I’m just back from the opening of this excellent exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Adam Nicolson, author of God’s Secretaries opened the show and spoke well on how the KJV held together the two big trends of the time – making the Bible available to all, and state control. Do visit it if you have the opportunity. Access to the Library is off West Road in Cambridge, and there is free parking outside. It is a bit off the tourist trail so there is usually plenty of elbow room.
It runs from 18 January-18 June 2011 (Closed 22-25 April inclusive)Monday-Friday 09.00-18.00, Saturday 09.00-16.30, Sunday closed Admission Free
King James I as depicted in the frontispiece to his collected works, published in 1616. Hunter.a.61.2 ‘A book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.’ So wrote Lord Macaulay of the King James Bible in 1828, more than 200 years after it was first printed in 1611. But this famous Bible did not spring fully formed from the minds of its translators in the reign of James I. Its text is to a large extent a patchwork of the many versions produced, chiefly outside England, in the preceding century, drawn together and harmonised by a painstaking process of comparison and revision in a complicated system of committees. Neither was it welcomed with acclamation into the fraught world of seventeenth-century English religion; Puritans disliked it, scholars picked holes in it, and the public preferred the familiar Geneva version of fifty years earlier. Its eventual triumph was as much a result of state sponsored monopoly as of literary or spiritual merit. In this exhibition we trace the history of English Bible translation which culminated in the King James Version, and look at its reception and use by its earliest readers.From Great and Manifold Blessings: The Making of the King James Bible.
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