I grew up in a household with little veneration for the King James translation of the Bible. My dad, who has a degree in Biblical studies and a deep regard for the Bible itself, was particularly not a fan. Early on he taught me and my sisters that as a translation of a translation, the KJV was often inaccurate, and he objected to the anachronism of those who believed that if it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for them. However, when my sisters and I memorized passages of the Bible as Awana kids, it was in the King James Version. As a six-year-old Spark, I remember voicing opposition to "all the thees and thous," probably parroting my dad's iconoclasm and getting a childish high off of sounding discriminating. Yet many of the Bible verses I have memorized, like Titus 2:11-13--the Awana verses we recited at the beginning of each week's meeting--I know in the King James:
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.
Twenty-two years later, I am still one of God's peculiar people, and now one who appreciates the King James, oddities and all, for its distinctive style and its incredible cultural and literary influence. My goal is to read through the King James this year, in celebration of its 400th birthday, and to blog about it here, along with a few of my friends. We'll be responding it in various ways, drawing on our faith, frustrations, and various interests. I'm also working my way through Robert Alter's Pen of Iron, which examines the influence of the King James on American prose. Early on, Alter quotes Edmund Wilson on the influence of biblical language. The passage is apropos and the source of this blog's name, and so I will begin (and end) here:
"Here it is, that old tongue, with its clang and its flavor, sometimes rank, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter; here it is in its concise solid stamp. Other cultures have felt its impact, and none--in the West, at least--seems quite to accommodate to it. Yet we find we have been living with it all our lives."
Without question, the most important book in the Anglophone world.
ReplyDeleteMy parents were NIV readers, but every Bible ever given me, whether by them or my holy-roller, "if it was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me" grandparents, was always a KJV 1611. And I am so glad of it. On a visceral level, on a level of presenting the mystery and majesty of the Divine, nothing else in English compares. I'm a layman, without any Greek or Hebrew, so I can't speak for accuracy at all. But for poetic and linguistic majesty, "the old tongue" is incomparable.
Theologically, I'm a fairly orthodox Protestant. Soteriologically, I'm Arminian. But I've always had a mystical bent to my faith. In college, I flirted with atheism, later realizing this was due only to me desiring something that would permit me to indulge my own lusts without consequence. I was brought back into the fold by Russian Orthodox liturgical music and the King James Version. Both, it seemed then and continues to seem, contain for we (post)moderns an element of uncomfortable mystery. And in that discomfort, we are forced into a recognition of our inability to make things clearly understandable, to recognize our essential limitations as flawed, fallen humans.
And we begin to see the majesty of God.
All this is to say--I look forward to following along.
I love this project, this blog. And the quote you chose, Ali, sounds so much like you I was surprised--and a bit disappointed--to find it wasn't you! Is this Alter guy a folk singer?
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