Working notes from King James Bible committee found

The astonishing discovery of the first draft notes of one of the translators of the King James Bible, miscatalogued in a Cambridge University library, offers a chance to peer over the shoulder of the "companies" whose masterpiece appeared four hundred years ago:

...No other hand besides Ward’s appears in the draft. Moreover, it clearly shows him not just recording group decisions about the translation after the fact, or even doing so in the process of group decisions being made, but rather working out the translation for himself as he went along, making mistakes and changing his mind. At one point, for instance, one finds Ward wrestling with the syntax of 1 Esdras 6:32. In the Bishops’ Bible, the verse relates, in somewhat convoluted fashion, the declaration of King Darius that anyone found disobeying his decrees “of his own goods should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged”. Proposing a revision to the front half of the passage, Ward at first began, “A tre”, but then crossed it out. No, “out of h”, he started writing on second thought, but then crossed that out, too. At last, he reverted back to the more straightforward construction with which he had abortively begun, which also more closely mirrors the Greek of the passage: “a tree should be taken out of his possession”. Moments like this simply do not chime with seeing Ward’s draft as the product, in the main, of a company discussion.

Such an example, however, also shows the complex relationship that Ward’s draft has to the translation as eventually published. In the KJB, only a very small piece of Ward’s proposed revision for 1 Esdras 6:32 has been followed. The Bible broadly retains the Bishops’ Bible’s syntax, even as it includes the clarifying “out” recommended by Ward, specifying that the convicted man should be hanged on a tree taken “out of” his own property. Furthermore, there appears an additional revision to the passage not suggested in Ward’s draft at all: the word “goods” in the Bishops’ Bible, which Ward had proposed changing to “possession”, instead appears in the KJB as “house”. In full, the King James translation of the passage would come to read, “out of his own house should a tree be taken, and he thereon be hanged”.

Disparities like this between the KJB and Ward’s proposals run throughout the draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4. They are, indeed, part of what helps identify Ward’s draft as a draft, and not a mere record of the changes made to the Bishops’ Bible in composing the KJB after the fact. Sometimes the King James translation went on to follow Ward’s proposed rendering to the letter. In the case of Wisdom 3:15, for example, Ward’s draft recommends changing the Bishops’ Bible’s declaration that “glorious is the fruit of the good labour” to “glorious is the fruit of good labours” – a translation that accords more with the Greek of the verse, as Ward notes, and which also aligns with the Geneva Bible, the English translation predating the KJB that the Puritan Ward clearly favoured. Here the KJB reproduces Ward’s proposed revision exactly.

At other times, however, the translation altogether rejects what Ward’s draft proposes, or consigns it interestingly to a marginal note. Regarding the translation of 1 Esdras 2:7 and 2:9, for example, Ward proposes changing the Bishops’ Bible’s twin references to “horses”, suggesting that they both be replaced with the word “substaunce”. As he makes clear in the draft, though, this is not because Ward thinks that the Bishops’ Bible has mistranslated the Greek word from 1 Esdras in question. Rather, he believes that the author of the Greek text of 1 Esdras itself has misunderstood or misrepresented a Hebrew word in the canonical Book of Ezra, which 1 Esdras there parallels. As Ward would write to himself (in Latin) elsewhere in the draft, in the context of a similar passage where he felt that the author of 1 Esdras’s Greek had misunderstood a word from the Hebrew Bible: “thus, it seems, did the very author of this book”, 1 Esdras, inaccurately “translate” yet another Hebrew word from the canonical Book of Ezra, “since he could not understand it”. In the case of 1 Esdras 2:7 and 2:9, however, the KJB would ultimately retain the two references to horses, notwithstanding Ward’s critique. Yet, as a marginal note, it would nevertheless include the draft’s insistence that the Hebrew word possibly behind “horses” meant “substance” instead.

So what, then, do we see going on in the movement from Ward’s draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4 to the KJB’s published version of the two books, and what does Ward’s draft tell us about that process? An important piece of collateral evidence lies outside of the draft, in the biography of one of the other men, John Bois (1561–1644), who served with Ward on the company of translators assigned to the Apocrypha. Recounting Bois’s involvement in the translation, the biographer – a member of Bois’s own family – reports “that part of the Apocrypha was allotted to him”, but that after “he had finished his own part”, Bois then “undertook a second”, being asked to do so “at the earnest request of him to whom it was assigned”. Read at face value, this, too, appears to suggest that the company to which Bois and Ward belonged “assigned” individual books or parts of books to individual members. It also seems to imply that certain members of the company evidently did not quite keep up their end of the arrangement, obliging others, like Bois, to step in and help translate additional parts of the Apocrypha, as well. Bois’s biography has long been known. But since various aspects of it have been shown to be unreliable, including portions concerning the translation of the KJB, it has been hard to know exactly how much store to set by its testimony.

The discovery of Ward’s draft, though, provides compelling evidence that, at least with respect to the Apocrypha company’s supposed division of labour, Bois’s biography deserves to be credited. Certainly, what one finds in Ward’s draft would perfectly align with the scenario outlined in the biography. Indeed, it would explain why the notebook containing Ward’s draft of 1 Esdras includes a further draft only of Wisdom 3–4, despite there being a number of blank pages still available where a draft of other portions of the text could have been added. It would also explain why the partial draft of Wisdom comes in the notebook not immediately after the full draft of 1 Esdras, but rather in a different section, written from the back, and with writing concerning other matters further separating the two drafts from each other. Ward, the evidence suggests, was initially assigned to the translation of 1 Esdras, but was requested at a subsequent point to help out with Wisdom, too. Had he himself been the one initially assigned to the translation of Wisdom, it would have made no sense for him to start with the book’s third chapter, as he did, instead of the first.

Yet, as Ward’s draft also indicates, even books like 1 Esdras went on to become something more than strictly individual productions. The evidence for this goes beyond the sheer gap between the version of 1 Esdras proposed in Ward’s draft and the book’s eventual published form in the KJB. Ward’s draft, in certain places, appears to show this very process occurring.

At multiple points, for example, Ward seems to have gone back and added new material to the draft, and at least two such instances were almost assuredly in response to suggestions provided by another of his colleagues translating the Apocrypha, perhaps in the context of a company-wide discussion. In the two cases in question, Ward added references to the work of the celebrated early modern scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), once regarding 1 Esdras 3:5, and the other time regarding 1 Esdras 4:39. Yet, though Ward himself would come to have personal dealings with Casaubon following the latter’s move to England in 1610, both of these references to Casaubon in the draft appear to have come by way of Bois. As Nicholas Hardy has recently shown, an edition of the Greek text of the Apocrypha, heavily annotated by Bois, survives in the Bodleian Library; and, alongside both 1 Esdras 3:5 and 4:39, Bois has added notes seemingly drawn from the same two works by Casaubon that Ward cites. Moreover, in a letter that Bois wrote to Casaubon around the same time, Bois describes himself as having discussed those two portions of the Apocrypha, among others, with his colleagues at work on the King James translation. In each case, the Bible’s published version of 1 Esdras would go on to reflect the proposed revisions drawn from Casaubon that Ward added. Read in conjunction with the evidence of Bois’s annotations and correspondence, such moments in the draft provide an unparalleled glimpse of the translation’s early process of development, stage by stage.

Just as importantly, though, the draft also helps to illuminate moments where the translation did not develop, where the Apocryphal books’ apparent origins as individual productions still remain visible even in the KJB’s published state. As a case in point, the edition of the Greek text of the Apocrypha to which Bois made his annotations appears not to have been the same edition being used by Ward for his draft. That is to say, different translators not only seem to have been initially assigned to the translation of different Apocryphal books, but to have then gone about their work on the basis of different editions of the text to be translated itself. More than one nineteenth-century scholar noticed that there seemed to be a maddening lack of consistency with regard to which version of the Apocrypha’s Greek was being privileged at any given moment across the KJB, but none could quite figure out why or how this might have happened. Ward’s draft provides an illustration.

To what extent this complex (if also precarious) interplay between individual and group translation evidently at work in the Apocrypha company points to the possibility of a similar dynamic at work across the Bible’s five other translation companies is hard to say. In the end, though, an awareness of that difficulty itself may represent one of the most valuable insights offered by Ward’s draft. Not only does it profoundly complicate the notion that members of a given company necessarily worked on the translation of each book together as a team; it forces us to think harder about the extent to which all the companies necessarily set about their work in the same or even a similar way. The KJB, in short, may be far more a patchwork of individual translations – the product of individual translators and individual companies working in individual ways – than has ever been properly recognized....