This morning we will dedicate a new Pulpit Bible – King James Version – which has been kindly donated by Bev & Jacoba Morash! This article by Fr. David Curry calls attention to the significance and importance of the King James Version of the Bible.
A raft of books dealing with the King James Version of the Bible – Alistair McGrath’s In the Beginning, Benson Bobrick’s Wide as the Waters, and Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries, for instance – all witness to a revival of interest and scholarly appreciation for the remarkable achievement of the King James Bible. Among publishers’ phantasmagoria of biblical translations available in bookstores, it is still possible to find the King James Version of the Holy Scriptures. But is it being read? Is it being heard?
The Pocket Canons is another project that calls attention to the significance of the King James Bible. A publishing initiative by Grove Press, New York, books of the King James Version of the Bible are published individually in small volumes, each 4 1/8” by 5 5/8” in size. They can also be purchased in box sets; thus far two sets are available covering a range of Old and New Testament books. But what is really outstanding and of interest is the way this initiative undertakes to engage contemporary culture in all its diversity. Each volume is provided with an introduction by a contemporary writer.
The range of writers is remarkable. They include such figures as P.D. James writing on The Acts of the Apostles – an interesting twist on the genre of the whodunit; Charles Frazier of the novel Cold Mountain, now a movie, writing about another struggle of epic proportions, the struggles of Job; the novelist, non-fiction and short-story writer Doris Lessing on Ecclesiastes; the author, poet, journalist and literary critic par excellence of The Spectator and the Sunday Times, Peter Ackroyd on the Book of Isaiah; the Dalai Lama on the Epistles of James, Peter, John and Jude; novelist Joanna Trollope on the books of Ruth and Esther; the mystery writer Ruth Rendell on The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans; Karen Armstrong, famed for, among other things, The History of God, writing on The Letter to the Hebrews; Thomas Cahill, author of such books as The Gift of the Jews, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, How the Irish Saved Civilisation, and Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter writing on The Gospel according to John; and without exhausting the list of writers but bringing it to some sort of finale, last but not least, singer and writer, humanitarian and activist and sometime court jester at the coronation of Paul Martin, Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono of the rock-band U2 writing, appropriately enough, on the Psalms!
Intrigued? You should be for what is on offer through these writers is more than Oprah fluff and puff. Here are some pretty high-powered writers engaging in a lively, serious and reflective manner with the most formative translation of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament in the English speaking world. What is amazing is the depth of the engagement. They are not biblical scholars, mercifully, but they more than do the job of providing informative and satisfactory introductions to the often very complex texts that are before them. Along the way they reveal, if not a yearning, then at least, an openness to the sacred and a profound respect for the language of revelation and its formative power that reaches, thankfully, beyond institutional religion to literature and the arts. Paradoxically, that reach of the transforming Word is often through exposure to the Word proclaimed in the life of the Church.
Doris Lessing, admitting that she hadn’t really read Ecclesiastes before her assignment, nonetheless recalls the formative experience of hearing “the thunderous magnificence of this prose” for the generations for whom church attendance was obligatory and frequent. Her father said that Sunday – Church three times plus Sunday School – “was like a great black hole every week, but… listening to the prose of the Bible and the prayer book …taught him to love language and good literature”.
Bono, growing up in Ireland during “the troubles”, the son of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father, recognized that “the Prods”, as he puts it, “had the better tunes and the Catholics had the better stage-gear” and recalled that “at age 12, I was a fan of David, he felt familiar…like a pop star could feel familiar”. “The words of the psalms”, as he says, “were as poetic as they were religious”. David “was a star”. Bono explains that “words and music” did for him “what solid, even rigorous, religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God”, though not necessarily to “belief in God” but “more [to] an experiential sense of God”. Once again, though, there is the paradox of being exposed to the words and music through the Church – whether Protestant or Catholic – and even to the doctrine conveyed on the wings of the word.
“No organization with which human beings are concerned, even one divinely ordained or inspired, is ever free from controversy”, Dame P. D. James observes about the Church as it emerges from that book of controversy, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, words which surely speak to our own day. The same can be said about the Scriptures themselves, of course, and yet, as Peter Ackroyd points out about The Book of Isaiah, which “incorporates the voices of many authors in a tradition of oral poetry”, it has a kind of unity “representative of the Bible itself”. As to the question about the Bible as literature versus the Bible as sacred text, he notes by way of Coleridge that “there is no necessary distinction between the two since the highest poetry is always a manifestation of the sacred, while the most sacred insights will necessarily take on the vesture of poetry”. God is the poet, the great maker of all, whose Word is poetry and doctrine.
Such sensibilities suggest that there is more in the secular culture than simply an antipathy towards the sacred. They also challenge the Church about the form and the content of the Word which she is charged to proclaim and present.
It might be said that these introductions are mere pot-boilers, but if so, ‘tis no mean pot that serves up so a rich feast. We may wonder whether the contemporary church has not exchanged the richness of its legacy for a mess of potage in forsaking the aural feast of God’s word in the King James’ Version of the Bible that has so caught the imaginations of these writers.
It is there, of course, to be remembered. Like ‘40’, the last track on U2’s album War, a song based on Psalm 40 with a refrain from Psalm 6, “’How long’ (to sing this song)”, we may find in the witness of the Scriptures the deepest yearnings of our souls. As Bono puts it, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long… hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded?” How long, indeed, how long?