King James Version

After going into the Bible a few years back as a scofflaw atheist and coming out as someone with a healthy respect for the philosophy and stories of the Bible, particularly when rendered in that gorgeous King James prose, I opened the Apocrypha with an open mind. These are the ugly stepchildren of the Biblical corpus; texts that, for one reason or another, are considered non-canonical. Sometimes that is because they were meant to be read in private rather than in public service, sometimes show more because their authenticity was unclear, and mostly, I suspect, because in the various translations and denominations of Christianity over the millennia, they just got shuffled out of the pack.

After reading the Apocrypha, I do find myself wishing some had been expunged due to being too heretical. Because, even though it is also available in that King James prose, the book could do with some spice to it. From first to last I found the Apocrypha dull and tedious, and while some might have that impression of the canonical Bible, that was certainly not my impression of it when I finally sat down to reading it some years back. The Bible had the masterpiece that is the Book of Job, some neat origin stories in Genesis, the fiery books of Moses, eloquent philosophic rants like Jeremiah, to say nothing of the New Testament's 'Greatest Story Ever Told' and Revelation fever-dream. The Apocrypha had nothing like that, but it also didn't have much else. (And some other non-canonical books which sound interesting, like the Gnostic Gospels – particularly Thomas – and the Gospel of Judas, don't form part of the Apocrypha either.)

The Apocrypha starts off with the two books of Esdras, which are standard Old Testament fare about waging war on powerful enemies and coming through by the power of the Lord. They're interesting enough, but they don't do anything that the Books of the Kings don't do, and the Books of the Kings are far from the best stuff in the Bible. After a banal book called Tobit, there is the Book of Judith, which is the only part of the Apocrypha which threatens to actually be interesting for a moment (Judith seduces a warlord who is an enemy of the Jews, then beheads him in his bed in the night).

After that, there is a long scattergun sequence of books that are nothing very much, but at least are short (though all of the books in the Apocrypha are quite short). This is disappointing, and even a book called the Wisdom of Solomon, which should at least have a few good lines, is mostly just unreflective stuff about praising and trusting in God, lacking the nuance of many similar proverbs in, well, Proverbs.

The book ends with its two longest pieces – the two Books of the Maccabees. Like Esdras, these are banal narratives of fighting other desert tribes and trusting in God to help you smite them. It's sub-standard fare, lacking anything memorable. Ultimately, one can see why the Apocrypha is not part of the canonical Bible; there's just not much there for people to chew on, except for one or two of the more dedicated Biblical scholars. I maintain, not just due to its importance and influence but its objective quality, that the King James Bible should be on the reading list of anyone who is serious about literature. But the Apocrypha can be safely ignored. show less

It is important to remember when assessing this 'book' that it is not a book but a 'bible'. It is a collection of books, its title coming from the same Latin root that gives us 'library' (the heritage is more obvious in the French equivalent, bibliothèque). I mention this seemingly trivial fact because it leads into my whole assessment of the Bible. As a self-styled atheist or near-atheist, the Bible only really had an impression on me once I stopped seeing it as the word of God passed down show more (which can be easily scoffed at) and started seeing it as the words of men, telling stories to try and figure things out. Ignoring a dogmatic approach and appraising it as literature and, increasingly, as philosophy, I think I tapped into the wellspring of why the Bible has endured.

This was strange for me. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion was a formative experience in my teenage years and I've always tried to hold myself to a standard of rationality and freethinking. So it was rather disturbing to me when my open-mindedness forced me to accept that when I actually got around to reading it, I was actually liking the Bible and taking a lot of worth from it.

I had two contemporary aids which I found myself leaning on when trying to understand why this was happening. The first – surprisingly – is the writing of Christopher Hitchens. The arch-atheist and public champion of secular rationality actually wrote glowingly of the King James Version of the Bible (codified in his essay 'When the King Saved God' – https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/05/hitchens-201105) and, certainly, if you want the Bible to have value as literature you have to read the King James translation. It is not up for debate. This is the one with all the seemingly archaic 'thees' and 'thou shalts' and 'cometh unto ye', but such language is beautifully rendered and flows easily from an English tongue. It rings with a cleaner sound than the supposedly more 'modern' translations, which become dated as soon as they are printed, just as a Shakespearean soliloquy can still stir your soul in the 21st century where slam poetry can't. The legacy of this translation in the English oral and literary tradition, from Shakespeare onwards, is unparalleled. If you are serious about literature, you have to read the KJV.

Indeed, my desire to retain my self-respect as an amateur bookworm is what made reading the King James Bible an ambition of mine. To qualify some of the heritage of my language – perhaps the most flexible of languages and certainly the most historically important – was what I expected. And it was what I got. But more than that, I found I was increasingly enjoying the book's lessons, its philosophy and its underlying themes. This is where the second contemporary aid proved useful: Jordan B. Peterson. Less surprising, perhaps, than Hitchens, for those who have engaged with some of this Canadian professor's talks and writings over the last couple of years, but still not entirely regular. Peterson is best-known for his 'self-help' stuff (a massive over-simplification, but I won't go into that here). But he also has a huge body of academic work on the psychology of religion and why such stories resonate with us, and (as a bookworm) it is often this rather than the 'tidy your damn room' stuff which has interested me. I began to find I was reading the Bible – still trying to come to terms with how it was so different from my preconceptions – as literature and as philosophy rather than from the point-of-view of a scofflaw atheist.

And it works on that level. In admiring the Bible, it's not that I've seen the power and the glory and I'm on board with the Light and the Word and I'll be going to church tomorrow, praise the Lord. I won't be. And anyone who thinks I am no longer a rationalist and have become someone who is willing to entertain hocus pocus would be mistaken. But I've been dipping into the Bible on and off over the past year and I have had to admit – at first ruefully and then increasingly unashamedly – that I've really enjoyed it. It's not that I've gone into it thinking, 'this is the Word of God and I have to accept it as truth regardless of what I think'. Instead, it's that I've gone into it and my mind has become shaped by the thoughts: 'these are the words of men and though I don't believe it's literal truth, there is a lot here to appreciate'.

And it is true that there is a lot to scoff at and even some to despise. This is a bible, after all; a library, a compendium, a collection. And like any library, some books on the shelves will be better than others. The Bible starts with Genesis and the four other Books of Moses – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is where it seems that, for many, the Bible's reputation is made. Some original and interesting creation stories, backed with some sound prose, that serves as the strong foundation of the Judeo-Christian faith. These are also the books where there are some rather iffy lines ('thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' is thrown in randomly among a bunch of some-stern and some-innocuous rules in Exodus, for example) and sickening events (Moses' war crimes, for example, or Lot's daughter, who is offered up by her father, the 'last good man in Sodom', to be gang-raped by a mob in order to spare his guests – two angels sent by God – from the same fate) that betray a morality you would not want to abide by. Couple this with some interminable passages in which such-and-such begat such-and-such, son of such-and-such, who begat such-and-such (for pages and pages), and laborious passages on the right way to go about minor rituals about sacrifices and unleavened bread, and you see why atheist mockery has such ample feeding ground. By this point a love-and-hate relationship with the Bible is established with the reader, something reinforced by the books which follow, including the Books of the Kings, which is all more of the same.

Things began to change for me with the Book of Job. Particularly when rendered in the KJV, this book is an absolute masterpiece of literature, and only slightly less so as a piece of philosophy. This was the point where I started to take seriously my reassessment of the Bible and began to embrace its ability to provide for metaphysical and transcendental moments. This is where I began to delve into Peterson's remarks about the Biblical storytelling tradition, particularly when infused into his 'self-help' lectures. From Job onwards, I began to recognize how many of the stories were about challenging God (which is what the name 'Israel' means) and being in conflict with God and, through this fight, becoming someone new and ascendant. There is a strain of individualism that starts to become very apparent, only reinforced by the eloquent and entertaining rants in the books of the Prophets (Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel) which follow. Add to this the lyricism of the Book of Psalms and the Proverbs, and the message throughout that doom will manifest on an individual and societal level if you do not take on this mantle and improve yourself (thanks to Dr. Peterson, again), and by this point I was seriously impressed. If you read only one book in the Bible, make it the Book of Job. It is the key.

This summarizes the thick wodge of paper that is the Old Testament and, to be honest, I actually prefer it to the New Testament. The New Testament is much shorter (about 250 pages compared to the approximately 870 of the Old) but the imperial joy I felt from reading parts of the Old Testament began to dissipate, even though I was completely on board by this point and putting my atheism to the side. The New Testament is still good, and in the figure of the Christ we have the embodiment of the individual 'ideal' to aspire to, which forms a continuation of the strain of individualism I so enjoyed in the Old books. In the story of the crucifixion we have, if not 'the greatest story ever told', then certainly a strong contender for it.

Furthermore, the line from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, when Jesus is being tortured on the cross and cries aloud to God, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), is – especially in context – the most heart-breaking line in all literature. A close second is the scene the night before his arrest, when Jesus, knowing exactly what he is going to suffer on the cross, asks God to remove this obligation from him – "let this cup pass from me" (Matthew 26:39) – but, if He cannot, to give him the strength not to falter ("the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" – Matthew 26:41). Monty Python were of the right mind when they said that Life of Brian evolved from being a lampooning of Jesus to being a mockery of his dim followers because there wasn't really anything funny about Christ, and that he had some good lessons.

Thinking historically and anthropologically, I also enjoyed the lesson that all men are equal before God, relative to their good or bad deeds. It is a hugely emancipating lesson and I don't know if Western civilization would have advanced beyond tribalism and monarchy and rigid class structure if not for the fact that its founding document had this imperishable kernel of the sovereignty of the individual built into it. But if I continue in that vein, I might as well just direct you to a Jordan Peterson video on YouTube, so I won't.

The problem I had with the New Testament is that whilst it is still a case of people telling stories to one another to try and figure things out, the people in question are becoming increasingly aware of that fact. A lot of Jesus' sayings are clearly inspired by passages from the Old Testament (particularly the books of the Prophets), and the secular response would be that Jesus was a man, rather than the Christ, who assimilated and taught the old lessons well, passing them off as his own. But that's fine – Jesus was clearly a man of fortitude and brotherly love, regardless of his divinity or otherwise.

Rather, it is the books of the Bible following the Gospels which disappointed me. I subscribe to what I call the John Lennon school of thought, which is that Jesus is alright but the disciples come along and ruin it. There are still some good lines, but they bastardize the message not only of Jesus but of the better Old Testament books. I didn't mind the Book of Revelation so much, sick and strange as it is, though I wouldn't want John the Revelator looking after any small children. Instead, it is the Epistles of St. Paul and the other contributions by the apostles which are damaging. The increasingly naked anti-Semitism (and I've read the KJV is actually rather tame compared to other versions) placed a grain of evil in Christianity which laid the first slat on the railroad to Auschwitz, the great failure of Western civilization in the 20th century, which we still have not recovered from.

Paul's epistles also introduce a missionary zeal completely contrary to the individualism of both the Old Testament and the example of the Christ. The establishment of the church and the ministry is the other great Christian error. It took away from the individual whom Christ was set up to represent, perhaps irrevocably. 2nd Peter also says that the Word is not up for interpretation (2 Peter 1:20-21), thereby making dogma rather than liberality the Christian code from then on. St. Paul can turn a phrase, but the Apostles did more harm than good. In some crucial ways, they were dim and dogmatic and closed-minded. (C. K. Stead's short novel My Name Was Judas is great on this.)

Thinking about this sad end to the Bible, with its perversion of all that came before, I was inclined to be unkind in this review. But, ironically, it is one of the lines from these later books, the Epistle of Paul to Titus, which encapsulates why I am unwilling to do so. "And let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful," says Titus 3:14, and this is why I am unwilling to judge the quality of the library by its least members. There is a lot to embrace in the Bible, from the archetypal stories to the lyricism to the masterpiece of Job to the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. Not to mention its role as one of the two founding pillars of Western civilization. To return to Hitchens, he wrote a few times of the values of the two cities of Athens and Jerusalem, to juxtapose the values of the Enlightenment to the role of Christianity in Western history. But increasingly, I am of the mind that you need both of these pillars; that a secular rationalism is not enough, and placing all the weight on that one pillar of the Enlightenment and the Classical tradition will cause it to wobble. We saw that in the 20th century, as predicted by Nietzsche, when nationalism and socialism and commercialism failed (and continue to fail) to adequately replace religion as a source of meaning.

There is humanism, of course, which is the right idea, but humanism has to embrace Christianity as much as rationality. It needs to be placed lengthways along both pillars in order to serve as the next foundation. You need the balance. People have a need which is emotional, metaphysical, and spiritual, alongside the intellectual and rational need. I am not in any way trying to explain away the horrors of religion which have been wrought throughout history or, for example, the problems involved in Jesus' injunction to believe solely in him, which could easily lead to the despotic, but the Christian tradition at its best had a deep philosophical meaning and sense of individualism. There's a lot about ascension in the New Testament, birthed from the Old, and not just in Revelation. And Christianity is arguably better than the other religions. Certainly, given its history, it has proven it can work in line with the secular tradition, even if that history has not always been an easy one. The test going forward for a rehabilitated Christianity (for I think that is the best possible outcome) will be in whether it can embrace the second pillar of rationality, whether it can resist the hostility to blasphemy and the overly-dogmatic thinking which characterized it when it was 'in charge' in the West. (One simple test might be: 'Can you laugh along with Life of Brian?')

Some secular atheists say, somewhat complacently, that you can make a believer into an atheist if you only get them to read the Bible. Whilst the opposite isn't true (I'm still an atheist), the near-opposite is. Reading the book from a secular point-of-view leads you to assess it as story: as literature and, through its themes, as philosophy. And it stands. As a piece of literature, it stands. And you might be so caught up in it at times that you believe it's real. That, after all, is what the best stories do to us. show less

Like most ancient works of literature, the storytelling is a sloppy and unedited collection of tall tales about questionable historical events, but this really did not have to be such a long read. The entire book should have been trimmed to maybe 200 pages, as the majority of what is written can be omitted without removing anything from the overall storyline. I understand that due to the difficulty required in writing in ancient times it was hard to edit things over, and most writings were show more first draft material, but the Epic of Gilgamesh was an easy read and Homer's epics weren't so bad either. There was just so much unnecessary info included in the Bible, like lists of ancestors.
The first five books obviously originated in oral tradition, especially Genesis. That's why the story is so convoluted, full of holes and missing details, with some details that sound like they've been passed through word of mouth until removed of any meaning. Several of the stories were stolen from Sumerian folklore as well. About halfway through Exodus to the end of Leviticus was a huge list of laws, most of which are extremely brutal or make absolutely no sense and lack relevance today. A large portion is dedicated to the construction of the temple, which is listed down to the smallest detail. Numbers is just a detailed census-like statement counting things.
The remainder of the Old Testament is filled with tales of God's wrath and the oppression he unleashes upon the world. God is a very brutal character, perhaps the most evil, tyrannous character in the whole novel. Not only is he a narcissistic, powerhungry brute with possessive tendencies and a huge temper problem, but he has absolutely no redeemable qualities about him. After all he created an entire world of people just to worship him and makes extreme demands of them like an abusive husband who clearly wants to be disappointed. It's no wonder that so many of the the minor characters lose faith and disobey him. People don't owe the guy just because he created them out of clay or whatever.
Psalms and Proverbs don't contain the wisdom they're reputed to have. Mostly a bunch of obvious observations, unsolicited advice, and religious fanaticism.
The New Testament was more of a political statement of its time than anything else. The story of Jesus, retold over and over in the first few books, was a criticism of the corruption that was going on among other Jews at the time under the influence of Roman authority. This was continued in Paul's letters.
Revelations showed us the true motive of the Nazarene movement, which was to overthrow the Roman Empire, or at the very least to get them to leave the Jews alone. The whole book was written in code under the wrath of Nero, who notoriously persecuted the Nazarenes. In order to escape the understanding of the Romans, it was written in a manner that only Jews at the time would understand, especially Nazarenes. It was a promise, a call-to-action, to bring forth the fall of Rome, which was already on its decline. The promise was to come "soon", within a few generations. The devil worship and blasphemies spoken of referred to the worship of the Roman emperors and their customs such as orgies, homosexuality, and prostitution that all broke the laws of the Bible. When it said the number of the beast but omitted the name, it was referring to Nero. 666 (or 616) is the sum of Hebrew letters in the name Nero[n] Caesar. The conquests, storms, and earthquakes weren't predictions of geological events; they symbolized the civil unrest and revolution that would be brought upon Rome by the Nazarenes once they'd grow in power. The mission would be to turn the entirety of Rome into a kingdom of God through violent revolution. A couple of centuries later, this became only partially true. When Constantine converted to Christianity, he set Rome up for the reign of Christianity that oppressed Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but this was far from a violent revolution. The symbolic "apocalypse" aka the fall of Rome came not from the Christians but from the Germanic invaders of the north. Christianity, too, lost its message as a mission for the liberation of the Jews and the end of corruption. The Nazarenes hadn't even hoped for anything beyond this. But instead it became a tool for corruption and oppression by the very people they sought to destroy. Instead of burning to the ground, Rome (symbolized by Babylon) became the center of Christianity instead of Jerusalem and Israel, the promised land. Constantine, being a clever politician, managed to put a stop to the rising threat of the Nazarenes by adopting their religion, simultaneously granting his successors a powerful tool to control the masses. And for almost two millennia rulers have followed in his lead, using the failed Nazarene movement to control people who were perfectly ignorant of the origins of the document.
It's absurd that after all these years people are still gullible enough take this book literally, and actually believe it to be of some value. It's hardly even useful as a historical document. show less

This really isn't something you can "review" as such, so I'm just gonna scribble down some of my thoughts in no particular order now that I've finally reached the end of this eight month journey.

1. Anyone who tells you to simply "read the Bible", with the expectation that it will change your faith has gotta be more specific. Not saying I didn't learn anything, the read certainly helped me understand a lot more about where we come from as a cultural tradition, but I didn't find anything that show more challenged me spiritually or belief-wise.
2. Whoever edited this needs to take a literal page from Tolkien and move some of this stuff to the appendices. Too often an engaging narrative will be interrupted by a long-ass genealogy or extremely specific measurements for a tabernacle or a census or some other highly uninteresting minutiae.
3. I was not ready for the use of "circumcised" and "uncircumcised" as shorthand for "holy" and "not holy". Moses telling God that he was not worthy to speak of him, citing his "uncircumcised lips" THREW me.
4. Reading the Bible really brings out the absurdity of the claim that it's in any way the literal word of God, or dictated by God, or perfect and complete. It's very obviously written by human hands, many of them at that, over hundreds of years. As one of my favourite Youtube channels (Esoterica) pointed out, the Bible works best when thought of not as a book but a library.
4. The darkest part: If God tells you to enact a genocide, does that mean it's not only morally right, but morally REQUIRED to do so? What could have been an interesting question about ancient belief systems becomes highly disturbing in light of current events.
5. You know that "Rivers of Babylon" song by Boney M? It's a bop, right? Do NOT look up the second half of the psalm the lyrics are based on.
6. It slays me that one of the big conflicts Jesus had with the establishment was about him not washing his hands before eating. Like I get what you're going for with the analogy, what goes into us is not what defiles up, but what comes out, our words and actions and all that. But dude, you gotta wash your hands.
7. Paul, you had me at "interminable genealogies".
8. At times, I thought that reading this would give me the knowledge I needed to respond to people who state that the Bible supports this or that position. But then I had the depressing realisation that they probably don't care what the Bible "really" says.

Worth it? Yeah. For me at least, I'm a big fan of mythology and ancient stories. What's unusual for this one is that it has had such cultural staying power, and impact on peoples beliefs and actions until this day. A lot of "title drop" moments where I recognised a phrase or saying that's still used in everyday language.

Life changing? Nah. Not more than any other collection of literature. show less