Penguins on Parade: the King James Bible!

Some Penguin Classics seem like parts of an exceedingly natural progression, and what could feel more natural than to conclude our little mini-tour of great ancient texts with the King James Bible? And equally natural that Penguin Classics should publish a King James Bible, and yet they took their sweet time doing so, only finally producing one in 2006, this enormous hefty trade paperback edition edited by David Norton.

Before this volume, Penguin's dabblings in Biblical literature had been sporadic and incomplete: segments had been reproduced with no critical apparatus in the mighty Viking Portable World Bible, and the four Gospels of the New Testament had been given four intensely interesting volumes of commentary in the Pelican line, and a volume of Paul's letters had appeared, also laden with commentary, but while publisher after publisher produced a critically annotated Bible, Penguin held back. Until the appearance of this volume, the best such Bibles in the general market were the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 and the Oxford World's Classics Bible of 1997. And that's an apt echo as well, since until the appearance of the King James Bible in 1611, there were also two main contenders for the top spot, the Bishop's Bible of 1568 and the Geneva Bible of 1560. When King James I gave his command that "a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek," forty-four scholars set to work on separate sections and labored both under their own rather remarkable sense of literary perfectionism and also under the goad of the king, who clearly didn't want the whole project mired forever in academic hair-splitting.



The result, of course, was an unparalleled thing, a mightier achievement than a dozen Taj Mahals. The blood and grandeur of the Old Testament comes alive as in no previous English rendition:

Now the Philistines fought against Israel, and the men of Israel fled before the Philistines, and fell down slain in Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines followed hard after Saul, and after his sons, and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul. And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him, and he was wounded by the archers. Then said Saul to his armour-bearer, 'Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith, lest these uncircumscribed come and abuse me.' But his armour-bearer would not, for he was sore afraid. So Saul took a sword, and fell upon it. And when he armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell likewise on the sword, and died. So Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died together. And when all the men of Israel that were in the valley saw that they fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead. Then they forsook their cities, and fled, and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.

And likewise most of the much thinner, nervier beauty of the New Testament is made clear to the common reader:

And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying, 'Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witnesses against thee?' But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, 'Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' And Jesus said, 'I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, 'What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye?' And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

And this Penguin Classic volume itself is also an amazing success, starting with Norton's simple, lucid Introduction, which makes a stirring case for the sheer worth of those forty-four scholars' work:

The King James Bible offers the reader both the meaning of the Bible and a religious or aesthetic experience of language that no modern translation can match. For instance, after Adam and Eve have eaten fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the King James Bible has Adam give this simple reply to God: 'And the man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (Gen. 3:12). The meaning is clear except perhaps for 'she gave me of the tree,' but in context it is obvious that he is saying she gave him fruit from the tree. The language is simple, almost entirely monosyllabic English, without a trace of pretence to grandeur. Only the archaic form, 'thou gavest' markes it out as biblical English.

Modern versions usually stay close to the King James in this verse. Here is the New International Version: 'The man said, "The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." It is still powerful, but not as powerful. There are no uncertainties of meaning, nor any archaism, but the rhythm has almost vanished, and there are several touches, all of them associated with a move from literal translation towards paraphrase, which make it less effective. The dash before 'she gave me' underlines the effect of having the subject stated twice  (as it is in the Hebrew), but it goes along with the changes that make Adam close to vindictive in his attitude to Eve. 'The woman you put here with me' is a bitter statement, as if Eve were inflicted on him. The sense of Eve as a gift is lost - 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me'; lost too is the parallel between Eve being given and Eve giving - 'she gave' (the Hebrew uses the same verb in both places). The change at the end of the verse, 'and I ate it', comes about not just because the New International Version, paraphrasing for clarity, has added 'some fruit' (not in the Hebrew), and so must finish with 'it' (again not in the Hebrew).

There's something refreshingly nuts-and-bolts about such a line of defense, and it's just the beginning of this volume's charms. There are plenty of excellent maps, and the end notes are a triumph, fully the complement of those Pelican commentary volumes of long ago. The stark elegance of the end product is reminiscent of the original appearance of the King James Bible, which was made to be both beautiful and useful, worth every penny of its cover price, as it were, loaded with extras that always take the breath away from museum-goers who view a copy on display.

The Unauthorized Version!

Our book today is Robin Lane Fox's mighty, encyclopedic 1991 volume The Unauthorized Version, one of the most essential works of Biblical exegesis ever written and a walloping amount of good old-fashioned literary fun.

Fox has an almost unbeatable track record. His Pagans and Christians is an enduring work of scholarship, and his biography of Alexander the Great became the 20^th century standard almost from the moment of its publication (Scarisbrick's Henry VIII volume did the same thing – a not entirely healthy procedure, but a toughly adhesive one just the same). The chief attraction in all Fox's prose can be summed up the way an old friend of mine used to do it: “He thinks on the page.”

As many of you will know, I have a sweet-tooth for biblical exegesis (I've even indulged in it here on Stevereads from time to time) – not biblical deconstruction, mind you, not in the sense of attacking the basis of anybody's faith – but biblical humanism, based on the assumption that whatever else the sacred texts of the Bible might be, they're also texts, able to be studied like any other written documents. Centuries ago, when humanism was in its perilous infancy, several of its most eloquent defenders pointed out the logical fallacies of objecting to such claims: if the Bible's various books are divinely inspired, they should be able to withstand a little textual scrutiny – and if despite their divine inspiration their human transmission has interpolated errors into their contents, well, then the divine inspiration isn't to blame, is it? Either way, humanists (at their best) argued, studying written texts cannot imperil true faith.

This is certainly the ethos behind The Unauthorized Version. Even though Fox wrote it as an atheist, he kept and open mind and heart (as he put it, he believes in the Bible, but not in God) – he's not out to attack anyone's faith, but even two minutes of studying biblical textual history is long enough to stumble into problems with the way most Jews and Christians today use and think about their sacred text. I see these people every day on the subway, complacently opening their Bibles with the exact thought in their mind that they're opening one book, written by one mind, moving toward one point.

It's an attractive thought, but as Fox amply demonstrates in The Unauthorized Version, it's a wildly inaccurate and inevitably self-deceitful way to deal with what Fox calls the “splendid incoherence” of the work as it's come down to us. That work can inspire many things, but complacent textual faith isn't – shouldn't be – one of them. As Fox puts it with doomed bluntness:

the prospects for one consistent and coherent construction out of this variety were precisely zero.

 

The main attraction of his book (which is so full of attractions it can literally be re-read every single year with new wonder, new discoveries … the acumen and sheer research necessary to have written it seem more impressive to me with every passing year) is the patient, open-minded, meticulous way Fox detonates that one coherent construction. In every text of the Bible, in every long-cherished received tradition of Judaism and Christianity, in every specific example, our author dives until he reaches the bottom, then presents us with a clear picture in sparkling, often very funny prose:

Historians are not so pedestrian that they cannot see how truth can be found even in an unintended fiction. A story may be wonderful evidence for what the narrator and his audience believed and assumed: it may help to hold their view of reality together. The beliefs may concern a god or an independent Satan (a late arrival on the biblical scene): they may be odd until we unravel them, like the curious story of Jacob in Genesis 30 who strips off the bark of fresh twigs, puts them in the water trough of his sheep and is somehow thought to have made them conceive speckled lambs as a result (it is not even that he had an speckled rams to father them: Laban had taken the speckled rams away). For centuries, scholars could still understand this story, as we have recently been reminded: it turned on the widespread belief that a mother's conception was influenced by whatever she looked at during sexual intercourse. In the water troughs, the stripped twigs looked dark and mottled; Jacob's ewes gazed on them and conceived mottled 'Jacob's flock', just as horse-breeders believed that a mare would conceive a fine foal if she saw her handsome stallion in a mirror while being mounted (in 1726 a woman amazed London society by claiming that she had given birth to rabbits after looking at a rabbit, but it emerged that she was wrong). Behind Genesis 30, which is story, not history, lies a widespread belief about conception and the facts of life. As late as 1950 there were commentators who claimed that it was true (which is another story and also part of history). It was left to Augustine to wonder why the ewes did not conceive twigs.

That emphasis on stories vs history is typical of Fox and a recurring note in The Unauthorized Version, which tries at every turn to strip away the accumulation of repetition and tradition that has filled up the holy books that comprise the Bible. In one delightful passage remarking on the fact that his contemporaries wondered if Jesus was King Solomon come back to life, Fox muses on how shocking Solomon would have found it, to come forward in time and see what the traditions of Judaism had done to his story:

Suppose that King Solomon had come back instead: he would never have credited it. Here were his descendants, venerating texts which he was supposed to have written and wondering whether or not they polluted people's hands: he had never composed a word of them. One of them said that he had 'uttered three thousand proverbs and his songs were a thousand and five': it was amazing to be thought so clever. There were even people who thought that he had written the Song of Songs: it would have looked to him like a collection of straightforward love poetry (his Egyptian wife had known plenty of bits like it). Why ever had people fallen for this book of the law in which Moses seemed to speak: why had they dreamed up a covenant with God or a future life? He and his friends had managed very well without any of them.

 

And yet, Fox allows, they weren't wrong to 'fall' for it, if it brought order and even comfort to their lives – the error happens when those same people, having been comforted, turn around and start to make untenable historical claims about the texts that gave the comfort. That's what historians like Fox can't tolerate – although The Unauthorized Version is in no way an intolerant book (you'll have to look to more modern pundits for the smallness of that). It's instead a fair and even loving one – but wry and unsparing too, and enormously worth your time regardless of your 'faith status.' Humanists everywhere should rejoice in it.

The Book of John!

Our book today is the Gospel of St. John (we’ll use the New International Version, just to keep everybody reading and happy!), and it comes to us today courtesy of the dozens of you who emailed me from the heart of the Silent Majority about a recent posting lambasting Beverly Lewis’ “Annie’s People” series in general and The Englisher in particular. Some of you accused me of hating all religious fiction, and the rest wondered if there were any religious fiction I actually like (no Amish themselves wrote to me, since they’re cramped and narrow enough to believe God doesn’t want them to have the Internet).

I should stress that the point I was trying to make in that posting about The Englisher wasn’t that religious fiction as a whole is insipid or limiting, but rather that I hate the examples of it that are. In The Englisher (and religious novels like it that I’ve read), religious belief is an extremely thwarting thing, a constraint that will inevitably force you to lop off living parts of yourself. Characters “successfully” deny their sexual orientation, they spend their whole lives married to people they don’t like, they voluntarily enter a kind of mental servitude based on readings of a text that’s 2000 years old … in short, they do what Annie does in The Englisher: they take the beautiful paintings they’ve created, wrap them up tight, and store them in the attic. Forever.

I confess, I don’t see the payoff of ‘faith’ like that. How on Earth do you ever know it’s good for you? You live your whole life, die, go to Heaven, and there, finally, God pats you on the back and says, “I instilled in you the talent to paint and the lifelong desire to do it, and you successfully forced yourself to resist that longing every day that you were alive – good job!”?

Probably “Annie’s People” bugged me because it so relentlessly ennobles one of the most backward and repressive back-alleys of Christian faith I’ve ever encountered (I’ve spent zero time around snake-handlers, so I might not know what I’m missing here), and it keeps doing it, in book after book. But it need hardly be said (except maybe to Richard Dawkins and his ilk) that Christianity has been the inspiration for many, many great expressions of art, including many wonderful books.

And the first of these is John. He’s not the first Gospel – the shorter, more telegraphic ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew were almost certainly all composed first – but his is the first Christian novel, the first book in which the author is doing something more than simply reporting the ‘and then He did … and then He did …” happenings of Jesus’ ministry on Earth. John tells that story too, but he makes it his – and so he sweeps us along in a way no other gospel does.

Despite five hundred years of exuberantly intense scriptural study, we can’t say with certainty when John’s gospel was written, or by whom, or for whom. “Sometime in the first century” is about the best that can be managed, with guesses ranging across the reigns of five different Roman emperors. The neatest narrative is that Jesus took John and James, the sons of Zebedee, as his disciples while they were very young men and that John lived to be a very old man, writing his testimony sometime toward the end of his life using as his guides and prompts all the other written accounts that had cropped up in the intervening years but enhancing and improving them as he went along. This is almost certainly not what happened, but like I said, it has the most attractive simplicity.

However it came about, we can say two certain things about the Gospel of Saint John: first, it reads nothing like the other gospels, and second, although we might not know the who, the where, the how, or the when of it, we most certainly know the why: John wants to preach the Word made flesh. Not for him the mere bare-bones tallying of miracles and sayings – he crafts a long, complex, and at times maddening narrative in which Jesus cannot possibly be construed as some random wonder-worker but is instead the way and the life, the door to salvation, the son and avatar of the living God (the synoptic gospels contain this element as well – more so than is often given credit to them, I think – but John is the only one that raises it to an art).

Which makes reading his book one of the ur-strangest literary experiences anybody – and especially any Christian – can have. Coming to the text fresh, as it were, you notice one thing before anything else: Jesus here doesn’t come across as the meek and mild Lamb of God. He’s confrontational, peremptory, enigmatic … one might almost say rude (if one weren’t leery of offending his Dad). In other words, he seems far closer to the heroes and demigods of Greek mythology than to the wan and lissome figure who emerged from Renaissance hagiography. He’s decidedly not quite human, and time and again, John makes clear that his semi-divine status caused his own disciples to get a little jumpy. They loved him and believed in him (most of the time), but they’d also never seen anything like him before, and many of John’s anecdotes preserve that fact, like the classic story of the storm on the Sea of Galilee:

When the evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.

Readers will of course notice that it isn’t the storm or the rough waves that terrify the disciples – it’s the sight of a man walking on water and perhaps looking slightly transformed while he does it (or else, why the need to identify himself once he draws near?). Unlike the primary impression given by the other gospels, here is a Jesus who feels his own supernatural status immediately. He knows he only has a limited amount of mortal time, and he’s impatient with practically everybody for not straight away seeing what his words and signs (one of John’s favorite words) signify.

The Jewish priests and authorities form a Greek chorus of constantly grumbling throughout the book, constantly griping about the liberties Jesus takes in identifying himself with ancient prophecies. Who does this guy think he is, they’re constantly asking. Don’t we know his parents? Don’t we know where he comes from? John never misses and opportunity to paint a picture of the new confronting the old, and the resonances are made all the more thrilling in light of the subsequent 2000 years (of which John – and perhaps Jesus – could know nothing):

You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the very work that the Father has given me to finish, and which I am doing, testifies that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

I do not accept praise from men, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Fathers’ name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe if you accept praise from one another yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?

But do not think that I accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?

Passages like that one also underscore something else: there was simply no way the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ time could let him live. And John’s account of the Crucifixion and Death is a small masterwork of tragic storytelling – and the scene he presents to us with such effusive artistic joy, the scene where a grieving and heartbroken Mary Magdalene is the first to encounter the risen Jesus, is virtually Homeric in its clarity and power.

I think Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually benefit by being read together – but you owe it to yourself to read John apart. There’ve been many lovely little paperbacks over the years of this gospel alone (some of you will remember the playful – and now intensely collectible – series of little hand-sized paperbacks that Penguin, naturally, did of each book of the Bible, including John), and that’s how you should read it. And then you should write and tell me your impressions – privately, of course!