We do not know much of the personnel of the company.Their names would mean very little to us at this distance.All were clergymen except one.There were bishops, college principals, university fellows, and rectors.Dr.Reynolds, who suggested it in the first place, was a member, though he did not live to see the work finished.This Dr.Reynolds, by the way, was party to a most curious episode.He had been an ardent Roman Catholic, and he had a brother who was an equally ardent Protestant.They argued with each other so earnestly that each convinced the other; the Roman Catholic became a Protestant, and the Protestant became a Roman Catholic! Dr.Lancelot Andrewes, chairman of one of the two companies that met at Westminster, was probably the most learned man in England.They said of him that if he had been present at the tower of Babel he could have interpreted for all the tongues present.The only trouble was that the world lacked learning enough to know how learned he was.His company had the first part of the Old Testament, and the simple dignity of the style they used shows how scholarship and simplicity go easily together.Most people would consider that the least satisfactory part of the work is the second section, running from I Chronicles to Ecclesiastes.A convert from another faith, who learned to read the Bible in English, once expressed toa friend of my own his feeling that except for the Psalms and parts of Job, there seemed to be here a distinct letting-down of the dignity of the translation.There is good excuse for this, if it is so, for two leading members of the company who had that section in charge, both eminent Cambridge scholars, died very early in the work, and their places were not filled.The third company, sitting at Oxford, were peculiarly strong, and had for their portion the hardest part of the Old Testament--all the prophetical writings.But they did their part with finest skill.The fourth company, sitting at Cambridge, had the Apocrypha, the books which lie between the Old and the New Testaments for the most part, or else are supplemental to certain Old Testament books.Their work was rather hastily and certainly poorly done, and has been dropped out of most editions.The fifth company, sitting at Oxford, with great Greek scholars on it, took the Gospels, the Acts, and the Revelation.This company had in it the one layman, Sir Henry Savile, then the greatest Greek scholar in England.It is the same Sir Henry Savile who heard, on his death-bed in 1621, that James had with his own hands torn from the Journal of Parliament the pages which bore the protest in favor of free speech in Parliament.Hearing it, the faithful scholar prayed to die, saying: "I am ready to depart, the rather that having lived in good times I foresee worse." The sixth company met at Westminster and translated the New Testament epistles.
It was the original plan that when one company had finished its part, the result should go to each of the other companies, coming back with their suggestions to the original workers to be recast by them.The whole was then to be reviewed by a smaller committee of scholars to give it uniformity and to see it through the press.The records are not extant that tell whether this was done in full detail, though we may presume that each section of the Scripture had the benefit of the scholarship of the entire company.
We know a good deal of the method of their work.We shall understand it better by recalling what material they had at hand.They were enabled to use the result of all the work that had been done before them.They were instructed to follow the Bishops' Bible wherever theycould do so fairly; but they were given power to use the versions already named from Wiclif down, as well as those fragmentary versions which were numerous, and of which no mention has been made.They ransacked all English forms for felicitous words and happy phrases.It is one of the interesting incidents that this same Hugh Broughton, who was left off the committee and took it so hard, yet without his will contributed some important matter to the translation, because he had on his own authority made translations of certain parts of the Scripture.Several of our capital phrases in the King James version are from him.There was no effort to break out new paths.Preference was always given to a familiar phrase rather than to a new one, unless accuracy required it.First, then, they had the benefit of all the work that had been done before in the same line, and gladly used it.
In addition, they had all other versions made in the tongues of the time.Chiefly there was Luther's German Bible, already become for the German tongue what their version was destined to be for the English tongue.There were parts of the Bible available in Spanish, French, and Dutch.They were kept at hand constantly for any light they might cast on difficult passages.
For the Old Testament there were very few Hebrew texts.There had been little critical work yet done on them, and for the most part there were only different editions running back over the centuries.We have little more than that now, and there is almost no new material on the Old Testament since the days of the King James translators.There was, of course, the Septuagint, the Greek translation from the Hebrew made before Christ, with the guidance it could give in doubtful places on the probable original.And finally there was the Vulgate, made into Latin out of the Greek and Hebrew.This was all the Old Testament material they had, or that any one could have in view of the antiquated original sources.
The New Testament material was more abundant, though not nearly so abundant as to-day.There were few manuscripts of the early days to which they could refer; but there were the two great critical versions of the New Testament in Greek, that by Erasmus and the Complutensian, which had made use of the best manuscripts known.Then, finally again, there wasthe Vulgate.
