The Bible

[Tekania]

Richard Dawkins has written a very interesting piece on the King James Bible:

The King James Bible occupies nearly 42 pages of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, only narrowly beaten by Shakespeare with 45. Not just literature in the high sense but everyday speech is laced, suffused – riddled, even – with biblical phrases whose status ranges from telling quotation (“They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind”) to banal cliché (“No peace for the wicked”) and all points between. A word in season and perhaps we can see eye to eye. Although I wouldn’t call the Bible my ewe lamb or the apple of my eye, and I would have to go the extra mile before I killed the fatted calf for it, you don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to see how biblical imagery dominates our English. If my words fall on stony ground – if you pass me by as a voice crying in the wilderness – be sure your sin will find you out. Between us there is a great gulf fixed and you are a thorn in my flesh. We have come to the parting of the ways and I wash my hands of you. I fear it is a sign of the times.

It has to be the King James version of course. Modern translations break the spell as surely as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Listen to this, if you can bear to, from the Good News Bible, whose clunking title matches its style:



Older readers might hear the voice of Tony Hancock. Or is it Victor Meldrew? Anyway, now here’s the real thing:



Real thing? Well, let me not emulate that notorious slogan against the teaching of Spanish in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas”. Hebrew, alas, is a sealed book to me (yes, that’s another one: Isaiah 29:11) but I have it on respected authority that Ecclesiastes, at least, is pretty damn good poetry in the original. If so, it certainly doesn’t make it through the Good News mangling. But I shall make the case that poetry can gain in translation, and I believe this may have been achieved with the King James Bible.

It is often said (though often forgotten) that the Bible is not a book but a library. Obviously unable to cover it all, I shall attend to my two favourite books, neighbours in the Old Testament: Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. First, the world-weary Preacher’s lament for the passing of youth and the privations of old age.



Compare that with the breezy Good News version:



“I don’t enjoy life”? How are the mighty fallen! If I can’t have poetry, I’d prefer the blunt frankness of a beloved godfather who died this year at the age of 93. “Richard,” this tall, handsome old man said, fixing me with his blue eyes for the only piece of solemn, godfatherly advice he ever gave me, “Old age is a bugger.”

My theory is that translation, and even mistranslation, can sometimes enhance the poetry. Here’s an example.



Those "grinders" have always intrigued me, and I have been especially haunted by "when the sound of the grinding is low". Some sort of ancient mill rumbled through my imagination, resonating with “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves” (no, that one’s Milton, or at least via Milton). But the Good News Bible finds a more down-to-Earth meaning of grinders and "those that look out of the windows". It’s simply that the poor old chap had cataracts (darkened windows) and lost his teeth ("grinders" is kin to Wodehousian "snappers"), and there’s a similarly anatomical come-down at the beginning of the passage too:



That may be less poetic, but it has the ring of plausibility. Hebrew scholars may correct me, but I suspect that this Good News banality may be closer to the original than my much-loved 1611 flight of poetry.

Naturally I have to come down on the side of accuracy, even at the expense of poetry. From the religious point of view, however, I can’t help wondering whether accuracy of translation is desirable. If you are trying to persuade people to follow your religion, do you really want them to understand it? When the Roman church gave up Latin, the congregations suddenly saw, with merciless clarity, exactly what it was they had been reciting all those years. Let me not try to charm a deaf adder (Psalm 58), but did the hierarchy really think through the implications of switching to the vernacular? And doesn’t something similar apply to the Bible? Ecclesiastes is hardly religious at all, but in those books where the message is a religious one we might ask, in the nicest possible way, what there is to be accurate about?

In any case, my interest is in the translated poetry, and I am suggesting that while some meaning may be lost, poetic value may paradoxically be gained in translation. Even more paradoxically, mistranslation may enhance the effect. After Ecclesiastes, my second favourite book of the Bible is the Song of Solomon (not by Solomon, needless to say):



I regret the day I first learned the real meaning of "turtle" in this lovely passage, and I am not about to shatter anybody else’s illusions by exposing the mistranslation.



I can guess the true meaning of the short verse about foxes and vines but – forgive me, spirit of science – I’m not sure that I can bear to spell it out. And the same goes for the last sentence of the following:



Isn’t it the unexpectedness – incongruity even – of “also our bed is green” that gives it its appeal, an appeal that in this case is more comic than poetic? On the other hand, at the end of the following passage I admit to being curious about what the other hand is really doing:



If that means what I think it means, coupled with “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him”, it casts into an even funnier light the charming bowdlerism that heads the page: “The mutual love of Christ and his church.”

I suspect that the poetry of those flagons and apples, too, gains in translation. And, back to my favourite book again, how about this inscrutable line:



For all I know, that is a dull cliché in the original, but the translation gives me the authentic tingling of poetic enigma. As for the following, the eight verses are so familiar I needn’t complete them, and the cadences so intrinsically musical that Pete Seeger hardly needed to compose the tune:



Let’s celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of this astonishing piece of English literature. Warts and all – for I have deliberately refrained from mentioning the carnage, the smiting, the vindictive, genocidally racist, jealous monster god of the Old Testament. Warts and all – for I have drawn a veil over the New Testament misogyny of Paul, the founder of Christianity: or the Pauline obscenity of every baby being born in sin, saved only by the divine scapegoat suffering on the cross because the Creator of the universe couldn’t think of a better way to forgive everybody. Warts and all, let’s encourage our schools to bring this precious English heritage to all our children, whatever their background, not as history, not as science and not (oh please not) as morality. But as literature.

Published the 20th Dec 2010 edition of New Statesman, available here.

Instead of going through the Bible with a fine-toothed comb and digging out everything we find objectionable, contradictory, or fanciful, would it be beneficial to at least treat the Bible (and I refer here, as Dawkins did, to the King James Bible) as the wonderful work of literature it really is?

Surely, whether each of us, individually, believes the Bible to be fiction, fact, or something in between, we can agree on that?

What do you think of his suggestion that the King James Bible be studied as such in schools as literature, rather than as a religious, historical, scientific, or moral text?

Personally I don't hold much water on engaging in debates over the bible with secularists... Personally I do not use the Bible to draft my positions on what should constitute public policy, and therefore the public in general does not get a say in my process of determining my particular biblically derived theological view from which-ever source(s) I decide to derive. Such a debate is truthfully meaningless because in the end it should not be public policy to use the force of civil law to enforce particular religious discipline (that is a duty solely between a particular religious institution's government, and its particular members/adherents)... The only ones who really have a stake in such a debate are those espousing theonomist/dominionist viewpoints, and they wouldn't agree with Dawkins on mere principal.... So this thread is powerless to achieve its intent.

[Gagatron]

Why do you always have to insist that God is a prick? He freaking killed himself for you.

No he didn't. He killed the equivalent of ... I don't know, a Second Life avatar, maybe, a creature of his making that he inhabited with a part of himself. The cop-out was, he didn't stay dead. He popped back up on the third day and claimed to have won the entire game for all eternity. That's one of the reasons Yahweh was never very popular with the rest of us, he was always pulling stuff like that, changing the rules in the middle of the game or knocking over the table when he was losing. All that really happened was, he lucked out with Paul of Tarsus, who could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos.

Half of that didn't even make sense. Knocking over the table? Selling refrigerators to eskimos? Is this a real argument or just rambling?

EDIT: Oh, I get it. You think you're a god.

[Farnhamia]

No he didn't. He killed the equivalent of ... I don't know, a Second Life avatar, maybe, a creature of his making that he inhabited with a part of himself. The cop-out was, he didn't stay dead. He popped back up on the third day and claimed to have won the entire game for all eternity. That's one of the reasons Yahweh was never very popular with the rest of us, he was always pulling stuff like that, changing the rules in the middle of the game or knocking over the table when he was losing. All that really happened was, he lucked out with Paul of Tarsus, who could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos.

Half of that didn't even make sense. Knocking over the table? Selling refrigerators to eskimos? Is this a real argument or just rambling?

EDIT: Oh, I get it. You think you're a god.

Good for you. I refer you to the lyrics of the song John Lennon wrote about his mother for another clue.

My point was, Yahweh didn't kill himself, he caused the physical manifestation of a part of himself to be killed, then caused that part to stop being dead after three days. Yahweh isn't dead and Jesus isn't dead. In fact, neither one of them can die.

And without Paul, the Jesus cult would have sunk back into Judaism and might be mentioned in a list of messianic movements from the time of the Emperor Tiberius (or whatever dating system we'd be using). It was Paul who took what was a purely Jewish message to a wider audience, an audience that thought the Jews were very peculiar people but who nevertheless bought into the idea of worshipping the god of the Jews and his son that Paul and his followers said Jesus was. Not an easy sell, hence the remark about refrigerators and Eskimos.

[Big Jim P]

No he didn't. He killed the equivalent of ... I don't know, a Second Life avatar, maybe, a creature of his making that he inhabited with a part of himself. The cop-out was, he didn't stay dead. He popped back up on the third day and claimed to have won the entire game for all eternity. That's one of the reasons Yahweh was never very popular with the rest of us, he was always pulling stuff like that, changing the rules in the middle of the game or knocking over the table when he was losing. All that really happened was, he lucked out with Paul of Tarsus, who could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos.

Half of that didn't even make sense. Knocking over the table? Selling refrigerators to eskimos? Is this a real argument or just rambling?

EDIT: Oh, I get it. You think you're a god.

Me, I KNOW I am a god. So are you if you chose to recognize the fact.

[Eireann Fae]

Half of that didn't even make sense. Knocking over the table? Selling refrigerators to eskimos? Is this a real argument or just rambling?

EDIT: Oh, I get it. You think you're a god.

I was rather amused by his post.

And 'selling refrigerators to eskimos' is a common adage, meaning that the person in question could sell anything to anyone. Like Sts. Paul, Peter, and John selling the lies of Christianity to the world.

[Gagatron]

Half of that didn't even make sense. Knocking over the table? Selling refrigerators to eskimos? Is this a real argument or just rambling?

EDIT: Oh, I get it. You think you're a god.

I was rather amused by his post.

And 'selling refrigerators to eskimos' is a common adage, meaning that the person in question could sell anything to anyone. Like Sts. Paul, Peter, and John selling the lies of Christianity to the world.

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

[Ubbawubba]

I was rather amused by his post.

And 'selling refrigerators to eskimos' is a common adage, meaning that the person in question could sell anything to anyone. Like Sts. Paul, Peter, and John selling the lies of Christianity to the world.

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

More disciples died for Heavens Gate.

[Big Jim P]

I was rather amused by his post.

And 'selling refrigerators to eskimos' is a common adage, meaning that the person in question could sell anything to anyone. Like Sts. Paul, Peter, and John selling the lies of Christianity to the world.

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

How many witnesses died for the lie, of say, WMDs in Iraq? Or the lie of Aryan superiority during WW2? Or any number of other lies that are believed by the mindless sheep?

[Gagatron]

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

More disciples died for Heavens Gate.

No, ten were crucified by the Romans. One commited suicide. And only one managed to die of old age. They all saw Jesus alive after being dead, save for the one who commited suicide.

[Johz]

I think if we're looking at it for pure literature's sake then the KJV is better than the GN but I wonder why he did not compare it to The Message version? I find it vastly superior to many other versions in terms of imagery.

Here is a website where you can compare many versions. I pulled up the Ecc. passage he was referring to in the article in The Message.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se ... ersion=MSG

Most "mainstream" protestants use the NIV but it's not as powerful as The Message if you ask me.
Fancy words are fine and all but clarity is good as well.

The message is more of a paraphrase. The CEV (Contemparory English Version, I believe) is very clear, and fairly accurate, although it may well be in the running for the most boring piece of text ever. The NIV is a good compromise between good clear English, accurate translation (it actually has some of the most accurate translation ever done for a Bible from the Original Languages) while the KJV is nice, although, due to it's many mistakes, I'd recommend the RKJV - the revised version. But I would love to be able to read the original Hebrew and Greek texts.

[Gagatron]

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

How many witnesses died for the lie, of say, WMDs in Iraq? Or the lie of Aryan superiority during WW2? Or any number of other lies that are believed by the mindless sheep?

Yes people die for lies. It's not common that they preach that lie while their dying, and even wish to die in a way to respect that lie. Like Peter's choice to be crucified upside down.

[Zilam]

It was a "lie" that all twelve witnesses died for.

How many witnesses died for the lie, of say, WMDs in Iraq? Or the lie of Aryan superiority during WW2? Or any number of other lies that are believed by the mindless sheep?

And how many of those people you mentioned saw a man crucified and three days later come back alive, just as he promised? That is the basis for why the Christian martyrs died, as opposed to being taught to believe something false like the example you gave.

[Ubbawubba]

More disciples died for Heavens Gate.

No, ten were crucified by the Romans. One commited suicide. And only one managed to die of old age. They all saw Jesus ralive after being dead, save for the one who commited suicide.

Stupid people, even smart people, will die for a cause, especially if they get fooled into thinking everythings amazing. Hate to be going all Godwins law on you already, so I won't use the example of the Third Reich, I'll use the example of Stalinist Russia.

[Rokartian States]

Aye, like don't be a prick unless you're God, or at least one of his good ol' boys.

Why do you always have to insist that God is a prick? He freaking killed himself for you.

Was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge? I forgot.

[Gagatron]

Why do you always have to insist that God is a prick? He freaking killed himself for you.

I forgot, was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge?

You mean when he got rid of murderers, adulterers, women who had sex with demons, and the children of demons?

[Rokartian States]

I forgot, was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge?

You mean when he got rid of murderers, adulterers, women who had sex with demons, and the children of demons?

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

[Zilam]

No, ten were crucified by the Romans. One commited suicide. And only one managed to die of old age. They all saw Jesus ralive after being dead, save for the one who commited suicide.

Stupid people, even smart people, will die for a cause, especially if they get fooled into thinking everythings amazing. Hate to be going all Godwins law on you already, so I won't use the example of the Third Reich, I'll use the example of Stalinist Russia.

There is no comparison at all. It IS easy for people to live and die for something they think to be true, even when we look back to see it as being false. You are right. But if people know outright that something is a lie, will they give up their professions, family, and way of life to be ostracized, tortured and killed for that lie? I don't know of many people that will do that for an outright lie. And with Apostles, it was either a lie or the truth. There is no middle, murky, subjective middle ground. Either Jesus died and was dead, and they stole his body and then lived for that lie (for some odd, wacked out reason) or Jesus died and came back alive, just as He promised them that He would.

Knowing humans, and their tendency for self preservation and what not, I find it incredibly hard to believe that 12 close disciples, 120 other disciples that aren't mentioned by name, and the thousands that came to Christian faith i the first few years of the religion, choose to live, suffer, and die for something they knew was a lie.

And again, it has to be an absolute lie or the absolute truth. There is absolutely no middle ground for this.

[Farnhamia]

Why do you always have to insist that God is a prick? He freaking killed himself for you.

Was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge? I forgot.

After. And he did say he was sorry.

[Gagatron]

You mean when he got rid of murderers, adulterers, women who had sex with demons, and the children of demons?

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

There was hardly anyone good on the planet. The human race was screwed up. It wasn't like modern times, where you could godless and still be decent to society. These people were tribal maniacs.

[Johz]

Why do you always have to insist that God is a prick? He freaking killed himself for you.

Was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge? I forgot.

I'm not sure, but I reckon it was after he saved, repeatedly, a bunch of pricks who couldn't believe in him for longer than five minutes, after he had given the Israelites a king, despite not wanting to, for good reason, after providing prophet after prophet to guide and help his people, it was certainly after he had consistently behaved like a loving parent who has had to intervene repeatedly to help a beloved world of people.

Sarcasm. Because two can play at that game.

[Zilam]

You mean when he got rid of murderers, adulterers, women who had sex with demons, and the children of demons?

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

It always strikes me funny when people always complain "If God is good, why does he allow evil to exist"....Yet when God destroys every evil person in a flood, its a bad thing.

All sin is deserving of death.

[Gagatron]

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

It always strikes me funny when people always complain "If God is good, why does he allow evil to exist"....Yet when God destroys every evil person in a flood, its a bad thing.

All sin is deserving of death.

Sigged.

[Johz]

You mean when he got rid of murderers, adulterers, women who had sex with demons, and the children of demons?

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

Yeah, 'cos the ancients were really knowledgeable on the whole world. That's why we didn't realise the earth was round until five hundred years ago...

[Rokartian States]

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

It always strikes me funny when people always complain "If God is good, why does he allow evil to exist"....Yet when God destroys every evil person in a flood, its a bad thing.

All sin is deserving of death.

So why did he decide to kill virtually everybody? Unless literally every single human was corrupt and incapable of being rehabilitated, there was no reason to do such a thing.

Was that before or after He nearly killed the entire human race in a deluge? I forgot.

I'm not sure, but I reckon it was after he saved, repeatedly, a bunch of pricks who couldn't believe in him for longer than five minutes, after he had given the Israelites a king, despite not wanting to, for good reason, after providing prophet after prophet to guide and help his people, it was certainly after he had consistently behaved like a loving parent who has had to intervene repeatedly to help a beloved world of people.

Sarcasm. Because two can play at that game.

In what way does that excuse complete and utter genocide?

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

Yeah, 'cos the ancients were really knowledgeable on the whole world. That's why we didn't realise the earth was round until five hundred years ago...

I don't understand. How is that relevant to my post?

[Farnhamia]

Along with every single other person on the planet, yeah.

Yeah, 'cos the ancients were really knowledgeable on the whole world. That's why we didn't realise the earth was round until five hundred years ago...

The round-earth thing isn't really the best example of this, since a number of Greeks had figured out that it must be round, and most people didn't really care. A better example would be figuring out that the heart circulates the blood through the body, or that mares can't get pregnant by standing with their hindquarters to the wind, or that mice don't spontaneously grow out of piles of grain or flies out of rotting meat, things like that.