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King James 400th Sermon
Exodus 32:1-14
Amos 8:11-12 reads (from the KJV!)…
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
So! Beware! A famine is coming says the prophet! Not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord…
In our age of shops full of Bibles, of Bibles you can download onto your cell-phone, and of so many different translations and versions of scripture that I’ve stopped bothering to keep track of the new ones… its hard to imagine what a famine of hearing the Word of God might be like. Despite that, for most Christians throughout most of history, this kind of famine is what they lived in.
Until the invention of the printing press around 550 years ago, copies of the Bible were all hand-written and were therefore very expensive, and quite rare. An experienced monk who had dedicated his life to the task could probably write out one full Bible a year, and so probably produced around 20 in his life before he died or lost his eye-sight.
Bibles then were very precious, and as precious things are usually sought after by thieves, they were often kept locked away.
Therefore, for an average peasant living in Europe in the middle-ages… access to the Word of God was almost impossible: their church wouldn’t own a Bible and neither would their priest. The priest would probably know of a rich church in a nearby town or city that did have a Bible, but he probably wouldn’t be allowed to touch such a valuable object – and if he was allowed to open it, he couldn’t have read it anyway as it was written in Latin; not in the language of the people.
Scripture would be read during services in these larger and richer churches, but again, read in Latin; this language that few understood.
Church buildings at this time were full of art which did portray biblical stories in a way that the common people could understand them – but again, small village churches usually had much less art than rich city cathedrals. Also, the Bible stories portrayed were usually the same: the crucifixion of Christ, the judgement of the dead, Noah and the flood, Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, and the days of creation. Those biblical stories were then mixed in with pictures of saints, hunting scenes, and the coats of arms of the local nobles.
Church art would not have given anyone a deep understanding of scripture.
A famine of the Word of God indeed!
In the notices today I’ve put a bit of a timeline of the creation of the English Bible.
The first name on that list is John Wycliffe. As a university theologian who did have access to the Bible and who knew enough Latin to actually understand it, he gradually came to the conclusion that the Bible was the ultimate religious authority for Christians, not the Church (and potentially not even the King)! This was a radical view at the time, and prompted him and his disciples to write out scraps and verses and chapters of scripture in English to be handed out.
And the response was dramatic!
Everyone wanted these scraps. Even those who couldn’t read wanted them so that their better educated relatives could read it to them. In the midst of their famine, people were hungry and were seeking the Word of God.
I imagine it’d be hard for most of us to relate to that desperate hunger for the things of God. We are blessed to live in very different times, any famine of the Word of God in our lives will be more due to us taking it for granted and choosing not to read it, rather than us not being able to find a copy.
So, that’s a brief insight into the access ordinary Christians had to the Bible in medieval times; but, even before that, the availability of the Word of God to believers in the Early Church still didn’t compare to the access we have to it now. Yes, people did have better access to the Bible in the first 500 years after Jesus died than over the 1,000 years that followed… but largely that was because there were less Christians, and so there were more copies of the Bible to go around.
If we go to the beginning of our faith, it can be surprising to remember that the Church existed before the Bible had been completed. The Church started on the day of Pentecost, only months after Jesus’ death. Whereas the New Testament was written down over the next of 20-80 as our faith spread.
Most of the New Testament was written as letters, explaining the faith to those who lived far away. Wise Christians were then appointed to take the letters around the Roman Empire and beyond: reading them to the gathered churches, explaining them, and answering questions. The churches would then make copies of these letters, swapping them with other churches who had different letters or Gospels.
Very few churches had all the books of the New Testament, and virtually no-one owned personal copies they could take and read at home. Through their churches all Christians had some access to some of the Bible in a language they could understand - but generally their experience of the Bible was by hearing it read in worship services or prayer meetings, not by sitting down and reading it themselves.
So…
Perhaps then, the situation of the early Church was similar to that of the Jews in Moses’ time? As the Church existed before the New Testament was written, so the nation of Israel existed before the Old Testament was written.
Earlier in the service Arthur read us Exodus 32…
For the people of God at that time too, the Word of God was something they heard, not something they read. They heard it spoken out of the mouth of Moses.
In that reading however, Moses had been away for some time. He was up on Mt Sinai, actually getting the first written copy of the Law from Yahweh, the God who had freed them from slavery in Egypt. With Moses being absent from among the people, so was the Word of God absent from among the people – and they quickly went astray…
The character that stands out for me in that story is Aaron their priest. He seems to try really hard to moderate the rebellious and idolatrous nature of the people.
The people demand that he makes them gods: in response he makes them a golden calf. What’s significant about that is that statues of gods at that time were often depicted as being carried on the backs of calves or bulls. Aaron makes a calf, but with nothing on its back – it’s as if he’s trying to emphasise to the people the invisible and uncontrollable and uncontainable nature of Yahweh, the one true God. They don’t get the point though, and start worshipping the calf!
Aaron’s response is again to try and turn their worship back to Yahweh. He builds and altar to Yahweh before the calf and declares that tomorrow will be a feast day to the Lord! And so, the people duly offer sacrifices to the Lord, but then go off and indulge in feasting which turns into sexual immorality.
(KJV: They rose up to play!)
Without the Word of God among them to guide them they quickly turn aside, distort the truth, and corrupt themselves. And this I think is what happened as Christianity spread through Europe, and the Bible became harder and harder for ordinary believers (and even their priests) to access.
Some more history (sorry)…
In the Early Church, in 405AD a man called St Jerome completed a translation of the whole Bible, a huge effort on his part. This translation was called the Vulgate, as it was a translation from the original Greek (the vulgar marketplace language of the common people of Eastern Europe) into Latin, (the vulgar marketplace language of the common people of Western Europe).
Christianity began in the east, but thanks in large part to the Vulgate, people could now more easily access the words of Jesus in the west, and our faith spread quickly in countries like Italy, France and Spain.
However! Over time the Vulgate itself became something of a golden calf. The calf Aaron made could have pointed the Israelites to the invisible and universal nature of God, but instead they turned it into an idol and worshipped it! In a similar way the Vulgate translation came to be seen as perfect and inspired by God, and other translations were suppressed. And as the common people forgot Latin and began to speak other languages, so this famine of the Word of God began.
(It has to be said that a similar process has happened in some branches of the Protestant Church with the King James: some say the KJV is the only inspired English translation, and that all other translations are heretical or demonic.)
Back to the Middle Ages…
People in Britain hungered for God’s Word though, and so, in time, scholars like Wycliffe began translating the Bible into English. The authorities (the King and the Church), were not used to being held to account to the Word of God by the public, and they did not like it! Accordingly, England became the only country in Europe that banned translations of the Bible into the common language.
The penalty for disobedience was to be burned alive…
The populace had had a taste of scripture though, and they wanted more. Many died brutal deaths because of their desire to read the Bible or to bring it to the masses. In your notices it also mentions John Collet who would read scriptures in English from the pulpit at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Records say that 40,000 people would regularly gather and clamour to get in, so that they might hear these words.
Collet’s father was the mayor of London so he was protected from execution.
William Tyndale, a brilliant word-smith, was born soon after and was able to take advantage of the amazing new invention of the printing press. Because his translation work was illegal he had to flee to Protestant parts of Germany. His first print run was of 6,000 Bibles which were smuggled in and sold out on the English black market in weeks.
The agents of the King and the Church would burn any copies they found and persecute if not kill those who were caught with them. But, the famine was ending! People were willing to risk this temporal life in the hope of gaining life eternal, and thousands of Tyndale’s Bibles flooded into the country.
The authorities eventually caught up with Tyndale and he was burnt at the stake. 3 years later though, King Henry VIII was convinced by people like Thomas Cromwell and his wife Anne Boleyn that he had lost the fight to suppress the Bible, and so he agreed to give the English a translation he approved of and which he could control. This was called the Great Bible. It was basically a re-write of Tyndale’s Bible and contained some beautiful phrases we still hear. Words like “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”
(Later in the service we will also read the Lord’s Prayer from the KJV. You may be surprised to see that the old version you know is actually from Tyndale and not from the KJV at all.)
The Great Bible was very popular, but Henry VIII is famous for changing his mind and relieving those courtiers who supported his old policies of their heads. Commissioning a Bible had been a radical step, Henry got cold feet, Anne Boleyn and later Cromwell were killed, the Great Bible was withdrawn, and English Bibles were once again hunted down and burned.
Later, Queen Elizabeth tried her father’s strategy again, commissioning the Bishop’s Bible which was a huge flop. It was translated by a committee and was incredibly boring. A boring Bible was not an option for people in the age of Shakespeare! Instead, devout English speakers had turned to another beautiful new translation that was published in 1560 by Presbyterians in Geneva – appropriately called the Geneva Bible.
Now one thing that both Protestants and Catholics, Bible reactionaries and Bible radicals had in common at this time, was a belief that the common people could not be trusted to just pick the Bible up, read it and understand it!
- The authorities said that the masses should be guided in their interpretation of scripture by the Church, and so should gather to hear it read in worship where it could be explained in a sermon.
- Puritans and bible radicals however firmly believed in personal daily Bible study. However, to ensure that people read the Bible correctly at home, Tyndale’s Bible and the Geneva Bible were full of notes explaining what it meant. After all, if uneducated people were to read it for themselves, who knows what silly ideas they might come up with!
This therefore was the great gift of the King James Version 400 years ago… The seventh full Bible in English.
Initially the KJV was regarded as another conservative Bible put out by the powers that be (in this case King James and his bishops) in an attempt to suppress the radical Bibles – which it was! No-one bought it and the printer went bankrupt. As the decades passed however, people came to appreciate its beauty, power, and genuine scholarship - and within 35 years the Geneva Bible had gone out of print.
Now the reason why Queen Elizabeth and King James had wanted to supplant the Geneva Bible was because it undermined temporal authority. Jesus was constantly criticising the authorities of his day, and as the authorities of their day were seeking to limit access to scripture, the explanatory notes in the radical Bibles were constantly interpreting Jesus’ words to their readers as criticising bishops, Popes and Lords.
However, King James knew that in order for his translation to succeed where Elizabeth’s had failed, he had to produce the best possible version: the most beautiful, the most accurate to the original languages, and something without explanatory notes (as any explanations coming from the authorities would have created more division, and not the unity he sought).
So, although the intent of the King James was conservative, in the end it was more radical than the radicals! What it gave believers was the plain text of scripture without any explanation! For the first time in Britain, the masses of believers began reading the Bible and interpreting it for themselves, (hopefully) as inspired by the Holy Spirit.
And in the decades and centuries to follow, thousands of British men and women left their homeland and travelled around the globe; clutching this translation and taking their culture, their faith, and their diverse interpretations of scripture with them.
Back in exodus, I believe that what Aaron was trying to signify in making the golden calf was the invisible and universal and uncontrollable nature of God – and this I think is what King James and his bishops forgot. They wanted to produce a safe and controlled version of scripture, but neither God nor God’s Word can be domesticated and made safe! The Bible is a manual for revolution and social change!
And so… If you know history you’ll know that placing the Bible in the hands of the people has lead to many weird and wacky beliefs: intolerance, racism and never-ending church splits. But, the Word of God is living and active, and it has also lead to some great scholarship, heroic acts of faith, a yearning for justice on earth, and that freedom which is the basis of small communities of believers like ours all over the world…
For all of us are now free to own Bibles, to keep them in our homes, and to read them. And as a church, all of us gather before God as equals: to wrestle with the teachings of scripture, and to seek the Spirit-breathed wisdom of our brothers and sisters as to how we are to live out those teachings today.
To conclude:
400 years ago the printing of the KJV was the last step in ending the famine of the Word of God in the English-speaking world. It went on to be the only Bible used by English speakers for 250 years, over 1 billion copies have now been printed, and it changed our world! It isn’t used as much today with all the new translations around, but still let us celebrate this book, and let us also remember with respect those who struggled and died to bring God’s Word to us!
The translator Tyndale wrote this about the Word of God in 1530…
[The Gospel] is good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy!
- May we also come to know that level of joy at hearing the Word of God.
- May it breathe truth into our spirits so that we do not fall into error and corruption as did the Israelites with the golden calf.
- And may God’s Spirit call each of us to build into our lives a life-giving discipline of actually reading it and wrestling with its teachings.