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Putting aside the remarkable confidence of one man to deign to decide which moral teachings from the ages deserve to be compiled into a ‘sacred text’, Grayling seems to misunderstand the nature of the Bible, which is not merely moral instruction, but historical interpretations, poetic prayers, grand visionary images, letters from one Christian to another, and a number of other very valuable literary genres. Without all of these genres, you don’t have a Bible. With them, you have far more than a guide to good living.
Maybe Grayling’s was simply an exercise in style and salesmanship. If so, it is the King James Bible that is setting the direction for Grayling, as it has for any writer since the 17th Century who wishes to draw on the resources of Scripture to tell his or her tales.
Although it didn’t catch on immediately, by the late 17th Century, there really were few English language competitors for the KJV. It was the Bible read in churches, the Bible memorized by children, the Bible of public ceremonies, and the Bible that shaped the literature, music and art of the time and beyond. It provided the words in which people expressed their love for God, their prayers, their exhortations and their promises. It also provided the words for writers to borrow in order to empower their own poems and stories with significance, authority and gravity.
Robert Alter, author of a recent book on the influence of the style of the KJV, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, points out that, “the stylistic resources of the King James Version were tapped even by writers who stood at a great distance from the biblical worldview or wanted to quarrel with it.”1
Examples abound. Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby Dick, employs the grand style of the KJV to write a novel challenging God’s goodness. There is a distinctly KJV cadence to Walt Whitman’s, Song of Myself, a poem written to move beyond traditional Christian views of the person. And, to change art-forms for a moment, the film Pulp Fiction has its main character, Jules, quoting Ezekiel 25: 17 from the KJV before he executes someone: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them”.
It seems that you can borrow the King James Bible without believing a word of it.
Generally speaking, the Bible is a sourcebook for literature. Novelists, poets, playwrights all draw on characters from Scripture (e.g. a ‘Judas’ or a ‘Moses’), archetypal storylines (such as the Exodus account or the Prodigal Son parable), imagery (e.g. the cup of wrath, the straight and narrow path, the tree of life) and evocative themes (e.g. the Good Samaritan, the sacrifice for sins, the renewal of creation). We might even go so far as to say that without the Bible, a great deal of Western literature would not have been written. The story of God’s dealings with the world is the source of so many of our own stories.
But these things could be gleaned from any translation of the Bible. There are also ways in which the King James Bible is a particular influence on literature and language.
In his book, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, academic linguist, David Crystal, has isolated the influences of the King James Bible on English. He finds 257 words, idioms or expressions that were popularized by the KJV (even if many of them already existed in earlier, less enduring, English translations). This compares with around 100 such offerings from Shakespeare, making the KJV by far the biggest single influence on English expression.
Every week, we hear about a disaster survivor who escaped “by the skin of his teeth”, or a stubborn boss who makes us wonder, “can a leopard change his spots ?”, or a warning that “the love of money is the root of all evil”. Each time, we are quoting the words of the King James Bible.
In this year of celebration, everyone wants to affirm the cultural value of the King James Bible. Particularly in England, the celebrations are grand, public and well supported. People rush to praise the language and rhetorical power of the KJV, even if they do not abide by its teachings. It is as if people think the language can somehow be separated from the meaning of the words. But this will not do.
As Alister McGrath has said, the KJV is only “accidentally eloquent”. The translators did not set out to produce an enduring cultural artefact, a religious museum piece or a finely wrought work of literary art. Their concern was “to provide an accurate translation of the Bible, on the assumption that accuracy was itself the most aesthetic of qualities to be desired.” The translators used lovely images in the Preface to the King James Bible to record that their express aim was to illuminate the meaning of Scripture:
Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place, that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water… 2
“Aiming at truth,” writes McGrath, “they achieved what later generations recognized as beauty and elegance”3. This focus on meaning, accurate translation and truth isn’t getting a great deal of airplay during the 400th anniversary of the KJV.
When interviewed by the King James Trust in England, renowned atheist Richard Dawkins declared that “not to know the King James Bible is to be, in some small way, barbarian”. This has been quoted far and wide in support of the KJV celebrations, and is a great recommendation—as far as it goes. But Dawkins went on to say, “it is important that religion should not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource”4.
In contrast, C. S. Lewis described the Bible as “a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach”5.
In 2011, it may just be that the atheistic aesthetes, not the believers, are the hijackers.
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1 http://www.rorotoko.com/index.php/article/robert_alter_book_interview_pen_iron_american_prose_king_james_bible.
2 Erroll F. Rhodes & Liana Lupis, The Translators to the Reader: The Original Preface of the King James Version of 1611 Revisited, American Bible Society, 1997, p. 34.
3 Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, Doubleday, 2001, p.254.
4 http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/news/2010/02/19/richard-dawkins-lends-his-support-to-the-king-james-bible-trust
5 Available at http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/kjv_lewis.pdf.
This article was first published at eternity.biz. Used with permission.
