The King James Bible Mystique: On Teaching the Bible in Public Schools

 Oklahoma Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters insists that Bible instruction will be mandatory and teachers “can find another job” if they won’t comply,

By Alan Levenson
Schusterman/Josey Chair of Jewish History
University of Oklahoma
October 2024

In 1987 political scientist Donald Lutz published a stunning statistical analysis: the American Founders quoted the Bible far more than the Enlightenment philosophes. The Founders go-to text was Deuteronomy – not Montesquieu, Locke, or Hobbes. Since then, a generation of scholars (including Daniel Dreisbach, Mark Noll, Carl Richard) have proven that the Founders were steeped in the Bible. This should have come as no surprise, since a new technology (e.g., Gutenberg’s movable printing press) and a new religious ideology (e.g., the Protestant Reformation) made Bible-reading widely affordable and centrally important. Atlantic literacy began with biblical literacy. Any reader of Jonathan Sheehan’s The Enlightenment Bible should appreciate the variegated ways in which an army of historians, philologists, poets, and antiquarians remade the Bible as a living letter – now construed as a cultural monument rather than a theology. The American Founders knew their Bible principally in the King James Version (KJV or KJB), which had displaced the ardently Puritan Geneva Bible favored by the first colonists. Of course, the Founders were all Christian, but some were Congregationalist, some Anglican, some Baptist, some Quaker, and in Maryland, primarily Catholic. Not all these groups read the King James Version, but no other Bible has had the same impact on American culture.

                A generation ago, Mark Noll wrote, “It would be hard to imagine a nation more biblical than the United States between the American Revolutionary and Civil War” (Noll 1982: 39). But Noll’s seminal piece also demonstrated how complicated that characterization truly was. Among the groups who understood the aspirational nature of a “biblical nation,” and how far Americans stood from achieving these goals, were enslaved Blacks and devout followers of the Edwardsian tradition. Oklahoma Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters is correct that the American Founders were keen Bible readers and that the Bible’s cultural footprints are everywhere (Kemp 2024). Yet Walters overlooks some obvious complications. While the Founders believed in Providence, many were Deists rather than orthodox Christians, and none of the “majors” regarded the Bible uncritically. No better example can be adduced than Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Using a pen-knife, two copies of the KJV, and his own sense of reason, Jefferson literally excised the miracles, healings, and superstitions from the New Testament and bound the remainder into an acceptably rational text. This “little red book,” once distributed to incoming members of Congress, could not pass muster now any more than Chairman Mao’s. Jefferson, it should be noted, did not lose sight of the King James Bible as being a translation: his efforts involved laying the English, Latin, Greek and French synoptically (Jefferson was truly a hopeless francophile) – much as Origen did in the Hexapla centuries earlier. Jefferson may have called himself “a sect of one” but he was not alone in his judicious awareness of the Bible’s power.

                Twice elected President, George Washington loved the prophetic image of “everyone sitting ‘neath his vine and fig tree” (Micah 4:4) and repurposed it on many occasions: often to reassure religious minorities that they would not be subjected to the tyranny of an established Church. The former Princeton ministerial student James Madison wrote, “the establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.” The endlessly erudite John Adams praised the Bible as an ideal constitution for ancient Israel – which under no circumstances should be imposed on contemporaries! Adams opposed clericalism, revivalism, missionary activity, and all forms of religious “enthusiasm.” The first four Presidents, like the rest of the Founders, were students of history as well as Bible and knew the disastrous results of imposing religion. Separating the publication of the Kings James Bible (1611) from the American Revolution (1776) were the bloody Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the English Civil War (1640-1660). When Ryan Walters attacks Jefferson’s image of “the wall of separation of Church and State” as not being in the US Constitution, he is factually correct, but disingenuous. The First Amendment prohibits an “establishment of religion” and neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mention Christianity as the American religion.

                It may seem strange to link a discussion of the King James Bible with the American Founders, but that equation is ultimately what drives Superintendent Ryan Walters’ proposed $3 million purchase of King James Bibles, which flouts the Oklahoma Legislature’s 2010 law (section I.2.c.) guiding elective Bible classes. That legislation stated, among other sensible guidelines, “A student shall not be required to use a specific translation as the sole text of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament and may use as the basic textbook a different translation of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament from that chosen by the district board of education or the student’s teacher.” That law put religious liberty exactly where it belongs: in the hands of the individual student and presumably, his or her parents.

                Whatever Walters’ motives, let us now praise the KJB – which is more helpfully called the Authorized Version in England. The KJB is truly a symphony by committee – or more accurately, six committees, or “companies,” assigned to the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek (Nicolson 2003). That translation project lasted a very biblical seven years and succeeded in producing a Bible that was beautiful, sonorous, and readable, although not yet affordable – voluntary Bible societies in England and America would solve that problem later. While embarking on his own multi-year and now completed Hebrew Bible translation, Robert Alter praised the KJB for “coming closest to the distinctive experience of the original [Hebrew]” and avoiding the philologist’s compulsion to explain the text rather than representing it. The KJB was designed as the established Church of England Bible. The Pilgrims who sailed to America on the Mayflower in 1608 and authored that compact to which the religious right so often refer, remained deeply attached to the Geneva Bible, which King James called “the worst” of all English translations (Bruce 1978: 96). Meanwhile, Catholics favored the Douay and Knox versions, which used the Latin Vulgate as their model. For the few American Jews in the early Republic, the pickings were sparse until Isaac Leeser produced his Bible, whose prologue struck a patriotic American note, describing the “superstitious dread” of departing from the King James Bible, “a species of mental slavery to rely for ever [sic] upon the arbitrary decree of a deceased King of England who was surely no prophet…” (Sussman 1985: 161). Unlike latter-day boosters of the KJB, the irony of a British Monarch’s project which targeted the Pilgrims as being the only fit American translation was not lost on Leeser.

                We will turn to some of the obvious shortcomings of KJB momentarily. Nevertheless, for theological and literary grandeur, it is hard to beat the KJB (1611): “In the beginning God created the heaven, and earth.” Modern scholars, trying to reproduce the strange grammar of the Hebrew (braeshit bara Elohim…) and diction the ancient Near Eastern creation epics, which always begin in the middle of things, come up with, “When God began to create…” (NJPS). While E. A. Speiser’s Anchor Bible Genesis considered this translation an improvement grammatically and historically; aesthetically, not so much. As to the theological differences that ensue from these various renderings, I recommend Gabriel Josipovici’s illuminating discussion of Genesis 1:1 in The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (pp. 53-74).

                Ryan Walters doesn’t want too many notes in his Bible and neither did King James. The Geneva Bible had pushed back against High Church renderings and royal tyranny. While God favored the Hebrew midwives and their descendants, who stymied Pharoah’s infanticidal plans (Exodus 3:15-21), King James did not. Shifra and Puah were, in King James’s eyes, guilty of sedition. Not too many notes, but lots of punctuation – the King James Bible was meant to be read from the pulpit to docile congregants. While hardcore Protestants wanted universal biblical literacy, that was not the ideology of the KJB translators, who were establishment elitists, not populists. That said, the KJB became the common property of Americans from the founding until recently and one would be hard put to understand Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Martin Luther King Jr.’s many speeches, or many other foundational post-revolutionary political texts without it. The same applies to American literature. Herman Melville’s quintessentially American Moby-Dick begins with a three-word sentence: “Call Me Ishmael,’’ and ends with “the devious sailing Rachel” plucking Ishmael from the Ocean. (See Genesis 21 on Ishmael the outcast, and Jeremiah 31:15 on the once barren Rachel transformed into a symbol of the redeemed exiles.) Take away the biblical allusions and substructure from Moby-Dick and we have a longish novel of a psychotic ship’s captain and a whale that makes Jonah’s “great fish” (KJV) look like a minnow. Even ardent secularists should champion Biblical literacy as a component of an educated citizenry, and while the Bible Literacy Project has its shortcomings, at least it aims at that laudable goal (see Chancey 2009).

                The “mystique” of the KJB is understandable. The desire for a pristine Bible, before any errors or corruptions crept in, may be chimerical, may be Protestant, but it is totally understandable. The sentiment does not deserve mockery and if I may transgress: is the motivation ultimately that different from the Hebrew University Bible Project? Obviously, HUBP uses both the Aleppo and Leningrad Codexes, employs cognate languages such as Akkadian and Ugaritic, pays attention to Septuagint, Samaritan versions and Aramaic Targumim, takes account of the Dead Sea Scrolls variants, insights drawn from Mishnaic Hebrew, and so on. The resulting text is truly a critical edition. But is this not another way, via academic scholarship, at arriving at the declaration made dogmatically by KJB die-hards: that this is the best Bible? To make short shrift of the flaws of KJB: any Bible translation published in 1611 would be dated for its inevitable failure to integrate all the evidence noted just above. To me, quibbling over just how Hebraically adept Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Bancroft and the other KJB translators were, or were not, misses the forest for the trees. Even the NRSV is dated. Thus, Robert Alter could devote an entire monograph to the influence of the KJB and still consider it a labor of love to translate the Hebrew Bible afresh.

                Given Walters’ insistence that Bible instruction will be mandatory and teachers “can find another job” (PBS interview) if they won’t comply, it’s worth briefly considering the pedagogical challenges. Teaching Bible as history and literature and as a voluntary subject is already allowed by Oklahoma state law (2010). Oklahoma law lays out some sensible guidelines: the course should be an elective, instructor expertise in both Bible and the US Supreme Court guard rails should be expected, no one translation should be mandated, and the course must not be used to either favor or disfavor a particular belief. That these electives have not caught on widely may be a tribute to our public school teachers who apparently think that home, parochial school, Church, and Bible camp are better places to teach this material. Or, to an equally laudable modesty when it comes to recognizing the expertise involved in teaching Bible, even beyond a basic knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, which would disqualify most high school teachers and probably plenty of professors too. You can’t teach Bible without bias, and a conscientious teacher, at any level, will let students know their own background and training without making themselves or their personal faith the subject matter. Readers of this journal will know that the Bible’s historiography is not our own, and that primeval history (Genesis 1-11) was never self-conceived as history at all, asseverations of latter-day William Jennings Bryans to the contrary. The Bible is unquestionably great literature, but for many people of faith, who comprise the great majority of Bible readers, the idea of treating the word of Gd as literature is itself offensive.

                Teaching biblical “influence” invites bias even more than teaching the Bible itself. Bible stories as presented in Branson, Missouri are both entertaining and invite positive identification with biblical heroes. Personally, I like to shop at Mardell’s Christian bookstore in Norman, Oklahoma. There is plenty of private space for Bible affirmation and presumably Walters’ would favor a click and drag in the public arena. But what about critical treatments of the Bible – are they not also the product of biblical influence? What about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, with its highly critical approach to patriarchy in Genesis? Or the mocking lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61” which re-tells Genesis 22 (The Binding / Sacrifice of Isaac) as if it were a scene plucked from The Godfather? (“God say to Abraham ‘kill me a son.’” ) Margaret Atwood and Bob Dylan cannot be dismissed as lightweights. As far as art history, depictions of the Bible range from the deeply reverential “Sermon on the Mount” of Fra Angelico and Diego Velasquez’ “Crucifixion,” to the baroque violence of Caravaggio and the unabashedly sexualized painting by Gustav Klimt, “Judith and the Head of Holofernes” (Judith may be found in the so-called apocryphal or deutero-canonical works). To cite contemporary examples (e.g., Kevin Rolly, R. Crumb) would be beyond the pale of classroom appropriateness by anyone’s standards.

                Much of the legal controversy over the Bible in the public arena has focused simply on posting the Ten Commandments. The US Supreme Court famously decided, on the same day in 2005, that posting the Ten Commandments was allowed on the Texas state grounds but was prohibited in a Kentucky courthouse! Had that court adjudicated Superintendent Walters’ proposition, they would surely have rejected it. But even after Kennedy v. Bremerton, which allowed voluntary prayer after a football game, I doubt the libertarian trending Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote that decision, would countenance mandating these classes as Superintendent Walters desires. What to do with the Ten Commandments just scratches the surface of how to teach Bible responsibly.

                Teaching Bible at the University of Oklahoma to upper-level undergraduates who elect to take these classes is difficult. Some students enroll convinced that the Bible is the infallible word of God and which they have learned mainly in denominational settings: Churches and Bible studies. Other students arrive assuming the Hebrew Bible is an ancient Near Eastern text and expect an historical approach to the text. How to parse the focus on historical, literary or theological issues is no easy task. Complicating the matter are some obvious but important distinctions. Let’s take two: First, what to call this anthology? For Christianity the texts are appropriately called Old Testament and New Testament; for Jews, the first five books of Moses, called the Torah, form a Bible within the Bible, liturgically and legally. But even within different branches of Christianity, what are called deutero-canonical by some are canonical to others. Second, various traditions understand narratives and even particular verses differently and with different emphases. So, the expulsion from Eden (Genesis 3) became a parable of original sin in Christianity, at least since Saint Augustine’s reading in the 4th century CE (Pagels 1988). In Jewish tradition, the Garden narrative serves primarily to explain the less-than-ideal (i.e., quotidian) world which we all inhabit. Genesis 15:6, which reckons Abram’s merit as righteousness becomes, beginning with Paul, but especially since the Protestant Reformation, a linchpin text in a faith vs. works dyad. But Jewish tradition considers Genesis 26:5, in which YHWH credits Abraham with observing all the commandments, as more critical since it “proved” to the rabbis that the Patriarchs and Matriarchs were Torah-observant even before the Torah was given at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20). Martin Luther found Genesis 3:15, where the man crushes the head of the snake, a protoevangelium (a foreshadowing) of Jesus Christ’s defeat of Satan. Other reformers, however, were less certain. The very next verse Genesis 3:16b, “he shall rule over you,” proves a major stumbling-block for those who would like the Bible to read a little less patriarchal. The once popular author Nahida Remy, who converted to Judaism, married, and adopted the name Ruth Lazarus, tried to read the Hebrew root mem-shin-lamed (mashal) differently, rendering a hemistich “he shall be like you.” Other scholars, such as Phyllis Trible, would prefer to consign the inequality in the Genesis 3 text to a post-Edenic state – real, but undesirable. We could proceed almost verse by verse and come to the same conclusion: a value-free Bible pedagogy lies beyond our reach.

                Proverbs 9:10 teaches that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and Superintendent Walters has surely put fear in the hearts of many Oklahomans; not, however, very wisely.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. “Beyond King James.” Commentary Magazine (September 1996). https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-alter-2/beyond-king-james.

Alter, Robert. Pen of Iron: American Prose and he King James Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: Translation and Commentary (New York: Norton, 2018).

Berkovitch, Sacvan. “The Biblical basis of the American Myth,” in Giles Gunn, ed., The Bible and American Arts and Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).

Bruce, F. F. History of the Bible in English (3rd ed.; New York: Oxford, 1978).

Chancey, Mark. “The Bible, the First Amendment, and the Public schools in Odessa Texas.” Religion and American Culture 19.2 (2009): 169-205. Chancey has written most extensively on every aspect of this issue, including an analysis of the Bible Literacy Project and its literalist competitors.

Gopnik, Adam. “How to Read the Good Books.” The New Yorker (21 January 2019). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/how-to-read-the-good-books.

Josipovici, Gabriel. The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1988).

Kemp. Adam. “How schools in Oklahoma are responding to a new Bible mandate,” PBS News (15 August 2024). https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-schools-in-oklahoma-are-responding-to-a-new-bible-mandate.

Lutz, Donald. The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). This book expanded an article Lutz had published the previous year.

Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

Noll, Mark. “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation,” in Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, eds, The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford, 1982).

Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Vintage House, 1988).

Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Sussman, Lance. “Another Look at Isaac Leeser and the First Jewish Translation of the Bible in the United States,” Modern Judaism 5.2 (1985): 159-190.