16 - The later reputation of the King James Bible

Summary

TESTIMONIES FROM WRITERS

In considering the reputation of the KJB over the century since the RV, it may be best to start with a somewhat amorphous collection of testimonies from writers to their experience of the KJB and, sometimes, its influence on their work, The History of the English Bible (1894) by the American Baptist minister and professor, author of The Religious Influence of Wordsworth, T. Harwood Pattison (1838–1904). It begins ordinarily enough but goes on to chapters on ‘the Bible in English literature’, and ‘the Bible and the nation’. An observation Pattison attributes to the American Prebysterian minister Charles Henry Parkhurst sums up the motivation for this development: ‘“I am interested in the people who made the Bible, but I am more interested in the people whom the Bible makes, for they show me the fibre and genius of Scripture as no mental studiousness or verbal exegesis can do”’ (p. 222). So in these chapters Pattison moves beyond opinions of the literary excellence of the Bible to testimonies from writers that their work was shaped by the Bible. His aim is to show that, ‘from John Bunyan to John Ruskin … we owe more than we can ever tell to our early training in the English of the Bible. The character of our national tongue has been tempered by it; and to it our great writers are largely indebted for the sobriety, the strength and the sweetness which distinguish their best efforts’ (p. 185). He by no means confines himself to style, but the question of where a writer gets his style recurs.