I recently did a post
citing Christopher Hitchens’ admiring comments on the King James Version in his
memoir Hitch-22.
This week I ran across
his May 2011 article in Vanity Fair
on the KJV titled When the King Saved God, which offers more
expansive insights into the celebrated atheist’s admiration for the Authorized
Version [the article also appears in Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 2011): 687-696].
Near the beginning,
Hitchens writes:
Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching
the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English
language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and
less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen
and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into
English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James”
version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the
kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian
sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. “The powers that
be,” it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, “are ordained of
God.” This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and
conformist, continue to echo in our language: “When I was a child, I spake as a
child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the
faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.”
It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our
liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such
crystalline prose.
He expresses
his admiration for the King James Version’s timelessness and its contribution
to a unified field of reference for English speakers:
Though I am sometimes
reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the
Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of
references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It
resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who
acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940,
faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British
officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ”
All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the
Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish
heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his
sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an
answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the
burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that
we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set
up.”
He adds:
A culture that does not possess this common store of image and
allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make
it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.
“Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want
to try to improve that for Twitter?
He closes by lamenting the
proliferation of modern English translations:
Not to over-prize consensus, it does possess certain advantages
over randomness and chaos. Since the appearance of the so-called “Good News
Bible,” there have been no fewer than 48 English translations published in the
United States. And the rate shows no sign of slackening. Indeed, the trend
today is toward what the trade calls “niche Bibles.” These include the “Couples
Bible,” “One Year New Testament for Busy Moms,” “Extreme Teen Study Bible,”
“Policeman’s Bible,” and—somehow unavoidably—the “Celebrate Recovery Bible.”
(Give them credit for one thing: the biblical sales force knows how to “be
fruitful and multiply.”) In this cut-price spiritual cafeteria, interest groups
and even individuals can have their own customized version of God’s word. But
there will no longer be a culture of the kind which instantly recognized what
Lincoln meant when he spoke of “a house divided.” The gradual eclipse of a
single structure has led, not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.
I’ve noted before the odd contemporary circumstance we find ourselves in in which the King James Version is vilified
in the Religion Department but praised in the English Department. Another modern oddity is that the use and
admiration of the KJV in evangelical Christian circles is somehow associated
with obscurantism and anti-intellectualism.
Can we
learn something from a skeptic like Hitchens about the value and beauty of the
Tyndale/KJV tradition and our stewardship of it?
JTR
