King James Bible Research Articles

DOA with SOA

It looks like today is finally the day that we all knew was coming. It was only a matter of time. An ambulance has just pulled up to haul away Marty the Software Manager after his boss pummeled him for failing to deliver on promises of money savings, improved software reuse, and reduced time to market that had been virtually guaranteed merely by adopting SOA (service-oriented architecture). Everything could have been so different for Marty. If only there had been a red-hot market for a software application that fetched the price of London gold, converted the price from pounds to dollars, calculated the shipping costs for the desired quantity, and then returned a random verse from the King James Bible. As opposed to the currently unfolding scenario involving an ambulance, Marty’s mental vision was one of a Brinks truck speeding to the scene to empty coffers buckling under the strain of overflowing cash.

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer BRUCE J. DIERENFIELD* Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O’Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “Ifpeople wantto go to church andbe crazy fools, that’s their business. But I don’t want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools.... They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest oftheir mumbojumbo, as long as they don’t interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray’s public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century. To dampen the extraordinary fervor against Engel, the U.S. Supreme Court re­ visited the question of school prayer in a pair of cases decided the following year. In School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, the ques­ tion before the Court was whether school officials in Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland, could require students to partici­ pate in daily devotions, including listening to Bible verses and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, even if the state had not written the devo­ tions. These cases had broad implications be­ cause thirty-nine states either required or per­ mitted religious exercises in public school classrooms. “THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA” 63 In Pennsylvania, Bible reading had existed in the public schools before the Civil War. In 1913, the state legislature voted to require the practice to help young people develop lives of “good moral training,” “honorable thought,” and “good citizenship.” As the Cold War di­ vided the world into two camps—one demo­ cratic and God-fearing, the other communistic and atheistic—many American politicians be­ lieved that devotions were indispensable to the nation’s survival. With that thought in mind, the state in 1949 required Pennsylvania public schoolteachers to read ten Bible verses without comment every school day orface dismissal. In Baltimore’s pubic schools, the Bible had been required as a “reading book” since 1839, a rule that was superseded in 1905 by a requirement for daily devotions consisting ofa chapterfrom the King James or Douay versions ofthe Bible and/or recital of the Lord’s Prayer. The Schempp case arose in 1956 when sixteen-year-old Ellory Schempp, a popular honors student and track athlete at the pres­ tigious Abington High School in suburban Philadelphia, decided to ignore the scripture reading. Every day, at 8:20 a.m., a teacher selected students from a television and ra­ dio workshop to lead their classmates in a familiar ritual. Using the public address sys­ tem, they opened with a “fact for the day”— “Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet high”—to get the students thinking, followed by ten Bible verses, the Lord’s Prayer, the salute to the flag, and school announcements. The school provided the King James Bible, but students who were selected to read sacred text could use a different version. The Revised Stan­ dard (Protestant), Douay (Catholic), and Torah (Jewish) scriptures were sometimes used. In the lower grades, which were attended by Ellory’s younger sister, Donna, and brother, Roger, entire classes recited the Lord’s Prayer with bowed heads and closed eyes. Although state law did not require recital of the Lord’s Prayer, the Abington School District mandated it anyway. At first, Ellory thought of morning de­ votions as harmless background noise, but he...

:A Textual History of the King James Bible

:<i>A Textual History of the King James Bible</i>

Review: A Textual History of the King James Bible

Review: A Textual History of the King James Bible

Problematic Figurations of the Nation as I-Land: A Phenomenological Report on Half-Knowledge from "Any Isle of Lethe Dull"

On ne concoit pas comment I's aurait disparu (1) THE FIGURATIVE PROBLEMATIC I WISH TO MAP IS ANTICIPATED BY GILLIAN Beer's article Discourses of Island, in which she argues that the concept of ['British'] nationhood ... relies upon cultural idea of island. This reliance draws strength, in turn, from word-play legible in spelling of Island as Iland in important influences on Romanticism, such as King James Bible, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton: word 'island' has a peculiar force in English which emphasizes connection with individualism. The sounded 'I' at beginning of word creates a habituating consonance between ego and island. (2) Beer, however, seems to unduly limit literal indeterminacy between Is/I when she parses it in terms of question Is or I: Dasein or (15). Heidegger, one of twentieth century's rigorous questioners of ontology (Is being Sein) in relation to existential life-world, is closer to truth when he uses Da-sein to signify You or I as a being-with others (being-with and Mitda-sein) and not as a psychoanalytically delimited Ego divorced from body, historicity, and community. (3) Being and Time (1927) reminds us that we still need to refine our terms if we are to produce a knowledge of precise rapport between philosophy and literature in relation to dominant contemporary discourses: post-structuralism, deconstruction, and historicism. I propose that a questioning of I-land as a reassuring figuration of relationship between self and society will contribute to this redefining of in a reflexive and theoretically informed manner. Tilottama Rajan's recent redefinition of (4) symptomatically registers problematic figuration that I wish to address via an interrogation of literary letter and figure of allegory (the relevance of latter will soon be clarified)--the figuration of Nation as I-Land: There is insularization of as despite ambivalence of many Romantics to Britishness: their desire for 'the experience of foreign,' a phrase by which Antoine Berman signals neither nor but an opening of self toward (my emphasis). (5) Rajan problematizes this definition by questioning disciplinary organization of disruptive of British Romanticism by Anglo-American publishing networks, universities, and other institutions of epistemic and cultural management, yet problematic I want to focus on is encapsulated by word (propre). Derrida has worried question of proper to death, (6) and it is our relation to death that insists that can never be managed, that absolute otherness of death may come flying out of blue on a sunny September day. The words exoticism and colonialism also historicize philosophically abstract category of alterity at play in Rajan's text by concretely situating as a complex response to an ever-expanding world system: a delirious exchange of alien peoples, foreign commodities, and uncanny (un-home-like) tropes. (7) The otherness that Western subject wants to enjoy as its own colonially owned other cannot, in other words, be contained within home-territory by insular figure of Island. If most profound hermeneutic shift ... made by deconstruction was to shif[t] ground of interpretation from philosophy to psychoanalysis, as Rajah contends, (8) then safely internalized philosophical abstraction constructed by phrase its needs to be further problematized by a psychoanalytic style of reading. Would it be too aphoristic to state that unconscious investments in foreign find themselves in flight from a death that cannot be masterfully mapped? …

Bubonic plague in the Book of Samuel

In 2000 the pages of the JRSM saw an intriguing exchange concerning an illness described in the Hebrew Bible. The story in 1 Samuel is that the Philistines, having captured the Ark of the Lord from the Israelites, experienced an outbreak of ‘tumours’ (Hebrew ophal), and the affliction followed them as they moved the Ark from city to city. Concluding that the Ark was responsible for this disaster, the leaders decided to return it to the Israelites along with a guilt offering of five golden tumours and five golden rodents (akbar). But soon after the arrival of these ‘statues’ (probably small wooden models covered with gold) in Beth-shemesh seventy Israelites died in that city. Evaluating this epidemic, JP Griffin1 concluded that the outbreak was plague, with its associated buboes. But WMS Russell2 responded that Griffin was ‘certainly erroneous’ because of a mistranslation (the tumours being haemorrhoids due to dysentery) and because the rat carrier of plague was not in the region at the time of the described events. Since then, advances in archaeology have shifted the weight of evidence towards Griffin; moreover, the ‘emerods’ of the King James Bible appear in all modern translations as tumours. Bubonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, is transmitted by the bite of the flea Xenopsylla cheopsis. This flea lives off the blood of many species besides man but its most notorious relationship is with the black rat (Rattus rattus). Recent archaeological evidence has caused a rethinking of plague in the ancient Near East. Fossilized remains of the plague flea have been found in large numbers in Amarna, Egypt;3 and, since Amarna was occupied for only a few years, we can date this contact between human beings and plague fleas accurately to about 1350 BC—which is before the events described in the Book of Samuel. Moreover, archaeological studies in the Nile Valley indicate that R. rattus was introduced at this time, probably via ships from India. Evidence of bubonic plague has not been seen in Egyptian mummies but all the vectors were in place.4 These vectors could have spread a few miles north to Philistia. From the story, it seems that the most characteristic features of the epidemic were rats and tumours. Dead rats, killed by the same bacillus that kills human beings, are seen in the streets of plague towns; and enlarged lymph nodes in the groin and axillae are the most obvious features of the illness. Why did the Philistines send statues of rodents and tumours to their neighbours? One interpretation is that the Philistines were offering a friendly warning: ‘We have experienced an epidemic and these are the things you should look out for’. Another is that the statues represented the essence of the judgment that had descended upon the Philistines, who hoped that the affliction would be passed on. The above analysis assumes that the story of the epidemic, as told in 1 Samuel, is based on an actual occurrence. A widespread view is that biblical stories of this sort are the product of a religious reform movement that flourished hundreds of years after Samuel, in the late Iron Age; but it is acknowledged, nonetheless, that they may have historical kernels.5 The kernel here is large enough to indicate that, even if the account is fictitious, it is based on a personal knowledge of plague.

A textual history of the King James Bible

Part I. The History: 1. Making the text 2. Pre-1611 evidence for the text 3. The first edition 4. The King's printer at work, 1612-17 5. Correcting and corrupting the text, 1629-1760 6. Setting the standard, 1762-9 7. The current text Part II. The New Edition: 8. Variants and orthography 9. Punctuation and other matters Appendices 1-9.

The Vision of Dante: Cary's Translation of 'The Divine Comedy' by Edoardo Crisafulli (review)

838 Reviews While the case for France's global dominance may remain not proven, Ferguson offershere a fascinatingly differentslant on France's perennial love affairwith food. University of Glasgow Elizabeth Moles The Vision ofDante: Cary's Translation of 'The Divine Comedy'. By Edoardo Crisafulli . Market Harborough: Troubador. 2003. xii + 348 pp. ?25; ?13.99. ISBN 1-899293-09-4. H. F. Cary's translation of Dante into Miltonic blank verse was one of the most culturally significant productions of nineteenth-century Britain. Writers as different as John Keats and John Ruskin carried it about their person and, illustrated by Gustave Dore, it would grace many a Victorian parlour table. Through its cunning allusiveness to a broad range of English poetry, it enabled a foreign medieval Catholic poet to be assimilated to British culture to such an extent that the Commedia came to supplant even Paradise Lost as the epic by which the nineteenth century sought to understand itself. Edoardo Crisafulli's study, therefore, is most timely in being the firstbook to con? centrate solely on Cary's translation, although Valeria Tinkler-Villani has included extensive discussion of Cary's project in her Visions ofDante in English Poetry (Ams? terdam: Rodopi, 1989) and Ralph Pite has traced the influence of Cary's translation on the Romantic movement in poetry (The Circle of our Vision: Dante's Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)). One of the most impressive features of Crisafulli's book is his close attention to the religious setting of Cary's work, and he situates it carefully in relation to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles and infers a broadly 'Ghibelline' reading of the poem, appropriate to a national Church that can read Dante's sympathies with a universal Emperor as prefiguring its own establishment, and which shares a Ghibelline antipathy to papal powers. Crisafulli notes specific instances when Cary's translation strengthens the antipapal language in a manner significant in the context of growing calls for Catholic emancipation in the early nineteenth century. In contrast, this study emphasizes the interpretative nature of Cary's understanding of textual criticism, which leads him to present the reader with a range of possible manuscript readings of debated passages and which prevents a totalizing reading of the source text. While offeringconsiderable insight into the cultural production of Cary's transla? tion, this study has a second focus in offeringa new model of translation study, and about half the book is taken up with this topic. In this context, Crisafulli argues for an eclectic approach that seeks to take account both of poststructuralist valorization of difference rather than equivalence in translation and empirical systemization to argue for an eclectic 'historical empiricism' (p. 78). This reviewer is not a scholar of translation studies but did note that there seemed to be a tension between the broadly synchronic nature of translation theory and the diachronic nature of Cary's project, which, indeed, seeks to dramatize historical distance itself as part of its own translation theory. Crisafulli himself seemed most alert to the problem and one had a sense of him struggling with the limits of his methodology. In his conclusion, for example, he states that Cary was a 'conservative' translator 'only from a stylistic point of view' (p. 331) in an attempt to use and also question translation-theory categories, but even Cary's deliberate use of archaisms, Anglo-Saxon-style alliteration, and King James Bible sublimity can all be attributed to a historicist project to subsume Dante within English culture and, importantly, to give the nascent English literary canon Dante's own cultural prestige. While this book agrees with my historicist reading, it still seems to conclude that Cary's translation seeks to render Dante historically MLR, 100.3, 2005 839 'ancient' by means of its archaizing strategy,rather than seeing him 'fill in' the histor? ical gap between source and target text. There are, indeed, not just Renaissance but eighteenth-century and even contemporary poetic allusions throughout the Vision, including references to poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. This is a new and implicitly ' Whiggish' historicism which sits uneasily with translation-theory formalism. Despite these caveats about translation studies, Crisafulli's chapter...

Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr

Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr, renowned educator, author, editor, and authority on polymer science and the science of color, died of a stroke following a four-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, in Clifton Park, New York, on 12 December 2004.Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on 24 August 1919, Fred attended Caltech and earned his BSc in chemistry there in 1941. He pursued graduate work at Cornell University, where, under Nobel laureate Peter Debye, he studied light scattering in synthetic rubber and its relation to particle size and molecular weight. In 1945 Fred was granted a doctorate.He subsequently joined the plastics department of the DuPont company in Wilmington, Delaware, where he developed methods of coloring synthetic materials, measuring molecular-weight distributions, and measuring rates of photopolymerization. From 1951 to 1964, he was also a lecturer in high polymers in the University of Delaware’s chemistry department and was a visiting professor of chemical engineering at MIT during the academic year 1960–61.Fred left DuPont in 1964 to accept an appointment as professor of analytical chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He taught and directed research in polymer science and color science, studied chromatography, and measured the molecular structures and chemical and physical properties of polymers. Fred founded the Rensselaer Color Measurement Laboratory and directed the lab from its beginning until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1984. The laboratory was the only institution in the US that granted advanced degrees in color science and was internationally recognized as a major color-science research center. Fred established the color-science journal Color Research and Application in 1976. As the editor-in-chief from the journal’s beginning until the end of 1986, he maintained a high level of scientific and editorial integrity. He was succeeded as editor by Rolf Kuehni in 1987, and Ellen Carter, one of Fred’s graduates, in 1990.In addition to more than 280 scientific publications on polymers, color, and related fields, Fred wrote several books on polymer science, the best known being his Textbook of Polymer Science (Interscience, 1962). He and Max Saltzman wrote Principles of Color Technology (Interscience, 1966), the only text on that subject. Fred’s graduates didn’t have to look far for advice on going into industrial color management. With Richard N. Kelley, Fred wrote a book about it: Entering Industry: A Guide for Young Professionals (Wiley, 1975).Technically and administratively active in every scientific society involving color or polymer science, Fred was a natural choice as an officer or member of governing boards. A list of the honors and awards bestowed on him by national and international scientific societies and other institutions would far exceed the bounds of this brief notice. He received the highest honors.Fred was a member of several national and international standardizing organizations. When he made a proposal or voiced a reasoned objection to one, he got undivided and respectful attention, and rarely much dissent. In the American Society for Testing and Materials, he worked tirelessly as a member of the committee on color and appearance and gave particular attention to matters of terminology. That committee instituted The Fred W. Billmeyer Jr Award for outstanding service to the committee and presented the inaugural award to him in 1999.Fred enjoyed the lighter side of life and included cartoons in his color-technology textbook. When one of my papers concluded with 10 rules for producing material color standards, they appeared in Color Research and Application as commandments, in the language of the King James Bible, and Fred had them set in Old English typeface.Beyond his prodigious legacy of scientific publications, Fred left a living legacy in his many students, particularly the cadre of young color scientists who earned master’s or doctoral degrees in his laboratory. The list of those distinguished graduates reads like a Who’s Who of modern color science. I considered it an honor and privilege to participate in the graduate program as an adjunct professor.Fred perpetuated his living legacy by transferring much of what remained of his laboratory to the Munsell Color Science Laboratory, established in 1983 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The lab soon came under the direction of Roy Berns, one of Fred’s graduates. In March 2005, RIT established the Fred W. Billmeyer Jr Memorial Undergraduate Fellowship in Color Science to employ undergraduates as research assistants in the laboratory or support their work in other institutions.Fred stood tall in every way. Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr PPT|High resolution© 2005 American Institute of Physics.

The changing balance of government and family in care for the elderly in Sweden and other European countries

Patterns of care for the elderly have changed dramatically in Sweden over the post‐war years, and new trends have emerged in the last decade. Relatively fewer elderly are institutionalised or use public Home Help and more are helped by family members. The family structure of the elderly in Sweden is more favourable today than before for providing help: more elders are married (or cohabit) and stay married longer and more of them have children and other kin than previously. Although old parents and their offspring very seldom live together, they often do not live far apart. Social services increasingly target elders who are short on kin, very frail and live alone, a pattern that is common in European countries. Both carers and cared‐for elderly persons want shared responsibility, that state and family together provide for frail elders. Paradoxically, more elders are cared for longer and more by their families, but eventually also a larger proportion of elders than before use public services; in particular, more elderly persons now use institutional care for some period before the end of their life than previously. This paper draws on evidence across 50 years of shifting patterns in Swedish old age care and makes comparisons with living arrangements and patterns of care in several western European countries. ‘Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth’. Text on a gravestone from 1702 at Fiskebäck chapel, Sweden, from the King James Bible, Psalm 71 Verse 9.

‘Never perfectly printed’: the Authorized Version of the Bible

The text is the editor's introduction to The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible to be published in 2004.THOUGH it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly printed. This is not to say either that it is badly printed or that absolute perfection can be achieved, but that the text and its presentation can be improved. First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these can be revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators' own decisions as to how it should read. Second, the presentation of the text – spelling, punctuation and formatting – interferes with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is. This article continues to explore the criteria used behind the publication of this new work.

The Earliest Textual Sources for Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the King James Bible

Research Article| January 01 2005 The Earliest Textual Sources for Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the King James Bible Review of Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson, and Robert J. Matthews, eds. Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts. Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2004. x + 851 pp. $99.95.With some commentary on Kent P. Jackson. The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts. Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2005. x + 180 pp., with index. $19.95. Royal Skousen Royal Skousen Royal Skousen received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and is a professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University. Since 1988, Skousen has served as the editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The FARMS Review (2005) 17 (2005) (2): 451–470. https://doi.org/10.5406/farmsreview.17.2.0451 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Royal Skousen; The Earliest Textual Sources for Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the King James Bible. The FARMS Review 1 January 2005; 17 (2005) (2): 451–470. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/farmsreview.17.2.0451 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The fourth R: conflicts over religion in America's public schools

Contrary to popular belief, God has certainly not been kicked out of the public schools. What is banned is state-sponsored prayer, not the religious speech of the students themselves. But as news stories, political speeches, and lawsuits amply demonstrate, this approach has by no means resolved the long-standing debate over religion in public education. While some people challenge the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, with its reference to one nation under God, others view school shootings and the terrorism of 9/11 as evidence that organised prayer must once again become part of the official school day. In this lively book, Joan DelFattore traces the evolution of school-prayer battles from the early 1800s, when children were beaten or expelled for refusing to read the King James Bible, to current disputes over prayer at public-school football games. Underlying these events, she shows, is a struggle to balance two of the most fundamental tenets of Americanism: majority rule and individual rights.

Four Histories for the Forthcoming Fourth Centenary of the King James Version, 1611-2011

FOUR HISTORIES FOR THE FORTHCOMING FOURTH CENTENARY OF THE KING JAMES VERSION, 1611-2011 The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. By David Daniell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xx, 900. $40.00.) In Beginning: The Story of King James Bible and How It Changed Nation, Language, and Culture. By Alister McGrath. (New York: Random House. 2001 [hardbound]; Anchor Books. 2002. Pp. x, 338. $15.00 paperback.) Wide as Waters: The Story of English Bible and Revolution It Inspired. By Benson Bobrick. (New York: Simon & Schuster. 2001 [hardbound]; Penguin. 2002. Pp. 379,7. $14.00 paperback.) God's Secretaries: The Making of King James Bible. By Adam Nicholson. (New York: HarperCollins. 2003); Power and Glory: Jacobean England and Making of King James Bible (London: HarperCollins. 2003. Pp. xiv, 281. $24.95.) Perhaps because four-hundredth anniversary of King James Version (KJV) is approaching in 2011, there have recently been publications on English Bible by David Daniell, Alister McGrath, Benson Bobrick, and Adam Nicholson. Starting with best, I will make brief comments on their merits and then return to fuller examination of Daniell's Bible in English. David Daniell, emeritus professor of English, University College, London, was an eminent Shakespeare scholar before turning full-time to Bible. In last fifteen years, Daniell has edited modern-spelling versions of Tyndale's New Testament of 1534 (hardbound, 1989; paperback, 1995) and Tyndale's Old Testament (1992), and he has authored William Tyndale: A Biography (1994, hardbound; 2001, paperback). These publications, his own wide reading, and consultation with many other scholars enrich his survey of English Bible over thirteen centuries, from Caedmon's Hymn c.658 to New International Readers' Version of 1997. Alister McGrath, lecturer in Christian Doctrine and Ethics, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and Reformation scholar, is perhaps better qualified than Daniell to publish on Bible. McGrath studies two centuries, from first printed Bible of Johan Gutenberg in 1456 to restoration of Charles II in 1660. Although McGrath omits notes, he names his sources within text. He offers balanced judgments, describing NT Greek as of workplace and market and KJV English as reminiscent of the palaces of Westminster and high tables of Oxford and (p. 239). McGrath rightly praises Tyndale as a master of pithy phrase (p. 79). I would use this paperback in graduate study of Early Modern English literature or history. Benson Bobrick earned Ph.D. degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and so he was taught how to write literary history. Bobrick covers three centuries from Wycliff (d. 1384), to Tyndale, Coverdale, James I, and Bunyan (d. 1688). Unlike McGrath, he gives notes, but they are often out of date, e.g., H. W. Hoare, Tbe Evolution of English Bible (1901) (pp. 149, 288); or secondhand, e.g., Thomas More quoted by Christopher Hill, The English Bible and Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993) (p. 280). Even worse, Bobrick makes allegations without documentation; e.g., that Elizabeth tampered with juries in political trials (p. 270) or that Jesuit attempted to assassinate one of KJV translators (p. 228). A publisher and travel writer, Adam Nicholson treats brief period from accession of James I in 1603 to publication of KJV in 1611. Like McGrath, Nicholson incorporates his sources into text, but he is more chatty than analytical; e.g., he surrounds five pages on work of Second Cambridge Company of translators with seven pages on private life of their secretary John Bois (pp. 202-213). Nicholson appreciates Tyndale's plain and dignified language but holds that rich and resonate style of KJV was better suited to public reading in an established church (p. …

:God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

:<i>God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible</i>

Musical instruments of the Bible

For everyone who's read the Bible and wondered what David's harp, or Nebuchadnezzar's sackbut and cornett really were, Jeremy Montagu, retired curator of Oxford's Bate Collection of Historical Instruments, has composed an astoundingly thorough investigation and explanation of the musical instruments that pepper the pages of Western Civilization's most holy book. This is a detailed study of all the musical instruments mentioned in the Bible, using the resources of linguistics, organology, and ethnomusicology to identify and describe them. Every reference to an instrument is noted and all the misconceptions of translation are corrected. The Bible, as we know it in English, is a translation, and the history of biblical translations into Aramaic, Greek, Latin and other languages is one of guesswork. The substitution of the musical instruments from the translator's era for those of the original author is as common as it is overlooked. Jubal did not have an organ, nor David a harp. This book uses all the resources available to establish what each instrument really was, what it looked like, and how it was played and is arranged in the same order as the King James Bible, with explanation where this differs from other versions in English. As well as a full bibliography, there are three indexes. The first is of Biblical Citations so that readers may check every mention in the Bible from its chapter and verse. The second is a quadrilingual parallel citation in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English, so that each reference can be crosschecked. The third is a general index. The four biblical languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, are used to the full, and the original texts are cited frequently. There are 18 illustrations, some of which are archeological remains, some ethnographic parallels, and one is of the sole biblical instrument still in regular use: the ram's horn which brought down the walls of Jericho. Musical Instruments of the Bible is perfect for university theology and comparative religion depa

Interactive Storytelling: From the Book of Genesis

Keith Park, advisory teacher for Sense (the National Deafblind Rubella Association) in Greenwich and Lewisham, London, has written about his approach to interactive storytelling for BJSE before. This article describes a series of poetry workshops based on chapters 37 to 45 of the Book of Genesis (the story of Joseph and his family) using the text of the King James Bible of 1611. The workshops took place at Charlton School in Greenwich between September and November 2002. The full text of the Genesis workshops, with a clear exposition of their implementation, is provided here but the article begins with a restatement of the principles of interactive storytelling. The importance of developing curriculum access for pupils with multi‐sensory impairments while simultaneously supporting staff who work with these young people in schools is emphasised. Keith Park discusses the relevance of the circle concept in storytelling and the strong focus, in the poetry workshops, on rhythm. He goes on to evaluate the impact of the workshops, both in terms of staff confidence and through examples of the pupils' responses mapped against the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) framework for recognising the attainments of pupils with learning difficulties. The article concludes with some indications of further developments in this exciting and innovative area of practice.

The Bible in English: its history and influence

A vibrant history of the myriad English translations of the Bible and what they meant to their translators, readers, and times The greatest of the earlier translators of the Bible into English, William Tyndale, was martyred in 1536 for his work. Immediately after him, however, translations proliferated: the whole Bible, or significant parts, has now been translated into English from its original Greek and Hebrew more than three thousand times. This major new book tells the extraordinary story of the Bible in England from approximately the fourth century, and its later translation into English in Britain and America to the present day. Eminent scholar David Daniell charts the profound impact successive versions of the Bible have had on the people and communities that read them. He explains the work of major translators, the history of influential translations following Tyndale, including Coverdale's, the Geneva Bibles and the King James Bible, and how greatly Americans have contributed in the late twentieth century, especially after the American Revised Standard Version. Encompassing centuries of change-from a time when no one except priests had knowledge of the Bible beyond a few traditional stories mixed with saints' lives, through later years when ordinary people were steeped in Biblical doctrine and language, to the present, when popular knowledge of the Bible, we are told, has disappeared-this eloquent book reveals how the endeavor of translating the Bible into English has changed religious practice, the arts, society, and the English language itself.

A Textual History of the King James Bible

A Textual History of the King James Bible

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: One Bible Only? Examining Exclusive Claims for the King James Bible

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: One Bible Only? Examining Exclusive Claims for the King James Bible