Vanity Fair (yes, Vanity Fair) carries an interesting piece (here) on the King James Bible by Christopher Hitchens (yes, he of God is Not Great fame), one of its columnists.
Here’s how the article is positioned:
‘An unbeliever argues that our language and culture are incomplete without a 400-year-old book – the King James translation of the Bible. Spurned by the Establishment, it really represents a triumph for rebellion and dissent. Accept no substitutes!’
In telling something of its history, Hitchens describes the translation as ‘a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people’.
But, he notes, ‘the translators’ legacy remains, and it is paradoxically a revolutionary one, as well as a giant step in the maturing of English literature’.
‘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... A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter?’
He blasts what he calls ‘stilted, patronizing, literal-minded’ attempts ‘to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose’. Referring to the proliferation of ‘niche Bibles’, he notes that special interest groups can have ‘their own customized version of God’s word’, yet ‘there will no longer be a culture of the kind which instantly recognized what Lincoln meant when he spoke of “a house divided.” The gradual eclipse of a single structure has led, not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.’
He closes by saying that the abandonment of the King James Bible by churches (he refers to ‘the Church of England establishment’) ‘is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts’.
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