The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
When they looked back on the conference, the Puritans felt that they had
lost everything, and the High Church people that they had gained
everything. One of the bishops, in a very servile way, and on his knee,
gave thanks to God for having given the country such a king, whose like
had never been seen since Christ was on earth. Certainly hard times were
ahead for the Puritans. The King harried them according to his word.
Within sixteen years some of them landed at Plymouth Rock, and things
began to happen on this side. That settlement at Plymouth was the outcome
of the threat the King had made at the Hampton Court conference.
But looking back one can see that the conference was worth while for the
beginning of the movement for the new version. The King was true to his
word in this line also, and before the year was out had appointed the
fifty-four best Bible scholars of the realm to make the new version. They
were to sit in six companies of nine each, two at Oxford, two at
Cambridge, and two at Westminster. The names of only forty-seven of them
have come down to us, and it is not known whether the other seven were
ever appointed, or in what way their names have been lost. It must be said
for the King that the only principle of selection was scholarship, and
when those six groups of men met they were men of the very first rank,
with no peers outside their own numbers--with one exception, and that
exception is of some passing interest. Hugh Broughton was probably the
foremost Hebrew scholar of England, perhaps of the world, at the time, and
apparently he was not appointed on the committee. Chiefly, it seems to
have been because he was a man of ungovernable temper and utterly unfitted
to work with others. Failure to appoint him, however, bit and rankled, and
the only keen and sharp criticism that was passed on the version in its
own day was by Hugh Broughton. He sent word to the King, after it was
completed, that as for himself he would rather be rent to pieces by wild
horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of
the Bible on the poor people. That was so manifestly pique, however, that
it is only to be regretted that the translation did not have the benefit
of his great Hebrew knowledge. John Selden, at his prime in that day,
voiced the feeling of most scholars of the times, that the new translation
was the best in the world and best gave the sense of the original.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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