Admiration for the Bible is something expected of Christians, and is not what one would expect from an atheist, especially Christopher Hitchens. Yet in his recent article in Vanity Fair, Hitchens writes extensively on the history, development and value of the King James Bible.
Hitchens, quoting phrases from the King James Bible such as “When I was a child, I spake as a child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.”, notes how the phrases ‘continue to echo in our language’, and states that “It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them.”
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| Tyndale's New Testament, from 1551, which contributed to the later King James translation. |
The admiration of the King James Bible from Hitchens is inspired primarily by the beauty and influence of the language, as he speaks of the version being a “giant step in the maturing of English literature.” He states, “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, rivalled 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.”
Hitchens believes that even if all the copies of the KJV were to be burned, it would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” He sees it as a repository of language which towers above its successors. Hitchens has a sting in the tail of his article: “all religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts”. This reveals his admiration of the King James Version is not the same as the admiration held by Christians for this influential translation of God’s inspired Word.
