With a thank you to Nima Hoda for the verse from THE RUBAIYAT of Omar Khayyam.
“Don’t read that, read this,” said a fellow with a group of people around him to me one day.
In my hand was a copy of the Douay-Rheims version of THE NEW TESTAMENT (the one used by The Roman Catholic Church). In his was THE KING JAMES BIBLE. I have several different translations of THE BIBLE. I find it interesting to compare them for the change of a word can change a lot more than most think.
They invited me to join them for a beer.
“Drop a round,” I said to the waiter, “and keep the change.” I gave him $20.00. It was my last $20 for a few days.
As he talked the leader of the group made a major error that was a major error in THE KING JAMES, THE DOUAY- RHEIMS, and any translation of THE BIBLE you care to pick. I forget now what it was.
I called him on it.
At once he started shouting. His acolyte’s swiftly piped in.
“LEAVE!” he roared.
I got up to go.
Attracted by the commotion the owner of the bar walked over. “What is going on here?” he asked.
“These people invited me in for a beer. I bought the round. Now they are asking me to leave,” I said.
“He bought the round?” he said to the waiter who replied, “And he tipped damn good.”
“Sir,” said the owner, “would you like me to throw these people out of here?”
“No. Leave them where they are,” I said.
“Come with me,” he said leading me to a table away from them.
“He is on the house. Give him whatever he would like for the rest of the night,” he said to the waiter.
I finished my beer and left.
One hot August day while out postering for my film programs I saw a group of men distributed on the corners of the intersection of Dundas and Yonge Street in Toronto. From their dress (black suits, black ties, white shirts on a sweltering summer day) I knew them at once to be bible thumpers, sky pirates.
“The word of God? Where is it found?” I asked the leader.
“In THE BIBLE,” he roared holding up his KING JAMES.
“Not true,” I replied adding, “Moses, Deuteronomy 30:14, ‘The word of God is very near that you may have it with you always. It is in your heart and on your tongue.”
“NOT TRUE!” he roared.
“Guy,” I said softly, “It is in the book.”
Deuteronomy 30:10-14 (King James Version)
10If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.
11For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.
12It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?
13Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?
14But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
Michael Valpy is the author of an informative and very interesting piece in THE GLOBE AND MAIL on THE KING JAMES BIBLE which, this year, celebrates its 400th anniversary.
Missing from the piece is the information that King James was a Roman Catholic and a homosexual. Given the antipathy of many who revere THE KING JAMES as the fundamental word of God, that information is vital. His homosexuality is always obliquely, never directly, referred to in the book, GOD’S SECRETARIES. We read of Sir Robert Carey, the man who rode relay to bring James in Scotland, news of the death of Elizabeth in England, “A rather handsome and deeply indebted English gentleman, Sir Robert Carey, who at different times had been a commander against the Spanish Armada band a court dandy—just the sort of glamorous and rather sexy man to whom James was instinctively drawn.”
Those who have eyes to see, see. Those who have ears to hear, hear. As for the rest it goes right over their heads.
Since the invention of the printed word we have produced generations of Bible idolaters. Where Jesus calls us to forgive those who trespass against us so that we in turn may be forgiven our trespasses Bible idolaters happily look for any verse that will allow them to burn our ass.
In the section of Deuteronomy where Moses speaks I would add in addition to, “11For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.
12It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?
13Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?”
“Neither is it in a book that we should say, ‘Who shall teach us to read that we may hear and do it.”
We can read any translation we choose of THE BIBLE a million times over. We can even learn Hebrew and Greek so that we can read its parts in the languages it was originally written down in.
Won’t do us a damn bit of good.
.Robert Fulford, like Michael Valpy, is a journalist I respect and consider a friend. Bob studied under Northrup Frye whose book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature is one I mightily enjoyed reading and studying. The only problem is that Frye is the barren fig tree. He has an abundance of leaves but no fruit.
As a result he turned most of those who studied under him into people like himself; barren fig trees. In this he As a result he turned those who studied under him into barren fig trees like himself. He was like those scribes and Pharisees of whom Jesus said, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (The word means ‘play actor.”) For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”—Matthew 23:15 (King James Version.
THE BIBLE is, as Frye pointed out, the foundation of our culture in the west. Reject it or accept it as you choose. Nonetheless, as it is the foundation I felt had to know it to work within the culture .Fortune provided me with a small pocket sized copy of THE NEW TESTAMENT. I found it in the house of my uncle Douglas Hartt in Ottawa. He had studied to be a priest before giving it up and entering the civil service. At the time he served, under Pierre Trudeau, as Director General of Public Works Canada. I lived with him for one year, 1969.
In December of 1969 I returned to Toronto and began screening films at Rochdale College. A friend I loved much appeared the first night. He was living in Hollywood. The night before I had had a dream of Elvis Presley and a yellow brick road. “Come on out,” he said.I decided to travel by bus. With me I took only one book; the small pocket sized copy of THE NEW TESTAMENT I had found at my uncle’s.
I did not know it then but it was a rare and particularly powerful translation.For example, this passage from Romans 2: 14 is translated in the KING JAMES as “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.” This goes back to Moses, Deuteronomy 30:14. We all have the law in our heart and in our mouth.
The translation I found at my uncle’s place put that far stronger. It said, “When the gentiles who know not Christ live the life Christ teaches they are Christ.” World of difference.
To really get THE KING JAMES BIBLE clear in your mind read IN THE HAND OF DANTE and KING OF THE JEWS (a biography of Arnold Rothstein) by Nick Tosches. Nick Tosches is a superb writer, a real writer. His books are worth reading for their own sake. THE KING OF THE JEWS, in particular, really takes the mickey out of THE KING JAMES BIBLE. Tosches again and again shows how the translators miss the mark. By the way, the word “sin” means exactly that: to miss the mark.
Do not mistake me.My saying this does not mean I reject either God or Jesus.
I have a hard time with a translation that suffers from the knife of Mr. Bowdler.Who?
Thomas Bowdler felt, along with his sister, that THE BIBLE and many great works were too strong for the minds of the young. At the same time in France a man named Edmund Ducis felt the same.Both boasted of having produced copies of THE BIBLE and the great works which could, with propriety, be read aloud to the family at the supper table. So out goes “cock” and in comes “thigh.”
This prompted a mighty man of letters, Alexandre Dumas, to say, “In Rome, until Pope Gregory forbade it, doctors had a sign over their door which said that for a small fee and a twist of the wrist young boys could be perfected for the Papal choir. As those doctors perfected those boys so Ducis and Bowdler have perfected Shakespeare.”From someone, perhaps David Mamet, I learned that this passage from 1 Kings, 12:10 (KJV) translated, “And the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him (Rehoboam) , saying, Thus shat thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy father (Solomon) made our yoak heavy, but thou make it lighter unto us; thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins,” the actual text reads, “My cock is fatter than my father’s thigh.’
“It is good taste, not bad taste, which is the enemy,” said Salvador Dali.THE I CHING (Wilhelm/Baynes edition) in Hexagram 48, THE WELL, teaches: The JUDGMENT THE WELL. The town may be changed, but the well cannot be changed. It neither increases nor decreases. They come and go and draw from the well. If one gets down almost to the water and the rope does not go all the way, or the jug breaks, it brings misfortune.
The rope not going all the way means we stay rooted in convention; what we have been taught to believe.Conventionally we are taught that King David sinned mightily when he had sex with Bathsheba, the wife of his friend and Chief general Uriah whom he had murdered.
And, yes, that was a mighty sin.The rub is that Bathsheba is the mother of Solomon.
From the moment David’s cock stiffened when he stepped out on that roof and looked across the road at naked Bathsheba bathing it is the hand of God writing.Similarly, if I have faith it is because God wills that I have faith. If you have not faith, it is because God has willed that you have it not. Whether you believe that or not, that is what THE BIBLE teaches.
For example, in Exodus it is not Pharaoh who hardens his heart against the children of Israel but rather God who hardens, for His own purpose, Pharoah’s heart. It was also God who hardened Adolf Hitler’s heart. Every Jew serious about THE BIBLE knows this is true. It is what THE BIBLE teaches.
A little knowledge puffs us up into arrogance wrote Paul.
If people everywhere deny the existence of God it is because it is God’s will they do so.“Do you think when the Son Of Man returns He will find faith?” says Jesus in the King James.
In the version I had it was put, “Do you think when the son of man returns he will find so much as one person believing?”That means that so long as there is one person believing on this earth it is not yet the time for the return.
So, as long as I am here don’t expect Jesus.We are called, however, to more than belief.
We are called to knowledge.For example, I am asked to testify in court.
I say, “I believe this is what happened.”The opposing attorney, whether for the prosecution or for the defense it does not matter, then says to me, “You believe this is what happened? Belief is not good enough. Either you know or you do not know. If you do not know you are wasting the court’s time.”
Well, I know.I know that without faith none of us can live.
Bullshit, you say?Well, you have faith, if you are an employee, that your employer will be able to pay you for your work. If you do not have that faith you can not work for him/her.
Furthermore the more your employer meets their obligation to you the stronger grows your faith in your employer.You have faith that the goods you buy will do what you have been promised they will do.
When they prove themselves false you return them.Forty years ago on that bus out to Hollywood I read that small pocket sized copy of THE NEW TESTAMENT through cover to cover five times.
I recognized many of the ideas in it from another book I had been studying, the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of THE I CHING, a Chinese oracle that was old when Confucius was young.I had left my I CHING behind in Toronto.
“Don’t you want to take that with you,” the fellow I had left it with had said.“No. If I need it, it will be where I am,” I replied.
My first day in Hollywood I decided to go for a walk.I had no idea where to go. I decided the let the wind lead me.
What I did not then know but now do is that the word “spirit” is Latin for “breath,” or “wind.”
Unknowingly I let the spirit lead me.
I found myself at a store that sold second hand goods.
A very attractive young man was asking the clerk questions about 8mm movie projectors the clerk could not answer.
“Pardon me, but I work with those things. That is the best one,” I said.The fellow bought the projector.
“Would you care to come to my place,” he said.“Would you care for a coffee?” he asked after he showed me a porno and we had fun.
“Sure?”“Have a chair in the living room,” he said.
I went in, sat down and saw in front of my right hand the same edition of THE I CHING I had left behind in Toronto.“Are you into this?” I asked.
“No,” he said, adding, “We had a fellow staying here who was into that. When he left he left it behind. ‘Don’t you want to take that with you?’ we asked. ‘No, If I need it, it will be where I am. There is someone coming who will want it,’ he said.”“With your permission I will borrow this,” I said.
I spent the next few weeks in Hollywood cemetery where, at he grave of silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, I read and meditated on the ideas in THE I CHING and THE NEW TESTAMENT. I found they amplified each other.One day I got a phone call from the young man from whom I had gotten THE I CHING.
“My housemate thinks you stole that book. Can you bring it back?”“Tomorrow,” I said.
Tomorrow was a Sunday.I got up early, too early to go to the fellow’s house. I went for a walk. I saw a lot of folks walking into a church.
The signboard outside said the sermon was to be on the brotherhood of man.“That can’t be too bad,” I said.
After the minister spoke about the brotherhood of man the deacon got up and made a mockery of his words.He told how he had looked all over another city for a Christian church, finally finding one in a small room in an office building.
Now, had he said their twig on the tree I would have had no problem.But he was talking about the tree.
When David set out to build the temple he was told the heavens are the throne, the earth is the footstool, how can you build a house big enough for God?When David died and Solomon picked up he, too, was told, the heavens are the throne, the earth is the footstool. How can you build a house big enough for God?
And Jesus, when asked where he wanted the church built, said, “The heavens are the throne. The earth is the footstool. How can you build a house big enough for God. Let where two or more of you are gathered in my name be the church.”There is a saying: The nearer the church/synagogue/temple, the farther from God.
Buddhists phrase it, “The nearer the temple, the farther from The Buddha.”I let the moment pass.
Then I had a vision that shook me to my core.On a cross that loomed out of eternity and hung over the heads of the congregation I saw the wounded body of Jesus, naked (no polite cloth over his loins), his cock erect (as it would have been forced to be by the crucifixion), on his head a clump thorns, from his body blood dripping on to the unknowing heads of the people seated below.
“YOU KNOW THE TRUTH HERE. STAND AND SPEAK.”“It is not my place,” I said.
“YOU KNOW THE TRUTH HERE. STAND AND SPEAK.”“It is not my place. I could get arrested. I could go to jail. I could get hurt,” to my shame I said.
On the way out to Hollywood by bus when I Bible dipped I always came to the thorns and thistles—the cares and worries of the world that strangled the seed.The voice from the cross said with great sorrow, “LISTEN, YOU KNOW THE TRUTH HERE. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE BALLS TO SPEAK IT HERE AND NOW, YOU WILL NEVER HAVE THEM.”
At once I knew this was true.I also knew that it did not matter what I saw was a real vision or the product of my imagination because I did know the truth. If I lacked the courage to stand and speak it in that moment then I would never have it.
I rose from the back of the church, where I was seated, walked to the front, stood behind the pulpit with the golden covered I CHING in my right hand and spoke.“By what authority do you speak to us?” some asked.
My right hand short up. My finger pointed to the huge ornate Bible sitting on their lectern.“In that book on any page you care to choose you will find my authority written,” I said.
THE I CHING was still in my right hand.Seeing it a woman said, “He has one of our psalm books. Get it!”
At that moment three men came at me from each side. Six hands gripped each arm.I knew at once that if I did not get out of there at once there was no way the man who thought I had stolen THE I CHING would believe my story.
Came the thought my body acted. I shook them off, turned to my right, saw the sunlight exploding through an open door at the bottom of the stairs and walked out into the light.The moment I did I said to myself, “That was the dumbest thing you have ever done.”
As I continued my way I saw people going into a Roman Catholic Church. Conventional Protestants teach the Roman Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon and The Pope the Anti-Christ. I knew better. I also knew that nothing like what had happened in that Protestant Church would happen there. I went in, sitting down at the rear.No sooner had I done so that the priest stepped up to the pulpit. He said, “My words today are from St. Paul: When you see the need to speak the truth, STAND AND SPEAK IT.”
“Okay, Lord,” I said to myself, “You have underlined it.”I rose, got up, walked out and went to return THE I CHING.
“You will not believe what happened to me,” I said to the man who thought I had stolen the book.When I finished my tale he said, “You were right. Had you nor brought back the book I would not have believed you.”
That was 1970.Ten years later I met a man who was a missionary from that church.
“How did you come to The Lord?” he asked.“At the age of fourteen I became aware of myself as a homosexual person,” I said.
“Someone like you deserves to be killed,” he said.“When the time comes that will be,” I replied.
Go back now to THE I CHING, the hexagram of The Well. The rope is not long enough. One stays rooted in convention: what one has been taught to believe.The Lord says St. Paul to Timothy, is like a potter. He makes base pots. He makes fine pots. He makes each pot to suit a purpose. “You be a fine pot,” Paul tells Timothy.
For myself, I prefer to be a base pot.Fine pots only get used on special occasions when we want to impress. Base pots get used every day. They get broken. They get cast away. I prefer to be a base pot.
Twelve years pass.I am in Montreal with my SEX AND VIOLENCE CARTOON FESTIVAL, a study of censorship in animated cartoons, for three days.
Wherever I go in Montreal I keep seeing a very intense young man.The spirit moves me to return to Toronto a day early. I do not ask for a penny of the money that is owed to me.
I am showing a program of films by the French homosexual artist, film maker, painter, playwright, poet, sculptor Jean Cocteau.A friend is supposed to handle the door. I call and tell him that since I am back there is no reason for him to come.
“I had planned on it. Why don’t I take care of them coming in. You take care of them leaving.”I saw none of the people who walked in.
One of those who walked out was a ringer for the fellow I kept seeing In Montreal.That night he entered my life.
He not only changed it for the better but also through him I found the answer to a problem I had been engaged in for twelve years. I had been working on an adaptation of the Sumerian story of GILGAMESH. Through him I not only found the key to getting it written but also got the gift of the time to write it.“You are a Crazy-Wisdom-Yogin,” said a man to me after a reading of GILGAMESH.
“I hear crazy often enough,” I said, adding with a laugh, “Before I slug you tell me what the rest of that means.”“It is the highest compliment I, as a Buddhist, can pay. It means,” he said, “You are living absolutely the life you are teaching.”
“I would not say that as I know how far below the mark I fall but I am making the effort. Anything less is hypocrisy. Would you care for a beer?”Luckily, he did.
As he spoke I discovered he was an Archaeologist, Egyptologist, Sumerologist and a Tibetan Lama who had travelled with the Dalai Lama on his first journey across Canada. Not only that, he was a person I had previously read about.A Crazy-Wisdom-Yogin is a Buddhist master who after having achieved Nirvana returns to be a teacher.
Conventional Buddhists don’t much care for Crazy-Wisdom-Yogins.When I was six I was playing in the bush behind my Catholic grandparents house in Minto, New Brunswick. We came across some older boys naked doing things with each other I had never imagined could be done.
“What are they doing?” I asked my five year old cousin.“Fucking,” he said.
“What is that?” I asked.“Let me show you,” he said pulling down his pants and underwear. His was the first cock I saw other than my own. He was circumcised. I thought I had a growth on mine.
He was a great teacher. We soon had all of our Roman Catholic cousins playing this game.For me, until I was fourteen, it seemed completely natural.
My first grade teacher that year asked us to draw stick figures of men and women. I drew women with breasts and men with our gear.“You are an artist,” she said. She gave me colored chalk and encouraged me.
My mother had been brought up in the Church of England. She was, literally, from the wrong side of the tracks. Her father, a blacksmith, had been wiped out by automation. Her mother had cleaned houses to help keep the family fed. They had a rough time until her brothers became mechanics.My father was the black sheep of a highly respected Roman Catholic family. Their marriage was as frowned upon at that time as a marriage between people of different skin color.
There was a huge battle between my mother and my dad’s family about whether I would go to public school or church school.When my mother said, “Why don’t we let him decide?” no one could argue.
That night, alone with me, she said, “Do you want to go to Catholic school with the bad kids or public school with the goods kids?”I came home the first day to find all my Catholic cousins waiting for me. They threw sticks and stones. They called me a Protestant. I had no idea what the word meant.
I realized, however, that those who are our friends one moment can turn against us the next for no good reason. I became a loner.This was not a bad thing.
When my grade two teacher, who read from THE BIBLE each morning, saw my anatomically correct stick figures she told me I had a dirty mind. She tried, in vain, to beat the badness out of me.I knew she was wrong.
My first grade teacher was the wife of the principal. Had I been doing something wrong I knew she would have told me.This was not a bad thing.
I kept drawing “dirty pictures.”
My health took a turn for the worse. I almost died that year. I have a memory of a torrential nose bleed that would not end. Thankfully, my father’s work with the Canadian Pacific Railroad caused us to move from our home town of Minto to another town, Chipman, sixteen miles away. My first school day my father said, “Do you want to go to school or would you like to spend the day with me?” The memory of that wonderful day lingers with me still. It was capped when my dad made ice cream from scratch. I have never tasted better. The next day began with my teacher reading from THE BIBLE. After that she looked me dead in the eye as she said to the class, “I will give a prize to every student who does not miss a day of school.”
“Where is my prize?” I asked when she handed them out.
“You do not deserve one. You missed your first day of school,” she said. My sister Linda had watched me go to school for two years. Now her time came. She was very pretty. She was full of eagerness. She was excited. When we got to the school we saw the principal going in. Linda played with her niece who lived across the road from us. The principal’s name was Carol Babbington. “Say ‘Hello, Carol,’” I told her for some reason. I knew it was wrong for a child to address an adult by their first name. At noon I met Linda to bring her home. Her face was red from tears. The principal had had her brought from the classroom to her office where she was given the strap.
“I had great teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that the teachers were nice but they were dopes.”–Jane Jacobs, author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN CITIES and DARK AGE AHEAD.
The years passed. I watched more and more of my classmates become crippled by the school system. When I was in grade eleven my dad moved us from Chipman, New Brunswick to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. My first day of school the principal told me the standard of education in New Brunswick was lower than that in Ontario. “Don’t be ashamed when you fail,” he said. I passed with honours. Two years later, in grade thirteen, we were studying T. S. Elliot’s play MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL, about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Elliot based the play on the number four. There were four priests, four messengers, four knights, four murderers. A touring company brought a live production of the play to town. In this version there five priests, five messengers, five knights, five murderers. “Why do you think the director changed the symbolism?” our English teacher asked us.
Each student gave long, convoluted, intellectual answers.
Finally he asked me.
“The fifth person is a very attractive young man. He is either the producer or the director’s boyfriend,” I said.
That led to a near riot. I found myself once again in the principal’s office where I was told I had the wrong attitude and would starve in two weeks if I left school that day. I borrowed thirty dollars from a girl friend, caught the bus and arrived on the streets of Toronto that night. I was homeless. I had no prospects. A few months later I got a job as an usher in a theatre. The young man who had played the fifth in MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL was working there as an usher as well. I asked him why he had been in the play. “I was the director’s boyfriend,” he told me.
Had I not walked out of that high school I would not have learned that my instincts were dead on right. In the years to come I was to discover that had I not walked away from the school system I would have starved of the great feast life had in store for me.
Until One Is Committed
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.–W. H. Murray, THE SCOTTISH HIMALYAN EXPEDITION.
“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.
“It is good taste not bad taste which is the enemy.”-Salvador Dali
“The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present and points the way to its new birth. He is at once the product and preceptor of his times.”-Norman Bethune.
“You have no need that any man should teach you.”-1 John 2:27.
“Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.”-Bernardo Bertolucci.
“Admit, assume, because, believe, could, doubt, end, expect, faith, forget, forgive, guilt, how, it, mercy, pest, promise, should, sorry, storm, them, us, waste, we, weed-neither these words nor the conceptions for which they stand appear in this book; they are the whiteman’s import to the New World, the newcomer’s contribution to the vocabulary of the man he called Indian. Truly, the parent Indian families possessed neither these terms nor their equivalents.”-Ruth Beebe Hill, HANTA YO.
“He who without the Muse’s madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.”-Plato.
“We only really learn in conversation after sex.”–Judith Merril.
“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very great mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”–Albert Einstein.
“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself,” writes the great playwright George Bernard Shaw.”Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education,” adds Bertrand Russell.
“School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,”–Ivan Illich.
“We get three educations. The first is from our parents; the second is from our schoolmasters. The third is from life. The last makes liars of the first two.”–Montesquieu.
“I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I’m afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes. I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me. They get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are. University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything.We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it’s clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web.”-Jane Jacobs whose books, from her first, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN CITIES to her last, DARK AGE AHEAD, are must reading.
“I honestly believe Reg Hartt is the greatest teacher I know for only he teaches the evil of teaching. Well, not only he. For confirmation of everything he has been saying all along read David Mamet’s TRUE AND FALSE.”–Emo Philips.
“Invent nothing. Deny nothing. Stand up. Speak up. Stay out of school.”–David Mamet, TRUE AND FALSE.
“TRUE AND FALSE is a revealing book of the highest order and a pleasure to read.”–Anthony Hopkins.
The teacher who made the biggest difference to me? A sparrow. I had pestered my parents into getting me an air rifle for Christmas. One day I saw two sparrows sitting on a hydro line. I shot one. It fell dead to the earth. Its mate flew away. The next morning I saw the mate sitting where it had sat. It sang a song of mourning. For three days it sat there singing. On the third day I shot it. I buried it beside its mate. Then I took the air rifle, broke it and threw it in the trash. I had no idea something so small could love so much.
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From THE KING OF THE JEWS by Nick Tosches;
The bible tells us many things. It tells us that in Egypt of old, a man called Amram, a second-generation Levite, married his aunt. Her name was Jochebed. It is written in the book of Exodus: “Amram took him Jochebed his father’s sister to wife and she bore him Aaron and Moses.”
Thus the King James Bible, one of the great prose works of the English language, published in London at a time (1611) when Jews were still prohibited from living in England. They had been expelled by King Edward I in 1290 and would be allowed to return under Oliver Cromwell in 1656.
This passage, which names Amram and Jochebed for the first time, comes four chapters after the tale of the birth of Moses, in which Moses, being born during a period of pharaonic edict decreeing that the mid-wives of the land were to kill every newborn Hebrew male, was spared by stealth, set adrift on the river in a little makeshift barque of bulrushes by his unnamed mother, and found and later adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter.
The Bible is the work of wise-men and madmen, seers and poets, givers and thieves of power and beauty, vendors and victims of shame and of guilt, fabulists and mythographers, makers of lists more tiresome than Homer’s Catalogue of Ships, seekers of miracle and splendor, seekers of bread and gruel, scholars of a past that never was, and prophets after the fact.
Much was made in the latter part of the twentieth century of a “postmodern literature,” a “new writing” that turned away from realism and linear forms of narrative. But, as the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” From its earliest words, written by an unknown hand, in the hill country of the kingdom of Judah or in the kingdom of Israel to the north, at an unknown time in the early tenth century b.c, the Bible threw all linear narrative and reality to the howling desert winds.
io nick tosches
We are told in the first verse of Genesis that on the first day of Creation God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. “And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Later in the same verse, we are told of the fourth day of Creation, when God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night”; and it was so. “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.”
And those who know Hebrew can read what has been kept from the world by every translation of the Bible since the earliest Greek versions of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, of the third century b.c.
It is not God who creates the world, but rather the gods. The Hebrew plural elohim appears many times in the archaic texts of Genesis before the gods, without notice, suddenly become God.
“God’s name changes from \elohim] in Gen. 1:1-2:3 to
[yahweh elohim] (predominantly) in 2:4-3:24, and then varies between | yahweh \ and \elohim] in the rest of the text. Many interpreters, including Philo |ca. 20 b.c.-a.d. 50], the classical rabbis [ca. a.d. 70-1200], and modern critical scholars [ca. 1895-present], have tried to make sense of these changes in divine name, with differing degrees of success.” Thus one modern scholar, Ronald S. Hendel, writing near the end of the twentieth century, in The Text of Genesis 1-11.
At the time that Genesis was composed, the cults of both kingdoms of the divided Hebrew monarchy, Israel and Judah, were of many gods, of whom the storm-god Yahweh came to be revered above the rest: El, the primeval lord of creation, whence all elohim; Asherah, consort of El and mother of the gods; Baal, the eldest of the storm-gods, son of El; Anath, blood-ravening goddess of war and love, daughter of El, sister and consort of Baal; Molech, to whom young sons and daughters were sent through the fire of child sacrifice; and the lesser gods beneath them.
The truth is simple. The origins of Genesis predated monotheism. Later, when monotheism took root, the literal meaning of elohim, the gods, had to be explained away. So it was, after some centuries, that the
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rabbi-sages explicated that elohim was a name for the one true God in all His manifold greatness. This, they said, was confirmed by the form of the verb that elohim governed—bara, “created”—which was inflected in the singular. As the verb must agree with the subject in number, elohim referred therefore, de facto and de fide, not to gods, but to the Almighty alone.
But bara is also the primitive root, the radix, the charged nucleus of all its descendant forms. The word is found in the Old Testament always with God, or the gods, as its subject; and the word is always the same. The creation of Adam and Eve: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. I… | So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” Here again the word translated as God is in the plural, elohim, in the original. The first-person plural phrases “let us make” and “in our image” are, however, also in plural in the original. Bara remains the same. As there were no verbal tenses in the old Semitic scripts, this word held past, present, and future within it. (The Bible was first construed with tenses in the Greek of the Septuagint. Masoretic rabbis of the next millennium changed the old Hebrew texts by, among other interpretative alterations, adding to verbs certain characters that they assigned to indicate certain tenses.)
In Isaiah, the Lord is “about to create,” is “creating,” and “will create.” In the phrase of the Qumran text of Isaiah known as the Isaiah Scroll, Yahweh describes himself as “making good and creating evil.” Everywhere, bara. Most notably, it transcends verbs. Nouns such as “creation” and “Creator” are bara. The primitive root, the radix, the charged nucleus: bara.
Judeo-Christian apologists have reached far to explain God’s elocutions in the first-person plural, as in: “Let us make man in our image.” The “royal pronoun” has been proposed—the “we” of kings and queens—as has been the “plural of deliberation,” as in the “let’s see now” of the solitary, muttering cogitator. It happens that the royal “we” did not develop until the third century a.d., when Diocletian used it; and in fact, when Diocletian did use it, he did so to include in his pronouncements the fellow emperors who formed with him the imperial tetrarchy that he had instituted. Only later was it used by sole sovereigns. As for the “plural of deliberation,” it is a grammatical sophistication along the order of the Latin “deliberative subjunctive.” It is unknown in the primitive syntax of biblical Hebrew, and it is not encountered in the Old Testament.
I use the term “biblical Hebrew” for convenience. It should be understood that this term does not denote a standard language. Throughout the centuries of the composition of the Old Testament, the Hebrew language was a mongrel language, ever inchoate, ever in flux.
From the eighth-century Vespasian Psalter to Shakespeare, a period of not quite nine hundred years—less a span than that of the composition of the Old Testament—we find the word “gods” written first in Old English, as godas, godo, and godu, then in Middle English asgodes, godds, and goddes, and coming to gods in Early Modern English. The name of the language itself, in less of a span, went through Engliscum, Engliscra, en-glische, englissce, Engleis, Inglis, Englysshe, and Inglish before emerging as English, which appears in the dedication of the King James Bible of 1611.
In the same time, from Old English to Early Modern English, changes in the grammar, syntax, word meanings, and the forms of characters and scripts of the language changed so multifariously that a reader living in the latter period would find it a daunting task to comprehend what had been written in the former. Old words vanished, new words came mysteriously and abundantly from sources that were far-flung, invested with definitions based on misunderstanding and understanding alike.
So much vaster were the changes undergone by the Hebrew language in the course of the more than nine hundred years in which the books of the Bible were written and rewritten. Linguists speak of Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Syriac, each with its own subset of little-known palimpsest dialects. From the paleo-Hebrew script of Judah to the profound Persian and Aramaic influences of the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. and the Hellenistic influences that came in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century b.c, the language of the Bible, whose first words were written in a script derived from Bronze Age Canaanite and whose last words were written in a script derived from Aramaic, is a polyglot sea far beyond containment by the term “biblical Hebrew” or any other term. The Hebrew language was never “Hebrew” to the authors of the Bible. The word ibri—Hebrew—
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referred to a race. The language of that race was yehudit—Judahite— whence the word “Jew.” It is a word origin that can be heard most clearly in the German Jude.
Assyria, in the north land of Babylonia, gained its independence at the end of the fourteenth century b.c. By the dawn of the next millennium, Assyria dominated Babylonia. This domination lasted for about four hundred years. Then, in 612 b.c, Babylon took, the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and regained dominion of Mesopotamia. The Assyrian kingdom continued to exist as a subservient power under Babylonian sovereignty. Outside of Babylonia, however, the new Assyrian king, Nebuchadnezzar, sought to expand an empire that no longer existed.
During his forty-three-year reign, which began in 605 b.c, King Nebuchadnezzar pursued his will throughout the Near East. His armies besieged Egypt, Arabia, and the city-state of Damascus in Aram, which the Greeks would call Syria.
The kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been held in vassalage by Assyria since the eighth century. Hoshea, the last king of Israel, had entered into alliance with Egypt to plot a rebellion against Assyrian rule. Ahaz, the king of Judah, did not join the anti-Assyrian coalition. In a desperate attempt to save himself and Jerusalem, he had turned to forbidden gods and old rituals. Restoring child sacrifice, he made his own son “pass through the fire.” The Assyrians laid waste to Samaria in the north and later the temple and palace of Jerusalem in the south.
In the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the upper classes of Judah were expatriated to Babylonia. This marked the beginning of what came to be known as the Babylonian exile or Babylonian captivity, a period traditionally ascribed to the years 586 through 538 b.c.
Nebuchadnezzar died midway through this period, in 562 b.c. And it was in this period that the Aramaic language supplanted the Akkadian language, of which Assyrian was a dialect, as the common language of Babylonia. Akkadian survived for a time as a language of literature and learning, but Aramaic would be a principal language of international communication throughout the Near East for more than a thousand years to come,
The Jews flourished in Babylonia, the legendary birthplace of the great patriarch Abraham. Many of them found prosperity in this pagan land whose culture had been revered since long before Abraham was conceived.
Cyrus II conquered Babylonia in the autumn of 539 b.c. With this conquest all of the Near East, save Egypt, was now under the rule of the Persian Empire, the most powerful and grandest empire that the world had ever known. The Jews were given liberty to leave Babylonia at will. A good number of them seem to have stayed.
In the early fourth century b.c, Alexander the Great took all of Persia’s empire and more than Persia had ever dreamt. From the Nile to the Indus, from Athens to the Arabian Sea: The empire of Alexander made the empire of Persia seem a paltry thing. Babylonia, like rest of Alexander’s vast conquerings, became a part of the Hellenistic world. It was in Babylonia, in the spring of 323 b.c, that Alexander died, just shy of thirty-three.
Another Persian kingdom, Parthia, under Mithridates I, seized Babylonia in the mid-second century b.c. Parthian culture was a rich amalgam of Persian, Hellenistic, and Semitic influences. They worshipped Ahura Mazda, the ancient Persian deity who had become the ruling god of the Zoroastrian religion. But they worshipped Babylonian gods, Greek gods, and Hindu gods as well. At its height, the Parthian Empire held large populations of Jews and Buddhists alike.
Parthian Babylonia extended to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The land west of the Euphrates was held by the Roman Empire under Augustus. In a.d. 98-117, under Trajan, and again in a.d. 193-21 i, under Septimus Severus, all of Babylonia fell to Roman occupation. The major Jewish settlements were on the east bank of the river.
Mesopotamia—the Greeks and the Romans still called it so; the Persians called it Khvarvaran; other names would come—was now only a place. Its time was ended. The majesty of its autochthonic vital forces, the magic and power of five thousand years, was dead.
In the early third century a.d., the Parthians of Persia fell in turn to the Sassanids of Persia. With conflict the Persians held at bay the imperial Roman forces that occupied the Syrian land to the northwest. The most feared and famed of these forces was XII Fulminata. This legion had been called upon by Titus, son of and successor to Vespasian, in the siege of Jerusalem in the spring of a.d. 70. The war in Jerusalem had led to the sec-
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Ond destruction of the temple in the summer of that year. The temple had been looted before it had been burned, and all throughout the empire and beyond had seen the denarii minted from the silver of that looting. These coins bore the words iudea capta (“Judea Defeated”).
If the Jews had it bad under the pagan emperors, they had it no better under the Christian emperors, whose succession began with Constantine in the early fourth century.
And what was this thing that had happened, this thing called Christianity?
Elohim is a noun of multitude. Like the myriad hosts of heaven found elsewhere in the Bible, as in Nehemiah, where Ezra tells the Lord: “The host of heaven worships you.” Like the flock of God, as in the First Epistle of Peter: “Feed the flock of God which is among you.” Like the vast legion of demons, as in the Gospel of Mark: “Legion is name to me, for we are many”; or a military legion in ancient Rome, as in George Rawlinson of Oxford’s Manual of Ancient History: “The legion was light, elastic, adapted to every variety of circumstance.” Like the pantheon, in its sense of an “assemblage of all the gods” or “the deities of a people collectively,” as found in a definition of monotheistic religions that states that such faiths possess “all the attributes of Olympian religions, except that the pantheon of gods is subsumed under a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being.” Like the assembly of gods itself.
E. Theodore Mullen Jr., author of The Assembly of the Gods: The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature: “Common to the mythopoeic world of the Ancient Near East was the idea of a council or assembly of the gods that met to determine the fates of the cosmos. Depictions of such divine gatherings are found in the religious and mythological literatures of Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Phoenicia, and Israel.”
The Semitic people of Ugarit dwelled near the Mediterranean coast of Syria from Neolithic times to the late second millennium b.c. They called this synod of the gods phr’ilm, or phr’elm. The gods were Urn, or elm. The Ugaritic language, an important influence on the development of Hebrew, began to insert a medial h-sound into its plural forms, and the gods began to be called ilhim or elhim.
There were no vowels in ancient Semitic writing systems. The numinous sigh, the primal ah with which every language begins, is heard in the names of the first letter of every alphabet. It is the ah of the Hebrew aleph. But unlike the Arabic alif, which also represents the sound of the sigh, the
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Hebrew aleph represents a sound more similar to that of the ancient Semitic B, the hheth or kheth of the Phoenicians. The Semitic letter represents a guttural spirant, a fast choking of the sigh, a closing of the throat in midbreath, the spiritus asper of classical Greek grammar, the ayn of the Arabic alphabet. It is a sound that occurs in the West, but not in its languages. It is certainly not the initial sound of the Hebrew word that is traditionally rendered as eluhim.
In non-Semitic tongues, this oldest element of human speech and sound-symbols—the sacred mark of the precipient, borning ah—was often invested with a sense of great power. In Sanskrit, it was the Word that existed before existence. Among certain Buddhist sects of Japan, it denoted the essence of all things or the incomprehensible void.
The Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The book of Revelation: “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.”
The tilted symbol of the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet was set upright by the Greeks in the late ninth century b.c. to form their alpha, which the Romans took in turn, altering other Greek letters as the Greeks had altered the other Phoenician symbols. The Greek and Roman alphabets added what the Phoenician alphabet lacked: the opening, in its aleph, of the universal sigh, and other vowels as well. From Latin, the Romance tongues took the sigh with which their alphabets began. The non-Romance tongues of Germany and England began their languages and alphabets with the sigh as well. During what is called the Great Vowel Shift, the effects of which changed English pronunciation forever by the time of Shakespeare’s birth, the values of long vowels and short vowels were transposed and the sigh became the anxious, clipped, repressive sound that is the first letter of the English alphabet as it is known today. So it was that the British colonies in America gave rise to the first nation whose language and literature were not born of the sigh.
In the case of Hebrew, vowel markings were formulated and added by the Masoretic rabbinate between the fifth and seventh centuries a.d., hundreds of years after the language was extinct as a vernacular, surviving only liturgically.
Like other Semitic languages, Hebrew had given way to Aramaic, which became the international vernacular and literary language throughout the Near East from the eighth century b.c. to the eighth century a.d. Only in the sixth century b.c, under the early Persian Empire, did the Hebrew alphabet evolve into the character forms familiar to later rabbis and scholars. The book of Esther, from the second century b.c, reveals Persian and Aramaic literary elements that are richer by far than its moribund Hebrew.
Esther’s name derives from that of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar; and the book of Esther reveals that the Hebrew feast of Purim derives from the pagan Babylonian new year festival called puru, an Akkadian word meaning “lot”or “die”: in the Hebrew plural of purim, “lots” or “dice.” Adar, the month of Purim, derives from the Babylonian month of Addaru.
Ishtar was the Akkadian name of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who came to incorporate the powers of a Sumerian goddess of unbridled passion and fertility, a Semitic goddess of war, and a goddess of the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. “I am Inanna of the dawn,” she says in Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, the Sumerian mytho-poem that may have predated the second millennium b.c. and foreshadowed all the mythic and literary descents to come—Theseus, Heracles, Odysseus, Orpheus, Virgil, Dante.
First and above all, she was the Divine Whore of Babylon.
The Sumerians, from whose soul she emerged, were not like other people. I defer to Jean Bottero, emeritus director of Assyriology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and the author of much profound and learned work on ancient Mesopotamia.
Jean Bottero tells us that the mysterious people whom we call Sumerians arrived in the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the territory of modern-day Iraq, in the early fourth century b.c., either from the east or from the southeast, along the Iranian coast on the Persian Gulf. Their ultimate origin is unknown. Their language was like no other. “In contrast to the Semites, who always maintained contact with their relatives who had stayed in the area of origin, and who constantly received new blood from throughout their history, the Sumerians, according to all indications, seemed to have burned all bridges with their point of departure, and they seem never to have received the least ethnic support from that area.”
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The Sumerians and the Semites “formed the principal elements of the country from before the beginning of history, and together they created their common high civilization,” which culminated around the year 3000 b.c. with the Sumerian invention of writing.
Rimbaud: La morale est la faiblesse de la cervelle.
The Sumerians were free of the feebling disease of morality. They had no conception of sin. “There was even a goddess whose domain was Love in all the meanings of the term, and she soon became foremost and absorbed all others in her powerful personality: Inanna I Istar.
“For the prostitutes and courtesans of the female sex, we have at least half a dozen different designations of these groups. Some stress their religious character: the quadistu were the consecrated’(?), and the isturitu, devoted to Istar, emphasized the links to their divine patroness.”
Marriage was not necessarily monogamous. The number of a man’s concubines were limited only by his wealth. A husband was “free to visit periodically other married or unmarried women.”
Women were free to abandon their households. “Others, in particular the istaritu, were perhaps devoted from their early childhood to Istar and to their vocation, which took them away from union with a single man only in order to offer them to all men.” Female homosexuality seems to have been considered no less natural than male homosexuality. “We have at least one record of it, and I have been told that there is a still more explicit one in the Berlin museum that remains unpublished.”
Prostitutes, consecrated or otherwise, were distinguished by the manner of their dress and the style of their hair. “The place where they were most easily found, and used, was the tavern {bit sdbi, bit sdbiti) and especially the hostel (astammu, bit astammi) which served as an inn but also played the role of the village pub, and almost that of a brothel, where one could drink and enjoy oneself to one’s heart content.”
There were also male prostitutes, for men and for women. There were transvestites. There were devotees of every sexual persuasion and specialite.
“These people were also largely connected to Istar.” This was a circumstance that “allowed them to partake in ‘abominations’ (asalfat), in other words behavior that is forbidden to common mortals, in order to delight the heart of the patroness.”
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The excesses of Ishtar “were well known in mythology, and several of them were reflected in her cult. Also known, at least in some places, was an entire liturgy of sacred marriage, the intercourse between a god and a goddess, which was enacted by the ruler and a priestess, perhaps in order to ascertain the fertility of the earth and the herds, and in any case the prosperity of the land. In this tradition there was something that constantly brought up love and its functions, and preserved it, or gave it a naturalism, an ingenuity, and a candor that is for us difficult to imagine.”
Love was “presented as being the point of access to a life that is truly cultural and human.” Sex “was practiced without constraints and joyously, promoted by all imaginable ‘specialists,’ encouraged by the gods without the least juridical, moral, or religious restriction—provided only that it did not involve any violence or disorder.”
The Sumerians left behind “a certain number of clay figurines where lovers in the midst of sexual intercourse are represented, lying down or standing. Among the latter, at least those figurines where the woman is sodomized while she is drinking beer through a long reed-pipe from a jar, as was the custom in those days, clearly reflect the pleasures of the ‘hostel’ rather than those of the conjugal bed.”
Love was not always rosy, in life or in literature. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero’s friend Enkidu, nearing his death, looks back with rancor to curse the courtesan of Uruk who long ago had “civilized” him:
Never will you dwell in a harem,
The dregs of beer will stain your beautiful breast,
With his vomit the drunks will splash your attire.
Ishtar was a predatory lover. Gilgamesh himself only barely escaped her caress, which was followed always by her wrath. She had given herself with passion to her first love, the shepherd-king Damuzi, then betrayed him. Any man who lost his virility through battle or illness knew to blame his misfortune on the wicked will of Ishtar.
Babylon: “She made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” Babylon: “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.” Thus the wandering, furying prophet of Revelation, in the time of Domitian.
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Ishtar to Esther, puru to purim.
Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, the thirteenth-century physician and codifier of Jewish law, asked rhetorically in his Mishneh Torah: What is the obligation of the Purim feast?
“That one should eat meat,” he said, “and drink wine until he is drunk and falls asleep from drunkenness.”
It cannot be known, therefore, how accurately the Masoretic vowel markings and the pronunciations assigned to them reflect the sounds of Hebrew as it had been spoken in biblical days. The vowels interpolated by scholars into other dead Semitic languages must be more conjectural by far. As early as the fourth and fifth centuries, when Latin was still a living language, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and others were arguing the proper pronunciation of that language. How much more problematic to derive at the pronunciation of a language, a language without vowels, centuries or a thousand years or more after that language had died.
In the Bible, the word “elohim” consists only of the letters aleph-lamed-heh-yod-mem, equivalent to alhym. The yod-sound is not represented in the traditional Romanized word elohim. The aleph was not a vowel, but rather a fast guttural choking of breath that Roman letters cannot approximate. The o-sound and /-sound were insertions based on a theoretical linguistic restoration of many centuries later. We are left, then, more accurately, with lhym. This is very close to the Ugaritic ilhim, or elhim— whose vowels also are based on theory—equivalent to lhm, as found in the phrase for the assembly of the gods. It is clear that the Hebrew word speculatively rendered as elohim and the Ugaritic word speculatively rendered as ilhim, or elhim, are, if not the same word, very close cognates.
It began with & and L-, the earliest known Semitic forms of the Hebrew character lamed, the l in lhym.
Enlil was the greatest of Sumerian gods. In the words of Nancy Sandars, translator of the Gilgamesh epic and other Mesopotamian poetry, Enlil was “air and storm and active power.” The worship of Enlil was attested to as early as 2500 b.c, in cuneiform tablets of the Sumerian city-state of Shuruppak, on the bank of the Euphrates in what is now south-central Iraq. Thousands of years later, in the early twenty-first century a.d., ancient Shuruppak, now called Fara, was one of many archeologically rich sites to be ravaged by desecration and looting following the American assault on Iraq.
The Sumerians, who were not Semitic, were absorbed into the first Semitic Empire, the Akkadian kingdom, established in southern Mesopotamia in the late twenty-fourth century b.c. The Akkadians adopted the cuneiform script to write their own Semitic language. They adopted much else of Sumerian culture as well.
The Assyrians established Nineveh and the other great cities of their kingdom in a geographic triangle formed by the Kurdish mountains to the north, the Tigris River to the west, and the Upper Zab River to the east flowing into the Tigris at the southernmost tip. The Assyrians adopted the Akkadian language, and like the Akkadians, they were cultural dependents of Babylonia and came to embrace the Babylonian gods.
Like the treasures of Sumeria, Akkadia, and Babylon itself, most of the artifacts of Assyrian civilization were stolen or destroyed in the rampages of the American military occupation of Baghdad.
In the Akkadian tongue, Enlil became Elil. The two elements of this name—el, il—were to be the theophoric source of all Semitic gods. Since the vowels are speculative, the / was where gods dwelled.
In Ugaritic, which descended directly from Akkadian, the word for “god” was el, or il. In Hebrew, as in Phoenician, the word for “god” was el. In Aramaic, the word was elah.
Deuteronomy, dating to the seventh century b.c, shows the influence of this Aramaic word for “god.” Here the form eloah, translated as “God,” is composed of the Hebrew letters aleph -lamed-waw-heh, the first two letters of elohim and the last two letters of Yahweh. Deuteronomy also includes reference to astral worship, which the conquering Assyrians brought to Judah in the century preceding that writing of Deuteronomy. Eloah is encountered again in the book of Job, which has been dated to the century after Deuteronomy. Here God bears three names: Yahweh, El, and Eloah, a welding of El and Yahweh.
Later, in Arabic, from al-ila, “the god,” would come the sacred name of Allah.
The el was enfolded into names of other Semitic gods as well: Bel, the Babylonian successor to Enlil in the thirteenth century b.c, known also as
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Belial, as Baal to the Canaanites, and, much later, in Christian times, Beelzebul, Beelzebub, Baalzebub. The plural of this dark god, baalim, occurs many times in the Old Testament, with the same Hebrew plural inflection as elohim. Yet while elohim is always translated as “God,” never as “the gods,” baalim appears always as “the Baals.”
Strange words from the book of Hosea: “And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name.”
A few points about this King James translation. The “thou” that suddenly becomes “her” is assumed to be Israel, the Lord’s chosen bride. The Hebrew word transliterated as Ishi means “my man.” Nowhere else in the Bible does the Lord seek to be called such, and nowhere else is he so called. As for the word “Baali,” it in fact appears in the Hebrew text simply as Baal. This is reflected in the New Revised Standard Version, which is also more explicit in its phrasing “the names of the Baals.”
Hosea, who was active in the prophecy racket in the eighth century b.c., is believed to have actually delivered many of the oracles, such as the one just cited, that are attributed to him. Be that as it may, verses such as this don’t-call-me-Baal routine serve to illustrate that the Old Testament is in no way a monotheistic work. It is a monotheizing work. Monotheism did not exist when the early books of the Bible were written. There would not even be a word to express the concept of monotheism until the dawn of the fifth century a.d., when the word “unicultor,” “worshipper of one god only,” appears in the late Latin poetry of Prudentius. The books of the Bible move, through the centuries of their authorship, toward monotheism.
In 1901, the scholar of myth Edwin Sidney Hartland (1848-1927) coined a strange and beguiling word: “theoplasm.” As he defined it, theoplasm is “god-stuff, not a god fully formed and finally evolved.” It is a definition that can be rightly applied to the shifting divine force, now plural and now again singular.
The Sole One. Creator of mankind. King of kings. Lord of lords. These are phrases applied to the gods Re and Osiris in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from the second millennium b.c. Though they are worded specifically in the singular, they are in no way to be taken as intimations of monotheism, only as titles of worshipful or fearful respect. The same is true of similar phrasings in the Bible.
The monotheizing process was a slow and winding journey, ending in theocracy: the mingling of deities into one divine being. God comes to us not ex nihilo, from nothing, but from the gods that preceded Him.
Yahweh—some say this name is of Egyptian origin—was a storm-god, like Baal and Enlil before him. And, like all the gods who have been born of monotheism, he becomes increasingly a god of destruction.
In forsaking paganism, in abandoning the gods and cleaving the sacred into Almighties, man had chosen, raised, and embraced under different names and guises long-sleeping Enyalion, the ancient Cretan god of war and destruction, and had begun to “go down,” to use the words of William Blake, “to self-annihilation.”
Enyalion. Ad nihil. Annihilation.
The artificial births of the one true God were the true genesis of the fatal disease that is the plague of Enyalion: the death of the soul. Where once theophany billowed through soul and sky, there now billowed the black smoke of annihilation through soul and sky gone dead. What can be made of words such as “Thou shalt not kill”? They have no meaning in this world and are worthless as poetry.
Theology redacts, revises, implants conditional clauses and circumstantial exegesis. Where once was the Word, there are now words. Where once was the Law, there are now legal definitions, interpretations, and amendments. Where once was the Book, there are now treatises.
The Greek word “pneuma,” the divine spirit, the breath of life, also meant flatulence. Thus theology.
The Koran tells that Jews, Christians, and followers of the holy messenger Muhammad were all descended from Abraham. This is the first sacred text to state the common Semitic roots of the three religions. In blood and language, Arab and Jew were indeed kindred Semites.
The fifth sura of the Koran tells of Allah’s giving His commandment against murder to “the children of Israel.” For “whoever slays a soul,” says Allah, “it is as though he slew all men.”
Central to early Christianity was agape, the shared feast of holy love.
King of the Jews 49
History attends no love feasts, but it does attest that it was men who were the products of Christian cultures who brought about the greatest feast of death that the world has known: the forty-month period that began in December 1941 with the implementation of the Nacht und Nebel order at Chelmno and ended in August 1945 with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Christian cultures in conflict, atom bomb courtesy of the good Jew.
50 nick tosches
Literature
How the mighty has fallen: The King James Bible turns 400
Michael Valpy
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Feb. 05, 2011 3:57PM EST
Last updated Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 6:50AM EST
It was published four centuries ago, the King James Version of the Bible, labelled the greatest manifestation of the English language – greater than Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan – although its primary author was strangled on church orders and his body burned.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, the 19th-century British historian, called it “a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”
It is the only literary masterpiece produced by a committee. It was printed at the moment in history when English was said to have reached “its brief perfection.” No other writing has penetrated idiomatic speech more deeply or for so long. By one linguist’s estimate, three times as many of its words and phrases have entered common usage as have those of Shakespeare.
It gave the language “no man can serve two masters,” “how are the mighty fallen” and “out of the mouths of babes.” It gave “fly in the ointment” and “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
It gave – who knew? – “kick against the pricks.”
Still, scholars such as historical theologian Ephraim Radner of the University of Toronto’s Anglican Wycliffe College speak of the 400th anniversary as something of a funeral notation for biblical literary culture – a culture that only four decades ago shaped the soaring oratory and cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. but now is passing rapidly from the collective memory of an English-speaking world with no knowledge of the bonds of its rhetoric, metaphors and sublime rhythms.
Made for a reason The King James Version (KJV) – its other name is the Authorized Version (AV) – is the product of royal and religious politics, linguistic nationalism, church bureaucracy and accident.
It was commissioned in 1604, a year after James was crowned, at a conference he convened “for hearing and for the determining of things pretended to be amiss in the Church.”
Indeed, much was amiss in England’s strife-riven Anglican Church, a mere 70 years after Henry VIII hived it off from Roman Catholicism: His son, Edward VI, made it Protestant; his older daughter, Mary I, restored it to Catholicism and then younger daughter, Elizabeth I, made it a big-tent monopoly edgily embracing both Protestant Puritans and Anglo-Catholics.
The son of Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed by Elizabeth for treason, James was already ruler of Scotland when he succeeded Elizabeth upon her death in 1603. But before he could get south to London, he received a petition signed by 1,000 ministers belonging to the Church of England’s Puritan wing complaining about practices – the wearing of robes, bowing at the name of Jesus and so forth – of their priestly colleagues in the Anglo-Catholic wing.
His response was to convene the conference, which was a failure except for the suggestion that a new Bible be prepared to correct known errors and bridge doctrinal differences.
James welcomed the idea. He saw it as a means to replace the popular Geneva Bible – the Bible of Shakespeare and, for the most part, of Milton – which he declared the worst in English because it was Puritan and counter to the divine right of kings.
Six committees were struck to produce the replacement – two each in Oxford, Cambridge and London – under the oversight of Lancelot Andrewes, the dean of Westminster, a scholar so outstanding that it was said of him “the world wanted learning to know how learned he was.”
Nothing then happened for three years for reasons unknown, although it may have had something to do with the 1605 discovery of Guy Fawkes and the Catholic Gunpowder Plot aimed at the destruction, James said, “not only … of my person … but of the whole body of the State.”
From 1607 on, however, the work went quickly, reaching the public four years later. And it was a masterpiece, marked not only by culture and learning, but by humility and piety – “the final answer to those who maintain that no good thing can come out of the deliberations of committee,” Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury and thus Anglicans’ spiritual world leader, wrote 350 years later.
The KJV is often labelled a “translation.” More than 80 per cent of its New Testament and much of its Old Testament were the work of William Tyndale, whose translations of original Greek and Hebrew texts had appeared nearly a century earlier.
Tyndale was a priest, reformer, scholar and linguist determined to give the English people a Bible in their own language – as he put it, “to cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture” – at a time when English was looked down upon by the educated elites as the coarse tongue of the masses, and the pre-Reformation church in England forbade translations, considering only Latin to be fit for the word of God even though few ordinary people understood it.
Frustrated in England, Tyndale left for the continent and, beginning in 1526, produced his New Testament in Germany, where Martin Luther’s Reformation was gaining strength, and Antwerp, arranging with sympathizers to smuggle it in cotton bales into England and Scotland.
Condemned for his efforts, he went into hiding in Belgium, only to be betrayed and tried as a heretic. He was executed (by strangulation) and his body burned in public. His last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes,” a prayer answered only months later when Henry ordered that copies of an English Bible vastly indebted to Tyndale be placed in every church in his realm. He realized it demonstrated his supremacy over the church, rather than the pope’s.
Archbishop Coggan wrote in 1963 that Tyndale’s translations were great “because of his almost uncanny gift of simplicity in the use of the English language. … Phrases of almost monosyllabic grandeur which have become part and parcel of our literary inheritance we owe to Tyndale. It was this kind of English that fixed the standard for centuries to come.”
Tyndale employed a register just above common speech, using basic Saxon vocabulary with short, powerful words and sentences to which he added a range of English styles that still astonish grammarians. No one else wrote like this at the time.
Timed to perfection What stoked the influence of Tyndale’s language and the KJV is, first, that they appeared in the period historian G.M. Trevelyan called the “brief perfection” of English. The steady progress and enrichment of English from Chaucer to Elizabeth reached its apogee at the opening of the 17th century – the English renaissance, the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer and Bacon.
Second, after centuries of feeling ashamed of their language, the English celebrated it, immersed their children in it.
University of Toronto rhetoric scholar Jane Freeman points out that pupils of Elizabethan grammar schools devoted a third of their studies to rhetoric. She says they readily, for example, would have been able to identify the rhetorical figure – epistrophe, the repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses – in Tyndale’s translation of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Third, by incorporating the KJV into its prescribed scriptural readings, the Anglican Church glued its metaphors, aphorisms and adages into everyday thought and speech.
Fourth, leaders of England’s Reformation Church, from Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century onward, aimed to create a Christian commonwealth of the English language by means of what Cranmer called “concrete ethical demands” – moral scripturalism and daily ethical intercourse expressed in biblical metaphors and poetic rhetoric.
That commonwealth lasted, the U of T’s Ephraim Radner says, until the end of the 19th century, when new biblical translations sought supposedly greater access to scripture at the expense of the beauty, mystery and majesty of KJV language, a major shift, Prof. Freeman says, that moved religion from the cathedral to humbler surroundings.
But in making prayer sound like people talking to their buddies, she says, the churches forgot to keep asking “why does language itself make us feel like we’re hearing the word of God, why poetry [is needed] to express certain things. You need language that’s powerful.”
Abraham Lincoln’s speeches were drawn from the KJV, which is still used to a great degree by African-American churches. “I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King Jr., whose speeches were drawn from it.
And for its 400th anniversary?
The Queen, who still holds the copyright, mentioned the KJV in her Christmas address. The Anglican bishop of Manchester has launched a project to have the entire Bible recorded on YouTube. (He also has read some of it on Coronation Street.) Britain’s Royal Mint will issue a commemorative coin. The Bath Literature Festival is looking for volunteers to read all 800,000 words aloud over five days in March. Cambridge University and the University of Toronto have exhibits of historic Bibles.
Curated by Pearce Carefoote, the exhibit at the U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library opens on Monday with a prized first edition of the KJV (as well as the famed Wicked Bible, which seems to advocate adultery). It was donated by Louis Melzack, founder of Classic Books, the chain bought out by W.H. Smith in 1985, and was once owned by George Stephen, the Montreal financier who became the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Today, English girdles the globe. All who speak it do so in the shadow of the KJV, which has been pushed out of most churches as too fustian – a word Tyndale never would have used.–Michael Valpy
Comments:
The G&M article was mostly about the English language. The comments are mostly about religion.
4 replies
D_Knight
10:06 AM on February 6, 2011
Hearing the words of the scriptures in anything other than the KJV does not sound, well, Biblical, anything else sounds dumbed down. Properly delivered the KJV can inspire faith or comfort in even a confirmed heathen like myself.
3 replies
Samuel Lount
1:41 PM on February 6, 2011
As an athiest, I can and do appreciate the KJV as art, as literature. Try reading the 23rd Psalm aloud. Wonderous poetry. And in it’s pages we see the struggle of men trying to figure things out in what was a terrible vacuum of facts they had to labour under.
What is worthy to rail against is the insistance by some that this book has any relevance outside its artistic merit. That is just plain nutty.
But that is not what the Globe article was about. It’s about the art, and like it or don’t, it’s a work of linguistic art.
babsam
12:16 PM on February 6, 2011
Even atheists can appreciate and enjoy the AV. Newer versions are so bland and pedestrian by comparison; like reading a textbook.
6 replies
The Duke of Clarence
4:32 PM on February 5, 2011
I think it would be nice to give a copy of the King James Bible to the Pope, he might learn a few things after turning a page or two.
Better, still put it on his night side table for reading… he might learn a few things about what it is to a good Christian who is god loving and accepting of all people.
Horus
12:19 PM on February 6, 2011
I wonder what Horus the Egyptian would think of this?
As I recall, Horus was born 10,000 to 12,000 years ago of the Virgin Isis. He became a great leader, healer, had 12 disciples, walked on water, healed the sick, raised the dead, fed many, turned water into wine and performed many miracles and much more.
Funny how this story keeps surfacing by others who steal ideas and try to steal other’s lands and resources through colonization efforts. Also interesting how the so called word of God is copywritten. What happened to gratuitous grace of God? Also, interesting how the Christians burnt the Alexandrian Library, the oldest one in the world and how it was the Roman Emporer Konstantine (sp) who created the original Christian Church…the Roman Catholic or “Universal Church”.
Also interesting that there are many errors in the translation. Go ahead, try to translate Arabic or any other language to English and you will see.
Also, why did Konstantine leave out the Gospel of Thomas and other Gospels? Was it because it spoke of God living within and that all are free….now the Church and State would not want freedom of the peasants would they! The aristocracy created “Limited Liability” under corporate entities separate from themselves so they could steal other countries land and resources without responsibility! And why is it that Christians and Jews practice usery when it is not condoned by the Bible, unless of course you twist the parables in your favour.
The bible is a fear based document used to subject people to the will of male dominated leaders. Europe was once a matriarchal place like most places in the world, until the men persecuted and killed the witches (spiritual women) and put on their dresses and picked up the big t or cross and started their terror…scaring money out of little old ladies, etc., Why is it that they never work nor do they ever seem to get enough money?
Even as a small child I could see through the whole fear based system. First there was the Word, then the word was made flesh….then the child asked, “Who made the world?” The scared parent responds, “God did.” Who is God asked the kid? “The Creator of all things,”said the scared parent. “Who created God asked the kid?” “Shut up and read and when you get to the places where they slaughter one another in many places, remember we are on God’s side just like George Bush said, while his chronies were selling arms to the wars and laughing as they filled their pockets with money made on rebuilding countries that were bombed out.” lol get a grip, read Tom Harpur’s ‘The Pagan Christ” Harpur one of the great Anglican Priests ever!
Lacan
1:58 PM on February 6, 2011
The real value of the King James Bible is how its widespread distribution increased literacy and took power over this religious text’s meanings away from the Catholic Church’s reading/interpretation.
Moe Unting
12:40 PM on February 6, 2011
The KJV is not based on the oldest manuscripts which were not available to Tyndale, hence required an updated translation. Further, the KJV lacks some clarity translating passages equating Jesus and Messiah, women in clergy (the status of the diakonin, deaconess or wife of deacon?) hence again needing some updating, etc.
The Douay Rheims Catholic equivalent should be considered as well, but seminaries teach Greek and Hebrew as a requirement for graduation. A multitude of translations and familiarity with the original languages is welcome.
The KJV is nevertheless a crowning achievement of English literature.
Bob Beal
2:14 PM on February 6, 2011
Just by the way, the other great work of English literature that was produced by a committee was the Oxford English Dictionary.
Helen McLean
6:03 PM on February 6, 2011
More quotations from famous people about the Bible:
“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” (George Washington)
“The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.” (Thomas Huxley)
“I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount.” (Martin Luther)
“Who decides what is right and wrong in the world? Who has the authority to define morality for all of creation? It is not the courts, congress, the media, public opinion, the “politically correct” police, the “tolerance” brigade or even the church. The only answer has been, is and always will be Jesus Christ. You can find His opinion on a great variety of subjects in His best seller…The Bible.” (Jeffrey E. Ramey)
“It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.” (Horace Greeley)
“The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.”(Immanuel Kant)
“The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it.” (Napoleon)
“The observant man recognizes many mysteries into which he can not pretend to see, and he remembers that the world is too wide for the eye of one man. But the modern sophists are sure of everything, especially if it contradicts the Bible.” (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)
Helen McLean
7:30 PM on February 6, 2011
valleygirl42 says: “The King James Bible is the worst biblical translation on record”
………………………………………………………………………………………………
“The KJV is not just another English version. It was a thorough revision of the Tyndale translation, which was already excellent. William Tyndale had a rare gift of translating Greek and Hebrew into simple, lovely, and forceful English, and the KJV committee left most of his work intact (e.g., nine-tenths of the First Epistle of John and five-sixths of the Epistle of Ephesians is Tyndale’s).
The KJV committee consisted of roughly 50 scholars, many of whom were incredibly gifted and knowledgeable. They were divided into six companies, and the revision went through the hands of each company. The finished product was submitted to a 12-man final-review committee composed of the two chief men from each company. By this process each part of the translation was examined at least 14 times. Further, the committee received assistance and feedback from other scholars throughout England. I am not aware of any Bible translation in history that has gone through such an extensive sifting process.
The King James Bible is an absolute masterpiece. It is a solid translation of the Hebrew and Greek and its English is peerless. It has been called “The Miracle of English Prose”………….. (David Cloud, Way of Life Literature)
Redness
4:37 PM on February 6, 2011
I’d wager religion has killed more innocent lives than it’s saved. And while I can appreciate some of the truly beutiful wonders religion has given us (e.g. Notre Dame, Sistine Chapel), I think it’s long overdue that we recogonize religion for what it is and stop making actual, crucial life decisions based on fairy tales.
wellversed
3:42 PM on February 6, 2011
Substitute the word Koran in the headline and see how far you get.
Marcel Mucker
11:47 AM on February 6, 2011
And soon to be moved to the fiction section.
Ruth McMonagle
10:28 AM on February 6, 2011
This extraordinary, beautiful and powerful book, The King James Bible, is undeniably the greatest work of the English language. From it’s Psalms, the term ‘from sea to sea’ was given to Canada. It’s wealth made the CCF popular as Tommy Douglas used its precepts and vocabulary to communicate his version of social compassion. It is also the greatest single gift to my life. I was raised in a conservative Christian home. I memorized many passages in order to attend summer camp, in my girl’s club and at church. My father, a Baptist minister, adored its wealth and spent his life unfolding its treasures, a week at a time. I love its poetry, its sense of evolving social justice and its cry for spiritual intimacy. I love the dignity and sometimes the simplicity of its stories, biographies, and little parables. The complexity of written forms, the obvious sincerity and passion with which it was translated, and the superb intellectual capacity of the men who translated it have make it a worthy volume for the devotion of a life time’s study. Thank you for an informative and timely reminder.
Der Bingle
5:48 PM on February 6, 2011
Blessed are the cheesemakers!
openwater2010
1:18 PM on February 6, 2011
UnionMan1 portrays Christian Zealots as some sort of harmless live and let live bunch faced with an unprovoked assault by the forces of reason.
Morality has nothing to do with religion. Christians putting laws prohibiting the sale of birth control technology in the Criminal Code was a very immoral thing to do.
Dorothea Palmer was arrested and charged in 1936 for distributing birth control information in Eastview Ontario.
In 1961 a Toronto Pharmacist was convicted for selling condoms.
For several years birth control pills could only be sold for “Therapeutic” purposes.
At the end of the last Century several brands of Christian superstition took Newfoundland to court, in a futile effort to try and overturn a clear decision by voters to get churches out of the business of running Newfoundland public schools. Where is the morality in trying to keep control of publicly funded schools, in the face of a clear majority of Voters choosing to set up a secular public school system.
That is a perfect illustration of how churches see education as the biggest threat to their continued existence.
“Athiests”, like most Canadians, have no problem with zealots, until they try to impose their superstitions beliefs on other people.
openwater2010
1:02 PM on February 6, 2011
It is always amusing to see zealots spouting off about supposed anti-religious bias at the G&M. The G&M simply reflects what is going on in Canada. Religion is literally dying off, as Elderly Zealots die off and fail to recruit enough replacements to keep churches open and roofs in good enough repair not to leak.
It is simply not reasonable for someone with a modern education to believe in supernatural beings.
Younger, better educated, Canadians simply know too much to fall for the myths swallowed whole by their ignorant elders. Only 1 Canadian in 3 says religion is important in their lives.
On Sundays the majority of Canadians do not go to church and go shopping pretty much as they do on any other day of the week.
Two of my uncles were ordained ministers. These days the Catholic church has to import priests from undeveloped countries with lower educational standards.
One of my uncles, the one ordained in the church of Aimee Semple McPhereson, aka 4 Square Gospel, once got into an argument with his Danish neighbour about some obscure point of the Christian Superstition. They both whipped out their bibles. Turns out they were both correct, depending on which bible they looked at.
The melancholy Dane sat there, comparing the King James Committee product with his Danish Bible, and muttering”they changed it, those guys changed it”.
It could have been an epiphany for him, but he stoutly closed his mind against the clue literally staring him in the face. Next time I visited the neighbor came over to tell me I would spend forever in hellfire. Nice friendly bunch those Christian zealots.
Treating the product of a committee as the 100% accurate message of a supernatural entity would simply be pathetic, if so many Christians didn’t use it to justify evil and unethical conduct and interference in the lives of other people.
Bob Beal
4:45 PM on February 6, 2011
This article is not about the theology of the Bible, nor is it about translations contained in the King James Version.
Unlike most of the comments here, it is about language, the flowering of Early Modern English that forms the basis of the English we speak and write today and that is being celebrated on the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version. It is no accident that Shakespeare was writing at the same time as King James I and VI (who was not a bad writer himself) commissioned the Bible that takes his name.
The headline writer was not trying to quote the Bible. He or she was trying to use a biblically based metaphor. The grammar of the headline is correct.
openwater2010
3:56 PM on February 6, 2011
There is a lot of Zealous hand wringing going on here about the supposed “Loss” of something of great cultural value.
What about the loss of thousands of Greek and Roman works during the Dark Ages, as Christian Monks scrapped off the previous text and overwrote the parchments with Christian chants and dogma?
The Greeks took technology as far as geared astronomical computers and Calculus, then it all vanished as “Pagan” during the Christian dominated Dark Ages.
We are just beginning to recover a few fragments of that lost heritage, such as the Antikythera mechanism and “Archimedes’s Method”.
pelican64
1:08 PM on February 6, 2011
Blue Knows Albertan wrote “Far greater minds than I have taken issue with blind belief in “Science”
Really, what makes you think these were great minds. And too, blind belief is the provenance of religion, not science. Science proves itself while religion attempts to bludgeon you into acquiescence.
Even ‘believe or die’ is and was an acceptable tool. It is the most often used tool of Islam and not long ago the catholic religion. It has been used as a tool by the rich and powerful, kings and governments to keep the masses in line. The masses have been, bilked, lied to, beaten and bludgeoned, tortured, raped sodomized, decimated, murdered, kept poor and miserable by religion. Wars have been fought, genocide and atrocities committed in the name of religion each of which claims to be the religion of love and reason.
You cannot be reasonable and at the same time embrace the tenants of religion.
Here’s a quote from the other evening. “The great thing about science is that even if you don’t believe it, it’s still true.”
The enemy of religion is the truth. Science is the truth; therefore the enemy of religion is science.
The constant companion and the greatest weapon of religion is ignorance. You can’t have one without the other.
The bible is a collection of fiction not real events-it isn’t even an accurate record of the times it purports to chronicle. Take Moses for instance. He is a myth. No such person existed and we know that now because of archeology and its discovery that slaves did not build the pyramids, that there were precious few slaves to let go; there’s no record of it anywhere in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the economy of the day could not have supported all of those slaves. Once again science finds proof of the lie created by religion.
But it is still surprising the number of powerful people and supposedly educated people buy into the myths presented in the edited King Jamesversion.
Mediaguy wrote:
The real church does not murder people for political gain. (think Mother Theresa, MLK, Mandela)
Since when; what real church? The catholic church has been murdering people for years-even committed genocide.
Kevin Lewiston
11:05 AM on February 6, 2011
What a creepy intro … hard to believe people once killed each other over differing notions of the supernatural.
We’ve come a long way.
The_Fisherman
11:56 PM on February 6, 2011
I often come to the Globe and Mail to see what the left have to say about our present conditions, and was presently surprised by a well written documentation of the facts. Without bias; objective, and from what I know, accurate.
The only book translated by a few from ancient scripts written by numerous men over centuries by the same author. If you have read, many books, it is apparent by discerning spirits a common pen.
A story, a testament so fantastic and outrageous with claims so high no man contrived.
From the beginning through to the end an offer to those tired of the wages of sin desperate for redemption; find a man, fully man and fully GOD offering salvation, peace, forgiveness and eternal life.
HE invited me, and we talked, and although I was contrary in every way, HE was and became my dearest friend, brother, Lord, and GOD.
The Lord Jesus Christ
DaveGIS
11:30 PM on February 6, 2011
The Bible is the most important book in all western civilization.
The KJV is probably the most influential book in the English language.
Taken together, these two observations demonstrate how the KJV is a towering masterpiece. More people should read it, or hear it read for them online.
http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/King-James-Version-KJV-Bible/
DJCC
9:33 PM on February 6, 2011
The King James Version is a meeting of the best of Hebrew, Greek and English minds, and one needs to add, hearts. The English language was challenged and lifted and changed by the writers of the original texts. It is a classic example of evolutonary development, humans peering into the transcendental and being tranformed in the process. We all do it. Modern translators, looking for that transcendental evolutionary spark in modern culture, have come up with a product that arises from a different centre. Where the KJV transformed the culture, today the culture has modified the text and the ideas of the original writers. Some call this a “dumbing down”. Of course, neither of these are absolutes. As St. Paul writes (KJV): “we see though a glass darkly” which is both an imperfect translation but an apt description of our our experience. And so we fumble along on the evolutionary journey posturing as “atheists” or “believers” but really not having too much of a clue about anything. Everybody’s partially right and partially wrong, and the best is yet to come and has already been.
EajD
9:37 PM on February 6, 2011
Thank you, Michael Valpe, for an informative and entertaining piece. Just one correction, however: In Tyndale’s time there was no “Belgium” — it did not come into existence until 1830. (The name, however goes back as far as the ‘Belgae’ of which Julius Caesar spoke in De Bello Gallico — “horum omnium Belgae fortissimae sunt”.) Flanders? The Netherlands?
GideonSword
8:56 PM on February 6, 2011
Thank God for The Bible His word for us!
Bob_J1
5:22 PM on February 6, 2011
Look at the “Holy Land”.
All three major religions are happy to fight & kill each other.
All in the name of God of course.
saltysmith
3:49 PM on February 6, 2011
“Has fallen”?!? The King James Bible is still (by far) the most inspiring and most poetic English-language translation of the Bible out there – and I’m a lifelong atheist!
Foster
1:55 PM on February 6, 2011
” Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
-Seneca
The Monarchy saw Religion as a tool to reinforce their power. Seneca was obviously right.
pelican64
1:45 PM on February 6, 2011
Union Man1 wrote: “Amusing to see the atheist/agnostic trolls out in full force, trying to convert people of faith to their nihilism. Never understood it. If faith comforts and brings joy to those who possess it, why try to take it away from them? Sounds morally wrong to me, but then again morals are usually not of concern to such folk.”
What would you know about morals writing something like this. Being an atheist (or agnostic) means you can do good things in life as the majority of the country does without worrying about whether you are going to get brownie points for it in some mythological heaven.
No one is trying to take comfort away from you though I bet you did with your kids-if you have them-when you told them the Easter bunny didn’t exist or Santa Clause was not real.
You really don’t get that deriving comfort and joy from something that is pure mythology is not living in the real world. When people do that in any other context it is called a dis associative disorder and a medical problem; and it can be dangerous. The Jamestown massacre is a good example.People make decisions, important decisions based on these myths. Can you imagine if Stockwell Day had been able to get to the Prime Minister stage what would have happened to education while his tenure was in play. The man believes that the Earth was made 6,500 years ago by god.
And let’s get this right, it is the religious mob which has been propagating power via myth for hundreds and hundreds of years, not those of sound reasoning. We need more atheists and agnostics in this world, not more religious nonsense if we are to survive.
There’s a good reason why you believers are called the ‘children’ of god and why ministers refer to their flocks and sheep.
ccdd
10:47 AM on February 6, 2011
KJB uses language in a way that religious weasels have to flee from it. The new modern translations remove the clarity of language which tells you what sin is. As a matter of teaching, KJB was used for centuries to teach folks how to read English, how folks speak it has been another matter. I love my KJB, it will never disappear.
The_Fisherman
9:44 AM on February 7, 2011
Of course it is stone dead for those who do not know Him, and His ways.
Of course it is a comic book for those who do not know Him, and His ways.
The Lord Jesus Christ said it would be true of those who do not know Him and His ways.
They crucified Him, remember?
So for those of you who are sceptics, there is no requirement for you do say, or be any differently. It wasn’t written for you, it was written for those who are His.
So if those of us who ARE His, we are called.
For those who are not His are not called.
Do you hear Him knocking, if so then invite Him in.
You have nothing to loose, and everything to gain.
What’s in a name
8:45 PM on February 6, 2011
Nice to hear the Bible has been updated, now how about the Koran and the other books of “religion”?
Helen McLean
5:55 PM on February 6, 2011
Some famous quotations about the Bible:
“The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.” (Charles Dickens)
“The Bible is worth more than all the other books which have ever been printed” (Patrick Henry)
“There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history.” (Sir Isaac Newton)
“If a man is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss which he had better make all possible haste to correct. A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” (Theodore Rossevelt)
“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.” (James McCosh)
“The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.” (Thomas Paine)
“If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures.” (Daniel Webster)
T.M.
4:33 PM on February 6, 2011
In case anyone out there doesn’t already know it, there is no god. It is humanity that created god, not the other way around.
Face facts, folks. There will be no god coming to the rescue; it is humanity that is going to have to save itself FROM itself.
Many Jews understood this when their pleas to god went unanswered as they rode in those packed railroad cars to the concentration camps, and waited in those long lines to the gas chambers. That’s why they now don’t rely on god to protect their nation. Then still pray, but guns, tanks, and nukes do the duty of protection.
BCsovereignty
3:18 PM on February 6, 2011
The King James is great english literature but not a very good translation, it really has distorted the meaning of scripture over those 400 years.
Jack1059
3:24 PM on February 6, 2011
And god created the heavens and the earth and all the creatures in it…….then forced them to eat each other.
Couldnt resist that one.
Its importance to reducing church power and catapulting the English language into the language of the rulers / upper classes is un arguable. Im not really seeing the the beauty or eloquence in bible stories however. Just my opinion, but an interesting article none the less.
Insane Jaber
2:07 PM on February 6, 2011
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. Is. 40:8 Any other Books out there with any greater history? We still have the dead sea scrolls which are thousands of years old.
SnapDeadRythym
12:14 PM on February 6, 2011
Not going to be indoctrinated but thanks again
Metasphere
7:21 AM on February 7, 2011
The KJV is the only Bible truly fit for shouting.
Others are too namby-pamby for a good shout.
But flip anywhere in the KJV and start belting it out –perfect. It feels like God itself is shouting thru you.
Honesty only
1:11 AM on February 7, 2011
There was division therefore again among the Jews for these sayings. And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear him? Others said, these are not the words of him that hath a devil. Can the devil open the eyes of the blind?…..Then came the Jews around about him, and said unto him, How long dost dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ tell us plainly. Jesus answerd them, I told you, and ye believe not: the works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not because you are not my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me; And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father which gave them me, is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.. I and my Fateher are one.
…I pray for them ; I pray not for the whole world, but for them which thou has given me, for they are thine. All mine are thine and all thine are mine; and I am glorified in them..
…..Now when the centurion and they that were with him, watching Jesus,saw the earthquake and those things that were done, they feard greatly saying, Truly this was the Son of God.
T Devitt
9:47 PM on February 6, 2011
Good article …. now there is a few dozen reworked versions to support the evangelical neo christian soldiers’ ideals of what Christ meant when he died for your sins…”Peace on Earth , Good will to man” I believe you missed … or maybe Treat every man as your brother… Feed the poor the hungry ….. If Christ was alive He would be VERY ashamed!!!!
All in all though nice historical piece to bad the root message seems to be beyond most of the books followers….including the ones who authorized it!!!!
Winston Churchill
8:43 PM on February 6, 2011
A quibble. “English was looked down upon by the educated elites as the coarse tongue of the masses, and the pre-Reformation church in England forbade translations . . .”. Not true. English was the first language in Europe to have a vernacular literature. The Bible has existed in English language from the 7th Century. Other translations were made thereafter. How could English be coarse, vulgar and suppressed when it was always the language of law, for example (albeit cut with Norman French still there)?
Shame of English was something that continent tried to impose, along with the Latin mass, and celibate clergy. None really took.
Another tiny quibble. Queen Elizabeth had already started the work. We owe it to her, for example, that God is consistently spoken of as ‘He’ in the KJV. It was referred to her. The Hebrew pronoun is neuter (and I think plural). They didn’t think ‘its’ really cut it. She said go with He. Her reasoning? Every civilised human knows that God is without person, number or gender. He is best, and most respectful.
Until somebody can find something different as the basis of our culture, I suggest that the naysayers just give it a rest. I’m with Frye and Bloom. The KJV underlays virtually everything written in English. I’m with Bloom in this as well: if the time is gone when children arrived in university with a knowledge of it, then they need to be provided with a knowledge of it there. How else can they comprehend our culture?
openwater2010
7:26 PM on February 6, 2011
Honesty Only rants about May 21, not having learned a lesson from 2000/Jan/1 and goes on to type
“Who has doubts that Jesus is not God, Put you hand up. If you put your hand up you are Fo*l.”
If Fo*l is supposed to be Fool Honesty should spend some time reading and pondering the meaning of Matthew 5:22
“And whoever says ‘You fool!’ will be subject to hell fire.”
alabaster10
5:46 PM on February 6, 2011
300 plus comments and less than 10 deleted comments! Has this been about Buddhism, there would be more censors here than a Japanese porn movie.
Der Bingle
5:19 PM on February 6, 2011
If English was good enough for Jesus its good enough for me
N.N.
4:50 PM on February 6, 2011
Every good deed in the Bible is the work of man. Every evil is divine or divinely inspired.
The world will not know peace until all the bibles, korans, vedas, sutras and the rest are burned to ashes. And the peace it will know then will be a hollow and empty one.
Religion will yet be man’s undoing.
joannie.w
2:47 PM on February 6, 2011
Me thinks some doth protest to much.
Sunday Scool as a child is the extent of my religious education, and I’m the better for it. Anglican Church. There was story telling reminiscent of Aesops Fables. The experience was far from bible thumping or hell fire and brimstone.
The church provided a good ethical and moral foundation that I’ve carried with me to this day.
Name withheld
beaches
2:30 PM on February 6, 2011
I suppose one never need fear that the G&M might recruit someone who knows wha they are tlaking about to comment on this topic.
The title is a misquote: The phrase appears in various passages but this form from 2 Samuel 1:19 “Your glory, O Israel, lies slain on your heights. How the mighty have fallen!” is at least slightly more correct using “have” rather than “has”.
As for “kicking against the pricks” it is not a reference to lashing out at ignorant editorialists. Instead it refers to a sharp, pointed device that was used to “encourage” animals such as oxen and horses in their work. When annoyed by the attentions of this object they would sometimes understandably, if painfully, lash out at it, hence the phrase.
Then I got bored
rottenralph
2:04 PM on February 6, 2011
when they introduce the new translation you know
the “others have take over the church” like the UC OF C
John Diefenbaker
1:48 PM on February 6, 2011
It’s always funny to see folks defend the King James Bible as the definitive text on the subject, while completely ignoring that it is itself a translation. As the article notes, the KJV is based on a number of differing Greek and Hebrew sources, all of which were several generations of transcription removed from the original texts. Meanwhile, a sizeable other faction prefers the Latin version, which is itself a translation of different source documents. In common is the fact that none of the source documents were written by anyone who had actually met Jesus.
Meanwhile, everyone ignores the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic. He would not have been able to read any of the “standard” versions that are currently being fought over. He might have been able to get through some of the Hebrew and a few words of Greek, but as the son of a carpenter he was most likely illiterate.
For believers, your position on the Bible was most likely formed by your parents, since they chose the version you grew up hearing. It’s a bit like preferring vinyl over CDs because records carried the music of your childhood.
ALASTAIR JAMES BERRY
1:12 PM on February 6, 2011
Interesting …
It perhaps explains why I have
(1) an OXFORD CONCISE ENGLISH DICTIONARY
(2)The BIBLE,
and
(3) A World Atlas
Within an arm’s reach when I am using the Internet.
watermelon
8:52 AM on February 7, 2011
Yeah, yeah, the King James Bible is stone-dead…but lots of us are still happily reading it, 400 years after it was written, and its phrases pop up in our minds frequently. (‘In the beginning was the Word…’ just did in mine). Even if we also have a more modern translation in the house, and read it, too.
Major Pain
4:26 PM on February 7, 2011
I’m raising my kids without religion, but I fully expect to encourage them to read the KJV Bible once they’ve reached an age where they can understand it. It’s a brilliant work of literature and an important cultural document. And it’s got some great stories, to boot!
Chesed
11:34 AM on February 7, 2011
I always tell people to start with the gospels when first approaching the Bible. Once you understand who Jesus is and why he came, then and only then will the rest of the Bible make sense. The Old Testament must be read from the foot of the cross.
Lots of people question the violence in the Old Testament. Here’s why it was necessary:
When sin entered the world, it separated humans from God. God wanted to restore the relationship. His plan of salvation centered on Jesus Christ coming into the world through the nation of Israel. Other nations were always interfering with the Israelites, threatening to take them off-track spiritually and wipe them out. If that happened, then God’s plan of salvation would be lost. Therefore, God had to protect Israel.
God always gave Israel’s enemies the chance to come on board and leave the idol worship and sacrificing of babies, etc. He made it clear who he was and what he would do if they continued in their barbarous ways. Despite his warnings, many refused to follow him and continued to threaten the plan of salvation. At that point, he acted and removed the threat.
Look at it this way: Let’s say you catch up with Osama Bin Laden. You tell him that, if he stops his terrorism, he is forgiven and can live as a free man. But if he continues with his murderous ways, then you will hunt him down and kill him if need be. If Bin Laden continues to pose a threat to the world, is it wrong for you to go through with your threat and remove him?
Of course, once Christ came, then everything changed. God didn’t have to protect the nation of Israel. His plan of salvation was fulfilled with Jesus. That’s why the kind of violence you read about in the Old Testament ended.
For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever might believe in him will have everlasting life. That’s what the Bible is all about.
3:12 PM on February 7, 2011
alabaster10
5:21 PM on February 6, 2011
Churchchill was wrong to say democracy is the worst form of gov’t. Secular gov’t is the worst. We can only hope Religion of Peace countries adopted secular values.
ULE Yankee
8:39 PM on February 6, 2011
from Berig Vintrange, Rochester, NY
I’ve read the KJV and agree it’s beautifully written,
however, I choose to study a Spanish biblia each morning,
Spanish is so earthy, el idioma de la gente comun y los pobres,
have also studied a French bible, still, Spanish wins out,
Thanks to the G&M on enlightening me on a bit of the KJV’s history,
Peace, Paz Berig
Un Salut Trudeau
8:28 PM on February 6, 2011
It isn’t as smelly and offensive as the koran, but it is chock full of fratricide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, unjustified war, mutilation, incest, voodoo magic and a host of fine rational values.
Mike Sumners
6:04 PM on February 6, 2011
The bible, like the koran, is a valuable work of fiction – a part of the world’s literary history. Nineteenth-century literature is strewn with biblical references that make authors like Thomas Hardy a joy to read. As for religion itself however, it’s time for Humanity to “put away childish things”.
Der Bingle
5:45 PM on February 6, 2011
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Attendee: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace – shut up!
Reg: There is not one of us who would not gladly suffer death to rid this country of the Romans once and for all.
Dissenter: Uh, well, one.
Reg: Oh, yeah, yeah, there’s one. But otherwise, we’re solid.
John Yossarian
4:27 PM on February 6, 2011
The article states that the KJV “gave the language ‘no man can serve two masters,’ ‘how are the mighty fallen’ and ‘out of the mouths of babes.’”
And yet somehow the article’s title gets the mentioned phrase wrong.
Frothmorton T. Whifflesniffle
5:38 PM on February 6, 2011
Religious hooey
Bob_J1
4:36 PM on February 6, 2011
Lost in Translation I say.
Most of the Israelites nor Jesus & the Romans DID NOT speak English.
To get the real meaning(s) you would really have to understand…
…Hebrew, Aramaic & perhaps some Latin.
I find the Old Testament Scary & Revelations Terrifying.
God scares me.
So much for the peaceful “Christian” religion. btw…I am Christian.
Jos464
4:05 PM on February 6, 2011
Second Samuel 1:19 KJV reads:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighy fallen!
The correct word is “are”, not “have”, and certainly not “has”.
Lancelot Gobbo
4:04 PM on February 6, 2011
It’s hard to resist playing with the innocent.
If you are able. look at Psalm 46 in the KJV. If you ignore the flourish “Selah” which is roughly equivalent to ‘amen’ you might count 46 words in from the beginning you get ‘shake’. If you aren’t too tired count 46 words in from the end – you get ‘spear’. A very happy coincidence which has kept academics who are interested in the life of Shakespeare entertained for some time.
true patriot
2:35 PM on February 6, 2011
Most religious people ought to understand this action: we should all gather, build a huge fire, and throw every single bible in it.
damesbond007
1:11 PM on February 6, 2011
The Bible is a book I have never aspired to read.
I had a fascist, religious zealot, uneducated imbecile for a mother, who via diktat, tried to get us to be as bible thumping as she is.
No thanks! I’ll take science and history over the bible, any day of the week.
Stude Ham
10:45 AM on February 6, 2011
like all other attempts at translation… the KJV does not represent a completely true and accurate record of the text from which it was translated….
and why does this g&m article not refer to Tynsdale by name… as the guy who was betrayed by a confidante and sent burning at the stake… only to have his translation ultimately form the divine diving board off which the kjv got a very fat helping hand?
stpnlll
3:11 PM on February 7, 2011
I recently saw a movie called The Road.
It was about a man and his young son in a world on the brink of extinction after a worldwide nuclear holocaust.
Lower life forms are virtually non existent. Vegetation is dying. Humanity are few in number. Children are an anomaly. Life has returned to hunting and gathering. Many of the remnants of humanity are cannibals.
Dreams of peace, comfort, safety and stability, are nightmares as they lead to hopeless despair.
The child was born after the end of the civilized world. He knows nothing of life beyond attempting to survive each day. The father’s goal is to keep the child alive and to travel south to the ocean where there is a potential for survival. The road is fraught with peril.
One night as they both hunger and ponder the point of living, the boy goes through a learned ritual of prayer. The father tries to correct him but he has forgotten so much of faith.
There is a discussion of the fire within and this is what motivates them to continue existing.
At the end of the movie, the boy encounters a stranger who may be a threat to his immediate survival. He allows the stranger to live as he has the fire as well.
The KJV is bred in the bone, and is a foundation of modern civilized behaviour.
Darren X2
10:00 AM on February 7, 2011
I’m an atheist. I think that as a work of literature, the KJV is without peer.
As a guide to science, history, or ethics it is pure rubbish.
Bob Beal
10:42 PM on February 6, 2011
I’ve tried twice now to post this in “reply”, but it hasn’t got uploaded. Does anyone else have that problem?
Winston Churchill re language of law:
For at least part of the period you discuss, Law-French, not English, was the language of law. It was originally Norman French, the language of the elite, but it was successively bastardized with Latin additions (and a very little bit of English), and its grammar deteriorated. It is difficult to read. A statute of 1362 decreed that legal pleadings would be in English. But Law-French continued to be a working language of the law. In the 17th century, Law-French was not much spoken, but some judgements continued to be rendered in it. For example, while the King James Bible was being written, the important Irish cases of Tanistry and Gavelkind were both reported entirely in Law-French. Statute books into the 19th century still printed the older statues in Law-French.
English was looked down upon as coarse. French and Latin were considered much more refined. Writers of the early 17th century such as Shakespeare and those who wrote the King James Bible were responsible not only for modernizing the language but for contributing greatly to its respectability.
I am not so sure English was the court language in the reign of Edward III. I can’t remember. What is your source?
D Waarheid
8:17 PM on February 6, 2011
Wight answered
“What will you wager, your life?”
Yes, I would.
If he’s even remotely worthy of my worship, he’ll forgive me my sins. He won’t be the judgmental prigs his followers are.
If he kills me, then he wasn’t worth my worship in the first place and isn’t worth yours, either
——————————————————-
Your worship? Your worship means nothing unless there’s conviction and obedience behind it.
He (God ) won’t kill you or anyone, we’ll all live forever! Its just a matter of where!
?Impact
6:27 PM on February 6, 2011
Perhaps the pre-Reform Church had it right when they forbade translations. We might be better off if those quoting scriptures did it in Latin.
Pincushion Man
6:13 PM on February 6, 2011
“…the soaring oratory and cadences of Martin Luther King Jr.”
Ah yes, he of the plagiarized Ph.D. thesis.
3:51 PM on February 6, 2011
“If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the scriptures than thou dost.” This spoked by Tyndale during a discussion with a priest.
The article misses the end of the sentence from Tyndale. The article is correct that he wanted to give the average person access to the scriptures, but it was more than that. He felt that the clergy of the day were doing a disservice to the people. He wanted to put the scriptures in the hands of average people so they could come to their own conclusions.
D_Peters
3:10 PM on February 6, 2011
I find it a very dry read. If it was written today no one would buy it.
valleygirl42
3:05 PM on February 6, 2011
Memory is linked to emotion. The King James Bible is the worst biblical translation on record yet it evokes such childhood memories and literary affinity. My mother uses it to press flowers from funerals she attends. It has a role in many family traditions.
openwater2010
1:59 PM on February 6, 2011
UnionMan1, with no apparent awareness of the irony posts a highly selective description of the meaning of Iconoclast.
Didn’t the practice of destroying Icons originate in the Byzantine Church, as a reaction to some Christians treating Icons as objects much like idols?
Among a sea of other horrific acts this early variation on the later Puritan movement saw one Byzantine Emperor order that his mothers eyes be destroyed because she clung to her Icons as part of her version of the Christian Superstition.
If UnionMan1 is Catholic is comment about Iconoclasts is an ironic unintended reference to many Protestant brands of Christian Superstition.
It would be highly ironic if UnionMan1′s brand of Christian Zeal is descended from the ones which saw Ornate British Churches “Cleansed” during the time of Cromwell.
damesbond007
1:17 PM on February 6, 2011
It has been my experience in life, that the greatest believers of the bible, commit the greatest sins.
1. My bible thumping aunt did not protect her daughter when her father abused her sexually. My aunt swept it under the rug.
2. When I was 16, my mother stole 3k from both my brother and I. Stolen to support the younger 3 kids……………we didn’t have them…why should we have been required to support them? The mother has NEVER payed us back that money! A thief of humongous proportions.
3. Another aunt, because of her big mouth and bible thumping ways, turned her 3 daughters off men and marriage. 3 middle aged women who have never even been on a date.
4. Another aunt beat her German Sheppard to death, and saw nothing wrong with it.
Yep! These zealots see themselves as being better people than you and I because they attend church and donate. Their sins are massive………………………………….right in line with the hypocrisy of the RC church…………………
british_eh
1:04 PM on February 6, 2011
Well, perhaps a bit premature, the death of a book we call the Bible. I would suggest that the internet pervades all literature, as we now read recreationally on I-Pad rather than venturing to the bookshelf. Of note though are the concepts described in the article, and the “good” vs
“evil” we see prevalent in scripture. Perhaps the book is dated……….but U tube may be yet another medium to preserve it for today’s reader.
RE
Mike McFae
12:32 PM on February 6, 2011
Nice story …pity the contrarians who crave the need to attack the religious aspect of this story….go back to bed and try to deal with your anger.
Lancer
4:27 PM on February 6, 2011
For the Atheists and the Faithful alike, The Rabbi who believes in Zeus:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-alan-lurie/why-all-intuitions-of-god_b_817435.html
An article for those who don’t ‘get’how anyone could hold a faith, and for the faithful a vision of grasping after truth.
E. Seldon
3:21 PM on February 7, 2011
I like the Norse mythology. Thor had a pretty awesome hammer. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Need I say more?
DJCC
9:54 PM on February 6, 2011
Good G & M article. Really shows how good stuff is co-opted by abusers of power – and brutally. Given the Internet, the “writing is on the wall” (thanks KJV) for the power-abusers.
Albin
6:24 PM on February 6, 2011
I can’t speak for its correspondence to the original archaic text, but the KJV was written in capable and sensitive writers of their language, which is a heck of a lot more than can be said for the 20th Century mediocrities, most of which would not pass the G&M’s editorial staff, parading as the modern “revealed Word” in English.
Canadiana
3:52 PM on February 6, 2011
WHO CARES!
ruthmatthews
11:53 AM on February 6, 2011
And the Bible says, and the Bible says, and the bible says: LITERALLY.
Really?
true patriot
10:02 AM on February 6, 2011
The King James Version is largely indecipherable, which should make no difference to the religious who prefer superstition over reason (as well as prefer their generous property tax breaks). I can only imagine over the centuries how many have been harmed by the hatred of Christians, justifying themselves with pithy quotations from the KJV.
Chinaman
5:05 PM on February 5, 2011
I still use the KJV besides other versions. Some of the modern version may be clear in mean but no depth. The poetic form of KJV makes the Grace of God so besutiful!
Yanni31
8:09 PM on February 6, 2011
And when it was translated, he conveniently left out the things Luther and Henry the VIII didn’t like. A protestant bible all about me, written for me and lets not forget the Queen holds copy rights! How convenient!
D Waarheid
8:28 PM on February 6, 2011
Psalm 14
1The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Universally true in any translation!
B0B lmamI
2:09 PM on February 6, 2011
Errors in the KJV Bible
http://www.angelfire.com/hi2/graphic1designer/errors.html
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/Aion.html
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-errors-in-king-james-version-bible.html
Horus
2:08 PM on February 6, 2011
Check out Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ and for those who live in fear of hell and brimstone, etc…free your mind and learn from this former Anglican Priest about how his life was freed from the Book that binds people into fear based indenturism. Oh and drop some cash in the collection plate or hide it in an envelop or buy a candle or a copy write bible on the way out the door.
http://www.tomharpur.com/books/books_thepaganchrist.asp
This is Harpur’s most radical and groundbreaking work to date, in which he digs deep into the origins of Christianity and how the early Christian church covered up all attempts to reveal the Bible as myth.
What began as a universal belief system has become a ritualistic institution headed by ultraconservative literalists. As he reconsiders a lifetime of worship and study, Harpur reveals a cosmic faith built on these truths that the modern church has renounced. His message is clear: our blind faith in literalism is killing Christianity. Only with a return to an inclusive religion where Christ lives within each of us will we gain a true understanding of who we are and who we are intended to become.
Praise for The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light
By Tom Harpur
“…a truly revolutionary work, devout but subversive in the best sense, with a carefully constructed narrative that challenges believers and non-believers to fundamentally re-examine ‘the Greatest Story Ever Told.’”– Edmonton Journal, Alan Kellogg
“Read this book … to enrich your personal quest for truth in order to break through previously unchallenged boundaries of religious insularity and exclusivism. … it most certainly challenges complacency and opens new vistas of insight to the serious thinker.” – Toronto Star
“ … those who cannot accept literal orthodoxy, and those whose spiritual quest is not yet at an end, will find renewed faith and hope in Harpur’s brave work.” –Calgary Herald
“ … Harpur takes pains to argue that his discoveries are not a blow to Christianity … but rather that true Christianity emerges from these discoveries with new strength, new relevance and a new importance in the life and faith of the individual.” – Globe and Mail
“This startling work is sure to engender passionate controversy…. Of special interest to Christians, it provides nourishing food for thought for questing members of all religious faiths.” – The Hamilton Spectator
N.N.
1:50 PM on February 6, 2011
Like any successful packaging of religious teaching, the KJV combines trite if true ethical maxims and the most abiding brutality under cover of brilliant language.
I love spin doctors
1:32 PM on February 6, 2011
I don’t get any of this anymore.
Why the need to slag off those who believe in the teachings found within parts of the Bible? Why the need to defame and diminish those who believe in a force beyond themselves?
What is truly, truly funny is the poster who posted that he or she had never read the Bible and still felt it proper to condemn the book and the faith.
Be an atheist or agnostic or Christain or Bahai or Jew or Muslim or Buddist or Hindu or whatever.
Makes no difference to me.
But do not be an ignorant bigot who lumps all people of faith into the garbage heap.
That just makes some of you folks look like fools.
The King James version of the Bible is a masterful work that allowed people to have personal access to the teachings of Christ and to the Old Testament. Of course it is selective, but why that stops folks from digging is their own fault really.
And I wouldn’t so proudly proclaim the death of religion as many of you have quite yet.
rupie
12:37 PM on February 6, 2011
Story telling made easy!
GlynnMhor of Skywall
12:38 PM on February 6, 2011
Sandy writes: “I really do not understand how this book, or any religious book, inspires people.”
It is probable that the desire for a religion of some sort is deeply embedded in our genetics.
Consider a tribe or extended family back a few hundred thousand years ago. The chief is the guy who’s the biggest and meanest in the tribe, and he gets to make all the big decisions. But he’s not necessarily the smartest one in the tribe.
But suppose the tribe has a religion, and therefore a priest, shaman, minister, or whatever to run it. The priest need not be big, strong, or mean, but he (or she) has to be one of the smarter ones in the tribe in order to remember, understand and administer the rituals and myths of the religion.
So in the tribe with a religion, one day the priest might say “Now is the time to go to the rivermouth and take of the salmon”, and since the priest has learned to read stellar positions to determine the seasons, the priest is probably correct and the salmon are running when the tribe gets there.
In the tribe without religion, the chief might decide that it’s time to go to the rivermouth, but since he’s not the bright one who understands the stars, chances are less that the salmon are there, and the tribe will have wasted precious time and energy on a useless journey.
So a religion, and the desire for one, provided in the distant past a distinct evolutionary advantage. In fact one of the most striking differences between the Neanderthal and the Cro-magnon who replaced them is that there is evidence that the latter had some sort of religion while the former did not.
Lulo
12:20 PM on February 6, 2011
400 years later, and people still mistake mythology for reality. This should be a source for religious studies and culture classes, not a manual on how to live life. Wake up people – you are being controlled by the Christian mafia.
blacklocus
12:07 AM on February 7, 2011
Just another comic book……………….literature, come on folks…………..historical truths again come on folks………………..a diamond in the rough or simple, a chunk of flawed glass in the sand.
Bruce Mowat 1
3:57 PM on February 6, 2011
Thank you for taking the space to note the birthday of the King James Bible. To me it is athing of beauty. The words, unfortunately, seem impenetrable for those who choose to read without a dictionary.
As a follower of Jesus Christ, I always wonder why people are afraid of the Bible. As Charles Stanley, one of the great Pastors of our time noted recently “one could study the Bible for a thousand years” and God would still be talking.
I have found more understanding of who we are individually and collectively in Scripture than in any of the non-inspired books created by mere mortals who feel that they have the answers for what ails us.
Imagine8
5:47 PM on February 6, 2011
John 11:35
D Waarheid
4:24 PM on February 6, 2011
John3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall have everlasting life.
The most powerful, profound, hopeful and beautiful words ever spoken, in any language!
alpha-omega
3:18 PM on February 6, 2011
The number 153 in John 21: 1- 14 has some amazing properties. For example, in binary 153 is 10011001, a palindrome. 153 is the smallest number that equals the sum of the cubes of its digits. For more on this very interesting number go to
http://www.shyamsundergupta.com/c153.htm
Sklosch
1:35 PM on February 6, 2011
It’s just another example that shows how people do not understand the different between a symbol and a sign.
Do not understand what a metaphor is.
Do not realize that there is no sky wizard to fear and appease, but that books like the bible merely point to energies and states firmly within one’s spirit/psychology.
Charter freedom v2.0
1:30 PM on February 6, 2011
Best fairytale book ever written
C-R
1:15 PM on February 6, 2011
The Bible: Great history.
UnionMan1
1:00 PM on February 6, 2011
Amusing to see the atheist/agnostic trolls out in full force, trying to convert people of faith to their nihilism. Never understood it. If faith comforts and brings joy to those who possess it, why try to take it away from them? Sounds morally wrong to me, but then again morals are usually not of concern to such folk.
Richard McAllister
12:20 PM on February 6, 2011
There are so many more contemporary and updated versions of the Holy Bible that are so much easier to read.
But it was the introduction of the King James Bible that allowed the average person to be acquainted with the knowledge and empowered with the ability to read.
Yes the language of King James is outdated, but the vast wealth of knowledge and truth found in scripture text, is not.
In the Holy Bible God is revealed.
George Hall
1:12 PM on February 6, 2011
As a work of fiction the King James is a stunning, rich and powerful book of great poetry that stimulates the muse, spirit and imagination
The book replacing it is tripe in comparison.
It makes me think our culture is becoming less literate.
Counterintel
12:46 PM on February 6, 2011
…… a culture that only four decades ago shaped the soaring oratory and cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. but now is passing rapidly from the collective memory of an English-speaking world with no knowledge of the bonds of its rhetoric, metaphors and sublime rhythms.
If that is the nature of the Bible …… rhetoric, metaphors and sublime rhythms.
Frankly (I quote the fhurer), I prefer my telescope ……
j howe
12:29 PM on February 6, 2011
FOR THOSE THAT DO NOT HAVE A KING JAMES VERSION CAN I SUGGEST YOU LOOK UP ON THE NET DR. SOLOMON M AORDKIAN… HONORING THE KING JAMES BIBLE … YOU’LL BE BLESSED. FOR THOSE THAT DOUBT THE BIBLE , LIFE MUST TO A REAL BOWL OF CHERRIES FOR YOU.
Blueknows Albertan
10:37 AM on February 6, 2011
I get tired of the Science “freaks” who keep posting to interesting articles like this, then dropping by my house and asking me if I have heard the Good News! about hypotheses and their predictions of wonder and things to come…
Far greater minds than I have taken issue with blind belief in “Science”
“Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess: and his political reactions would probably be somewhat less intelligent than those of an illiterate peasant who retained a few historical memories and a fairly sound aesthetic sense.”
George Orwell
What is Science?
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien
Tribune. — GB, London. — October 26, 1945
Honesty only
3:16 PM on February 6, 2011
Every Christian religion , such as the Catholic, Mormon, Pentecostal religion etc read the same bible and even the MUSLIMS read the bible and come up with their own books. They use the bible only to give them credibility.
Jesus, God is a Merciful God and would NEVER create an ENDLESS hell where babies, heathens, Hindus, Muslims, criminals, lost people even devils would be punished forever and forever. That would not be a Merciful God. The Muslim copied that silly idea from the Cathoics who maee a lot of money, from people who were concerned about lost relatives, and gave a lot of money land, gold and so on for prayers for the dead. That is how the Catholic Church got its billions.
Then other churches began the money spinning idea of 10% of Gross income to be paid to priests, One says !0%of take home money, another wants 10% Gross income.
JESUS WARNED BELIEVERS NOT TO BE MADE MERCHANDISE OF. Religions peddal the gospel, which is given to us free. It cost no money to follow God. When it comes to the Gospel there is not such thing as mr 10% or tithing, or compulsion.
WOULD YOU BE HAPPY IF YOUR FATHER, MOM, BROTHER, ETC WERE IN HELL, IF HELL WAS REAL? God DOES NOT FIND joy in people burning in hell. Would God find joy in seing a baby of an infidel or a 2 year old child of an infidel, Muslim, Jew etc suffer torment forever and forever. This is the madness of the churches who are misrepresenting a loving God.
The Devil too like the lost and this world will perish, vanish, vanity, all go out of existence when Jesus returns.
Hell is TOTAL SEPARATION from the ENDLESS JOY OF BEING IN GOD’s ENDLESS Kingdom prepared tof those who love God.
JESUS IS THE CHRIST, IS THE MESSIAH, IS ALLAH, IS THE SAVIOR, IS THE BRIDEGROOM OF THE BELIEVERS. The beleives have a very close relationship with God like the wife to her husband. Even women are called sons. There are not baby angels, baby humans, no baby devils in hell. there is no hell. period.
The bible is God’s actual words. Translation are the work of men. Therefore a translation might have errors.
A CHILD KING MIGHT HAVE A REGENT, WHO WILL RULE FOR HIM TILL HE CEASES TO BE A MINOR. That is why it APPEARS that the bible has an error because 2 dates were given for the start of a kingdom. God allows that to TEST his loyal followers who would be born thousands of years later. Will they believe that God does not lie,or will they doubt the purity of God who cannot lie.
N.N.
11:44 AM on February 6, 2011
By the way, don’t gloat too much about English being spoken world-wide. Those who speak it outside a few Anglo countries in terminal decline, speak it not for reasons of fustian language, but of erstwhile economic conquest: as a necessity still, certainly not in reverence. The extent to which the Bible influenced the temporary English dominance are certainly debatable, but wander off the topic here.
T
h
I love spin doctors
1:36 PM on February 6, 2011
And one more thing, if some of you folks who seem to hate those who follow their faith,
what does that really say about you? That you’re oh so smart? Is that it?
Or that frankly, you can’t separate history from faith. I’ll bet some of you geniuses don’t even know the meaning of the word “pesher”, which comes in quite handy when deciphering this book you so proudly spit upon.
Don’t be such bigots.
Honesty only
1:55 PM on February 6, 2011
On October 21, 2011 the sun will be taken out of circulation. There will no longer be an more days and nights. The sun came on the 4th day of an actual 24 hour creation day.
Remember that Gallileo almost lost his life for saying that the earth and the planets go round the sun? Christopher Columburs was mocked for about 17 years because he said that if he sailed the opposite way he could reach India. Finally he sailed and we know how after a long journedy he discovered America. The West Indians did not look to him like the people of India.
MAY 21, 2011 is JUDGEMENT DAY. After May 21, 2011 there will be NO MORE ANY CHRISTIANITY. No more gospel. The judgment of God is in motion.
Jesus told Philip that those who have seen him have seen the Father. Jesus said that he and the Father are ONE. Jesus KNOWS what the Father knows. So Jesus knows when he will return for his chosen ones. The rapture of the elect is May 21, not far away from today. You may google for May 21, 2011, Judgment Day.
Who has doubts that Jesus is not God, Put you hand up. If you put your hand up you are Fo*l.
Honesty only
4:01 PM on February 6, 2011
In Turkey today 400 Bill Boards are going up declaring that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day. 500 such boards are going up in India in prominent places declaring the Judgment Day is May 21, 2011. They are springing up across the U.S. South America.
From Turkey the Christian gospel is being broadcast to Arab Nations. God promised Abraham that 12 princes would spring up among the Arabs and that he would bless the Arabs and he had NOT FORGOTTEN the Arabs the descendents of Ishmael(GENESIS 17:20)
Jesus said that the Last would be First and the First would be Last. The Gospel was first told to he Jews, and they rejected him, only about 4 were saved of all who were 20 AND ABOVE, who came out of Egypt, such as Joshua (I forget the others at this time) out of a million, and then came the Church and in these last days, those who NEVER heard the gospel are coming to know Jesus. Only God knows who they are. But only about 200 million of all from Adam (about 14 million) will go into God’s endless kingdom. Then everything we see around us will be burnt up, perish, Satan, lost people, God has no more concern about them. they go into nothingness like before creation God would not bother with them by creating a hell.
B0B lmamI
12:21 PM on February 6, 2011
The G&M, in its typical anti Christian editorial posture has taken a significant religious book and reduced it to a book of English lit.
Valpy has entirely missed the point.
His attitude would be one which, upon meeting Jesus Christ after the sermon on the mount, would report that he was a repetitive street performer.
BazzaRichie
11:27 AM on February 6, 2011
The only Bible worth reading.
e
w
take heart
6:57 PM on February 5, 2011
It is always curious how some people seem to feel the KJV is the “only” authorized word of God, recognizing that the original words of God as uttered to Moses were probably Hebrew, and spoken by Jesus were probably Aramaic. What language was used when God spoke to Adam or Noah is probably not even certain. The important thing is that God’s word be listened to, understood, and followed, whether in Hebrew, Greek, 400 year old English, or even today’s languages.
Still, the KJV has a special place, having been used for 400 years. The curious thing, is the title of the article, “How the Mighty Has Fallen.” There are many who will argue that the word of the Lord, as documented over the ages certainly has not fallen, and continues to live in the hearts of many people today. Those who read it, find the word is fresh and real, and matters every day. A better title might be, “How the Word Lives!”
MEDIAGUY50
6:20 PM on February 5, 2011
“was strangled on church orders and his body burned.”
What makes us think that these thugs have anything to do with Christ or His church….let their deeds judge them.
The real church does not murder people for political gain. (think Mother Theresa, MLK, Mandela)
7 replies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Camping
http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40885541/ns/us_news-life/
The word religion comes from two Latin words, “re” which means “back” and “ligare” which means “to bind, to tie.” The word religion literally means to bind or to tie back. We are told Jesus came to set us free. That means He did not come to tie us back.
We have, most of us, become slaves of a book.