My critics wonder about the King James Version I keep quoting

But it's all about the collective memory

I started to post here about the question I get a lot, and then I decided to post it on my blog, Like Mother, Like Daughter, since it has to do with my book, The Summa Domestica. (That three-volume (!) work is an edited, organized, and expanded version of all the posts I wrote over the course of what was then fifteen years and I suppose you could say it is in large part my grand vision of carrying out the part of the vocation of the family to educate and form its children.)

Some just can’t understand how a Catholic can cite and recommend the King James Version of the Bible. Some are vexed, disappointed (a word used in an email), and angry with me. Isn’t the Douay-Rheims enough?

Here is what I wrote about it:

Dear Auntie Leila,

I'm curious/mad/disappointed that you use the King James Version in your book, The Summa Domestica. Why would you, when there is the Douay-Rheims?

Respectfully [but Nonetheless Irked],

Many Readers

Dear Readers!

We are the lucky, blessed, and favored heirs of the richest language and most profound treasury of literature, poetry, and song of any culture.

The source of this textured, subtle, and brilliant expression of man's creativity comes for the most part (not completely of course, but in broad terms) from two springs: Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. For centuries, many of our greatest writers and poets only had these two works at hand, or learned on them before encountering others, which in turn took nourishment from them.

This is a historical fact. If you want your children to have a chance at the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln, consider making them read Shakespeare and the KJV by firelight only. Living in a log cabin and having no shoes might also help!

But seriously, we are trying to educate our children, which means to pass along to them, in as intact form as we can manage, our faith and culture and this particular aspect of our culture, its poetic beauty. It's ours. We actually have a duty to it, as well as to our children and making them able to apprehend it.

In my books, contrary to what my critics assert, I generally reference and use three translations: the Douay-Rheims (which is often identical to the King James Version, in which case that's the one I mention), the King James Version, and the Revised Standard Version.

We need to understand that no translation achieves perfection. Some are better for studying, and that is why we would turn to the RSV. Some are better for prayer, e.g. the Douay-Rheims or RSV or perhaps Knox (with whom I have quibbles), and I would argue, the King James Version, for sheer beauty and forming a deep connection to our heritage on a visceral level. By the way, did you know there is a Catholic King James Version (affiliate link)? Because the main objection to it is just that it leaves out canonical books, which this edition restores. I address the other objection below.

But let me put it this way:

Surely we all know the beginning of Psalm 23 as “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want” (KJV) and not “A psalm for David. The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing.” (D-R).

We want our children to know it the first way too, I would think! And meet it with recognition and warm joy in hymn and poem.

The reasons might be subtle, but they are real.

First, the rhythm of the KJV fits its meaning. It is childlike and simple, easily memorized or rather, just slipping into the memory. Its poetry will cause it to come back easily when the soul needs it.

Second, the lack of a direct object in the second clause offers a deep meaning. “I shall want nothing” is a bit too negative — the word “nothing” isn't helpful in this context — and although the meaning is that nothing will be lacking, that idea is conveyed better by simply leaving out the predicate. “I shall not want” emphasizes the existential fulfillment of the person, the child, the “I”, the subject, the sheep. I will not be in a state of having any needs, because I will be perfectly taken care of by the good Shepherd.

And of course, the image of Shepherd, so central to this Psalm, is left out of the D-R verse entirely.

So in my book, when I talk about, say, building writing skills by doing copy work from the Bible, I suggest usually using the KJV or at least weighing the different translations before choosing one. Personally, I usually find the KJV more satisfying.

And I often use a KJV quote in my writing precisely as a sort of object lesson or ready demonstration of how powerful it is in conjuring up all sorts of connections in your, the reader's, own mind, in the hopes that you will wish to pass that intellectual (at a minimum) superpower on to your child.

Copying out, say, the KJV Psalm 23 imprints it on the child's mind. He internalizes its meter and will recognize it, if only subliminally, in future readings of other works. He himself will become more familiar with expressing things this way. Those of us who are sure to pass along these venerable passages can attest to our children coming up with charming and funny expressions, like my four-year-old son's “Oh, I am as tired as a gazelle falling down!”

Fr. Paul Mankowski, translator extraordinaire, expert in Semitic languages, and priest of sterling orthodoxy, referenced the KJV and other old translations easily, without self-consciousness let alone compunction, as all educated Catholics do. He once commented in an email to me,

Another issue, that also hinges on lexical distribution of reference distinctions, has to do with the Deus/homo antithesis, especially where it's implicit. In the KJV, Isaiah 53:3 reads (cue the Händel): “He was despised, and rejected of men.” In our Lectionary that became, “He was spurned and avoided by persons.” Try Händeling that. The point is that a word can't drop out of a language unless another word pushes it out by doing the same job better, and obviously no word can do the job of English “men,” no matter how many professorial fingers are wagged at us.

He's making a point about inclusive language, but notice the embedded point that we would lose a major master-work of our patrimony, Handel's Messiah, and our deep resonance with it, if we did not preserve its wording, or if we used a different translation in our literature and music classes.

If we insisted on “Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity” (Douay-Rheims) we lose the punch of that un-Latinized word grief in the KJV: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” (Getting back to why the NAB is so bad, not really the subject here, the biblical connection of the movie and soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou would be lost on us entirely if we existed on a diet of technical scriptures. We might think it's only a retelling of The Odyssey and wonder why “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” is a featured song.)

It's very difficult to teach later on what should have become second-nature from the start. The child who hears the KJV from infancy in at least some contexts is far better positioned than the one who has to assimilate it later for the purpose, perhaps, of appreciating some work of art that depends on it.

If we, in some doctrinaire fashion, ban what we perceive as the “Protestant” essence of the KJV, and then later, when our mature children are reading some great work, try to explain the genesis of its allusions, diction, and especially cadences, we will find it hard going and I can tell you from experience, often unavailing. The explanations might fall on the barren ground of basic disconnect.

It works the other way too. If the child doesn't know these favored passages (favored for good reason!) by heart in his own mother tongue, he won't recognize them in worship. I've been struck so often how the current lectionary in the Novus Ordo effects the separation from the past quite efficiently, if tragically:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen~ KJV: Pithy, straight to the point in a matter not easily explained, namely, what is faith.

Now faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not ~ D-R: Good, not as pithy, and “things that appear not” is a tad ambiguous.

Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen ~ NABRE (the edition used at Mass in the US): More words, the most important of which is not a clear improvement (realization for substance).

Can a child take this to heart is my question. Will it come back to him in moments of trouble? Less crucially, but still importantly, will he catch the reference in the title of some novel?

If attending the Traditional Latin Mass, the faithful will hear the readings in Latin and then a translation may be offered. For the child to learn his Bible, extra effort needs to be made to offer good translations in our everyday speaking and reading that offer more than just information.

Fr. Mankowski writes, “Further, a biblical text is not so much read as heard, and not so much heard as re-heard, often hundreds of times in a single lifetime.” He is opposing Ronald Knox's theory of translation as applied to Scripture. Traditional Catholics should read his argument in this article; the Campion Missal, for one, uses the Knox translation for Low Masses.

Tony Esolen skewers the issue of clunky translations (not that I'm saying the D-R is that) in his article What We've Lost in Translation:*

One of the thieves crucified at the side of Christ is mocking him, and the other thief feels a pang of conscience. “We are receiving the due reward of our deeds,” he says, “but this man has done nothing wrong” (RSV); “And we indeed justly, for we are receiving what our deeds deserved; but this man has done nothing wrong” (Douay-Rheims-Challoner). I suppose that if you are hanging on a cross, you will come straight to the point. Now the NAB: “And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” Corresponds? Nothing criminal? Who talks this way? A lawyer arguing before an appellate court, maybe. A professor, probably. A thief on a cross? The translators cannot have considered the drama of the specific situation.

The KJV has “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.” Even more direct, more dying-on-a-cross-like.

For the issue of translating from the Latin Vulgate and how decisive that is for the question of eliminating the KJV, I recommend this article by Jimmy Akin: Uncomfortable Facts about the Douay-Rheims. I appreciate that he points out Douay-Onlyism as a counterpart to KJV-Onlyism!

While translator bias is a fact to be contended with, Douay-Rheims Onlyists often accuse contemporary translations of being tainted by Protestant translations.

But there’s another side to that story. Just as the original Douay came to influence the KJV, the KJV itself came to influence the Douay. Ward notes: “In nearly every case Challoner’s changes took the form of approximating to the Authorized [i.e., King James] Version.”

The fact is that Bible versions on both sides of the confessional divide influence each other. This is because serious translators don’t read only works done by one side. Sometimes the other guys come up with a way of better capturing what’s written in the original language, and when that happens the serious translator wants to know about it, not to hide his head in the sand.

All of this is not to say that the Douay-Rheims is a bad translation, or that it is not to be read, or that individuals may not prefer using it to other translations. It is only to indicate that the Douay-Rheims ought not be put on a pedestal.

The truth is, I found after my conversion that unbeknownst to me, many Bible verses and patterns of diction were embedded in my mind and heart because they had been transmitted in the culture — in books I had read, poetry I had heard, and hymns I had sung (because my mother, as a former Methodist, sang them, or because they were Christmas carols we also learned at school) — all in the KJV. My experience has convinced me that we are charged to transmit such things to our children, that they not be cut off from the land — the land of knowledge and collective memory.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. ~ 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22

---

*Fr. Mankowski, by the way, and just to underline how delicate the issue of translation is, said of this article, “[Esolen] is absolutely right about the English, about its cadences and levels of diction and so forth. And he's not only right but he nailed the folly dead center. In other places where he's criticized the NAB he gets himself into trouble by making claims about the Hebrew and Greek originals that aren't true; [he]… sometimes is out in front of his skates.”