The Book of Books (43 page)

In its beginnings was the call to faith. In those beginnings were other hidden calls to people who would listen to them. Its impact has been immeasurable and it is not over yet.

I encountered the King James Bible in 1945 when I was six. My uncles had hauled me into the choir of St Mary's, the Anglican church in the north Cumbrian town of Wigton. A town at that time of twelve churches. Wigton's population was about 5,000.

In the service of the Nine Lessons and Carols, the tradition is that the youngest choirboy reads the first lesson. It was a tough call. The words I had to read, from Genesis, were incomprehensible: ‘and the serpent beguiled her and she did eat.' The church was packed, floor and gallery, candlelit, parents and relatives somewhere in that mass of congregation, all of whom wore their best, their ‘Sunday' clothes. I remember as I tried to peer over the eagle-masted lectern that it was so very strange: this voice was not mine, out there was something both me and not me. But it got done. ‘Here endeth the first lesson,' and the page was turned for the next reader.

My mother, a Wigton girl, was christened and confirmed in that church. She was married there and at some time soon will join my father who is buried there.

The church was a strong strand in my childhood. Choir meant regular attendance and the choir practice, church services, Sunday school, the church youth club (the Anglican Young People's Association), debates, outings, games and dances in the Parish
Rooms. The Bible came into the school in morning assemblies, prayers, hymns and lessons called Religious Instruction. I was caught up in it, doused in it, bound in it, and then, in the heady liberation of adolescence, unbound. But there has continued to be a residue, stronger than a ‘trace memory', but much less, as I said in the book, than the total Christian demand on a believer.

This book grew out of that early experience. The language of the King James Version flowed into me, its stories and characters fed the imagination and its various promises and threats provided both meat for argument and grist for guilt.

St Mary's is a handsome Georgian church on the site of a huddled medieval church pulled down without any recorded regret. There are several fine stained-glass windows but on the north side there were three large empty windows which, a few years ago, I decided to fill with stained glass as a tribute to my parents and family and as a thanksgiving to the church for what I had got out of it.

This was an unconscious education. The stories and words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms and hymns, were sung and listened to for many years. They are still lodged in my mind. They were a gift. The music, too, the anthems we sang, the organ voluntaries we heard and the quiet ceremonies of a then benign, easy, undemanding church built up a hidden store of knowledge and sensations, church bells and candles, bowing to the altar, versicles and responses.

I wanted the three new windows to bring the town into the church. Other windows told stories from the Bible. I wanted stories of Wigton, representing the congregations which had been the Church in that town for more than 800 years. To illustrate this I chose not only the school and the church itself, but the factory, the cattle auction, the rivers, the once prosperous now obsolete mills, the streets, terraced houses, the special features of the place
and the people. The King James Bible brought them into the church with eyes and ears at last fully opened to the Faith they practised. Over the centuries many had lived and died for it.

Brian Campbell, an artist and long-time friend, made the designs. Alex Haynes, crafted the stained-glass final version.

Occasionally I go to the church when I am in the area. Its numbers have fallen as they have all over the country. I think there's a gallantry about those who still assemble there. You see this most clearly when you go into one of our magnificent cathedrals in the late afternoon to listen to the incomparable music of the Choral Evensong. The choir can outnumber the congregation.

They are few. But they have been few before and they hang on. Perhaps out of habit or nostalgia or perhaps because of an apprehension or hope for some intimation of the mystery of things – things that the recent President of the Royal Society said we shall never know about but sometimes think or feel that we sense.

The whole idea – God, Genesis, Christ, Resurrection – is now to me a moving metaphor, a poetic way of attempting to understand what may be for ever incomprehensible. When I was six it was the truth about all of life.

But in what those remembered words in the Bible hold, there is still for me a sonic echo of something Isaac Newton – a mathematician, and a Christian – said at the end of his life. He described his work as having been like that of a boy merely collecting pebbles on the shore ‘whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me'.

Hannah Whittingham has been invaluable in helping with the research for this book. She is widely gifted and I have been lucky that she found the time to work so energetically on this project.

I am once again in debt to my friends Vivien Green and Julia Matheson whose counsel and practical help have been unstinting. I have been very fortunate to know and work with them over so many years. My wife, Cate Haste, has been unfaltering in her support.

To the authors listed in the bibliography I owe a lot. This Book of Books has been built on books. Books are written to be read and studied: and to be used by later writers of other books. None more than the King James Bible.

I am grateful to my publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, especially its exemplary non-fiction editor Rupert Lancaster and to Sam Richardson who was in at the beginning.

Finally my warmest thanks to my friend Richard Simon, of whose generous reading and knowledge I was a beneficiary here, as I have been for many years.

© Alamy/Pictorial Press: 2 below. © The British Library: vi (C.35.I.11), 1 (C.188.a. 17, CXIV), 6 above right (G.11631), and below (C.70.aa.3). © Corbis Images: 5 below, 8 below, 10 below, 12 below, 14 above left/ attributed to Giotto, 14 centre right/painting by Cristofano Allori, 14 below/painting by Guercino, 16 above/photo Jim Bourg, 16 below/ photo Goran Tomasevic. © Mary Evans Picture Library: 4 centre right, 10 centre right, 13 above, 15 centre left, 15 below right/Marx Memorial Library. © Getty Images: 2 above/Time & Life Pictures, 3 above/ portrait by Nathaniel Hone, 3 below/painting by John Collet, 4 above and below, 5 above left and centre right, 6 above left, 7 above left, 7 below left/photo Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures, 12 above. © The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California: 9 above/portrait by Bass Otis/photo Bridgeman Art Library. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC: 7 above right/engraving by Samuel Hollyer, 8 above/photo Arthur Rothstein, 10 above/photo Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 11, 13 below. © National Portrait Gallery, London: 15 above right/portrait by John Singer Sargent/NPG 1746. Private Collection/photo Bridgeman Art Library: 9 below right/portrait by John Keenan. © Rex Features: 7 below right. © Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries: 9 below left/portrait by John Rising/photo Bridgeman Art Library.

Anderson, Christopher,
The Annals of the English Bible
, London: William Pickering, 1845

Bobrick, Benson,
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired
, Simon and Schuster, 2001

Bourne, George,
A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument
, 1845

Bragg, Melvyn,
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
, Sceptre, 2004

Bragg, Melvyn,
12 Books That Changed the World
, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006

Bruce, Frederick Fyvie,
The King James Version: The First
350
Years
, OUP, 1960

Bruce, Frederick Fyvie,
History of the Bible in English
, Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002

Campbell, Gordon,
Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611
—
2011
, OUP, 2010

Crystal, David,
Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language
, OUP, 2010

Daniell, David,
The Bible in English: Its History and Influence
, YUP, 2003

Davies, Julian,
The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625 – 41
, Clarendon Press, 1992

Dawkins, Richard,
The God Delusion
, Bantam, 2006

Fox, John, ‘The Influence of the English Bible on Literature',
Princeton Theological Review
, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1911

Harris, Sam,
Letter to a Christian Nation
, Bantam, 2007

Harrison, Eugene Myers,
Blazing the Missionary Trail
, Chicago, Ill.: Scripture Press Book Division, 1949

Hill, Christopher,
The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution
, Penguin Books, 1993

Hills, Margaret T. (ed.),
The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Testament Published in America, 1777 – 1957
, Greenwood, 1991

Jayne, A.G., ‘The Bible in English' in Henry Barker,
A Tercentenary Celebration of the Authorized Version of the English Bible
, New York Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, 1911

MacCulloch, Diarmaid,
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
, Allen Lane, 2009

Mayhew, Henry,
London Labour and the London Poor
, Penguin Classics, 2006

McAfee, Cleland Boyd,
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and its Influence on Life and Literature
, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912

McGrath, Alister,
In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture
, Hodder & Stoughton, 2002

Middleton, Richard,
Colonial America: A History, 1565 – 1776
, Blackwell, 2000

Miller, Randall M. (ed.),
Religion and the American Civil War
, OUP, 1998

Nelson, Scott Reynolds and Sheriff, Carol,
A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854 – 1877
, OUP, 2007

Nicolson, Adam,
God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
, HarperCollins, 2003

Noll, Mark,
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
, University of North Carolina Press, 2006

Norton, David,
A Textual History of the King James Bible
, CUP, 2005

Rowse, A.L.,
William Shakespeare: A Biography
, Barnes & Noble, 1995

Scrivener, Henry Ambrose Frederick,
The Authorized Edition of the English Bible, 1611, its Subsequent Reprints and Modern Representatives
, CUP, 1884

Shaheen, Naseeb,
Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays
, University of Delaware Press, 1999

Taylor, Alan,
American Colonies: The Settling of North America
, Penguin, 2001

Walsh, W. Pakenham,
Modern Heroes of the Mission Field
, New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1915

Wheeler, J.M.,
Satan, Witchcraft and the Bible
, London, 1895

 

WEBSITES

 

http://www.tyndale.org/TSJ/
3
/mansbridge.htm
l
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chaptero
1
.html
http://www.natsoc.org.uk/society/history/
http://www.gideons.org
http://www.biblesociety.org.uk
http://www.usccgettysburg.org/
http://www.av
1611
.org/kjv/reagan.html
http://www.ymca.net

‘KJB' indicated the King James Bible.

Abel

abortion

Abraham

Abravanel, Isaac ben

Adam

Adams, John

Addams, Jane

adultery

Africa

African Methodist Episcopal Church

African-Americans

Ahab, King

Alcott, Louisa May

Alfred the Great

All About Eve
(film)

Allestree, Richard

‘Am I my brother's keeper?'

America

the Bible and literature

Great Awakenings

missionaries in

new world founded

slavery and civil war

American Bible Society

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

American Civil War

American English

American Indians
see also
Native Americans

American Social Gospel movement

American War of Independence (1775 – 83)

Andrewes, Launcelot, Dean of

Anglican Church
see also
Church of England

Anglican Young People's Association

Anglo-Saxon

Annesley, Reverend Samuel

Anti-Slavery Society

Antwerp

Antwerp Polyglot (1572)

Apocrypha

Aquinas, St Thomas

Aramaic

Aristotle

Arnold, Matthew

Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury

Astell, Mary

Athelstane, King

Auden, W.H.

Augustine, St

Austen, Jane

Australia

Australian Aboriginals

Authorised Version
see
King James Bible

Babylon

Bacon, Francis

Baker, David

Ball, John

Balzac, Honoré de