© New York Times
The notebook containing the draft was found by American scholar, Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research in an article in The Times Literary Supplement. The New York Times didn't take long to pick up the story. They ran an article about it, HERE. Mr. Miller was researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators, and was hoping to find an unknown letter at the archives. While you can say he certainly accomplished that end, he definitely wasn't expecting to find the earliest draft of the King James Bible — which is now giving new insights into how the Bible was constructed.
He first came across the plain notebook not knowing what it was — it was incorrectly labeled. That's why no one has found it until now. It had been cataloged in the 1980s as a "verse-by-verse" Biblical commentary with "Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes." When he tried in vain to figure out which passages of the Bible the commentary was referring to, he realized that it was no commentary at all — it was an early draft of part of the King James Version of the Bible.
Professor Miller described what it felt like when he first knew what he had in his hands:
"There was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment. But then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct."The material in the manuscript discovered by Miller covers the apocryphal books called Esdras and Wisdom and seems to show that the translation process at Cambridge worked completely different than what researchers had previously known. Until now, it had been assumed that six different teams, or companies of translators that is, had worked more collaboratively rather than individually. Yet — this draft throws that idea out the window.
Ward's draft seems to indicate the people were assigned individual sections of the Bible and then worked on them almost entirely by themselves — a massive undertaking with little guesswork. You would think this would cause people to become more error prone. In fact, quite hilariously, Professor Miller noticed that the draft suggests that Ward was picking up the slack for another translator. This really shows how human the entire job was, according to him.
"Some of them, being typical academics, either fell down on the job or just decided not to do it. It really testifies to the human element of this kind of great undertaking."This is sure to piss off a lot of religious conservatives who claim that the Bible is the "actual word of God." While this finding certainly doesn't disprove God, it does show that the translators of the Bible didn't get a finalized product the first go around — it wasn't a walk in the park with an angel over their shoulder telling them what to write. It took many different individuals, working separately — and they often suffered from man-made struggles, like meeting deadlines. You know, now that we think of it, doesn't sound that much different from the writers of today's workforce.
Good grief. The King James Bible is a translation. Translations take a lot of work, editing , rewriting, to bring them as close to the original. the trouble with American Protestants is that they never bother with the original. They wouldn't need so many different translations if more of them read Greek. The entire New Testament was written in Greek--including Paul's letters to the Romans--who obviously spoke Greek at the time when the Church was understood to have started in Jerusalem and the Bishop of Jerusalem was...a bishop. The process of editing and correcting a translation does not have anything to do with the truth or the efficacy of the original. Think, people.