Whether you believe or not, the King James Bible is a work of art

I HAVE a new best friend. Actually, it is a slab of grey Chinese plastic.

But it is a minor wonder of the world. I have absolutely no connection with Amazon but, if you haven’t treated yourself — or been treated — to their Kindle book reader, you are missing out.

Sixty seconds after you thought, “I’d like to read that,” there it is on the device through the miracle of satellite technology. And even a digital numbskull like me can operate one. I am already carrying around 60 books in a device the size of a slim paperback.

Just one advantage is that you can read many books on the day of publication without having to pay a trip to a bookshop or go online and then wait for the postman to arrive. So, on Monday, I typed in “AC Grayling” and, before I knew it, I was reading this week’s big release, The Good Book: A Secular Bible.

You can’t fault Grayling on the marketing front. What a brilliant idea: a new Bible focussing on the meaning of the good life and how to live it, without any reference to God. It should sell well in this day and age where the only people you ever seem to see carrying the “old” Bible are either swivel-eyed or African.

Grayling, a mild-mannered but convinced atheist, has consciously modelled The Good Book on the genuine article. It is divided into 14 books: Genesis, Wisdom, Parables, Concord, Lamentations, Consolations, Songs, Sages, Histories, Proverbs, The Lawgiver, Acts, Epistles and The Good. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say.

And just like the Judeo-Christian Bible, it has been “made by” Grayling, in a process of redaction, editing and re-writing. The text is derived from thousands of sources, an easy-read distillation of aphorisms, parables and words to live by from non-religious thinking in both East and West. From Aristotle to Voltaire via Goethe and Runi, they are all there.

For Grayling, we humans are innately spiritual. But, according to him, the need for a code to live by was hijacked by religion and a bossy and controlling Bible. How much milder his Ten Commandments seem: “Love well, seek the good in all things, harm no others, think for yourself, take responsibility, respect nature, do your utmost, be informed, be kind, be courageous: at least, sincerely try.” Who could disagree?

Now Grayling might be over-hyping when he describes his aim as “the good for humanity and the good of the world,” but he has produced something, at the very least, innovative and interesting.

Still, even though I have only dipped into The Good Book, I am yearning for all those heroic struggles between good and evil and dramatic tests of faith. Above all, Grayling cannot provide a meaning to life: just why are we here? For all its faults, the real Bible does at least, to use Grayling’s phrase, sincerely try.

So will Grayling’s totally unauthorised version stand the test of time? Who knows? Somehow, unlike the King James Version (KJV), I suspect our successors won’t be celebrating its 400th anniversary.

In the strictest liturgical sense, of course, most people in Ireland have not had much direct experience with the KJV. By the time the Catholic Church had allowed the vernacular language versions to be used, new more “up-to-date” editions of the scriptures like the Jerusalem Bible and the Revised Standard Version were in widespread use. These “Catholic Bibles” owe more to the translation undertaken by the members of the English College at Douai, in Flanders and Bishop Challoner’s 18th century revisions.

That the KJV is apparently many American fundamentalists’, er, Bible has occasionally given it a bad name. But it has endured as a work of literature, even if it is used less and less a cultural text or learning tool on this side of the Atlantic. Even in the Church of Ireland in the North, it has largely been supplanted.

That is in some ways a pity. Where else can one find passages as powerful as this:

“For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughterNay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us”?

Although the KJV was not the first Bible translation into English from the original Hebrew and Greek, it is widely regarded as the most important, a landmark in the history of the English language.

It emerged spattered with the blood of the Reformation and is that rare thing, something good written by committee. Despite seven years of work by dozens of learned men it didn’t immediately catch on. At least the translators did not suffer the fate of William Tyndale. He spent his last hours in a prison cell with his Hebrew grammar before being burned to death for his belief in the right of every “plowboy” to be able to read his Maker’s words his mother tongue. Tyndale’s earlier version provides most of the backbone for the KJV.

The translators were organised into six companies: two in Westminster, two at Cambridge, and two at Oxford. Each group took responsibility for particular books of the Bible.

They were learned and impressive men, with passionate convictions; cosmopolitans like Henry Savile and George Abbot, who — long before Darwin — started to suggest that animals, rather than being moulded by God, might be shaped by their physical circumstances.

SOMEHOW, the committee, despite their divergent religious beliefs managed to agree a text containing 788,258 words which was both plain and grand. It was not perfect by any means. Hundreds of changes in vocabulary, grammar, spelling and punctuation had to be made for a century and a half. Errors crept in — “Thou shalt commit adultery”; “The unrighteous shalt inherit the kingdom”; “Let the children first be killed” — instead of “filled” — before a ‘final’ version was adopted in 1769.

And it is, in parts, quite impenetrable. What did the prophet Ezekiel mean when he said: “Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes?” Who knows?

Nevertheless, produced against the backdrop of the rich Jacobean literary culture, the KJV is the masterpiece of English literature. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “The translation was extraordinarily well done … and achieved a beautifully artistic result.” The great climaxes of the KJV quite simply set the standard, ever-pervasive to this day.

Catholic, Protestant or atheist, for anyone who has English as their mother tongue, the influence of the KJV is everywhere we turn. It has been injected into the stream of the language and invigorated and enriched all subsequent English prose.

Turns of phrase like “fire and brimstone”, “apple of his eye”, “skin of my teeth”, “root of the matter”, “at his wit’s end”, “eye to eye”, “handwriting on the wall”, “salt of the earth”, “two-edged sword” and “powers that be” might not have originated with the KJV but they live in the English language because of it.

One indefatigable linguist, Professor David Crystal, tried to work out how many idioms from the KJV had entered into the English language and, following a strict methodology, came up with 257.

Its presence has had an inescapable and powerful influence on all of us and belongs to the cultural inheritance of all of us too. I read mine on my Kindle.