{"id":5819,"date":"2011-04-30T22:38:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T22:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5819"},"modified":"2011-04-30T22:38:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-30T22:38:15","slug":"christopher-hitchens-the-kjv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/christopher-hitchens-the-kjv\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Hitchens & the KJV"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Via Vanity Fair<\/em>, here\u2019<\/a>s a fine account from Christopher Hitchens of the\u2014King James Version\u2014greatest of all the English translations of the Bible.<\/p>\n

As always with Mr. Hitchens, there\u2019s room for a good anecdote:<\/p>\n

After she was elected the first female governor of Texas, in 1924, and got herself promptly embroiled in an argument about whether Spanish should be used in Lone Star schools, it is possible that Miriam A. \u201cMa\u201d Ferguson did not say, \u201cIf the King\u2019s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it\u2019s good enough for the children of Texas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those were the days.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s this:<\/p>\n

Until the early middle years of the 16th century\u2026torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It\u2019s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale…Their combat fully merits the term \u201cfundamental.\u201d Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean \u201cthe congregation\u201d as an autonomous body, rather than \u201cthe church\u201d as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words \u201cHoc\u201d and \u201ccorpus\u201d (in the \u201cFor this is my body\u201d passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, \u201cHocus-pocus,\u201d finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe. The cold and righteous More, backed by his \u201cBig Brother\u201d the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel\u2019s masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome story in such a way as to revise the shining image of \u201cSaint\u201d Thomas More, the \u201cman for all seasons,\u201d almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted upon others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One can only agree, pausing only to note that, during the course of his recent visit to the UK, the current pope had the gall to lecture the English<\/a> on the virtues of the bleakly proto-totalitarian More. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Vanity Fair, here\u2019s a fine account from Christopher Hitchens of the\u2014King James Version\u2014greatest of all the English translations of the Bible. As always with Mr. Hitchens, there\u2019s room for a good anecdote: After she was elected the first female … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[624,765,766,425],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5819"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5823,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions\/5823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}