{"id":15287,"date":"2015-10-14T14:26:18","date_gmt":"2015-10-14T18:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/news\/article.php?ArticleID=15287"},"modified":"2019-10-24T15:58:37","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T19:58:37","slug":"15287_jeffrey-a-miller-discovers-the-earliest-known-draft-of-the-king-james-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/2015\/10\/14\/15287_jeffrey-a-miller-discovers-the-earliest-known-draft-of-the-king-james-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey A. Miller Discovers the Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Jeffrey Miller, assistant professor of English<\/a> and John Milton scholar, loves to spend time in literary archives. Late last summer, time spent in the stacks reaped a major reward: the discovery of a fragment of the King James Bible, composed in the hand of\u00a0Samuel Ward<\/a>, sometime between 1604 and likely the end of 1608.\u00a0This discovery, verified by leading scholars in the field, was announced by Dr. Miller in the\u00a0Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/a>, the leading literary and cultural weekly.<\/p>\n

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The Samuel Ward draft, found in the archives of the\u00a0University of Cambridge\u2019s Sidney Sussex College<\/a>, reveals the complex interplay of individual and group\u00a0translation involved in the composition of the King James Bible, as well as its close connection to the previous English translation known as the Bishops\u2019 Bible. It also\u00a0helps to illuminate the role that Hebrew, Greek and Latin played in shaping the King James Bible\u2019s iconic English.<\/p>\n

Dr. Miller explained the significance of the discovery: \u201cIn addition to being earliest draft of the King James Bible now known to\u00a0survive, the draft is the only one ever found in a hand that can be definitively identified as belonging to one of the King James translators themselves.\u00a0It is also the only draft ever discovered of a highly controversial part of the translation, the\u00a0\u2018Apocrypha\u2019, and the only draft yet to be discovered in Cambridge, one of the\u00a0three\u00a0initial centers\u00a0of the King James Bible\u2019s composition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unexpected discovery<\/strong>
\nDr. Miller notes that he wasn\u2019t exactly looking for the draft, as it wasn\u2019t known to exist.\u00a0\u00a0Rather, he had been asked to write an essay about the King James Bible translator Samuel Ward, whom Dr. Miller had studied in connection with his scholarship on John Milton.\u00a0Knowing that a lot of Ward\u2019s old manuscript notebooks survived in the archives of Sidney Sussex College, Dr. Miller spent days reviewing reams of notebooks.<\/p>\n

The draft, originally catalogued as \u201cverse-by-verse biblical commentary,\u201d was not immediately identified as part of the King James Bible, and it was only after recognizing which English translation of the Bible that Ward was using that \u201cthe manuscript\u2019s true significance suddenly came into focus.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Dr. Miller\u2019s full treatment and explanation of this discovery is being published as a chapter in\u00a0The King James Bible:<\/em>\u00a0The Scholarly Context<\/em>\u00a0(edited by Mordechai Feingold for\u00a0Brill<\/a>).<\/p>\n

For Biblical scholars, and perhaps even the more casual reader of the Bible, Dr. Miller\u2019s work\u00a0\u201cpoints the way to a fuller, more complex understanding\u201d of\u00a0what would become not just the most enduring English translation\u00a0of\u00a0the Bible, but the most widely read work of English literature of all time. \u00a0Among other things, as Dr. Miller writes in the\u00a0TLS<\/em>, the discovery of Ward\u2019s draft shows that\u00a0the King James Bible “may be far more a patchwork of individual translations \u2013 the product of individual translators and individual companies working in individual ways \u2013 than has ever been properly recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n

About Dr. Jeffrey Alan Miller<\/strong>
\nJeffrey Alan Miller: \u00a0Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and raised in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Miller received his A.B in 2006 from Princeton University, where he majored in English. \u00a0He attended graduate school at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving his doctorate in English in 2012.<\/p>\n

More coverage <\/strong>
\nThe Guardian<\/a><\/em>
\nMSNBC<\/a>
\nWABC<\/a><\/p>\n