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IRev It Up... |
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It’s not the first book written by committee, and it won’t be the last. It’s just that this one looms so large and has lasted so long in our human consciousness. Today is the 396th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. Right before it came out the black plague had killed 30,000 Londoners. The Puritans were holding civic protests against the monarchy as a form of government. Some Catholics were plotting to assassinate the King. The King himself, hoping to hold the country together (and preserve his life, no doubt) thought it was time to get the Bible into the hands of the people. He pulled together a committee, 54 of the best linguistic scholars in the country. The most important thing about the Bible, they said, was that it needed to sound right when read aloud in churches. And even though words like “thou” and “sayeth” had already gone out of fashion, they used them anyway, because they “wanted to give the sense that the language in the Bible came from long ago and far away.” The King James Version of the Bible didn’t catch on very fast. It was only after a disastrous civil war that it came into fashion. from The Writer’s Almanac, 5.2.07 Committees of scholars have been at work ever since, striving to make the Bible available in the language most widely used by any given group of people. The one that published the Revised English Bible in 1990, which was commissioned by most of the major churches in Britain, said the same thing the earlier committee did: the Bible was to be read aloud in worship; therefore it must sound right. “Care has been taken,” they write in the preface, “to ensure that the style of English used is fluent and of appropriate dignity for liturgical use, while maintaining intelligibility for worshippers of a wide range of ages and backgrounds.” And, finally, “as the ‘you’-form of address to God is now commonly used, the ‘thou’-form which was preserved....has been abandoned.” In a twist that bothers some folk, “the use of male-oriented language, in passages of traditional versions of the Bible which evidently apply to both genders, has become a sensitive issue in recent years; the revisers have preferred more inclusive gender reference where that has been possible without compromising scholarly integrity or English style.” introduction to the REB, p. viii Well, you know those Brits. How about here in America? Here’s page ix of the New Revised Standard Version: “This preface is addressed to you by the Committee of translators, who wish to explain, as briefly as possible, the origin and character of our work...which is the authorized revision of the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952, which was a revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which, in turn, embodied earlier revisions of the King James Version, published in 1611...which came to be regarded as ‘the noblest monument of English prose’, and it has entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English- speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt. “Yet the King James Version has serious defects....” And so, they set out to make corrections, to make it more right. “The Biblical message must not be disguised in phrases that are no longer clear, or hidden under words that have changed or lost their meaning; it must be presented in language that is direct and plain and meaningful to people today.” ibid. p. xii. God is still speaking, we like to say here in the UNITED CHURCH of Christ. And why does any of this matter? Well, for one reason, the Bible is used by all sorts of people to try to hold all sorts of kingdoms together and, presumably, to attempt to preserve all sorts of lives. And when it is used in meanness and ignorance, this widely hailed Book of Life can as easily become as deadly a weapon as any other projectile. In 1995, for instance, “a federal appeals court upheld the overturn of a death sentence in a Colorado kidnap-rape-murder case because jurors had inappropriately brought in extraneous material – Bibles – for an unsanctioned discussion of the Exodus verse ‘an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth...whoever...kills a man shall be put to death.’ The Christian group Focus on the Family complained, ‘It is a sad day when the Bible is banned from the jury room.’” Stephen Prothero, cited in Time magazine, 4.2.07, p.42 “Who’s most at fault here?” the article continues. “The jurors, who perhaps hadn’t noticed that in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus rejects the eye-for-an-eye rule, word for word, in favor of turning the other cheek? The Focus spokesman, who may well have known of Jesus’ repudiation of the old law but chose to ignore it? Or any liberal who didn’t know enough to bring it up?” You can see how this goes. When ignorance abounds, it doesn’t take long before lots of people are on the defensive, even people who consider themselves both liberal and Christian, for instance. Well, it’s too nice to stay inside pondering thick discourses and unresolved dilemmas today. There’s a luscious world out there in which to bask and for which thanks can be profusely offered. I’ll just leave you with a couple of things you can put up on the refrigerator, and go for my morning walk. You can come along if you wish. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” C.S. Lewis “If the God you believe in hates all the same people you do, then you know you’ve created God in your own image.” Anne Lamott May you have the privilege of hearing scripture read aloud in a church before the week is done
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602 Mitchell Drive ● Alcester, SD 57001-0229 ● Phone: 605.934.2341 |
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Entire contents © Copyright 2007 Alcester United Church of Christ |
Reflections
on faith and life by Rev. Kathryn Timpany