Pure King James
The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible
edited by David Norton
Cambridge University Press, 2005
(1,904 pages, $79.45, hardcover)
reviewed by Robert Hart
Several years ago, when careful restoration was being done to clean up the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, some people complained that it was being ruined. The work of restoration was, to them, a desecration. Never mind what Michelangelo actually painted, or what the artistic eye intended. They wanted the appearance to which they had grown accustomed.
In his introduction to The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, editor David Norton compares his work to that of restoring a painted masterpiece.
Though it is the most important book in the religious life and culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly printed. . . . Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is.
Norton, Reader in English at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and author of A History of the Bible as Literature, explains that the first edition of the Authorised Version was hurried in its production, and errors were introduced into the original publication. The first edition is “uniquely authoritative” due to direct supervision of some of the translators, “but it has its unavoidable share of mistakes.” These, he says, were mostly typographical or caused by the printer’s type, but there are also a few mistakes by the translators themselves.
The changes made in the several subsequent attempts to update or improve it have left us with something not in accord with the intention of the original translators, and “the textual development came to an almost complete stop in 1769, which thereafter became accepted as the standard.” Norton has edited his new, old Bible in such a way as to solve these problems. The spelling and punctuation are entirely modern, but the words themselves are the exact words of the translators.
Revisions Undone
In some places he has quite deliberately undone revisions. One example he cites is Hosea 6:5, restoring “I have hewed them by the prophets” to read, “I have showed [in 1611, spelled ‘shewed’] them by the prophets.”
To decide what the translators intended to say, he consulted the ancient Targum Jonathan that influenced them (a targum is a translation of the Old Testament from earlier Hebrew into the Aramaic commonly used by first-century Jews). In addition, he concluded that “shewed” also followed “the general sense of the note to this verse in the popular Geneva Bible.”
Another example he cites is 1 Timothy 2:9. The standard revisions render the verse: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety.” St. Paul, writes Norton:
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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