Home Americanism Killing? No, out of the question. Adultery? Yes, please.

Killing? No, out of the question. Adultery? Yes, please.

Recently, The New York Times ran an article that seemed personally tailored for me.  Many of you, no doubt, know what this feels like.  The words feel like a perfectly fitted coat, which will keep you warm for years to come.  When you venture outside into the snow, this miraculous piece of sartorial brilliance will protect you.  And when you come back inside from the cold, which you always do, you will wipe off the snowflakes just before they fade away into the seams of your perfect coat.  It will always have its place in the closet, and no one will dare take its hanger.

I am, obviously, overstating my point.  But on the twenty-ninth of September, I was thrilled to see a piece about the series of exhibits going on right now, concerning the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible (KJB).[1]  The review is by Edward Rothstein, a critic-at-large (incidentally, my dream job) at The New York Times, and is called “400 Years Old and Ageless.”  In many ways, it’s a glorified add for the Folger Institute, which currently has what promises to be a marvelous collection of materials pertaining to the KJB.  I want to go.  In other ways, it is a tribute to the persistence of the Bible, and scriptural tradition in general.  To paraphrase the words of the former Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, offered in a television debate with the British comedy troupe Monty Python, religion is not simply going to vanish.[2]  It keeps living on in our traditions, though it might be somewhat unrecognizable to men like Stockwood and Malcolm Muggeridge (who headed an attack on The Life of Brian in the late 70s), let alone the religious zealots of the 17th century.

It is the notion of inalterability that I want to take up, and I want to do so by homing in on a comment made by Rothstein in his article:

The consequences, the exhibition recalls, are all around us: “One can hear the language of the King James Bible echoing from English cathedrals to rural American churches, from traditional Anglican hymns to Jamaican reggae music, from the poems of John Milton to the novels of Toni Morrison.” Displays also allude to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, to R. Crumb’s recent graphic version of Genesis, and to the 2010 film “The Book of Eli,” in which Denzel Washington’s postapocalyptic character must protect the world’s last copy of the King James Bible.

Can’t you just hear the spiritual fervor pervading our culture and everyday life?  Can’t you just experience the old days of religion through our music and literature—when faith was implicit, precisely because we never needed to justify it?  Listen to the radio.  Watch movies like “The Book of Eli.”  Don’t you see how it’s all a window to an older concept of religion?

No, me neither.  The problem with this idea, as right as it may be in some respects, is that it overemphasizes the continuity of religious language, at the risk of underestimating the changes that have taken place both in religious practice and culture.  Certainly, juxtaposing the KJB, reggae music, the “I have a Dream Speech,” et.al. serves a tremendous purpose: it demonstrates that many aspects of a secular culture are religious in foundation.  The next step, and the much more important step, is to understand that religion has changed—that the resonances manipulated by each of these cultural artifacts are strikingly differently.

This is not to take anything away from the displays that are happening throughout the year, at Folger and other places around the globe.  I just want to point out that the historical development of the Bible is based on discontinuity as well as continuity.  Basically, and to go back more explicitly to Rothstein’s article, I want to bring attention to the ambiguity of a term like “ageless.”  The KJB is ageless, in the sense that it will probably never waste away from existence (though the books themselves might, at some point), and will always have a place in the social imagination.  But it is not ageless, if we are to understand that term as a quality of being forever young.  The Bible certainly has changed over the years.

My favorite aspect of the Folger Institute’s display is the “Wicked Bible” (1631).  The printers, when setting down the commandments, left the “not” out of the one pertaining to adultery.  So, in case you’re wondering, adultery is fine.  The words are almost to shocking to read in the Biblical text: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”  The brilliant thing about this is pretty simple, and has to do with the wonderful, pseudo-imperative “shalt.”  Not only are we permitted to commit adultery, but it is incumbent upon us to do so.  So, at the risk of quoting a strange man I once men in an abandoned train station, “sow your seed!”

Oh, and by the way, I would hate to leave out the fact that Denzel Washington’s “The Book of Eli” is a bad film.  Yes, you read me correctly.  It’s just an awful rendition of a story that was pseudo-inspired by Biblical lore, and which features a character too old to be a badass and an ending too absurd to be taken seriously.  There you have it.  That’s my two cents.[3]

 

JASON GULYA


[1] Edward Rothstein, “400 Years Old and Ageless,”  <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/arts/design/manifold-greatness-and-king-james-bible-at-folger-review.html?ref=arts>

[2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAHHhr7vmU

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAMUv22y1og

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