The story of the King James Bible, and how it was written by committee, is fascinating. I highly recommend Adam Nichol’s volume on the topic, God’s Secretaries, one of the most engrossing books about religion I’ve ever read. Over at Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes about the King James and Tyndale Bibles in “When the King saved God,” If you’re a Hitchens aficionado, a lot of this is familiar, but there are some nice tidbits:
It’s [the attempt to get the Bible printed in English] a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns). . .
Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe.
Hitchens compares the King James version (1611) to William Tyndale’s 1525 translation (Tyndale, of course, was ultimately strangled for his efforts); the later version doesn’t always come off better:
Tyndale, incidentally, was generally good on the love question. Take that same Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, a few chapters later. For years, I would listen to it in chapel and wonder how an insipid, neuter word like “charity” could have gained such moral prestige. The King James version enjoins us that “now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Tyndale had put “love” throughout, and even if your Greek is as poor as mine you will have to admit that it is a greatly superior capture of the meaning of that all-important original word agape. It was actually the frigid clerical bureaucrat Thomas More who had made this into one of the many disputations between himself and Tyndale, and in opting to accept his ruling it seems as if King James’s committee also hoped to damp down the risky, ardent spontaneity of unconditional love and replace it with an idea of stern duty. Does not the notion of compulsory love, in any form, have something grotesque and fanatical about it?
Hitchens argues that to be considered educated, even in our era, you simply must know the Bible, preferably the Tyndale or King James versions. Few of us would disagree. One example:
Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
Finally, Hitchens excoriates, as only he can, the attempts to modernize the Bible and make it user friendly.
Here, from last year, is Hitchens on the Ten Commandments. He handles the spoken word like a jazzman handles notes. At the end, he creates his own Ten Commandments; my favorite is Number Eight.
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“to be considered educated, even in our era, you simply must know the Bible” – true I admit, particularly for literature & art lovers as so much is illuminated by getting the context. However we are entering an age when a knowledge of ‘the Classics’ of any type of literature, is no longer automatic at school or in society. I hear the voice of an ancient Babylonain berating the youth for not knowing the Epic of Gilgamesh, or a mediaeval English man chiding his son for rejecting the stories of Wade in favour of French romances… I hope one day we will be able to treat the bible myths as just that – myths.
Additionally, the shared agreement on the meaning of surviving/persisting tropes can be enough, without demanding thorough historical grounding in their provenance. Science has to usurp a bit of the time traditionally spent on classics…
Yes – Widsith has a line something like ‘Alewih ruled the Danes – of all men he was the bravest’ – yet we know nothing of him apoart from that!
[blush]…googles Widsith…
Well, that Exeter Book sounds possibly as interesting as the Bible…
I like how Hitchens’ new commandment #2 ends up being a thoughtcrime as well – “Do not even think of using people as private property.”
Except that we’ve more than enough real life examples of the horrors of this to spare us the need to run any thought experiments on the subject.
great piece for sure
i’d probably add only one on top of everything
excersize your brain and don’t trust opinions of the past: keep up with science
+ 1
I love this article. The Bible, and especially the King James Version, is definitely an important part of our literature.
There’s no question about that.
But it is dreadfully boring, for the most part.
I am currently reading the NRSV Bible, since it’s the only version in my possession.
And I must say that the OT at least(about halfway through so far), is extremely painful to read.
There are certainly some interesting stories, but it’s mostly filled with useless information and barbarism.
And why must it be so damn long?
So why am I subjecting myself to this? Know thy enemy, of course.
I transcribed them so the rest of you don’t have to:
Thank you Peter ~ you (are the) rock
At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament …
I ran square into the problem of funeral recitations last week. In anything but the hands of an atheist, invoking the Bible at solemn occasions inevitably leads to unacknowledged disaster, as I was reminded firsthand.
We buried my 97-year-old grandmother one week ago. She grew up in Serbia, no doubt with an orthodox background, and married a Lutheran, but my grandma never had any strong religious attachments. One of her daughters married an Conservative Jew and this daughter’s influence on her sister inspired this sister, my mother, to convert to Reform Judaism. So the kids held the service for my grandma at a synagogue, which is a little bizarre because my grandma wasn’t Jewish, but at least offered some opportunity for remembering my grandma appropriately. “Just don’t make it very Jewish” was my input to my mom. “It’s Reform, so it’s not an issue” was the reply. Of course we got a very Jewish service.
I could have overlooked even that because it doesn’t matter to my grandma anymore, and the service was for the family—primarily her children—and the family portion was indeed nice. But the religious parts were so strange as to be unintentionally hilarious.
To solve the problem of speaking religiously about a non-Jewish Serb, the Rabbi found and retold a Serbian folktale that—surprise, surprise—is basically ripped-off^H^H^H^H inspired by the story of Abraham. The moral of this tale, titled “THE SONS’ OATH TO THEIR DYING FATHER“, is to obey divine contracts no matter what criminal thing they stipulate that you do to your family, in this case subjecting your sister to the whims of the first man you meet on the street. And mind this: this Abrahamic folktale about surrendering your daughter to whatever fate God decrees is being retold by a presumptively liberal woman Rabbi to my young daughter and me, and the Rabbi’s website declares an interest to “advance women’s issues”.
My thought bubble during my grandma’s service is “What the fuck?!” and I’m looking around the pews trying to see who else shares this thought with me. But it gets better. A few days after the service, I wonder where, exactly, did the Rabbi find this uplifting tale, so I hit teh Google and it pops out immediately. Tellingly, the best parts of the Abrahamic fairy tale were censored for the service. The full story [link above], worthy of both its Biblical and Balkan origins, also teaches that:
• God chopped the heads off of the two disobedient sons and boiled their decapitated heads in a cauldron
• God will smite with hail and destitution anyone who rejects god
• God with make everyone obedient to god prosperous
This is the kind of story chosen specifically for a religious funeral service, omitting the explicit bits about God chopping people’s heads off and boiling them in a cauldron. And the really funny thing is that the explicit Biblical parts are nearly all equally appalling. People offer the excuse for religion that it provides comfort in the face of death, but I know firsthand that that’s blithering nonsense.
The one thing that redeemed this experience was that my dad coined an atheist neologism last weekend. While listening to some history-book-on-tape that mentioned the monophysite heresy, my dad declared that he was a nonophysite. With that new word in mind, I listened ironically as the Rabbi recited Psalm 23 from the good old King James.
Wonderful story. Sounds as if a fine streak of irony runs in your family, even if it skips the odd person now and then…
“Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.”
Says it all right there…
I agree that the eighth commandment is by far the best. Now if God had just thought to include that in the original Ten Commandments, that might have been the evidence for God that everyone has been arguing about so much of late.
& an addendum about the casting out from the temple of those devils who would have us tied to 18-month mobile ‘phone contracts
Agree with Hitchens. I recently obtained a copy of the Catholic New Testement of the “New American Bible” St Joseph Edition(revised 1986).
They try to simplify the text and I agree it is more readable but they have added more of their own gobble de gook than was in the former Catholic “Bible” or in the King James Version to comment on the text and insert added stuff just like the so-called writers that tried to make up additions years ago. The end result is that this “book’ contains all of the Catholic “party line” and is twice as long as the original!
On a more humorous note, here’s George Carlin on the ten commandments:
Really? I am wondering if you would same about the Bhagvad-Gita? The Quran? The plays of Kalidasa and Shakespeare? The works of Homer? The works of Confucius? Sun Tzu’s Art of War?
I think putting something on an unqualified pedestal like that reeks of ignorance of the multitude of cultures in the world. There are plenty of “educated” people in India or China or Japan who would never even have heard of the bible, except in there school books as “one of the several religious books mildly popular in this country.”
I won’t presume to speak for Jerry, however, reading the site as much as I have, I suspect that he would indeed include the works you’ve mentioned as a worthy path to education and did not intend for his statement to be interpreted as you did. Where’s the fire, Circe?
I’m with you on this, Circe, and I disagree with Jerry’s suggestion that ‘few of us would disagree’ that it’s necessary to know the Bible to be educated. There are more than just a few of us. It may have been the case in the past that familiarity with the Bible was necessary to demonstrate an educated mind, but that’s no longer true.
A knowledge of evolution, on the other hand, is most definitely necessary to be considered educated (though not in some parts of the world).
Agree with Circe and Andrew. I’m an atheist from India (a software analyst). Many of my friends and I regularly follow and appreciate most of Jerry’s views on religion and evolution, and loved these 10 commandments but I am surprised not to be counted among literates by Jerry and Hitchens just because I know little of the Bible!
If that’s supposed to get me started on the Bible, well, don’t hold thy breath! 🙂
My point simply: Each major work of religious mythology has significant literary, cultural and historical contributions, and provides a ‘common stock of references and allusions’ to its generations of adherents. Studies of these works can be encouraged but should not be necessary for each of the ‘literates’.
“…generations of adherents” and of course, non-adherents with the same cultural backgrounds.
I think part of the problem here is that Jerry and Hitchens are both looking at this from a Western perspective. Of course, even in the West, the benchmarks of literacy have traditionally been both the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology. It would be more neutral to say that every culture has certain mythological works one must know about in order to deeply understand its history and traditions, and the King James Bible is one of those works in English-speaking Western cultures.
It depends on which civilization you’re talking about.
The Japanese might not care about the Bible.
Just like I don’t care about Shintoism or Chaka Zulu. I have not the slightest interest in African or Japanese myths.
I don’t believe in one giant world-encompassing human civilization. Traditionally we’ve had the West (consisting of Europe and most of its former colonies), and a collection of various Eastern civilizations, plus some African tribes.
And it’s fine by me if each one has and continues to maintain its own cultural and literary legacy.
Hey, Jerry, I left you a voice message on your cell phone about Hitch’s Commandment Eight!
Totally agree, man!
I have to disagree with Hitchens’ rant against modernizing the Bible. The Shakespearean English in which the KJV is written is almost as obscure to some 21st-Century readers as the Latin of the Vulgate Bible was to medieval peasants. It’s much easier to see the contradictions in the Bible if you read it in plain English.
You do have a point!
You can write plain English without bowing to either political correctness or youthful “hip” jargon.
The New Inclusive Translation of the Bible is so politically correct, it’s practically a self-parody:
“God the Father” is everywhere replaced by “God the Father-Mother.”
“Son of Man” is replaced by “human one.”
They even omitted “God’s right hand” because they didn’t want left-handed people to feel discriminated against.
There’s no question that parts of the Bible expressed more patriarchal attitudes that we commonly accept today. But that’s a reality you should not flush down the memory hole. (No one has butchered the Declaration of Independence by crossing out “All men are created equal” and replacing it with “All men and women….”)
Of course, if your goal is to cast ridicule on the Bible, then the dumber the language used to express it, the happier you’ll be.
Very good point. IMO it’s important that all the politically incorrect crap be left in, esp. the mysogyny, racism (“tribe-ism?”), slavery approbation, etc.
The problem is that Hitchens implies that any modern translation makes the language of the Bible flat or “hip hop.” My point was about the understandability of the language. Specifically, I think a lot of Christian leaders these days like the KJV because its language has become obscure enough that it’s easy to lie about parts of it without the average churchgoer knowing any better. If you’re going to debate a religious text, it’s important to have a clear idea what the text says. And yes, that includes reflecting the fact that the faith of the Bible posits one god who is identified as mael
*male.
#11: Wash your hands before handling food.
#12: Wear Sunscreen.
Slightly off-topic, but I am curious what other books about religion have others enjoyed reading? I have been reading _God’s Secretaries_ in my free time (love the kindle version;-) and find it very interesting as well.
The Portable Atheist is outstanding. Hitchens complied some of the best religion writing available and his introduction is brilliant.
Great post. Love Hitch. Love his 10 commandments. And really love your book, Why Evolution Is True. As a non-science guy that only took nutrition and baby-bio in college because I HAD to take 6 science credits, I really appreciate how digestible the material is without sacrificing content.