzling K.J.V.-onlyists found, please God, mostly on the Internet. Other Catholics in this group, those from the rest of the Anglosphere, may admire it from afar or see it rather as the inheritance of the Church of England, reminiscent of English public schools or of Charles Dickens.

If the first group is largely composed of cradle Catholics, the second group is overwhelmingly made up of converts. These are a silent, unassuming but sizable minority: English-speaking Catholic converts who were raised on the Authorized Version and apologetically admit that they read their old childhood copies out of “nostalgia” or because they are “used to how it sounds.” The nostalgia they feel is actually, I suspect, a larger and older phenomenon. Newman, in his Idea of a University, described English literature in the fallout of the Reformation as imbued with a kind of Protestant character. The reason that Newman could give an address on the need for a “Catholic Literature,” one treating “all subjects . . . as a Catholic would treat them,” in English (by which he did not mean Catholics merely writing upon religious subjects) is that the tone of English has, since the Glorious Revolution, strayed ever away from the Church, from the imaginative and linguistic world of Alfred, Bede, and Anselm. It is not that everyone speaking the language since the English Reformation was himself a Protestant or was writing about these ideas but that the character of the language had been “lived in,” adapted to, and perpetuated by a nation, and later an empire, that shared in the common backdrop of the Established Church. Besides this, the literature of a language, as Newman contended, is a historical fact and a written product of the thinking of the day. While language is, of course, always changing, the historical circumstances of the golden age of English literature are set, just as any events in history are set, unchangeable.

Newman continues, “We may feel great repugnance to Milton or Gibbon as men; we may most seriously protest against the spirit which ever lives, and the tendency which ever operates, in every page of their writings; but there they are, an integral portion of English Literature . . . They are great English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with incomparable gifts.” Newman goes on to cite certain “masters of composition, as Shakespeare, and Pope, the writers of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, Hooker and Addison, Swift, Hume, and Goldsmith,” who “have been the making of the English language; and as that language is a fact, so is the literature a fact, by which it is formed, and in which it lives.” English literature, he concludes, “will ever have been Protestant.”

Newman’s description of the state of English and its literature here may perhaps seem fatalistic, or even a stretch, but anyone doubting his line of thinking has only to spend, as Newman did, some considerable time outside the English language and in a culture where it does not predominate. We can consider the towering influence of the Koran on Arabic, but striking examples can be found closer to home. This phenomenon of the interplay between culture and language can be readily observed in the languages of historically Catholic nations. This is not, again, to say that persons who speak those languages are any more Catholic or have a greater likelihood of being Catholic at all. It is only that many of these characteristics are, as it were, built in. Newman brings it to a point: Men are not “mere abstractions and phantoms, marrowless in their bones, and without speculation in their eyes”; no person, no people, no language can exist without the influence of thought or the truths they take for granted leaving an impression on their language. Lest we think Newman to have despaired of our English tongue entirely, he ends his essay on a high note: “Much may be attempted, much attained, even granting English Literature is not Catholic.” And in fact today’s Catholics in the Anglosphere have some considerable influence in swaying the tide toward orthodoxy.

If this second group is influenced by nostalgia, it is at least well placed; it is probably the natural inheritance, at least to some degree, of any speaker of English. It brings to the fore an assumption which I imagine we all hold at some time, and, even if it is incorrect, it is at least something we have to learn is incorrect. The Authorized Version is what we imagine the Bible to sound like, full of “thou art” and “saith,” “it came to pass.” The fact that the Message Bible sounds cheap or funny to us is proof of this. If English literature is, at least in some sense, irrevocably Protestant, this is no cause for throwing it out wholesale. But how ought we to approach the English Bible, which, apart from being the inerrant Word of God, is assuredly one of the foundations of that literature?

A yet different, third kind of Catholic will object that the Authorized Edition is at least tinged with heresy, that it is lacking whatever necessary qualities one supposes it must have for it to qualify as a “real” Bible. Most modern editions of the English Bible do, in fact, lack the deuterocanonical books, but this is the fault of modern, continental (and American) Protestant publishers, not of the actual translation, which originally contained all of the canonical books and included such delights as the Prayer of Manasseh and Bel and the Dragon. The objection that the Authorized Version of King James is heretical for doctrinal reasons has some purchase. Since it is a Protestant translation, there is a pervasive fear that it contains Protestant errors or mistranslations. The use of “highly favored” for “full of grace” at the Annunciation is inexcusable. But the more common error arises from Protestants’ twisting lines of scripture to suit heretical theology or to attempt to reconstruct a religion from the Bible completely apart from its historical context. The risk of this error exists with any translation. Protestants are able to malign and manipulate Catholic translations of the Bible. The Bible is a Catholic book, begun by the Jews and compiled, safeguarded, copied, and commentated by Christ’s Church.

If we look at the context of the Authorized Version’s publication, we may be pleasantly surprised. Aside from a markedly catholicizing party that sympathized with the “high church” view, the translators of the Authorized Version varied too much in opinion between themselves to impart any denominational character onto the text. Their primary concerns were accuracy, beauty of language, and avoiding any appearance of Puritanism. The Puritans of the day believed that the Church of England was moving in a direction that made it look “too much Catholick,” and employed vestments, altars, and sacred vessels. The conscious choice of the editors was to omit any polemical notes and to let the text speak for itself; it sees itself as a word-for-word translation. Earlier English translations such as Tyndale’s and Wycliffe’s were condemned on the basis that the texts were slanted to reflect theological errors, but the Authorized Version was concertedly more measured in its approach.

Many Catholics who appreciate the traditional language and beauty of the Authorized Version content themselves with the so-called Douay–Rheims Bible, published two years earlier by the English College in France. It has an important place in the history of the Counter-Reformation, but from a literary standpoint it is hardly the next best thing. The Douay–Rheims is accurate in one sense, but it lacks the real character of English prose. It is just as much an English book as English as She Is Spoke. The reason for its slavish, wooden accuracy, even to a fault, is understandable. Neither Catholic nor Protestant polemicists at the time wanted to be accused of doctoring their text to fit their doctrines, so the translators made no sacrifices for word order or sentence structure and used words like “benignity” and “longanimity”—words that only have any meaning if you can read the Latin behind them. The Authorized Version, in the same place, has “gentleness” and “longsuffering.” Attempts were made to smooth the text out later, to varying degrees of success. The incurable problem of the Douay–Rheims is the insistence that somehow writing bad English—English that is not really intelligible to a monolingual reader—in a translation is preserving accuracy or inspiration. It is in cases like these that the Douay–Rheims fails as a translation. The old Catholic Encyclopedia (hardly a text influenced by Protestantism) calls it “sadly deficient in literary form, and so full of Latinisms as to be in places hardly intelligible.” The Authorized Version, it must be said, is not without awkward renderings of its own, and some of the vocabulary does vex modern ears: “I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.”

Because the Authorized Version lacks the approval of the Catholic hierarchy, there are obvious objections to its being used by Catholics. A question worth further explanation may be exactly what is being approved when something like the New American Bible and its myriad, subsequent revisions have been granted such approbation. Compare Handel’s setting of the ninth chapter of Isaiah from the Authorized Version with its parallel text in the N.A.B.: “They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.” Given the current nature of intellectual property law and the fact that most new translations receive approval by local bishops’ conferences, it is unlikely for the foreseeable future that the N.A.B. will be officially replaced by anything other than whatever the newest New American Bible is for some time. So this avenue is unlikely ever to address the Authorized Version, or frankly any other version than the in-house N.A.B. This aside, there is no reason a formerly Protestant text cannot be approved later on, so long as it does not contain error. The Protestant Coverdale Psalter, immortalized in the English Prayer Book, was recently approved for liturgical use by the Anglican Ordinariates in the Catholic Church, with only minor alterations. Texts from the Authorized Bible are already used as shorter quotations in the Ordinariate’s missal, and it is quoted at length at the end of the Mass for the Last Gospel. I am not proposing that the Authorized Version should be imposed for use in the liturgy—Saint Jerome already gave us the Bible we need for that—but am only pointing out that what “counts” as a Catholic translation is a deeper issue and that texts, like all the “spoils of Egypt” from antiquity, which did not begin as Catholic texts, can find their confirmation and right interpretation within the fold of Christ’s Church. Newman again: “We are glad, for their own sakes, that anti-Catholic writers should, in their posthumous influence, do as much real service to the human race as ever they can, and we have no wish to interfere with it.”

To take this issue of Protestant texts that may contain “noxious error and heretical slants” a step further, for many serious Catholics the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition is the English default. The original R.S.V., which consciously uses the Authorized Version as its basis and inspiration, is not the work of Catholics only but of a committee of thirty-eight churches and ecclesial communities. It was later added to and altered to make it suitable for Catholic use, hence the version approved for Catholics. In nearly every way the translators of the R.S.V. and its committee of editors have a far wider-ranging background, theologically speaking, than the men behind the Authorized Version could ever have had. I cannot imagine what thirty kinds of Protestantism could possibly disambiguate themselves in any meaningful way, but the number of denominations continues to climb. The fact is that most Catholic Bibles today are lightly edited Protestant translations. If there is no cause for suspicion in something like the R.S.V. because it began as an essentially Protestant text with tweaks to make it more Catholic, then the same way of thinking must also apply to the Authorized Version. When compared to the great majority of modern English translations, the Authorized Version often uses language much more akin to Catholic sensibility. We should never want to insist on one translation, but there is value in having a standard reference text, a status which the Bible of King James already has. The Authorized Version, just like the Mass, stands on its stability, its use by generations, and its history of remaining unchanged. As Bible translations multiply, fewer people seem to read the Bible. In light of this, it seems unlikely that any other translation will ever supplant the Authorized Version in use. The English Bible of 1611 is now as much English literature as it is the Bible, though we should never like to reduce it to simply literature.

One good objection to the Authorized Version’s use by Catholics is that because it is not based upon the Vulgate it does not sufficiently reflect the historically Catholic understanding of Sacred Scripture. Here I agree wholeheartedly. The issue is that English translations based on the Vulgate are few, and neither the R.S.V. nor the N.A.B. is based principally on the Vulgate. The Jerusalem Bible is not either, and our English translation is a translation of a French Bible translation. If this is the landscape, whither shall we go? The Douay–Rheims has its value but is still unsatisfactory. If I may: The Douay, of which, I, saying, make my reply, being translated is not translated according to the consuetude of the speaking of speech of the English. Most, I think, would generally be hard pressed (“constrained”) to tell between the two when given a passage at random, a further proof that the Authorized Bible generally lacks some unknown Protestant contagion.

The other option available for an English translation that prioritizes the Latin Vulgate is Ronald Knox’s Bible, published in 1949. Knox’s version was commissioned by the bishops of England and Wales, and his translation has serious strengths. He made the translation completely himself (no squabbling committees), armed only with his dictionaries, his typewriter, and his pipe. The translation takes the Clementine Vulgate as its primary, authoritative text, noting variants in the Hebrew or Greek in footnotes. But the style of this Bible is not for everyone. As he translates, Knox asks himself, “How would an Englishman say what this text conveys?” The result is fresh; it is the kind of text one could read devotionally for a quarter of an hour, but it will seem eccentric to some. Here again it lacks the breadth of use and notoriety already possessed by the Authorized Version.

The point here is not to insist on the Authorized Version exclusively but to insist that if it already holds some place as a default, Catholics can take it up and tell others what it really says. The Authorized Version is probably more Catholic than the Corinthian column or the Egyptian obelisk, and both of these now, taken up and baptized by Catholic use, can serve the right worship of God in His Church. If the acanthus leaf can be put to legitimate use, then so can this treasure of our English language.