By Kevin Baldeosingh Sunday, March 1 2009

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Although the Bible is a perpetual bestseller in the Western world, most readers do not realise that it is not one book. In fact, the very word “bible” comes from a root which means “collection of documents”.

As historian Robin Lane Fox writes in The Unauthorised Version, “In Biblical times, the Bible or Old Testament was not a book at all. Its texts were copies on rolls of papyrus, parchment or even leather, each of which would hold only one text or groups of shorter texts. These rolls were often cumbersome. A text of Isaiah which was copied on papyrus and found quite recently in a cave near the Dead Sea unrolls to a length of 20 feet.”

Moreover, many church-going Christians treat the Bible as though it is an account written by eyewitnesses to the events recorded, or by persons who lived in the times when the various moral laws were laid down.

But, says Fox, “The texts which we now read as a book between two covers are a collection whose origins span at least 700 years…The texts of the Hebrew Old Testament were composed at moments between the eighth century BC (some would say ninth or even tenth) and the mid-second century BC. There is a further gap of two centuries until the texts of the Christian New Testament, which were composed probably between AD 60 and 100.”

The first ‘‘official’’ Bible was produced near the end of the fourth century AD, when Pope Damascus commissioned an eminent scholar named Jerome to produce a Latin translation as the authoritative text. This became known as the Vulgate (Common) Bible and, until the modern period, this was the book that scholars, theologians, and priests used. It took over a thousand years before the Vulgate Bible began to be superseded by the Tyndale Bible, and William Tyndale was put to death for producing it.

In 1524, Tyndale, a 30-year-old Oxford classical scholar, fled England ahead of spies who had informed King Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey of his subversive activity: Tyndale was translating the New Testament from Greek and Hebrew into English. The clergy feared that such a Bible, which could be read out to the common people in their own language, would undermine their authority.

Just two years later, 6,000 copies had been printed in Cologne, where Tyndale had settled, and were ready to be smuggled into England. “But Henry VIII and Wolsey’s spies informed them of this invasion,” writes historian and novelist Melvyn Bragg in The Adventure of English. “It now seems quite extraordinary, but the whole country was put on alert. In order to prevent the word of God in English landing in the land of the English, naval ships patrolled the coastal waters, boats were stopped and searched, men were arrested and great many Bibles intercepted…Latin was the only word of God allowed by the state and now the state came out in full armed force to defend its most loyal ally, the Church.” Sir Thomas More railed at Tyndale for “putting the fire of scripture into the language of ploughboys.”

Constantly hounded by Catholic spies, Tyndale had to spend his life on the run, living in secrecy in various Protestant countries of northern Europe. But two English assassins eventually caught up with him in Antwerp, and he was imprisoned. In 1536, a Netherlands court found him guilty of heresy and he was put to death by strangulation. But his Bible was now widely available in England, and had even been printed in pocket-sized editions that could be easily concealed.

Seventy-five years after Tyndale’s execution, the King James Bible was produced. Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between 60 to 80 percent of this version. (Examples are “scapegoat”, “let there be light”, “the powers that be”, “my brother’s keeper”, and “broken-hearted”.) But, notes author Adam Nicolson in his book God’s Secretaries, “Tyndale required and produced a simple and plain man’s translation to be slapped in the face of the medieval church and its power-protective elite…The Jacobean Translators had a different commission: to evolve a scriptural rhetoric which could be both as plain and dignified as Tyndale’s and as rich and resonant as any book in the language.”

King James 1 commissioned the Bible in 1601 and it was first printed in 1611. “Integration is both the purpose and method of the King James Bible…The Bible which bears his name is a monument to hope, produced, ironically, at precisely the point in English history when that hope — for national integration under a beneficent king — was just beginning to look hopeless,” writes Nicolson.

To this end, a committee was set up for the monumental project. The group consisted of 48 translators, six directors, and six sub-committees.

They operated according to 16 specific instructions from James. Nicolson notes that the instructions “exude a habit of orderliness: numbered, coherent, managerial, and modern…There is no hint of inspiration, or even of prayerfulness, no idea that the Translators are to be in the right frame of mind. These are exact directions, state orders, not literary or theological suggestions.”

Nicolson also observes that the King James Version was deliberately written in an English that had never actually been used in speech.

“This English is there to serve the original, not to replace it. It speaks in its master’s voice and is not the English you would have heard on the street, then or ever…This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace.

“It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text.

This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extraordinarily freighted, with a richness that few other texts have ever equalled.” (Interestingly, one of the translators, John Layfield, had travelled in the Caribbean, and our landscape, judged by his written account, strongly influenced his description of the Garden of Eden.)

The KJV was not standardised till 300 years after its first printing, however.

“No copy of the 1611 Bible is like any other,” Nicolson writes. “And they were riddled with mistakes… ‘she’ for ‘he’, three whole lines repeated in Exodus, and alarmingly ‘Judas’ for ‘Jesus’ in one of the Gospels.”

In the 19th century, Dr F Scrivener tried to collate all the editions and found 24,000 variations between them. “The curious fact is that no one such thing as the ‘King James Bible’ — agreed, consistent, whole — has ever existed,” says Nicolson.

Bible scholar Bart D Ehrman, in his book Misquoting Jesus, goes even further: “The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early 17th century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text,” he says.

Ehrman also notes that “We don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament.

What we have are copies of these writings, made years later — in most cases, many years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places.”

So scholarship has changed the way experts view certain portions of the Bible.

Matthew’s Gospel was not by Matthew; the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and the Hebrews were not by Paul; the Epistles of Peter were not by Peter; there are doubts about the Epistles of James and of Jude; and Mark 16:9-20 and 1John 5:7 are no longer valid parts of the New Testament.

Ehrman recommends the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which has footnotes that explain translation and source reliability problems of the texts.