Study of the King James Bible | Page 5

he could do so.
Fourteen years he labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine,
to do his work the better. Barely four hundred years (404 A.D.) after
the birth of Christ his Latin version appeared. It met a storm of protest
for its effort to go back of the Septuagint, so dominant had the
translation become. Jerome fought for it, and his version won the day,
and became the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible.
For seven or eight centuries it held its sway as the current version
nearest to the tongue of the people. Latin had become the accepted
tongue of the church. There was little general culture, there was little
general acquaintance with the Bible except among the educated. During
all that time there was no real room for a further translation. One of the
writers[1] says: "Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible in the
mother tongue; while the illiterate majority were in no condition to feel
the want of such a book, the educated minority would be averse to so
great and revolutionary a change." When a man cannot read any writing
it really does not matter to him whether books are in current speech or
not, and the majority of the people for those seven or eight centuries
could read nothing at all. Those who could read anything were apt to be

able to read the Latin.
[1] Hoare, Evolution of the English Bible, p. 39.
These centuries added to the conviction of many that the Bible ought
not to become too common, that it should not be read by everybody,
that it required a certain amount of learning to make it safe reading.
They came to feel that it is as important to have an authoritative
interpretation of the Bible as to have the Bible itself. When the
movement began to make it speak the new English tongue, it provoked
the most violent opposition. Latin had been good enough for a
millennium; why cheapen the Bible by a translation? There had grown
up a feeling that Jerome himself had been inspired. He had been
canonized, and half the references to him in that time speak of him as
the inspired translator. Criticism of his version was counted as impious
and profane as criticisms of the original text could possibly have been.
It is one of the ironies of history that the version for which Jerome had
to fight, and which was counted a piece of impiety itself, actually
became the ground on which men stood when they fought against
another version, counting anything else but this very version an
impious intrusion!
How early the movement for an English Bible began, it is impossible
now to say. Certainly just before 700 A.D., that first singer of the
English tongue, Caedmon, had learned to paraphrase the Bible. We
may recall the Venerable Bede's charming story of him, and how he
came by his power of interpretation. Bede himself was a child when
Caedmon died, and the romance of the story makes it one of the finest
in our literature. Caedmon was a peasant, a farm laborer in
Northumbria working on the lands of the great Abbey at Whitby.
Already he had passed middle life, and no spark of genius had flashed
in him. He loved to go to the festive gatherings and hear the others sing
their improvised poems; but, when the harp came around to him in due
course, he would leave the room, for be could not sing. One night when
he had slipped away from the group in shame and had made his rounds
of the horses and cattle under his care, he fell asleep in the stable
building, and heard a voice in his sleep bidding him sing. When he
declared he could not, the voice still bade him sing. "What shall I
sing?" he asked. "Sing the first beginning of created things." And the
words came to him; and, still dreaming, he sang his first hymn to the

Creator. In the morning he told his story, and the Lady Abbess found
that he had the divine gift. The monks had but to translate to him bits of
the Bible out of the Latin, which he did not understand, into his
familiar Anglo-Saxon tongue, and he would cast it into the rugged
Saxon measures which could be sung by the common people. So far as
we can tell, it was so, that the Bible story became current in
Anglo-Saxon speech. Bede himself certainly put the Gospel of John
into Anglo-Saxon. At the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, there is a
manuscript of nearly twenty thousand lines, the metrical version of the
Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an Augustinian monk named
Orm, and so called the Ormulum. There were other metrical versions