The King & I IS THE BIBLE RELIABLE? NINETEEN “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” —Psalms 119:1 |
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I am concerned by our church's fanatical obsession with the Authorized King James translation of the Bible to the exclusion of and hostility towards all others, and by a pervasive ignorance about the volume and how it came to be. When I ask them why they consider the KJV the “real” Bible, they really can't answer. Not one of these zealots can tell me, in even broad terms, how the KJV came to be. The most common reply is typically the most egregiously wrong, “The KJV is the most accurate.” The KJV refers to Unicorns nine times: Numbers 23:22, 24:3, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9, 29, Psalm 22:21, 29:6, 92:10, and Isaiah 34:7. The 1611 KJV has the following note in the margin at Isaiah 34:7: “Or, rhinoceros.” These renderings seem to be the result of the influence of the Greek Septuagint, which used “monokeros,” and the Latin Vulgate, which used “unicornis” or “rhinoceros.” That's when I figured it out: apparently, these lovely people who, by the way, don't actually read this or any Bible, don't trust any translation written by people who could have possibly driven cars. The invention of the automobile seems the litmus test by which these folks can determine when a thing is holy. The pervasive trend among our Church Folk is an irrational mistrust of anything progressive or even contemporary; an irresistible tow towards Yestertime, as Yestertime represents for them The Incorruptible Good. The rule of thumb seems to be, if they can actually understand what the scripture is saying, they don't trust it.
I admit, I have recently fallen in love with the language of the
KJV. It's taken me a long time to do it. For more than two
decades I refused to read it, on the grounds that we as a people
must move beyond the archaic language that befuddles most people
and is totally alien to the young. I felt, and still believe, if
God be God, then, surely, we can speak to Him in a language we
actually understand. It both amuses and saddens me that, every
Sunday, our great learned deacons stand before us praying— in
the King James. In really bad King James. Lots of “thee's” and
“thou's” and “O Mighty Father Wherfore's” and such. I think, if
I were God, I'd be really ticked off. The respect is certainly
nice, but the reversion to laughable attempts at Shakespearean
syntax are wholly disingenuous and suggest God is too stupid to
know what we are saying. It is high on a very long list of what's wrong with Church Folk and how religion has absolutely failed us. The notion that something being old makes it somehow less prone to error and corruption is absolutely laughable. But, that's the goods we've been sold: the KJV is nearly 400 years old, so it must be correct. It is the only version without error. It is the definitive version of the Bible. The men who translated it didn't own cars. It's the Bible the Disciples used. The irrational, uninformed devotion to this translation of the Bible is the high water mark of ignorance, the Ostrich Method of Historical Theology, a terrifyingly blind faith in an archaic manuscript which was, ironically, created for the purpose of modernizing the Bible into contemporary language of the day. This KJV-Only!” mentality contradicts the wishes of that Bible's own translators, who wrote in the introduction, “...variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures.”
For me, God's Word is Holy in any language and in any
translation. In spite of the many problems that arise upon any
reasonable study of how this Bible came to be, I prefer to keep
my eye on the ball: the essence, purpose, and meaning of God's
Word, the intent of the authors in preserving and defending it,
and it's value to us as children of God. Most Christians assume the Bible is an inviolate, exact record of scripture, meticulously preserved from the day of The Apostles. While the Torah, our Old Testament, was indeed preserved over the centuries in the Greek Septuagint, the more controversial Masoretic Text, the Latin Vulgate and other corroborating documents, New Testament manuscripts, the foundation of the Christian Church, were handled many times over many centuries by mere mortals who, even those possessed of the very best of intentions, were prone to error, and prone to interpreting the scriptures to conform to doctrines and manuscript styles of their day.
Thus, we have the study of Manuscript Tradition. Every
handwritten copy of a book is textually unique, revealing things
about its author or copyist. Manuscript Tradition involves
establishing the relationship of every transmitted copy of a
text and comparing it to other copies of the work, and other
works of the manuscript author, to determine the work's
authenticity. A critical examination of any given document's
Manuscript Tradition provides clues as to when and where it was
written, if not by whom. And these clues go a long way to
authenticate or discredit documents presented as scriptural
text.
From the Synod of Carthage to this modern era, we've seen lots
of bickering over what is and what is not cannon. Revisions,
re-translations, church splits, reformations— lots of men
deciding for you what is and what is not the Word of God.
Reportedly a man of faith, James, a Scottish king who became King of England, encouraged the Church to get the Word of God into the hands of the common man. In 1536, the Catholic Church burned William Tyndale to death for distributing the Bible and it was displeased with King James' authorization of a Bible in English. Roman Catholic Nicolo Molin, an Ambassador said, “...he is a Protestant...The king tries to extend his Protestant religion to the whole island. The King is a bitter enemy of our (Roman Catholic) religion... He frequently speaks of it in terms of contempt. He is all the harsher because of this last conspiracy (Gun Powder Plot) against his life... He understood that the Jesuits had a hand in it.” King James said this in Basilicon Doron, “Now faith...is the free gift of God (as Paul sayeth). It must be nourished by prayer, which is no thing else but a friendly talking to God. Use oft to pray when ye are quiet, especially in your bed...” [1]
Commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference of January 14-16,
1604 by King James I, The Holy Bible (as it was titled) was
created in an attempt to create a modern language, sleeker and
more accessible version of the Bible, “An act for the reducing
of diversities of Bibles now extant in the English tongue to one
settled vulgar translated from the original.”
The earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, such as The
Alexandrian or “Neutral” Text, did not exist until seventeen
years after the King James Version's debut. Much of the New
Testament was, therefore, translated from whatever sources were
available. Is any Bible perfect? I suppose that depends on your definition of “perfect.” Noted Theologian Charles C. Ryrie writes:
To me, this “self-authenticating” argument opens the door to
head-in-sand rhetorical stonewalling. Maybe I'm missing Ryrie's
point, here, but he makes Christianity out to be a
self-reinforcing delusion by side-stepping issues of
authenticity and accountability. But, if God be God, couldn't He have protected His Holy Word so there is a valid chain of custody back to the Apostles? Of course He could. Why didn't He? I dunno, you have to ask Him. I tend to believe, perhaps like some of the men at the Synod of Carthage, that the intent of the work— in that it amplifies and enhances Scripture without contradiction— is a valid consideration. So I don't really worry about who wrote John, but take comfort in some of the greatest and most profound statements about Jesus ever committed to writing (while decrying John's frequently anti-Semitic tone; a tone that makes it seem unlikely the book was written by a Jew— John, the brother of Jesus). Does having faith in a Christian God, in spite of the problems with textual criticism make me a loon? Probably. As I've said in other rants, I believe faith is a choice. A choice we make sometimes in direct conflict with our intellect, and our need for rational, detailed data and encyclopedic reference on Why This Is True. At the end of the day, it may be impossible for many intellectuals (of which I am certainly not one) to find God, or to have a thriving spiritual life and relationship with a higher power. But, perhaps, at the very end of intellect and reason there is a precipice beyond which no rational thought exists. Perhaps faith involves leaping into that abyss and, in so doing, elevating our thinking beyond what we can prove on paper or websites. Without dismissing intellect and reason, we can evolve both and, in so doing, find that small piece of ourselves that we've been missing. A friend who is a theological scholar put it this way: Anonymous “The thing to remember is that most people don't put any thought into their religion at all. And the people who do, generally stop believing. Religion is by nature irrational absent some variety of what is generally termed “mystical experience.” St. Paul experienced such a phenomenon and went a bit nuts. (Or he just went a bit nuts if you don't believe his account of what actually happened.) The Apostles and St. Francis and Muhammad had mystical experiences. Otherwise it becomes a question for philosophers, and after the Cartesian Dilemma, philosophy is not that easy a hurdle to clear “I believe in God the same way I belief in water and television sets and my mother. He's a concrete reality which is just there all the time. The question of God's existence doesn't even make sense to me at some level. I see it as an academic question, like proving the existence of the self. (Of course, Descartes demolished the self...)" “I believe in God the way I believe in water.” I like that. Maybe I could have saved us all a few hundred kilobytes of bandwidth by just having said that.
Christopher J. Priest
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