In the past couple of years, two good books have appeared on the work that was done to issue the King James Bible. Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible and God’s Secretaries: the Making of the King James Bible. This year marks the 400th anniversary of its publication. We should have a party!
Despite the tongue-in-cheek reputation that Episcopalians and Anglicans have about Biblical ignorance (there’s the old joke about the parish priest making his periodic visit to the Jones family; he remarks how nice it is, every time he visits, to see the family Bible in a prominent place. Little Percival remarks “I always know you’re coming to see us because they only take that book out of the closet just before you get here.”), the Anglican Church has done more to put the Bible before its communicants than any other Christian denomination.
The Bible we commonly call the King James Version (its official title is “The Authorized Version”) is the result of 54 “Translators” who labored for seven years to complete their work. It was produced at the command of King James I, the successor to Queen Elizabeth I; the new king was sick of the squabbling Puritans and wanted a version of the Bible which would not only appear under his imprimatur, but with the intention of supporting the established Church of England against its naysayers.
While many of the arguments it was prepared to answer have long since passed into irrelevance, what remains is one of the greatest works of the English language. The renowned Anglo-American poet, W H Auden, in 1968, responding to questions about modern revisions of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, said:
“…our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say when the English language was already in all essentials the language we use now-nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer-at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language. Why, except in very minor details, any Episcopalian should want to tinker with either the Book of Common Prayer or the King James Bible, and go a-whoring after cacophonous and sometimes heretical new versions passes my comprehension…”
The Bible, of course, is much more than one of the Great Books. It’s the Book. Fr Georges Florovsky, one of the 20th century's greatest Russian theologians, said “…the miracle and mystery of the Bible is that it is the Word of God in human idiom…God has allowed His Word to speak with a human voice. The Word of God is not diminished when it speaks in the tongue of man, for man is created in the image and likeness of God…”
Over the past 400 years, since the publication of the Authorized Version, Anglicans have been in the forefront of Biblical scholarship, championing a golden path between the fundamentalism and literalism of many Protestants on the one hand, and the denial of Biblical truth by much of secularist Christianity. Holy Scripture is the Word of God, Anglicans insist, while at the same time recognizing the Bible is not a science textbook or a mystical guide to stock market investing. The Articles of Religion (technically not a part of the Book of Common Prayer though usually printed at the back of the book) give a good indication of Anglican thought about Holy Scripture. Article VI says:
“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”
This Anglican understanding, though, is far older than Anglicans. The idea that Scripture contains “all things necessary to salvation” is the teaching of the ancient Fathers of the Church, most especially of the two most prominent Biblical scholars of early Christianity, St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and St Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, the Latin equivalent of the King James Version.
The purpose of the Bible, Anglicans understand, is to guide us towards salvation. The great Catholic Creeds grafted into Anglican daily worship, are intended as summaries of the teaching of Holy Scripture. In and through Scripture, God speaks. We read the Bible, not simply to learn what God has done in times past, but to enable us to understand what God is doing among us today. Though the books of Scripture were written by many different authors, the story Scripture tells is one story: it tells us—promises us—that these things, here and now, are meant “for us men and for our salvation.”
God spoke in times past to His people, and He continues to speak to us today. St Augustine, at the time of his conversion, saw a vision of the Scriptures and heard a voice calling to him “Pick it up and read it!” Don’t wait for the priest to come calling to dust off your Bible. “Pick it up and read it!”-Fr Gregory Wilcox
No comments:
Post a Comment