Hunter Griffith

One of the points in our film is that the translation project was driven by political as much as by spiritual concerns. King James had just come to power in a realm divided by very different traditions. On one side were the High Church practitioners who valued stateliness and ritual, and on the other the Puritans who believed in a personal, no frills, sort of religion based solely on the individual’s relationship to God. To James this wasn’t a mild difference of opinion; it was life and death. Guy Fawkes and a small group of Catholic radicals tried to kill him. Later a much larger group of Puritans succeeded in killing his son. The King James Bible was essentially an attempt to combine the best of earlier translations into a single, universal bible that could bring the people together and end the divisions. The effort failed, but it did produce one of the most moving texts in the history of the English Language.