So, what happens when you get four people from the Church of God together on a Friday night where the hosts want to find a Sabbath-appropriate way to spend the evening with company [1]? You watch a documentary on the making of the KJV Bible, that’s what. At least, that’s what I did tonight after an intriguing and somewhat disconcerting dinner that I may write about in the morning but don’t really feel up to releasing to the world tonight. Since my life sometimes seems to resemble a Jacobean drama or a Spanish telenovela (the two are not always that different), it makes sense that the documentary commented at least a little bit about the drama of the life of King James and his most notable achievement in the Bible that, however unjustly, bears his name, which I have no copies of.

The movie itself was more fun if you knew a bit of the context that is left out. A suitably romantic portrayal of King James being a dashing hero rescuing his bride, Anne of Denmark, seeks to counteract the less savory aspects of his life, which it mentions only briefly and in passing. The movie does portray him convincingly (and accurately) as a complex and pathetic figure whose deeply unhappy childhood (which included being crowned at the age of thirteen months, having his circle of regents continually culled by Scotland’s anarchic politics, and being left more or less an orphan from his earliest months after his father had died in a murder plot that implicated his mother, who was forced to abdicate and lived in house arrest before being executed in England. It was a difficult life, in difficult times, and James coped by being inscrutable and impossible to read, a master of dissembling. Not everyone is cut out for that kind of life.

It took some time before the movie discussed its main point, and that was the providential inspiration for the New Testament, as an idea that was buried in committee in the Scottish Kirk, and then a suggestion of the Puritans in England that led to the repudiation of the subpar Bishop’s Bibles. Of course, there were some notable parts left out. Included in that was the fact that while the Bishop’s Bible was subpar and the Geneva Bible had rather fierce footnotes that struck James VI/I as seditious against monarchs (one of the reasons, no doubt, why I like that version so much, even if it does not necessarily speak flatteringly of me), the beauty and majesty of the King James Version of the Bible had less to do with the sublime beauty of multiple layers of checks and more than the diverse degree of gifts in the committee of translators, but also a lot to do with pilfering Tyndale and other good translators. Having royal support for such a thorough effort was not a bad thing either, in ensuring its success, even if it remains the one crowning glory of James’ reign.

The film closed in a bit of a bittersweet way, looking at how so many of James’ relatives were honored with glorious memorials while James himself received somewhat shabby treatment in that way. Yet in his life James had good things, and a great many people in his realm had bad things. Has his reputation been besmirched by a dark age looking to find any dirt on historical figures? Yes, it has. Did James’ desire for peace lead him to fail to be properly loyal to his son-in-law, the Winter King of Bohemia, leaving him to the tender mercies of the Hapsburg dynasty? Yes, it did (even though the film did not discuss this at all). We are all deeply flawed people, prone to err both in our equivocation and timidity as well as in our boldness. Yet our lives are woven into a tapestry with a skill far beyond our own, and our lives are pieces to puzzles that we have no conception or understanding of. And this film, as flawed as it was, appreciated a book of incredible importance, showed divine providence as well as human agendas and politics, and reminded us in its fight between elitist and ambitious bishops and learned but anti-authoritarian scholars that the more things change, the more they stay the same in our cultural disagreements.

[1] With mostly the same company, they previously showed the first part of Fiddler On The Roof:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/book-review-fiddler-on-the-roof/