To mark the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611, the 'Year of the Bible', Malcolm Guite has written a series of sermon notes on well-loved passages. Here he reflects on 1 Peter 1.3-9.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
This great declaration of Easter hope is an especially good place with which to begin our celebration of the Authorised Version (AV), a translation that can bless us in so many different ways.
Peter speaks of having been ‘begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’. And well he might, for he was a man who knew what it was to have lost hope altogether. He had lost hope in everything, and most of all in himself. On Good Friday Peter had witnessed the death of his hope. He had witnessed not only the death of his great friend, but the death absolutely and altogether of his own self-esteem. He had denied three times the person he most loved in the world, and when he wept bitterly and fled the hall of judgement, he must have been in a state of despair from which he saw no recovery.
If we want to see what he means by being ‘begotten again unto a lively hope’ (lively: living, life-giving, joyful – lively in every sense) then we can see it happening in front of us when Peter meets the risen Christ (John 21.15 ff) and is brought back to new life in those three great affirmations of love, one to make up for and redeem each of his three denials. So Peter knows what he is talking about when he blesses God for that second begetting, that ‘lively hope’.
But those who translated these verses into English, not only the translators of the AV, but those like Wycliffe, Tyndale and Coverdale, who went before them, also knew as viscerally and as joyfully as Peter what it meant to be ‘begotten again unto a lively hope’. For those generations, translating and reading the Bible in their own language for the first time was as joyful, as astonishing, as ‘lively’ a revelation of unexpected mercy, as Peter’s own encounter with the risen Jesus had been for him. For a generation that had grown up bowed under the weight of penances, wondering, as Latin readings fell on uncomprehending ears, if all their works added up to enough to balance against their secret sins; for that generation to read, in clear and lovely English, a simple sentence like ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ was indeed to be ‘begotten again to a lively hope’. The AV is the full fruit of this ferment of discovery, this second begetting of hope, and all it has to offer is embodied in the lovely phrase ‘a lively hope’. It is true that ‘lively’ could then mean ‘living’ as opposed to dead. But ‘lively’ also meant so much more: vigorous, energetic, active, brisk, life-giving, too. So in Exodus 1.19, speaking about fertility, the AV translates: ‘The Hebrew women... are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.’
‘Lively’ also meant, vivid, present, alive to your mind, so in his Worthy Communicant 4 Jeremy Taylor prays: ‘that we may have lively relish and appetite to the mysteries’.
By the time of the AV translation, the new Book of Common Prayer had ensured that the word ‘lively’ had also come to have a special place in people’s prayer life as summing up what we bring to God when we come to the risen Lord in the Eucharist and present ourselves as ‘a reasonable holy and lively sacrifice’. And when the translators of the AV came to this great passage in the letter of Peter, they looked back over the century of translation and discovery that had gone before and kept this whole passage, with its lovely ‘lively hope’, unchanged from Wycliffe’s translation of 1525 and Coverdale’s translation of 1535, just as the Cranmer had included Coverdale’s translation of the psalms unamended in the Book of Common Prayer.
Herein lies the secret of the AV: it was just as alive and alert to the treasures of the past as it was ready to make new departures for the present and the future. What I hope to show and share in future reflections on these pages is that the AV is not a museum piece, an old tome to be festooned with footnotes, but is in every sense of that word, a lively book, able on every page to ‘beget us again unto a lively hope’.
4 Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore, The Worthy Communicant: a Discourse of the Nature, Effects, and Blessings consequent to the Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper.
Malcolm Guite, poet, musician and priest, is Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. His latest book, Faith, Hope and Poetry; theology and the poetic imagination, has recently been published by Ashgate.
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