Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Happy Birthday to the King James Bible

Worthy of dramatic commemoration, indeed. Whether you believe in it or not, this book formed much of the world we live in, very probably forming you yourself, dear reader.

It is an act of faith to believe that the books of the Bible even belong together between the same covers. The New York Times food columnist Robert Farrar Capon once suggested this analogy: The Bible is like a trunk in your grandfather's attic. It contains a variety of things: a family tree, some poetry, some attempts at short fiction, some political opinionating, some love letters, some legal documents, some penny wisdom gathered through the years, and etc. All very diverse, and all from different times, but all from the same grandfather.

Have some quotes:

"A noble book! All men's book! It is our first oldest statement of the never-ending problem--man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on earth; and all in such free-flowing outlines, grand in its sincerity; in its simplicity and its epic melody."
-- Thomas Carlyle

"The Holy Bible is not only great but high explosive literature. It works in strange ways and no living man can tell or know how that book in its journeyings through the world has started an individual soul 10,000 different places into a new life, a new belief, a new conception and a new faith."
-- Stanley Baldwin

"I know the Bible is inspired becaue it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge