Scripture: Gather and scatter
Four hundred years have passed since the venerable King James commissioned a group of Christian scholars to produce the version of the Bible that still bears his name. What a landmark that was on the long and winding road that brings us the sacred texts as we know them today. No other English language version of the Bible has been so widely used and so well respected for so long; none exerted such enormous impact on the language and Western culture.
Yet today it is something of relic. Its majestic language is considered archaic and some of the sources from which it drew its authority have been supplanted by the discovery of earlier, more reliable manuscripts. The king may live long, but he doesn't live forever. Scripture may be eternal in its message and unchanging in its substance, but the ways we receive and distribute the sacred texts are as multiple and varied as the book spines lining a library shelf.
These days, Bibles are so readily available that people who live in North America scarcely notice them. Anyone who wants a Bible can certainly get a copy for free from any number of eager distributors (including most churches), and the Internet overflows with free Bible resources - many of them excellent.
Meanwhile, publishers churn out countless new versions and specialty editions each year, and people keep buying them. It's a huge industry. New translations keep coming along as well. Were the author of Ecclesiastes writing today, he might well say, "of making many 'Bibles,' there is no end" (3:12).
In a strange way, this too is nothing new. The Bible as we know it is a library in itself, a collection of 66 books written over a stretch of more than 1,000 years by prophets, poets, preachers, historians, disciples, scholars and scribes who had no idea their stories and manuscripts, proverbs and proclamations would some day be enshrined and revered as Holy Scripture.
The centuries-long process of selecting which literature would be part of the Christian canon is another mind-bending tale of complex decision-making, yet another revelation of how God works through humanity. No one really knows how the books of the Old Testament were chosen or when, and the process of selecting the New Testament took several hundred years and some of the choices are still disputed.
Creation of its times
Disputes were part and parcel of King James' world as well. The Bible he authorized in 1611 was certainly a creation of its times. Its literary merits are many and its scholarship was the apex of its era. But the motives of its patron were largely political.
James VI wanted to establish the monarch as the head of the Church of England, and producing the "authorized" pulpit Bible was key element in his strategy. In particular, he felt his authority to be threatened by the ideas of individual conscience that were amplified in the notes of the popular Geneva Bible (1576). His "companies of translators" relied heavily on this and several other existing translations. These included, most notably, the work of William Tyndale, who in 1536 had been found guilty of heresy and cruelly executed for translating the Bible and promulgating Reformation ideals.
Throughout history, this tension between popularizing sacred manuscripts and preserving the holiest of them in their most authentic form has played out in countless arenas. From time immemorial, God-seekers have been reading, collecting, studying collating, translating, embracing and rejecting stories and teachings that give meaning and purpose to life.
One of the reasons the "word of the Lord endures forever" is that it must be discovered anew in each generation. Each of us must come to terms with its sacred authenticity and its claims on our lives in order for it to be meaningful. It isn't just some answer book for the ages. It's more of a narrative whose many genres and episodes reveal the fractured yet enduring relationship between God and His created beings. It's not a closed book.
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