'Education for all' is Bible's legacy (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

'Education for all' is Bible's legacy

2:23pm Wednesday 11th January 2012 in Reviews By Jim Greenhalf

The Book Of Books: The Radical Impact Of The King James Bible 1611-2011, by Melvyn Bragg, Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99

Melvyn Bragg may not be orthodoxly religious, but I suspect his book about the King James Bible was the one he always wanted to write – whether he knew it or not.

The reason is not hard to fathom. A pretty prolific author himself, for many years he presented ITV’s South Bank Show and Radio 4’s Start The Week, programmes which took the history of culture and ideas as a starting point.

How could the man of letters from Buttermere, the country’s great explainer, not be attracted by perhaps the most influential book ever compiled, written, translated and published?

My only regret is that I was not in Bradford when he gave his talk about The Book Of Books at the cathedral last autumn. I would have liked to have asked his opionion about those who believe that the Bible and the Koran are the undiluted word of their particular God.

Arguably, more blood as has been spilled, more atrocities have been committed, in defence of that view even though the evidence is contrary. Men inspired by a vision of God or Allah undoubtedly contributed to the texts; but both books evolved from what had gone before, principally in Greek, Hebrew and Latin.

Bragg’s job was to recount the history of the 1611 King James Bible, why it was commissioned and its subsequent impact on the world, in time for this year’s 400th anniversary.

In the beginning he summarises this impact with his customary skill as a presenter. “The King James Bible was the steel of will and belief that forged America and other British colonies. It has inspired missionaries around the globe and consoled the hopeless in their desperation.

“It was used by the enforcers of slavery and later by the liberators of slaves, and transformed into liberation theology by the slaves themselves,” he writes. “It became the bedding of gospel music and the spirituals which set in motion soul, blues, jazz and rock, the unique cultural gift of America to the world. It has defined and re-defined sexual attitudes. It has fortified and provoked philosophy.”

Britain’s road to democracy may have owed more to Methodism than Marxism, as Bragg says towards the end. But along that road he looks back on two pillars of wisdom: the first was the Reformation, unwittingly inspired by Henry VIII, which led to demands of freedom of thought and expression; the second, underpinning the first, was the translation of the Bible into English.

This, he says, “resulted in a book which became the university for those who were barred from them, the education for those who had hitherto been denied it, and the national book giving access for all to the high table of debates on life and death and eternity.”

In the end he re-encounters his own experiences of the Bible, starting from the age of six when his uncles “hauled me into the choir at St Mary’s, the Anglican church in the Cumbrian town of Wigton.” And this is what Bible has come to mean to him. “The whole idea – God, Genesis, Christ, Resurrection – is now to me a moving metaphor, a poetic way of attempting to understand what may be forever incomprehensible. When I was six it was the truth about all of life.

“But in what those remembered words of 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’.”