Lancelot Andrewes’ life (1555-1626) encompassed the reigns of Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James I (1603-1625). He was closely associated with both of them. We celebrate his day on his death Sept 26, 1626.
Andrewes was the foremost theologian of his day and one of the most pious. He will be forever linked to the creation of the King James Bible being on the committee that created the book. He served not only as the leader of the First Westminster Company of Translators, which translated Genesis – 2 Kings, but also as general editor of the whole project. His contemporaries include everyone from Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith who ventured to Virginia and scientist Galileo.
A concise description of him can be found in God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, noting his intellectual abilities as well as a man close to the ordinary Englishman. “This was the man who was acknowledged as the greatest preacher of the age, who tended in great detail to the school-children in his care, who, endlessly busy as he was, would nevertheless wait in the transepts of Old St Paul’s for any Londoner in need of solace or advice, who was the most brilliant man in the English Church, destined for all but the highest office. There were few Englishmen more powerful. Everybody reported on his serenity, the sense of grace that hovered around him. But alone every day he acknowledged little but his wickedness and his weakness. The man was a library, the repository of sixteen centuries of Christian culture, he could speak fifteen modern languages and six ancient, but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. Against an all-knowing, all-powerful and irresistible God, all he saw was an ignorant, weak and irresolute self”
A man of intense piety who spent five hours every morning in prayer, Andrewes kept in that chapel a book of private devotions which, when published after his death, became a classic Anglican guide to prayer.
In the time of Elizabeth he was the vicar of St. Giles Cripplegate and was known for his striking sermons. He served as bishop in three communities, including that of Winchester during the reign of King James I.
Andrewes’ theology reflected intimacy between the believer and God. Andrewes’s experience of God was not just spiritual but visual, physical. The fact that God had taken on humanity in the person of Jesus Christ meant for Andrewes that not just our souls but our bodies must take active part in prayer. So he insisted on “worshipping, falling down, kneeling before the Lord” (Psalm 95:6).
“For me, O Lord,” he wrote in one of his prayers, “sinning and not repenting, and so utterly unworthy, it were more becoming to lie prostrate before Thee and with weeping and groaning to ask pardon for my sins, than with polluted mouth to praise Thee.”
The King James Bible arose shortly after the beginning of the reign of James. A conference of churchmen requested that the English Bible be revised because existing translations “were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.” The idea actually was first proposed by the Puritans, one of the groups challenging James in religion. James was beset with a number of religious factions – Catholics who wanted to return to Catholicism, Puritans who wanted all the rituals removed, Presbyterians who wanted the hierarchy around Bishops eliminated.
By the middle of 1604, James appointed 54 revisers, warming to the idea. They were organized into six companies, two each working separately at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge on sections of the Bible assigned to them. Andrewes was one of them. Unfortunately the beginnings of the work occurred in one of the worst plaques London has experienced.
James was looking for a single translation that the whole nation could rely on “To be read in the whole Church,” as he phrased it. There as a number Bibles being read
The Great Bible that had been authorized by Henry VIII (1538) enjoyed some popularity, but its successive editions contained several inconsistencies. The Bishops’ Bible (1568) was well regarded by the clergy but failed to gain wide acceptance or the official authorization of Elizabeth. The most popular English translation was the Geneva Bible (1557; first published in England in 1576), which had been made in Geneva by English Protestants living in exile during Mary’s persecutions. Never authorized by the crown, it was particularly popular among Puritans but not among many more-conservative clergymen.
Not since the Septuagint—the Greek-language version of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) produced between the 3rd and the 2nd centuries BCE—had a translation of the Bible been undertaken under royal sponsorship as a cooperative venture on so grandiose a scale. James particularly wanted a popular translation. He insisted that the translation use old familiar terms and names and be readable in the idiom of the day.
In contrast to earlier practice, the new version was to use vulgar forms of proper names (e.g., “Jonas” or “Jonah” for the Hebrew “Yonah”), in keeping with its aim to make the Scriptures popular and familiar. The translators used not only extant English-language translations, including the partial translation by William Tyndale (c. 1490–1536), but also Jewish commentaries to guide their work. The wealth of scholarly tools available to the translators made their final choice of rendering an exercise in originality and independent judgment. For this reason, the new version was more faithful to the original languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors.
The work was completed and the King James Bible was published in 1611 and was the predominant Bible for 300 years. It was not without errors!
Two editions printed in 1611 was later distinguished as the “He” and “She” Bibles because of the variant readings “he” and “she” in the final clause of Ruth 3:15 (“and he went into the city”). Some errors in subsequent editions have become famous. Perhaps the most notorious example is the so-called “Wicked Bible” (1631), whose name derives from the omission of “not” in the injunction against adultery in the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt commit adultery”).