THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS LITERATURE

 

PROF. K. VISWANATHAM

 

 

The Authorized Version is not good enough for the Church, and is not good enough for scholarship.

–THE Rev. D. McHARDY

 

To my mind King James Bible has been very harmful influence on English prose.

–MAUGHAM

 

It seems to me scarcely an exaggeration to say that the style of one half of the English Bible is atrocious.

–MIDDLETON MURRY

 

To read it as literature is the way to essential and reasonable belief.

–MATTHEW ARNOLD

 

Scripture easy of translation! Then why have there been so few good translations?

–NEWMAN

 

I

 

It is an accepted commonplace that the Authorized Version is the highest reach of English prose, that its influence is all-pervasive in writings like those of Ruskin, that its immortality as Literature (let alone as scripture) is unquestioned and assured. Quiller-Couch says: “It is in everything we see, hear, feel because it is in us, in our blood.” The A. V. according to him set a seal on the national style. It controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray. MaCaulay with his usual cock-sureness refers to the Bible as a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. Compare this with Middleton Murry’s ‘atrocious’. Coleridge was of the opinion that it will keep any man from being vulgar in point of style. And it is curious, to note that it is precisely terms like ‘meanness’, ‘rusticity’ ‘lowest language’ that were used about the language of the Bible by St. Augustine and others. Harwood in 1768 wanted to translate the Bible into elegant English; perhaps be found it bald and barbarous. The discovery of ostraca and papyri in the Egyptian sands made it clear “that the New Testament documents so far from being written (as many had previously thought) in a kind of special language of the Holy Ghost were as a matter of fact written in the ordinary language used by the people of the first century Graeco-Roman world.” (The English Bible, BCP. p. 30)

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ras Shamra tablets and the Akkadian and Aramaic inscriptions have thrown new light on the Hebrew language. And exact scholarship finds earlier translations inadequate. For instance, in the sentence:

 

“The pastures of the shepherds mourn and the top of Carmel withers,” (Amos 1.2) ‘mourn’ is an incorrect translation of a word meaning ‘scorch’. Again in David’s lament: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy places, ‘beauty’ is incorrect for gazelle. Roughly the expression corresponds to the Sanskrit  Thou tiger among men, thou bull among men meaning thou best among men. The Hebrew word means thou gazelle of Israel or Prince of Israel. Hence Prof. Hardy’s remark that the A. V. of 1611 is sadly out of date from the point of view of the Biblical scholar, from the point of view of the church too. “Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings” of the Prayer Book is misleading in Present Day English; the original sense from Latin prae+venire = come before is not understood. ‘Let’ is used for hinder and ‘allow’ for approve. “But whom say ye that I am?” from St. Matthew is not strictly grammatical either. The expression ‘iron entered into his soul’ is a mistranslation of the Hebrew: “his person entered into iron” (i.e. fetters). In the story of The Prodigal Son the verb does not mean ‘gather all together’ but ‘realist goods into ready cash’ (St. Luke 15, V. 13).

 

It is true that the influence of the A. V. is apparently tremendous. As J. R. Green put it, England became the people of a book and that book was the Bible. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is from St. Matthew: ‘and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again’. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Henry James’ The Golden Bowl and Kipling’s Many Inventions are from Ecclesiastes. Dryden’s great satire (though Achitophel is not from the A.V.) derives its power from the roman a clef with the Bible story. In any book on the English Language in the chapter on the Makers of English the Bible finds its inevitable place. The warning of Prof. Wrenn is relevant: “One must always try to avoid the very easy confusion of the influence of thought and image with that of actual word and phrase. (The English Language, p. 150) Sounding brass or tinkling cymbal–does not show any wonderful skill in the Bible translators if only the Latin original is kept in mind. Some expressions like ‘sweat of thy brow’ are elusive; its occurrence is inexplicable. Wordsworth’s ‘The rain is over and gone’ and the title of an American play ‘The Voice of the Turtle’ are from the song of Solomon. Countless phrases or proverbial sayings–salt of the earth, skin of my teeth, the powers that be, no man can serve two masters, no new thing under the sun, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, wolf in sheep’s clothing, camel and the eye of a needle–are from the Biblical word-hoard. The effect of the continual domestic study of the book upon the national character, wrote Trevelyan: “Imagination and intelligence for nearly three centuries to come was greater than that of any literary movement in our annals or any religious movement since the coming of St. Augustine.” (The English Bible, BOP. p. 26) Prof. Wrenn speaks of “the vast influence of the Bible on English prose-rhythm and phrasing as well as on the many image and verbal echoes which have continued to owe their origin to the Bible translations. (The English Language. p. 155) One has only to read C. S. Lewis’s essay which debunks the views we are accustomed to and states bluntly that Bible as Literature does not exist, that Bunyan and Ruskin cannot be derived from the A. V. though Ruskin himself declared that but for the Bible he would have been a Johnsonian. If Donald Coggan writes: “But of course the influence of the Bible has been far deeper than a literary influence only. The influence on religion, on ethics, on character has been even more profound than it has been in the realm of literature.” (The English Bible. p. 37) Maugham observes in The Summing Up (p. 25) “I cannot but think not the least of the misfortunes that the secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people...Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew Prophets.”

 

II

 

Why does the English Bible lead to such a variety of opinion? To understand this one has to make clear to oneself the following:

 

  1. The Bible is a library of books
  2. The English Bible is a branch of the European tree and hence the problem of translation.
  3. What do, we mean by the influence of one work on another?
  4. The Bible as Literature.

 

The word ‘Bible’ means book. Chaucer uses it in this sense:

 

Men might make of hem a bible

Twenty foot thikke, as I trowe. (House of Fame)

 

The word is from Lat. biblia from Greek ta biblia. The singular biblion is a diminutive of biblos which means the inner rind of papyrus which gives us paper and taper. The word book is of course from O. E. boc meaning beech. A Jew of the first century would have been bewildered by the word Bible. The term was invented by John Chrysostom in the 4th century. The Bible consists of 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 of the New Testament. We have a total of 66 books. Though the people of Israel made these books, the people of Canaan, of Babylon, of Persia, of Greece left their impact on the thinking and habits of Israel. Moses the great leader rescues the Jews from slavery in Egypt. After many bitter fights, they settle in Canaan now called Palestine. Under Solomon the Jews emerge as a strong state. His successor antagonizes the 15 Northern tribes who form Israel and fight against Judah.. The Prophets fulminate and thunder in vain; they become the conscience of the people against the politicians. The Jews are exiles in Assyria and Babylon. Cyrus allows them to return to their homeland. The exiles return, rebuild Jerusalem as the only place of worship. Next this Jewish state becomes part of Alexander’s Empire. After the Conqueror’s death Ptolmey becomes the ruler. During the time of the Maccabee family the Jews get divided into the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes. The Romans make Palestine a semi-independent kingdom. And in Herod’s reign the great Saviour Jesus (as called by the Greek neighbours) was born. The splintered world was mortised by the carpentry of love. For the exclusiveness of the Hebrews Jesus substituted that all are the children of God and Hebrew fanaticism was replaced by love. Rome the centre of Pax Romana became the centre of Pax Christi though Pax Romana tried to suppress Pax Christ. Arnold in his well-known essay on Marcus Aurelius tries to explain the suppression of the Jews by so enlightened an Emperor as Aurelius. If Christianity became a world religion it is Pax Romana that helped this broadcasting, of the Gospel. Charity, loving-kindness is the gospel of Christ and those who believed that Jesus was the Christos came to be called Christians, publicly for the first time in the city of Antioch. As Hendrik Van Loon puts it: It was a question of four letters. That which separated Jesus from the merciless Roman, the sophisticated Greek and the dogmatic Jew was his understanding of the word ‘love.’ His heart was filled with love of his fellow-men. Their strife seemed so senseless, their ambitions so futile, their desire for gold and glory such a waste of  valuable time and energy. It was true that many of the Greek philosophers had come to an identical conclusion...But they had never carried their ideas beyond that small and exclusive circle of well-born gentlemen who alone in those days were allowed the luxury of an immortal soul. (The Story of the Bible, p. 369.) Father forgive them for they know not what they do–is the divinity in man speaking. No wonder Huxley calls the Bible the Magna Charta of the poor and the oppressed. And Paul made a skywriting of this spiritual gospel of love. It is sometimes thought that St. Paul is the virtual founder of Christianity–overshadowing even Jesus. But can the body be greater than the soul?

 

III

 

            The Bible translations are a legion–in English from Caedmon to the New English Bible published by the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Presses on 16th March 1970. It was a noble passion of Erasmus: I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of the shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of the journey. Tyndale’s desire was to cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the scripture than many of the clergy. Perhaps the Sacred Word cannot, and should not, be translated. The Vedas are regarded as Divine Logos. It is this attitude that makes the 1611 Bible the Bible of the English. Septuagint is the standard translation of the Old Testament into Greek; the Vulgate into Latin; Peshitta into Syriac and so on. The old distinction between the Prophets and the writings was blurred in the new order of the books in the O. T. we find today. The Law (the first five books) are the most sacred; the Law is supplemented by the Prophets. The golden rule of the Christians:

 

            Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord

            Thou shalt love thy neighbour at thyself

 

is from the Law. The Book of Jonah is considered the Holy of Holies The Book of Psalms is the finest hymn book in the world. They range all the way from the sublime in goodness to the sublime in wickedness and revenge. They contain the oldest and most beautiful descriptions of nature...They have inspired most of the great poets of later times. They have been set to music by the greatest of our Western composers. (Van Loon, p. 290) Milton’s “Sion’s songs to all true tastes excelling” (P. R.1 IV 347) not in their divine argument alone but in the very critical art of composition shows his life-long conviction. C. S. Lewis comments: “But if any man will read aloud on alternate mornings for a single month a page of Pindar and a page of the Psalms in any translation he chooses. I think I can guess which he will grow tired of.” (A Preface to P. L., 2 p. 4-5) Newman too in his lecture on Literature tries to disprove Laurence Sterne’s view. But I will maintain that elaborate composition is not unknown to the writers of Scripture. (The Idea of a University, Hampton’s Ed. p. 119) Consider the Book of Job–is it not a sacred drama, as artistic, as perfect, as any Greek tragedy of Sophocles or Euripides. (Ibid., p. 136) The Song of Solomon is perhaps a love lyric, sensuous and voluptuous though interpreted as Jehova’s love for his people. The Song of Songs is a very old love poem, perhaps sung at wedding feasts, centered in a shepherdess of the village of Shunem weaned away by the king from the warm side of her shepherd lover to the golden cage of royal favour. The Song of Songs is not a religious book but it is the first evidence of something new and very fine which had at last come into the world.” (Hendrik Van Loon, p. 293) What is the religion, if not the religion of love, as in the immortal Song of Love in Samskrit Jayadeva’s Gita Govindam, in:

 

            Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah,

            Comely as Jerusalem,

            Terrible as an army with banners.

            Turn away thine eyes from me,

            For they, have overcome me:

 

Goethe considered Ruth as the loveliest little idyll. Ecclesisticus ranks with the Book of Job as one of two finest examples of the wisdom literature of the Jews. The New Testament books are knit together by the personality of Christ. As thought it is superior to the O. T.; 3 as poetry it is inferior to it.

 

            What is the influence of the timeless drama of this great classic in English on English writers? Before we proceed to define influence we have to think of the many views on translation as the English Bible is a translation. A few basic facts can be mentioned:

 

            1. A translation is indebted to the original for its very existence.

            2. All translation is vanity and futility because of the genius of a language.

            3. The linguistic part can never be translated.

            4. Some advocate free translation as that alone brings out the beauty of the spirit of the original. These take liberties with the original.

            5. Others plead for a word-by-word literal translation which is scrupulously faithful to the original. This is mere crib to the advocates of free translation.

            6. Some like a prose translation as verse translation brings in changes or departure from the original because of metrical necessity.

            7. Sometimes a literal translation sounds ridiculous. For instance, Sanskrit Narasardula literally means tiger among men, tiger meaning the best. If we use ‘the best’, the reader fails to know that a metaphor of that type was in Sanskrit. So perhaps a literal translation with a note is needed.

            8. Sometimes a translation suffers from, what has been termed, etymological fallacy. For example, the line of Chaucer:

           

            He was a veray parfit gentil knight

 

is very far from meaning. He was a very perfect gentle knight. For veray is the old French verai (Modern French vrai) ‘true’, parfit means something like ‘complete’ or ‘finished’ and gentil has its older sense of ‘noble’ which survives somewhat in Modern English gentleman. The line means literally, then ‘He was a true, complete and noble knight’. (The English Language, p. 123.)

            9. To understand the grand style of the Greeks read Milton, said Arnold though Milton did not translate the Greeks. Homer’s grandeur is incarnated in Milton’s epic just as we say that Gandhiji, though he was not a Christian, proves to us, in the words of Einstein, that one like Christ walked in flesh and blood at a period in Jewish history.

 

            So the only changes that a translator can make are those where the idiom of the language of the original is distorted if translated literally. Barring these contexts a translator should be faithful to the original and should not in any way distort the world picture in the original. If there are grammatical mistakes in the original, they too should find a place in the translation. How else is the reader to know that the original committed these mistakes? The translation is more a commentary than a creation, giving us a picture of the author from A to Z.

 

            For instance, Prof. Moulton observed that the Bible was the worst printed book because the magnificent bursts of poetry are printed as prose. “It is as though we printed the poems of Shelley and Wordsworth as prose.” (The Outline of Literature, p. 119) It is relevant to read what G. B. Harrison writes about a similar problem in the printing of Shakespeare. “But readers and even critics have not realized that Shakespeare often wrote in a free verse, because they are not accustomed to use the Folio. After the murder of Duncan the quick jerky utterance of Lady Macbeth is much more effectively shown in the Folio printing like this:

 

            My hands are of your colour, but I shame

            To wear a heart so white.

                        Knock

            I hear a knocking at the South entry;

            Retire we to our chamber.

                                                            (Introducing Shakespeare, p. 179)

 

            The Sermon on the Mount printed as follows in the Revised Version of 1881 makes a beautiful poem in the free verse of the Hebrews:

 

            And everyone that heareth these words of mine

                        and doeth them not,

            Shall be likened unto a foolish man,

            Which built bis house upon the sand:

                        And the rain descended,

                        and the floods came,

                        and the winds blew

                        and smote upon that house

            and it fell:

            and great was the fall thereof!

 

            According to Croce all translation either spoils and diminishes or it creates a new expression. (Chap. IX, p. 68) Dryden in the

 

Preface to his Ovid distinguishes three grades of translation:

 

            (i) Metaphrase or literal translation

            (ii) Paraphrase or translation with latitude

            (iii) Imitation or free translation.

 

and announces as his own standard the ‘mean’, paraphrase (Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 216)

 

IV

 

            What is meant by influence has been very ably analyaed by C. S. Lewis. And one has to draw a distinction between the Bible and the A. V.4 The Bible is European and belongs to the world of Western culture though it is Truth from the East. The A. V. is English and belongs to the period of King James; it is a branch of the European Bible.

 

            1. A source need not be an influence. Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is derived from Shah Namah but the influence is that of Homer. Malory is source and influence for Mort d’ Arthur. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel is from the Bible, not necessarily from the A. V. Achitophel, for instance, is the spelling in the A. V.

 

            2. Quotations from the A. V. do not indicate influence. Quotation, are like clothes borrowed for an occasion. Borrowing is not adopting another’s dress. Borrowing a post-man’s dress for the fancy dress competition is not to be influenced by him.

 

            3. The embedded quotation is either facetious or solemn. Sometimes the expression is used without knowing the source. Shakespearian tags–more sinned against than sinning, a consummation devoutly to be wished, more honoured in the breach than in the observance–stand conspicuous in the context by their difference.

 

            4. The Bible as one of the Makers of English has been already dealt with. Peace-maker, loving-kindness, beautiful–may be Biblical but this cannot be brought under influence.

 

            5. Milton’s Epic theme is no doubt Biblical but the structure is Virgilian. It cannot be said that the A. V. influenced Milton as The Waste Land influenced Modern Poetry with reference to structure and language.

 

            Even with regard to Bunyan C. S. Lewis points out that without the Bible Bunyan would not have written the Pilgrim’s Progress but his style would have been the same without the A. V. the Bible is only one of the influences on Ruskin. It is not like the influence of the Italian Epic on Spenser.

 

            The Bible is either read as Scripture or not at all, When we have not sufficient faith to read it as the Sacred Word, we invent expressions like Bible as Literature, The Mediaevalists looked to the honey of the allegorical meaning in the honey comb though later the ignoring of the literal in the Sacred Word was considered sinning against light, the literal is needed even for the allegorical just as a reach braid of hair is needed for any style in hair-dressing. The Humanists thought that the Sacred Word could be made more elegant in language. The Romantics were attracted by the primitive simplicity of the Biblical World. “The Hebrew mind was simple and the Hebrew eye was fixed on the common objects of life...common to all ages, to which these old poets went for their imagery.” (The Outline of Literature, p. 124) Those opposed to the Romantics may not be drawn to the Bible as literature, When your affection for your grandfather dries up, you say: I love my grandfather for his silvery beard. This attitude towards the Bible is in tune with earlier criticism of Spenser and Milton which rhapsodized over the Spenserian vowels and the slow planetary wheelings of the latter’s verse ignoring ‘our sage and serious Spenser’ and Milton’s ‘Ingorged without restraint’. If parallelism of thought and expression is the characteristic of Hebrew poetry:

 

            “Saying, “Touch not mine anointed ones

            And do my Prophets no harm (105th Psalm)

 

do we find this frequently in English writers to speak of influence. If repetition characterizes Hebrew literature:

 

            At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down:

            At her feet he bowed, he fell;

            Where he bowed, there he fell down.

 

as in the Song of Deborah, do we find this frequently in English writers? If in Matthew Arnold there is the trick of repetition, Chesterton has a very unsavoury comment on this: Arnold’s great error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases as well as of his enemies. (The Victorian Age in Literature. P. 32) If Hebrew poetry is full of metaphor and common imagery as in

 

            Thy, teeth are as a flock of sheep

            Which go up from the washing

 

we cannot say this is because of the A. V. Take a sentence of sheer beauty:

 

            The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

 

            Can we say this pattern is from the A. V. alone?

 

            So when a critic writes: “A giant work, still to be done, perhaps in the old manner by committees of committees is to trace the penetration of English religious and secular life by the substance and idiom of the English Bible.” One feels, in the light of C. S. Lewis’s essay, that there is no material for this giant work. The influence of the Bible in the authorised version is exaggerated and the Bible as Literature is an indirect admission of its dethronement. If the Light of the World said: Father, forgive them ..., the great Emperor who persecuted this light also said: I am deprived of the pleasure of pardoning the enemy of Rome. Both are ‘mahavakyas’. The A. V. as Bible is the ever-living and ever-lasting word; the A. V., as A. V., i.e., as language and style is not perhaps as great as it is made out to be.

 

1 P. R. Paradise Regained.

2 P. L. Paradise Lost

3 Old Testament.

4 Authorized version

 

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