This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
“The English Bible,” said Lord Macaulay, is “a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.” There has been some discussion in recent years about the revival of the Book of Common Prayer and the way in which its ancient rhythms and cadences are tempting a new generation back to church.
There is, however, a ghost at the feast.
If it is true that the Book of Common Prayer is “the Bible rearranged for public service”, then the Bible that has been rearranged in it — or at least the one which sat alongside it for four centuries, was the Authorised Version, known as the King James Version. “This translation is not just the blood in the veins of our culture,” says Andrew Motion, sometime poet laureate, “but the veins themselves.”
This is borne out in polling, where YouGov still has the Bible as the most well-known book (95 per cent recognition), and. of that, the King James Version as the most recognised and popular translation (77 per cent fame and 43 per cent popularity).
But of the 16 per cent who say they dislike it, my money would be on being able to find almost every priest in the Church of England within that number.
It is absolutely bizarre. You can win the battle over Evensong and the use of the old Prayer Book but try suggesting that they should use the magisterial words of the old Bible alongside it and you might as well have proposed infecting the congregation with the plague.
I saw this in my own parish where, early on in my time here I asked the Parish Council which version of the Bible they would like to have used at our services.
I brought along almost all the versions currently authorised by the Church of England and gave everyone 20 minutes to browse and compare the versions.
New translations are not pristine examples of pure scholarship
The laity was unanimous: restore the King James Bible! When I broke the news to my clergy colleagues, there was a riot. “Will I really have to preach on the phrase ‘in the bowels of Christ?’” asked one.
The short answer is, “yes” because that phrase, like so many others coined by the geniuses who translated the Bible then, has gone into our historical lexicon.
It was used by Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, that you may be mistaken.” W.H. Auden, when writing to his rector after the introduction of the new version of the Bible to his church in New York, wrote “I implore you by, the bowels of Christ, to stick to Cranmer and King James.”
Why has this version captured the public imagination so well? T.S. Eliot explored this in a 1962 article for the Sunday Telegraph deconstructing a new translation: “The age covered by the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I was richer in writers of genius than is our own, and we should not expect a translation made in our time to be a masterpiece of our literature or, as was the Authorised Version of 1611, an exemplar of English prose for successive generations of writers.”
That brief moment of charity past, he went on. “We are, however, entitled to expect from a panel chosen from amongst the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: ‘What is happening to the English language?’”
The vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic. Since returning to a rich diet of Renaissance English, it is astonishing how weak the new translations sound. Just read the Prologue of John or the wonderful purple prose of Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 and ask yourself which is better to read out loud.
Why, then, is there such resistance to its use? The obvious answer is accuracy and clarity. It’s one thing having a liturgy go over your head, it’s another thing to have the Bible do so.
And yet … the new translations are by no means pristine examples of pure scholarship. Let’s take the unspeakable NRSVue, brought out in 2021 to purify the older NRSV of phrases like “slave” (it’s now “enslaved people”). It is, inevitably, obsessed with being gender neutral, but this carries all sorts of consequences.
Take Psalm 8. This is one of the big psalms about Christ. In the old version it read thus: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”, but in the new it says “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Total change. It cannot now be read about Christ; its meaning is actually less clear.
So, in the bowels of Christ, I ask my fellow clergy to look again at the version of the Bible that has defined our Christian consciousness in English and to consider restoring its beauty to the heart of the Church that gifted this version to the world.
