Should a recent discovery change the way you read the Bible?

There are often new discoveries in the world of science and technology, but new findings in the Bible are a whole different story.

Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University, recently uncovered a notebook that is believed to be the oldest known draft of King James Bible. Some experts have called it one of the most significant archival findings in the history of Biblical research.

Miller spoke with KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross in his latest Rossfire episode about the 17th Century manuscript and its implications, including that the discovery happened “in stages rather than all in a flash.”

Miller found the manuscript last fall after he was asked to write about Samuel Ward, one of the roughly 47 known translators of King James’s Bible. Not much is known about why these individuals who were asked to be translators, and Miller traveled to the Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, where many of Ward’s papers and manuscript notebooks were archived.

“I went off to Cambridge, to Sidney Sussex, just to have a look around see what I could find,” he said. “(I was) certainly never expecting to find anything like this. I think I was, at best, hoping to find maybe an unknown letter that would be relevant, and I found that pretty early on and thought, ‘Oh great, that will be my great discovery.'”

It wasn’t.

Later in the research process, Miller found a manuscript notebook that had been cataloged as containing “unknown biblical commentary.” It was intriguing enough that the professor snapped a picture and brought it home for further study. Back in the U.S., he realized the manuscript was not commentary, but, in fact, a portion of the Bible that Ward had been asked to translate.

The translation was commissioned in 1604 and the King James Bible was published in 1611. The King James Bible was translated by six teams in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Miller said that the translators were not supposed to be translating the texts individually, instead working on drafts as groups. He said Ward’s draft seems to strongly suggest that the widely-told story that the King James Bible was a collaborative work, through and through, from start to finish, is not entirely true.

“Which is another way of saying that different parts of the translation may have been more individually shaped, shaped by specific individuals, or certain individual companies working in certain individual ways than we’ve ever really had great, or really even good, evidence to recognize,” he said.

With that being said, Miller didn’t believe this finding complicates the common understanding of the translation.

“Because it’s just a translation of the Bible, whether it necessarily shapes our understanding of the Bible itself is a more complicated matter,” he said. “For better or worse, I don’t think it would necessarily have anything to say about whether the rich should inherit the earth, or anything like that. So I don’t think anyone has to worry on that end.”

According to a story by The New York Times, a Bible translator’s mission was to create an authorized version of the Bible that would support the Church of England against the Puritan influence seen in some earlier translations. The King James Bible includes phrases such as “salt of the earth,” “drop in the bucket” and “fight the good fight.”

The previous official translation, prior to King James Bible, was called Bishops Bible. Miller explained that the problem with Bishop’s was that it was widely thought to not be very good. Another, the Geneva Bible, was considered seditious, with such notes as saying people could overthrow the king for behaving wickedly.

“I think the idea seems to have been to create a new Bible both that would replace the Bishops Bible and supersede it, but also that would, in so doing, perhaps also serve to supersede the Geneva Bible,” Miller said. “And ultimately that’s exactly what the King James Bible did.”

Miller said the manuscript shows how the translator struggled with the idea of “what is the ‘original’ of any of these books. For example, scholars believe that the book of Genesis was written in Hebrew, but there’s no actual first draft of Genesis in that language.

“These books are transmitted over time,” he said. “…There are a couple times where this Samuel Ward man, at least, believes that he Greek translator has in fact misunderstood a Hebrew word.”

The finding gives a front row seat into translating meaning from language to language to language.

“That’s something that I think the King James Bible gives you… profound access to the way that some of the greatest minds who ever lived approached that question,” he said. “And I think Ward’s draft, the draft I found, really does give us special access to exactly how they went about that incredibly complex undertaking.”

Miller said “it’s hard to put into words” the feeling of holding a text so important in the history of human history.

“You’re holding something that was a part of that process,” he said. “And that you’ve maybe then discovered something that has helped contribute to our understanding of that process is certainly more than I could have ever hoped to do in my whole life.”

Miller said he didn’t believe the translators could have entirely grasped the importance of their work.

“I’m not sure even Shakespeare… when he was sitting there writing Hamlet thought that, ‘Well, I bet in 400 years they’ll still be talking about this,'” Miller said. “And the King James Bible is maybe the only thing ever more widely read than Hamlet.

“I’m sure they probably had no sense that it would ever turn out to be quite like that. That being said, it is very clear from the draft that they do have a sense that this is an extremely important undertaking and that it is an undertaking that is meant to last. I think they do think that this is meant to be the greatest English Bible that there has ever been… so I do think they are aware of how important this undertaking is and that they are clearly putting a lot of thought and energy into it.”

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