I'm for Requiring the King James Version in Schools. No Other Translation Will Do

 

I just love Texans for their eternally stubborn naivety. Members of the Texas state board of education just decided that five million Texas school kids, from first grade to seniors in high school, will be required to read selected Bible stories in school. Last year, the same board decided to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Naive and bossy. The 15-member board are all elected to staggered terms from distinct geographical districts. Currently, the board consists of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. 

I got a.i. to assemble the approved list of required readings:

Old Testament

• Genesis
  • Noah's Ark
  • Tower of Babel
• 1 Samuel
  • David and Goliath
• Book of Jonah
• Psalms (including Psalm 23)
• Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3, "To everything there is a season")
• Job
• Lamentations

New Testament

• Gospel of Luke
  • The Parable of the Prodigal Son
  • Luke 14:7–11 (the teaching on humility)
• Gospel of Matthew
  • The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12)
  • Matthew 6:25–34 ("Do Not Be Anxious")
• Acts of the Apostles
  • The Road to Damascus (conversion of Paul the Apostle)
• First Epistle to the Corinthians
  • Chapter 13 ("Love is patient, love is kind")

 

I have no problem pushing the early 17th-century prose of the King James Bible on every student as one important ingredient of being truly educated. I'm not so sure about modern translations. The much simplified New International Reader's Version that Texas prescribes for the youngest kids takes away all the magic language of the King James, and so what's the point? The simplified language means you're no longer teaching language arts; you're teaching bullets of cultural mandates and signaling virtue. For me and for the sake of the children, it has to be the King James or nothing. I consider that translation's Book of Isaiah a towering masterpiece of elite philosophy. I go to the Book of Amos for bug-eyed intensity. I can certainly settle down for an hour or two with Psalms, and I recently reread the Four Gospels to see if I could detect any traits in Jesus that would attract the likes of Samuel Alito. 

What we now refer to as the Holy Bible was the literature of a specific monotheistic religion and the culture of a place that arose along the Jordan River. That literature became dogma all over Europe and spread from there all over the world, including to America. How the book has evolved most recently in the hands of political preachers and grifting presidents should and does ignite an opposition to the Texas Bible requirements. The selections favor an evangelical Protestant approach to the biblical text rather than a broadly ecumenical or academic one.

The devil in me wants to make fun of the Texas school board for its attempt to bring all the children to obedience through the Book of Job, but I won't. I think I'd like to be one of those Texas teachers that got to build a lesson plan around what happened to Job and why. There's no Isaiah on the reading list, nor Amos, but yes the Book of Job. Glad to see First Corinthians, but no Revelations? Who would miss that druggie trip!

I was in the 5th Grade in a small, rural Texas public school in the mid-'50s when all the classrooms got wired up for a new P.A. system, and we began to hear from the principal at the start of every day, followed by Bible readings and little sentence prayers, the last two offered by students selected for their good behavior. I was never asked. But, then, I already knew the Bible better than most of my classmates, because of my Pentecostal background. We read the Bible. The King James Bible.

The language gets in your head, becomes a muscle for the way you see the world, see yourself in the world and how you order the universe. Yes, it's culturally specific especially for Anglo Texans, and I air one of those. Which makes me actually sympathetic to the sweet idiocy of the Texas School Board.