Benjamin Blayney is no celebrity, but he was responsible for what the Americans call the King James Bible, and we the Authorised Version. His work appeared in 1769, and almost the whole edition was consumed by a fire at the warehouse in Paternoster Row, London. Yet his is the Bible we know today.
I know that we are about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version, but Dr Blayney made thousands of changes to the text of 1611. In vocabulary he incorporated amendments from another version from 1743, for example, fourscore changed to eightieth, neesed to sneezed, and the archaic crudled to curdled. In grammar he changed, among other things, number, so that ‘the names of other gods’ became ‘the name of other gods’; and tenses, so ‘he calleth unto him the twelve and began’ changed to ‘he called unto him the twelve, and began’. There were changes in spelling, in punctuation, and in the choice of words to italicise (which had been intended to indicate words not literally present in the original languages).
I learn this about Dr Blayney from Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version (Oxford, £16.99), but I shan’t try to steal the thunder of a reviewer. It is just striking that English-speaking evangelicals take God for an Englishman. Indeed, a statement in the Bible Believers’ Church Directory, signed up to by a thousand churches, declares: ‘The Authorised Version preserves the very words of God in the form in which He wished them to be represented in the universal language of these last days: English.’ Yet the version they read is not the AV but Dr Blayney’s, which Oxford and then Cambridge quietly took up as the standard one to be printed.
Differences remain between Britain and America. In the 19th century, the American Bible Society adopted a text fundamentally Blayney’s, but with updated spelling. So a ‘King James Version’ from the American Bible Society has basin (as at Exodus 12:22); in England it is bason.
Oxford has now published, as a Quatercentenary Edition, a faithful version of the 1611 text, except that it replaced the black-letter type, which is hard to read, with roman, the easier to enjoy the crudled neesing.
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