The Good Booklets. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by Jack Miles

The Pocket Canons: The Books of the Bible, Authorized King James Version (Grove Press, $2.95 each, $24.95 the set)

Mr. Miles, senior adviser to the president at the J. Paul Getty Trust, is the author of God: A Biography, which won a Pulitzer prize in 1996.

IN time for Christmas, Grove Press offers a boxed dozen small-print, small-sized (4" x 6") fascicles, each containing a book of the Bible in the King James Version and a brief introduction. Nine of the introductions are by novelists. The remaining three are by Bono, Thomas Cahill, and Kathleen Norris-a rock singer, a popular historian, and a memoirist.

The publishing plan evidently allows for some doubling up of shorter books (Corinthians 1 & 2 are combined) and considerable deletion from longer ones (68 of the 150 psalms have been dropped). Allowing for such adjustments, Grove can probably accommodate the 66 books of the King James Version in 60 fascicles for a total cost of $177, if purchased separately, or $125 in five boxed sets. Since the King James Version can be purchased at any bookstore for $20 or less, the appeal of this costly edition must rest primarily on the handiness of its pamphlet format and the effectiveness of its literary introductions.

Secondarily, of course, it rests on the continuing viability of a 17th- century translation. Many regard the King James Version as a masterpiece beyond all challenge. I confess that I am not among them.

Each of the Grove fascicles contains, verbatim, the same three-sentence encomium:

The Authorized King James Version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature. This version, more than any other, and possibly more than any other work in history, has had an influence in shaping the language we speak and write today. Presenting individual books from the Bible as separate volumes, as they were originally conceived, encourages the reader to approach them as literary works in their own right.

The first sentence in this paragraph is true. The second is debatable but defensible. (Because the Bible had had a massive cultural impact in England before English itself began to be spoken there, the King James Version may have to share the credit.) The third is problematical on two counts. First, no scholar believes that the book divisions in the King James Version coincide with the literary works of the Bible "as originally conceived." It is universally believed, for example, that Luke and Acts were conceived as a single work, not as the two works listed in the canon (with John coming between them). Second, no scholar believes that the books of the Bible affected English literature as separate, freestanding works. Long before the English language came into existence, the Bible had become the Bible in Western Christendom, the anthology functioning as a singular, definite literary and religious whole. Yes, the psalms were sometimes copied separately; so were the four Gospels. But Exodus or Amos or Ephesians alone? Even when the influence of the Bible in Europe was at its peak, separate publication of individual biblical books was generally unheard of.

These historical objections aside, the question remains: Is the King James Version really the best choice for a 21st-century reader? Those who are at home in the 17th century, the way certain English professors are, can easily translate its archaic locutions for themselves. A good many less learned readers, it would appear, are content to experience the King James Version as a kind of language poetry, allowing its cadences to wash over them without worrying too much about the sentence-by-sentence meaning. For both of these, the King James may remain the translation of choice. Those, however, who are less interested in the art of 17th-century prose than in the practice of 21st-century religion, grow impatient when they find themselves in doubt about the meaning of the text.

Consider, for example, 1 Corinthians 9:3-7 in the King James Version:

Mine answer to them that do examine me is this. Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? Or I only and Barnabas, have we not power to forbear working? Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?

Are you swept away by the cadence of this prose, or do you find that the paragraph, as you read it, keeps going in and out of focus? Here, for comparison, is the New Jerusalem Bible's translation of the same passage:

To those who want to interrogate me, this is my answer. Have we not every right to eat and drink? And every right to be accompanied by a Christian wife, like the other apostles, like the brothers of the Lord, and like Cephas? Are Barnabas and I the only ones who have no right to stop working? What soldier would ever serve in the army at his own expense? And who is there who would plant a vineyard and never eat the fruit from it; or would keep a flock and not feed on the milk from his flock?