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gconan wrote:

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The Tyndale Society Journal

Thanks, what a great resource!! i didn't realise there was that much serious interest in Tyndale and his work these days, but i guess i stand corrected.

here's a couple of excerpts from an article that, to my happy surprise, sheds light on KJBOism (underline mine for highlight):

The Annual Gloucester Cathedral Lecture October 2003

Translating the Bible; Why Tyndale is still vital

Professor David Daniell

...

I want to talk about something of the experience of making it. Although there had been a number of books lately about the King James' Bible (the AV), and they keep on coming, not many people have surveyed the whole extraordinary history of the bible in these islands and then in America, from the earliest time in the first millennium till now. That is an ocean in whichthe 1611 or AV or KJV is only one wave. I thought that there might be value this afternoon in hearing from someone who has seen the whole story and about what some of that experience reveals.

....

Now let me just pause for a moment on the Authorised Version of 1611, always known in America as KJV, the King James Bible. It can be beautiful and powerful especially in the New Testament, where it is as we now know, 83% pure Tyndale. But though a good deal of the K.J. Old Testament poetry and prophecy is fine, a good deal of it is incomprehensible. But for some reason one is not allowed to say so! Not because of archaic language, but through bad translation and a loss of notes. As I was preparing this, my AV fell open at the first page of Micah, where I read these words:-

'Pass ye away, thou inhabitant of Saphir, having thy shame naked: the inhabitant of Zaanan came not forth in the mourning of Beth-ezel: he shall receive of you his standing'

Now that is incomprehensible - dare I also say it's rubbish?! There are, of course those, and I have met them, who say seriously that it doesn't matter that it is rubbish because God wrote it and He will help us to understand it. And there is worse. A cluster of marginal alternatives in King James only make it more difficult. The Geneva Bible at that point is much better and the marginal notes more elucidatory. Tyndale was killed before he could get to the second half of the Old Testament, so we don't have Tyndale on that.

For the record, King James had almost nothing to do with his version as it is always called, beyond receiving the obsequious dedication where he is surely blasphemously described as the 'author of the work'. Myths abound. We know now, thanks to recent study by Patrick Collinson, that the standard account of the version's initiation at Hampton Court in January 1604, with its hatred of the Geneva Bible, reeks of the writer's prejudice and malice and was a political gesture to the Bishop of London as a step to his own preferment. Moreover, in spite of another persistent myth, the 1611 KJV was not instantly loved and taken to the heart of English Christians ever after. Its publication was a non-event - the arrival of a large piece of church furniture, at best described as 'The new translation without notes' (notes are essential to Hebrew poetry... half the Old Testament). Many of those who noticed its arrival more carefully, loathed it and said so. Its publishing success was the result of murderous rivalry between printers fighting over monopoly. No one has ever told this story before; it includes all sorts of extraordinary things including court cases and imprisonments.

The King James Version did not reach its near-divine status until the late 1760s. That was a political happening; the lifting up of God's England against the wicked French, and exactly paralleled the 'invention' of Shakespeare, in the same year, 1769, as the 'Immortal Genius'. It was to mark the English as God's proper people, (not the French), because they had the bible - and - Shakespeare.

....

I claim to have seen, while living in California, 'Jesus got his disciples together. He threw them a grin and said - Hey you guys, lighten up!' Now we haven't got quite to that (and I made that up!) But I have seen things that are remarkably close to that. The three essentials in making an English translation of the New Testament are (1) accuracy to the Greek, (2) clarity in English, and (3) the hardest of all, the finding of an appropriate register of language.

....

[On Genesis 3]

Tyndale has recognised in the Hebrew the mixture of imperfects and imperatives used for different purposes in what the 1534 prologue referred to as the future indicative and the imperative mode and the optative mode. His 'shoulds' are exactly right for what the serpent is up to in Hebrew; twisting the grammar to offer Eve, instead of a God who makes demands from His Divine law, a God who merely makes predictions which are open to discussion, even to curious experiment. The serpent seizes on this indeterminacy of the Hebrew to confuse Eve about which God, the one giving unequivocable laws or the one making suggestions, spoke to Adam. After all it knows she did not hear God herself. This uncertainty . . .reducing God's laws to conditions is all in Tyndale's 'shoulds', this brilliant use of conditional modal auxiliaries.

In the 1611 King James Authorised Version this is a truth quite missed. The 'translators' removed all the subtlety by using the word 'shall' throughout. It is surely a significant loss. The serpent says, 'Your eyes shall be opened, ye shall be as God'. Simple futurity! Why did the KJ committee do this? Because for political reasons they had been given the wretched 1568 Bishops' Bible to follow. True.. .the first 1560 Geneva bible gave 'shall' but the Geneva men put in the margin a careful elaboration of the sense of 'should', the 'shouldness' that they wished to get across. As though, they said, the serpent should say God doesn't forbid you to eat the fruits...save that if you should eat, you should be like Him. Splendid! That is what the Geneva notes do all the time. The Bishops' Bible for political reasons had no notes.

In the first 1611 version the margins were bare and instead of the serpent's "Ah Sir" they had the miserable "Yea, because" and it tells us nothing.

The only consolation is that in the 17th and 18th centuries the KJV was sometimes printed with the Geneva notes, but it is a very sorry tale of loss. And today? With all our sophisticated knowledge of Hebrew and English and biblical theology? Not a 'should' in sight! The true subtlety of the Fall in Hebrew and in Tyndale, the temptation being not so much to eat the apple, but to misrepresent God as being open to minor experiment has been lost; replaced by a sort of shiny, supermarket futurity.

'God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like Gods'. This is the New Jerusalem Bible of 1985 and similarly in all the modern versions I have seen. TYNDALE is still vital.

....

Both Greek and English have the indicative, infinitive and imperative. But all English has to take the place of fully inflected Greek verbs, the fully structured mode of subjunctives expressing contingency or hypothesis and the optative expressing a wish, are a few modal auxiliaries like 'may' and 'might' and so on. Paul, in Romans, a Hebrew writing in Greek has available a big grammatical palette or, to change the image, a large pipeorgan with many stops. English has to struggle to get the effect right. I take briefly one example from Romans 6 in Tyndale and familiar to us: - 'What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that there may be abundance of grace? God forbid. How shall we that are dead as touching sin. live any longer therein? Remember ye not that all we which are baptised in the name of Jesus Christ, are baptised to die with Him? We are buried with him by baptism, for to die, that likewise as Christ was raised up from death by the glory of the father, even so we also should walk in a new life'. In that paragraph Tyndale uses what Brian Cummings calls a whole lexicon of auxiliaries- 'shall, shall, may, shall, should, must, must, might, should, shall. 'In a scrupulous attempt to match the exacting syntax and elusive theology of Paul's intricate prose,' Cummings goes on, 'Paul's theology modulates between a statement of how things are, an assertion of how things can be, a description of the conditions prescribed by God if this might happen, a prediction of how He will reward us and finally, an exhortation to what we should do about it. Paul exerts unremitting pressure on Greek grammar in order to test the concentrations, linguistic and philosophical of his readers. In the process he places an intolerable burden upon his later translators.'

You won't be surprised to hear me say that Tyndale has done well: King James' panel made only slight changes, replacing Tyndale's 'remember' with 'know' and one or two other tiny alterations so that in this passage it is more than the famous 83% Tyndale and much more like 96%. And Today?

In all my experience I found a surprise. Facing that wall of modern versions in California, and taking down a good dozen, I expected a uniform 'wash' of paraphrases, ducking Paul's complexity. Yes, I found one or two of the most 'hyped', those with the biggest marketing budget that were frighteningly glib, miles from the Greek, and Paul, and theology and even God; but the majority of modern versions followed rather carefully the subtleties of Paul's verse. This was excellent news, but there was better news still, for many of them followed Tyndale word for word as being the only way to do it.

nice demythologisation of KJBOism there.