Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada years. For one thing, they set much store by Romish ‘persuasion’ (sophistical reasoning) and were often superb linguists. Among the languages codified by Jesuits were Guaraní in Paraguay and Sri Lankan Tamil. Jesuit attempts to translate the Bible into local vernaculars were often less successful, however. Japanese converts to Jesuitism apparently still believe that Noah survived the flood in a canoe; scribal error had corrupted the Ark into an unlikely means of salvation.
Inevitably, translation is a frayed and ragged version of the original (Traduttore traditore, the Italians say: ‘The translator is a traitor’), but the Bible presents a special challenge. Not one word in the Old Testament is believed by Jews and Gentiles to be unintended or extraneous, so there is little room for error. The King James Bible of 1611 of course remains a marvel of cadenced tautness and high-flown poetry, but that was an exception.
In his scholarly and entertaining account of biblical inerrancy down the ages, Harry Freedman makes much of the so-called ‘Wicked’ or ‘Adulterous’ English language version of 1631, which neglected to include the word ‘not’ in the seventh commandment. Amid the familiar exhortations ‘thou shalt not kill’ and ‘thou shalt not steale’ was the clamorous slip up ‘thou shalt commit adultery’. The edition was hastily withdrawn on the orders of a horrified Charles I.
Others have gone so far as to tinker with holy writ. The gay-friendly Queen James Bible, published in New York in 2012, rephrased or simply removed perceived anti-homosexual passages on the grounds that James I was himself, in the words of the anonymous editors, ‘a well known bisexual’. This is a queer kind of logic, but there is always a special risk, says Freedman, in tampering with the gist of God’s word.
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