In Woody Allen’s story “The Kugelmas Episode,” a bald, hairy, soulless New York Jew, “professor of humanities at City College,” solves his mid-life crisis with the help of a magician named The Great Persky. By entering Persky’s magic cabinet with a copy of Madame Bovary, Sidney Kugelmas is transported into the world of Flaubert’s novel and has a torrid affair with its protagonist, who is desperate for love and hasn’t yet met the dashing Rodolphe. Later, Kugelmas brings Emma Bovary to New York, but finds her exhausting and expensive. Persky returns her to her novel, and tries to send Kugelmas into Portnoy’s Complaint but has a heart-attack and dies in the process, having accidentally sent Kugelmas into Remedial Spanish instead. The story ends with Kugelmas on the run, pursued by a “large and hairy irregular verb.”

John Bunyan, though not without his own sense of humor, was an altogether more serious writer than Woody Allen. Like Sidney Kugelmas, however, Bunyan had the remarkable ability to transport himself into and live inside his favorite book, in his case, the Bible. Bunyan is hardly the first writer to be profoundly influenced by the Bible, nor is he the first to allude to it frequently and intensively in his writing. In English literature alone, writers had been alluding to, paraphrasing, and adapting the Bible from the Anglo-Saxons on. Some of these writers, like Edmund Spenser, may have influenced Bunyan’s own practice. The first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a complex allegory of St. George (stepping in for the biblical Michael) aiding Una (the Church?) in rescuing her parents, King Adam and Queen Eve, from a dragon. We know Bunyan enjoyed Romances, like the popular Bevis of Southampton, so it seems hard to believe he wouldn’t have relished a Romance that was also inherently biblical, and Protestant. Indeed, comparisons of Pilgrim’s Progress to Book 1 of The Faerie Queene date back at least to Samuel Johnson. Yet Bunyan’s manner of biblical allusion goes beyond Spenser’s. Christian’s pilgrimage to the Heavenly City, followed later by that of his wife and children, not only alludes to the Bible at certain points, it seems like a journey through Scripture itself.

In 1986, the New International Version (NIV) accomplished what dozens of other American translations had been unable to do: dethrone the King James Bible (KJB) as the bestselling Bible version among American Protestants, a position it had held for nearly three hundred and fifty years. The impressively long reign of the KJB in the United States is important for many reasons, but its relatively recent migration from the center of American biblical culture is particularly interesting for the way in which it echoes the American political trope of democracy replacing monarchy. When Americans wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then ratified the Constitution over a decade later, they turned away from Britain’s monarchal tradition with its pronounced emphasis on aristocracy in favor of governance which emphasized more common rule. The story of Bible translation and usage in the United States tells an eerily similar tale. At the end of the twentieth century, the remarkable reign of the KJB in America finally gave way to an ever-increasing number of new biblical translations which ultimately offered American Bible readers not a single authoritative voice, but a multitude of voices to guide them. Monarchy had once again been replaced by democracy.

The KJB, however, had not been intended as a regal, elite translation to be read only by a chosen few. Its translators had always wished it to be a translation capable of being “understood even of the very vulgar.” This desire for a vernacular Bible still echoes today as the quest for an intellectually accessible translation in a common idiom stands as the single most important driving force in contemporary American Bible translation and publishing.

The language of the King James Bible (KJB) has not been lacking in admirers. From T. B. Macaulay (1828) onwards, praise has come thick and fast. For Richard Chenevix Trench, writing thirty years later,

For George Saintsbury it (with Shakespeare) represents “the perfection of English, the complete expression of the literary capacities of the language” (1887). For others it is “a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast” (Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1916); “probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world” (H. L. Mencken, 1930), its style is “characterized not merely by homely vigour and pithiness of phrase, but also by a singular nobility of diction and by a rhythmic quality … unrivalled in its beauty (John Livingstone Lowes, 1936); in short, it is “a miracle and a landmark” (H. Wheeler Robinson, 1940).

The girl’s Bible

My cousin showed me the Bible she had been given for Christmas. It came in its own little box – hinged and clasped like a jewellery casket. The small book was bound in white leather embossed with stars. The pages were tissue-thin, and every one was edged with gold. It was very beautiful and I wanted one for myself.

The week before my birthday I went with my mother to the “Scripture Union” shop. There were shelves full of Bibles but they were: “new,” “revised,” “common,” for the “plain man.” Their covers were made of card and paper. The pages seemed thick and ordinary. I wanted a “girl’s Bible” gleaming white and gold with transparent pages. At last we found one. It was entirely perfect from the white ribbons attached to the spine for bookmarks to the deep pink inside page upon which my mother wrote my name, my age, and all her love.

Such a lovely thing and so useful. I had always been afraid of the dark, but now each night I placed the sacred casket under my pillow and slept protected from all harm. If the darkness was particularly terrible I would hold the Bible to me and curl around it as its warmth spread out through every narrow vein.

This chapter focuses upon John Ruskin (1819–1900) as perhaps the most biblically literate of all nineteenth-century writers, who owed much to the KJB in his prose style, which was admired worldwide, and yet who came to understand its limitations as a translation from the Hebrew and Greek. Unique in the range of his interests, which are reflected in his massive œuvre, Ruskin is also representative of his age. (His dates coincide almost exactly with those of his monarch, who outlived him by a year.) First, then, let us consider the Victorian age.

Nineteenth-century Britain was broadly Christian, largely Protestant, and, judging by the newspapers, passionately interested in religious news. Individual believers were ready to defend their own doctrinal and sectarian positions against those who held different views, often with gusto. Before the 1860s, most people believed in the literal truth of the Bible and regarded the Four Last Things – death, judgment, heaven, and hell – as being central to their faith. With the possibility of everlasting punishment in hell fire hanging over you, it was important to be sure that you had access to the means of grace. Religious battles of words raged between different groups, sects, and parties, each of which believed that it had access to a saving truth. Apart from the Roman Catholics (about 5 percent of the population by 1860), all turned to the KJB as the authoritative source; and many Catholics had some acquaintance with the KJB.

If God is Milton’s father, and his scriptural word is the strongest of all precursor texts, then the King James Bible (KJB) is the most intimidating version of that text. In Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the Mosaic law enshrined in the Bible occupies the place usually reserved for Christ as the incarnation of deity: “the law is [God’s] reveled will, … herein he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters into cov’nant with us.” Milton is both the most learned and most biblico-centric of the great British poets. He read the Old Testament in Hebrew (and the relevant parts of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic, which he called Chaldee), the New Testament in Greek, as well as the Latin translations of both the Vulgate and the Protestant Junius–Tremellius Bible, the latter used with some frequency in his prose. Although Milton’s third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, owned a Geneva Bible of 1588, there is no evidence that her husband used it. The only edition of the Bible that bears incontrovertible signs of Miltonic ownership is a 1612 printing by Robert Barker of the King James Bible, with seven entries and various marginal notations in Milton’s own hand.

James H. Sims has painstakingly counted 1,364 individual biblical citations in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained alone, recorded by Milton’s editors from Patrick Hume in 1695 to Merritt Hughes in 1957, and he has added 816 citations of his own. And Michael Bauman has provided an index to more than 9,000 biblical quotations, citations, and allusions (to the last of which he has taken a conservative approach) in Milton’s highly original work of systematic theology, De doctrina Christiana. What follows in this essay are three mere snapshots of Milton and the Bible, taken in youth, middle age, and (if, with Shakespeare as the standard, early modern poets over fifty can still be called old) old age. The focus is on the poet’s anxiety or conspicuous lack of it in relation to the KJB.

The story of the King James Bible (KJB) – or the Authorized Version (AV) – is, as its multiple names suggest, not one but many stories. To begin with, its creation entailed many different stories. It was the work not of one translator but of several groups or “companies” of translators whose charge was not to produce their own original translation but rather to cull from and revise the work of earlier English translations of the Bible. The end result was the product of a collective effort not only of the various individuals who made up each company of translators, and the different companies (each assigned to particular sections of the Bible), but also the amalgamated efforts of prior English translators dating back over roughly a hundred years before the 1611 KJB was first published. In addition, this transhistorical translation story itself originated in the court of James I, which involved a still more complex tale about the intimate relationship between politics and religion in Jacobean England.

Yet these are just the beginning of a vastly more complicated and multifaceted story – indeed, a collection of interrelated stories – of how, over the course of the past four centuries, the KJB became the most popular and influential translation of the Bible among English-speaking peoples. Indeed, it became the single most influential book in the English language and arguably the greatest work ever produced by a committee. This larger story – the reception history of the KJB – is a story that comprises not only different individuals but also different peoples, countries, and historical eras. It is a story so complex that it is best told not by one voice but by many. That is why we created The King James Bible after 400 Years. Bringing together leading scholars from a wide range of different fields of study relating to the KJB and its influence, this book offers new insights intended to spark new kinds of conversations about the many different roles the KJB has played since 1611.

The Rainbow (1915) and To the Lighthouse (1927) are the most religious of modern secular English novels. But whereas D. H. Lawrence expressly mobilizes a host of biblical motifs (Creation, Eden, the Flood, Resurrection, the Trinity), Virginia Woolf’s novel is stealthily biblical, and its visionary power all the stronger for the submersion and ghostliness of its biblical allusions.

Perhaps the central question of To the Lighthouse is “what will endure”? In different ways, the Ramsay family, along with various guests, ponder again and again the hopes and anxieties of one of the greatest of the Psalms, 90, the text that most canonically measures man’s limited lease on life (“threescore years and ten”) against God’s cosmic tenure (“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night”):