Bill would limit protests. A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill that would make it harder for protesters from a fringe church in Topeka, Kan., to protest outside military funerals. The Sanctity of Eternal Rest for Veterans Act, introduced by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in March upholding the right of Westboro Baptist Church to picket military funerals. The bill would increase the “quiet time” before and after services from one hour to two hours and expand the protest buffer zone around a funeral from 150 feet to 300 feet. The buffer zone around access routes to and from the funeral would also grow from 300 feet to 500 feet. Westboro protesters have demonstrated outside military funerals with signs that say “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” calling U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan divine punishment for tolerance of homosexuality. The bill, which has seven Democratic co-sponsors and six Republicans, also is supported by military groups including AMVETS, Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Attorney Margie J. Phelps, daughter of Westboro founder Fred Phelps, has said her small church stands ready to “quadruple” its number of funeral protests.

Worker who burned Quran reinstated. A New Jersey Transit employee fired for burning pages of the Quran at the site of a proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero will get his job back. Derek Fenton, who sparked a national firestorm during his protest on the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks last year, will be reassigned to his $86,110-a-year job, get $25,000 for pain and suffering, and receive back pay for every day since he was fired. Fenton had joined a protest in Lower Manhattan at the site of a planned Islamic center, where he removed and burned three pages of the Quran. At the time, he was off duty and did not publicly link himself to the transit agency.

Toxic drywall taxes Katrina relief. Relief organizations whose volunteers built or repaired hundreds of damaged houses after Hurricane Katrina have found they installed toxic Chinese drywall in more than 200 buildings, requiring hundreds of low-income families to move out for months while the houses are gutted anew and rebuilt. For relief organizations, which have decided to shoulder the full cost of millions of dollars in repairs, doubling back to gut and rebuild old homes is a major budget setback that cuts into their future work. In class-action suits in federal court in New Orleans, people whose new or repaired homes were ruined described how sulfurous Chinese sheetrock emitted vapors that corroded electrical wiring; ruined the circuitry of air conditioners, appliances, computers and televisions; tarnished jewelry and other metals; pitted mirrors and sometimes made their homes stink of rotten eggs. Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities’ Operation Helping Hands and Rebuilding Together New Orleans all have launched programs to identify tainted homes, move homeowners out, sustain them for months and make the houses safe for occupancy.

–Compiled from Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” If only he had said how we should react when they die at our own hands.

After President Obama announced al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had been shot dead in Pakistan, ebullient crowds gathered outside the White House and at Ground Zero to cheer the demise of the world’s most wanted terrorist, smoking cigars and breaking into chest-thumping chants of “USA! USA!”

Watching from her home in suburban Virginia, Christian ethicist Diana Butler Bass felt a growing sense of unease.

“What if we responded in reverent prayer and quiet introspection instead of patriotic frenzy?” she posted on Facebook. “That would be truly American exceptionalism.”

At the Vatican, where church leaders had just wrapped up joyous celebrations elevating the late Pope John Paul II to one step below sainthood, officials urged caution.

“A Christian never rejoices” in the death of any man, no matter how evil, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said, but instead “reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us has before God and before man.”

For many Americans, bin Laden’s death was quite literally an answer to prayer. Muslims who saw bin Laden as an apostate breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Ethicists and pastors searched for the appropriate space between vindication and vengeance.

U.S. Special Forces did what they had to do. How everyone else is supposed to feel about it is a little less clear.

“As Christians, we believe that there can be no celebrating, no dancing in the streets, no joy, in relation to the death of Osama bin Laden,” Christian ethicist David Gushee said. “In obedience to Scripture, there can be no rejoicing when our enemies fall.”

Indeed, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel warned that our enemies are not necessarily God’s, who takes “no pleasure in the death of wicked people,” preferring only that they “turn from their wicked ways so they can live.”

Questions around bin Laden’s demise tended to break into two different camps: Were we right to kill him? And is his death something to cheer?

For many, what set bin Laden apart was his defiance, unrepentant violence and coldly calculating designs to rain destruction upon Americans, innocent civilians and even fellow Muslims.

“While vengeance is not a responsibility of us mortals, the pursuit of justice is,” said a statement from Agudath Israel, an Orthodox umbrella group. “As believing Jews, we see in bin Laden’s demise the clear hand of God.”

In a larger sense, removing the singular threat of bin Laden can also lessen the violent threat of radical extremism and terrorism. Put another way, taking one life can save countless others.

“It is a sad truth that one man’s death can represent a step forward in the progress of human relations,” said Zainab Al-Suwaij, president of the Washington-based American Islamic Congress.

For many people, bin Laden’s guilt or innocence never needed to be adjudicated in a court of law, and an American bullet to his head was judgment enough. Scholars cautioned, however, that there’s a difference between judging a man’s actions and judging his soul.

John Langan, a Jesuit professor of Christian ethics at Georgetown University, said killing bin Laden to prevent future attacks is morally valid, but cautioned that vengeance is ultimately a divine, not human, right.

“I knew people who died in 9/11,” Langan said. “I feel deeply the evil of that action. But I am part of a religious tradition that says that we don’t make final, independent judgments about the souls of other men. That rests with God.”

That all leads back to Americans’ response to the death of a madman.

 “You have to have compassion, even for your enemies,” said A. Rashied Omar, a research scholar at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

“The Quran teaches that you never should allow enmity to swerve you away from compassion, because without compassion, the pursuit of justice risks becoming a cycle of revenge.”

Others said there is a difference between rejoicing in bin Laden’s death and finding a certain degree of satisfaction—a “subtle but important difference,” said Jay Emerson Johnson, an Episcopal priest who teaches at the Pacific School of Religion.

“I’m not sorry Bin Laden is dead,” Johnson posted on Twitter. “That’s not the same thing as celebrating his death.”

And that, perhaps, is where Americans will live in the coming days and weeks, caught in the gray space between satisfaction and celebration, glad that bin Laden is finally gone but not wanting to dance on anyone’s grave.

“Without apology, we all sleep better in our beds knowing that Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat,” said R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “But celebration in the streets is something that falls short of the sobriety that I think Christians should have on our hearts in reflecting on this  event.”

With reporting Daniel Burke, Adelle M. Banks, Nicole Neroulias, Omar Sacirbey and Alessandro Speciale.

WASHINGTON (ABP) – Two American church-state experts say Friday’s British royal wedding holds lessons about why the marriage of church and state is a bad one.

Anticipating nuptials for Prince William and Kate Middleton at London's Westminster Abbey, the Washington Post’s On Faith blog posed a question April 26 about why, even in secular societies like the United Kingdom, people still turn to places of worship for rituals like coronations, weddings and funerals.

Brent Walker

Panelist Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said for him a more interesting question is how a country like England with deep Christian roots can become so secular in the first place.

Walker surmised that one reason is privilege afforded to an established religion – in this case the Church of England – “sows the seeds of its own attenuation.”

“State support for religion tends to rob religion of its vitality and, for some, turns it into a mere ceremonial exercise,” said Walker, an ordained Baptist minister. “This is one reason why I object so strongly to efforts in the United States to use tax dollars to support religious education and church ministries, allow officially sanctioned prayer in the public schools, and tolerate government-sponsored religious symbols.”

Another panelist, Barry Lynn of American United for Separation of Church and State, noted the irony that in a country with an official church only one in 10 people attend religious services weekly.

The Church of England formed early in the Protestant Reformation after Pope Clement VII refused over a number of years to annul the marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon. The church in England recognized Henry as supreme head of the Anglican Church in 1531. If Prince William ever ascends to the throne, he will play the same role in the church.

Lynn, also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, said that relationship between church and state causes several things to happen.

Barry Lynn

“First, official ceremonies, including weddings, are held at the place where church and state commingle: the church building itself,” Lynn wrote. “Second, the public ends up finding no need to send resources or put in any time to buttress the fortunes of something that the government is already supporting. Finally, the very idea that a government would select an official religion and, by implication, that God blesses a particular denomination, is itself anathema even to many theists.”

Walker said that even in highly secular societies, non-religious people often continue to turn to religion to “solemnize” important life events because of tradition and “a deep-seated sense of longing for the divine.”

“Religion does a lot better when government gets out of the religion business and leaves it to its own devices,” Walker concluded.

Supporters have called it “the book that changed the world.” Detractors have derided it as archaic and inaccurate. But few dispute the impact the King James Version of the Bible has made over the last four centuries.

Arguably, no other book has had the widespread influence and lasting significance of the King James Version of the English Bible,” said Jeffrey Straub, professor of historical theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Plymouth, Minn.

Although popularly known as the Authorized Version, the King James Bible of 1611—unlike the Great Bible of 1539—never carried an edict by king or bishop commanding that it be read in churches. Even so, for at least half its 400-year history, King James reigned over other translations.

How it was created

Contrary to popular misconception, King James did not translate the Bible that bears his name. But he assembled the committee that produced it over the course of seven years of translation, deliberation and review.

“It did not just drop down from heaven on a sheet and end up at the Red Roof Inn,” quipped Scott Carroll, research professor of manuscript studies at Baylor University.

When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England after his cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, died in 1603, he inherited a divided Church of England. Puritans within the Anglican Church promptly presented King James the Millenary Petition detailing a long list of grievances.

In response, he convened a conference at Hampton Court the following January. King James dashed the Puritans’ hopes by rejecting virtually all of their demands and letting them know he would not tolerate religious nonconformists.

However, the king responded positively to a call for a new translation of the Bible into English. He saw it as a way to unify the Church of England and displace the Geneva Bible, which he believed undercut the office of bishop and divine right of kings.

A Torah, with a smaller scroll on top displaying the book of Esther, was on display at Baylor University as part of the Green Collection.

So, King James assembled 47 scholars to work under the direction of Bishop Richard Bancroft to create a new translation, using the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 as their guide. In 1611, the King James Bible was published.

Within two generations, the translation’s language became part of the Book of Common Prayer. And within about two centuries, it beat out competing translations as the preferred Bible of the English-speaking world.

Literature & language

At a time when many people bemoan a general lack of biblical literacy in American society, speakers continue to quote snippets from the King James Bible—although often without even knowing it.

The translators of the King James Bible preserved Hebrew idioms such as “fly in the ointment,” “sour grapes,” “skin of your teeth” and “fat of the land.” They also contributed expressions such as “sign of the times,” “holier than thou” and “straight and narrow.” Some literary analysts have asserted the King James Bible is second only to the writings of Shakespeare as a source of common English expressions.

“The King James Bible brought about profound changes in literature,” said Lamin Sanneh, professor of mission and world Christianity and professor of history at Yale University. He spoke at a conference sponsored by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

Indeed, from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln to the fiction of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, echoes of the King James Bible can be heard in American literature and language, said Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

“If there is a single attribute readers attach almost reflexively to the King James Version, it is eloquence,” Alter told the Baylor conference.

Perhaps ironically, the King James Bible translators preserved the beauty of the original language in the Hebrew Bible most effectively in the narrative prose passages, rather than in its poetry, he noted.

“Homespun Anglo-Saxon vernacular offered a good English equivalent of the plain diction of Hebrew” in prose, he said. “It captures the evocative force of the original.”

But in the poetic passages—most notably Psalms and Job—translators demonstrated “indifference to the cadences of compactness of the Hebrew,” Alter said. Even so, they produced classic English in the process.

“After 400 years, its grand language still rings strong,” he said.

Impact on Great Britain

Until the 18th century, the King James Bible competed with multiple other English-language translations for use in churches throughout Great Britain, said David Bebbington, professor of history at the University of Stirling.

“It was not yet a sacrosanct cultural item,” he said.

However, as romantic sensibilities and “esteem for the old” grew in England, so did marked appreciation for the 1611 translation. Instead of looking down on the King James Bible as outdated and vulgar, it came to be seen as “freighted with wisdom,” he noted.

Particularly as revolutions occurred in the American colonies and in France, the British rallied around the Authorized Version as a national treasure “undergirding the fabric of the social order,” Bebbington observed.

When the British and Foreign Bible Society began printing and distributing copies of the Authorized Version, its reach extended to every part of the British Empire, he noted.

“The Authorized Version became a symbol of national culture,” he said.

Ironically, as new English translations have proliferated, the key defenders of the Authorized Version in Great Britain have been secular members of the “cultural elite” who view it as a literary treasure and a few conservative evangelical Christians who view it as divine revelation, Bebbington observed.

“In 2011, the Authorized Version is more warmly appreciated by public intellectuals than by believers in the pew,” he noted.

Impact in the United States

The King James Bible provided “an indispensable reference point” to Americans in the 19th century, said Mark Noll, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the people of the Union and the Confederacy who “read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” Everyone understood Lincoln referred to the King James Bible.

“It’s not that all the people were Bible readers,” Noll noted, but a Protestant consensus rooted in a common Bible shaped society and culture. “That changed after the end of the war.”

Increasing numbers of non-English-speaking immigrants and the claims of higher criticism that called into question preconceived attitudes about Christianity and the Bible meant a diminished adherence to the King James Bible.

“Internal fault lines became permanent fixtures in American Protestantism,” Noll said. By the time the King James Bible marked its 300th anniversary in 1911, he observed, those fissures could be seen clearly in representative speeches by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan.

The social gospel civil religion expressed in speeches by Roosevelt and Wilson, as well as the anti-intellectual populism to which Bryan appealed, lacked the kind of deep biblical resonance and specific foundation in the King James Bible that naturally had permeated Lincoln’s speeches 50 years earlier, Noll concluded.

Today, the language of public speakers in the United States may be even more impoverished, because they cannot use allusions from the King James Bible with assurance their listeners will understand. Instead, they must rely on more generic references to faith.

“Platitudes, even when biblical, are platitudes still,” he said.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.—The preface to the King James Version of the Bible captures Barclay Newman’s respect almost as much as the holy words the translation contains.

And the longtime translator for the American Bible Society is disappointed modern editions of the world’s most popular version do not include the 11-page opening, simply called “The Translators to the Reader.”

Newman served as a translation consultant in the Asia Pacific region with the United Bible Society 42 years. In 1984, he was asked to research, plan and organize the American Bible Society’s Contemporary English Version of the Bible with Eugene Nida. Newman translated all the Bible except 12 Old Testament books. His wife, Jean, served as editorial associate to Newman and two other translators on the CEV committee.

The Bible society published the CEV New Testament in 1991, the entire Bible in 1995 and the Bible with the Apocrypha in 1999.

The translators of the KJV 1611 edition might be appalled at the reverence some individuals hold for it, Newman believes. The Bible scholar has a facsimile of the 1611 edition.

“In this preface the translators reveal their intentions, concerns, methodologies and even uncertainties with such openness that makes practicing translators want to insist that it be required reading for all King James lovers and serious Bible readers,” Newman wrote, with Charles Houser, in "Rediscovering the Preface and Notes to the Original King James Version."

The KJV translators wanted to make Scripture plain and understandable to the masses. “But how shall men meditate in that which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknown tongue? …. Indeed, without translation into the vulgar tongue, the unlearned are but like children at Jacob’s well without a bucket or something to draw with.”

The translators faced opposition, as well. Many church leaders of that day wondered why a new translation was needed. While King James had his own, perhaps less-than-holy, reasons, the translators explained in the preface that the Bible in common language opened the Bible to everyone.

“But we desire that the Scripture may speak like itself, as in the language of Canann, that it may be understood even by the very vulgar,” the KJV translators wrote.

The translators also were well aware that people could develop a strong relationship to the words of one translation over others. But they believed in “equality of language,” Newman contends, and analyzed the context as well as the words.

“People tend to become defensive and protective of their religious icons,” Newman said. “But if you read the preface, then you can’t hold on to the idea of its superiority.”

The King James committee believed the translation did not diminish the holiness of the word. “We affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English set forth by men of our profession … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it,” the translators wrote.

That desire to reflect the holiness of the word in an understandable way to people who generally hear, rather than read, the Bible prompted the CEV translation. “The society decided to do the translation on the conviction that we needed something with oral readability,” Newman said.

A good translation, he contends, “ought to communicate the message of the Bible clearly in terms that they can understand when they hear it.”

WACO—Like the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s “wheel in the middle of a wheel,” King James-only churches represent a resilient subculture within the subculture of American fundamentalist Protestants, some scholars insist.

King James-only churches believe God preserved the inerrancy of the 1611 translation of the English Bible—perhaps even using it to correct errors in earlier versions of Scripture, said Jeffrey Straub, professor of historical theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Plymouth, Minn.

“Few issues have had the kind of polarizing effect that the battle over Bible versions in general, and the battle for the KJV in particular, have had within some segments of American Protestantism,” Straub told a group during a conference at Baylor University marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

For King James-only Christians, he explained, “the use of the King James 1611—as opposed to corruption of the KJV which include the New King James and even the New Scofield Reference Bible which updated certain words within the text, rendering it a corruption of the original KJV—has become the litmus test for Christian orthodoxy. The sign of a biblical church becomes the Bible version used from the pulpit.”

The King James-only movement grew largely out of opposition to newer translations of the Bible—first the Revised Version of 1881 and American Standard Version of 1901 and later the Revised Standard Version of 1952 and those that followed, he noted.

Peter Ruckman, founder of Pensacola Bible Institute, became one of the movement’s most strident and extreme advocates over the last 40 years, Straub explained.

“Many of his views are idiosyncratic with regard to the general teachings of most KJV proponents. For example, Ruckman believes the (King James) 1611 sometimes is superior to any Greek text,” he said. “That is, when there is a discrepancy between the KJV and the manuscripts, … then the KJV should be considered authoritative.”

While Straub views the King James-only movement as “hyperfundamentalism” as distinguished from “mainstream” fundamentalism, he noted its staying power.

“There does not appear to be any realistic hope that the KJV-only position will die out any time in the near future,” he said. “If anything, the Internet has made the dissemination of even the most extreme forms of KJV-onlyism accessible to a worldwide audience.”

Scholars who study the King James-only movement need to look not just at rational arguments about the superiority of certain manuscripts but at the human side of the movement as reflected in the lives of individual Christians and the churches where they worship, said Jason Hentschel, a graduate of Baylor’s Truett Theological Sem-inary and doctoral candidate at the University of Dayton.

Hentschel spent several months attending worship services and interviewing leaders and members of Charity Baptist Church, a congregation in Kettering, Ohio, that adheres to the “inerrancy of Scripture as preserved in the King James Bible.”

Fear of doubt and a desire for an unchanging objective standard seems to motivate the church members’ commitment to the King James Version of the Bible, he asserted.

“Their insistence that the KJV Bible is the physically present, perfect, inerrant word of God reads, in many ways, as an attempt to certify their Bible’s authority and thus ultimately their faith and salvation,” Hentschel said.

“What Charity seeks is certainty and not confusion, objectivity not subjectivity, constancy not fluctuation. Believing the King James Version of the Bible to be the only authentic, historically and divinely preserved revelation of God is an attempt to achieve such certainty.”

The King James-only proponents, as exemplified at Charity Baptist Church, believe a perfect God not only inspired a perfect Bible but also preserved a perfect Bible, he explained.

“In this line of thinking about inerrancy, the King James Bible is the perfect word of God, which means it is eternally immutable. To add or subtract from it, to argue that we need something more or something different than what is found in it, is to argue against that Bible’s perfection and thus against God’s promise to provide humanity with salvation,” Hentschel said. “Authority and perfection here represent two sides of the same coin.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—An evangelical businessman from Oklahoma has planned a multimillion-dollar, high-tech, interactive museum of the Bible.

The plan was announced first amid 130 biblical artifacts exhibited at the Vatican Embassy and later at a conference at Baylor University in Waco honoring the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.

The exhibit included samples of Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant treasures from the future museum’s 10,000 manuscripts and texts, one of the world’s largest biblical collections.

Some are as old as pages of the gospel in the Aramaic of Jesus’ time; as political as the only Bible edition ever authorized by the U.S. Congress; and as treasured as first editions of the majestic King James Version, displayed near the king’s own seal.

These will form the basis for “a public museum designed to engage people in the history and the impact of the Bible,” said museum sponsor Steve Green, owner of the Oklahoma City-based craft chain Hobby Lobby.

The Green family has amassed the world’s largest collection of ancient biblical manuscripts and texts including his favorite—the 1782 Aitken Bible authorized by Congress.

While the location, architecture and even the museum’s name stil arel in the works, 300 highlights of the Green Collection will go on tour beginning at the Oklahoma Museum of Art on May 16. The traveling exhibit, called Passages, will move to the Vatican in October and New York City by Christmas.

Meanwhile, scholars at 30 universities worldwide are burrowing into rare texts from the collection and pioneering technology that enables them to bring out the ancient words in the most faded and printed-over manuscripts, said Scott Carroll, director of the collection and research professor of manuscript studies at Baylor University.

Carroll’s primary focus has been finding and authenticating ancient manuscripts that can deepen—or alter—“our understanding of the word of God. The Bible didn’t come from the sky as tablets handed to Moses on Mount Sinai and then wind up in a hotel desk drawer,” Carroll said.

“The Bible is not in a lockbox. It changes across time,” he said, pointing to the earliest known manuscript fragment of Genesis, a section of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Jewish Torah (the five books of Moses) from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and more.

Passages also will address the dramatic struggles behind the texts, as translations are a matter of life, death and eternal fate to believers. The illustrated frontispiece of one King James Version shows the king flanked by people who would be burned at the stake within 10 years.

“Translating a Bible is a soap opera of moving political and spiritual parts,” Carroll said.

There already are American museums centered on the Bible. Conservative evangelicals established the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., to walk people through a literal reading of the Bible. And the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan was established by the American Bible Society, which has a Christian evangelizing mission.

Green and Carroll say their museum, opening by 2016, has no theological agenda.

“Think of the great new science museums that take you inside how things work, or the Folger Library’s public and scholarly center for Shakespeare,” Carroll said. “This will be our approach to the Bible. It’s a museum, not a ministry.”

Highlights of the Green Collection include:

• The Codex Climaci Rescriptus, one of the world’s earliest surviving Bibles. Using a new technology developed by the Green Collection in collaboration with Oxford University, scholars have uncovered the earliest surviving New Testament written in Palestinian Aramaic—the language used by Jesus—found on recycled parchment.

• One of the largest collections of cuneiform clay tablets in the Western Hemisphere.

• The second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which are unpublished and likely to contribute substantially to an understanding of the earliest surviving texts in the Bible.

• Previously unpublished biblical and classical papyri, including surviving texts dating to the time of the now-lost Library of Alexandria.

• The earliest-known, near-complete translation of the Psalms to (Middle) English.

• Some the earliest printed texts, including a large portion of the Gutenberg Bible and the world’s only complete Block Bible in private hands.

WACO—When many readers describe the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, the word “majesty” tends to enter the conversation.

It’s no wonder, according to Laura Knoppers, professor of English at Penn State University.

The translators King James enlisted to create a new version of the English Bible had an agenda—to provide scriptural support for the divine right of kings, she asserted.

The Dort Bible, a rare second-edition of the Authorized King James Bible, was published in 1613. (RNS PHOTO/Pablo Richard Fernandez)

But Protestant dissidents such as John Milton, in turn, used the same language the translators appropriated to emphasize democratic principles, she observed.

Knoppers examined different views on the term “majesty” in her presentation to a convocation sponsored by Baylor University and its Institute for Studies of Religion that marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

When nonconformists brought a list of grievances to King James at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, James later boasted he “peppered the Puritans soundly” and turned aside nearly all their demands. However, for his own reasons, he embraced their desire for a new English-language translation of the Bible.

A uniform translation could unify the English-speaking people of Great Britain, James reasoned. Also, the king realized, he could use the translation to shore up the Anglican Church and “amend and polish what was amiss” in existing English translations.

For the most part, the translators employed a variety of English words to express a single Hebrew or Greek word.

“One important exception was the reiterated word ‘majesty,’” Knoppers observed. In that case, the translators reversed normal procedure and applied that single English word to multiple words in the original biblical languages. The word “majesty” is used 72 times in the text, headings and notes of the King James Bible and 18 times in the opening dedication and preface, Knoppers discovered.

“Use of the word ‘majesty’ linked the earthly monarch with God himself,” she concluded. The translation blurred distinctions between the attributes of God and attributes of the earthly king.

However, in both his polemical writing and his epic poetry, Milton took the opposite ap-proach—stripping majesty from the office of the king and portraying it as resting upon the people at large.

“For Milton, the emphasis was on the power and dignity of the people” rather than the monarch, Knoppers said.

In Paradise Lost, Satan seeks to claim as his own majesty that rightly be-longs to God and to the couple in the garden created in God’s image—a metaphor for “kingly usurpation of divine majesty,” Knoppers ex-plained.

“Milton dramatizes the danger of usurping the characteristics of God,” she said.

WACO—Translation of Scripture grows naturally out of a central Christian theme—God making himself known by identifying with the commonplace, said Lamin Sanneh, professor of mission and world Christianity at Yale University.

“Translation into the common idiom is emblematic of the incarnation in which the Word became flesh,” Sanneh told a conference sponsored by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. “Christianity is embodied faith. It must have a face. … Christianity is a translated religion, and a translated religion is necessarily interpreted.”

Christianity’s view of its holy book, the Bible, stands in sharp contrast to the Islamic attitude toward the Quran, he explained.

Muslims believe the angel Gabriel directly gave Mohammad the pure word of God in Arabic, and it remains immutable. Muslims see value in the words of the Quran, even if they are not understood.

Christians, on the other hand, believe the Bible’s value rests in the message it communicates about God, and efforts to make it understandable to varied cultures and languages are encouraged.

“Once the Quran is translated, it is no longer the Quran,” said Sanneh, who grew up Muslim and attended Islamic schools in Gambia at an early age before becoming a Christian.

“For Christians, the word of God is not sealed in idiom.”

Pentecost signaled the expansion of Christianity beyond the boundaries of one language, race and culture, he noted.

“No language is forbidden, nor is any one language a prerequisite,” he said. Christian mission takes a utilitarian view of language—God provides multiple means of making the gospel known in ways comprehensible to different people in different places, he said.

Sanneh recalled be-ing “scandalized” the first time he heard a question asked by Christian missionaries: “What name do you call God?” For a Muslim, Allah is the one and only name of God, but Christians understand God makes himself known in the language of each of the world’s people, he learned.

“Christianity is both universal and particular,” he explained. “God speaks all the languages of the world.”

God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ transcends culture, but at the same time, it must be translated into the language and cultural expressions to each specific culture, Sanneh observed.

“Christianity has to be embraced by an indigenous source before it takes root,” he said. “Understanding is at the heart of the gospel.”

The King James Version of the Bible demonstrated “a power intrinsic to itself that transcended the circumstances of its translation,” he observed. As English-speaking Christian missionaries translated the Bible into other languages, they often used the King James Bible as their guide, and in spite of its flaws, that version proved itself remarkably well-suited to cross-cultural expression.

“The King James Bible brought out the strength and beauty of the simple and ordinary,” he said. Its earthy idioms translated well into societies that lived close to the land, and its lyrical quality appealed to nonliterate people with oral traditions.

“Oral culture is a formidable challenge to a religion of the book,” he noted. However, the beauty of the King James narratives—even when translated into other languages—demonstrated “the triumph of the warm voice over the cold pen.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—For evangelical author John MacArthur, the best way to explain a Christian’s relationship to Jesus is what appears to be a simple metaphor—one often used by the Apostle Paul himself.

“To be a Christian is to be a slave of Christ,” writes MacArthur, pastor of a nondenominational church in Sun Valley, Calif.

His new book, Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ, explores varied practices of Bible translators regarding the controversial term. It’s also drawing mixed reactions among African-American Christians whose ancestors were slaves in 19th-century America.

While biblical texts use the word “slave” to describe actual slave-master relationships in biblical times, English translators often opt for the word “servant” when describing a believer’s relationship to God, MacArthur explained.

“The stigma was just too great with that word to use it to refer to believers, even though they knew that was what ‘doulos’ meant,” MacArthur said, referring to the Greek word for “slave.”

In most translations, the Apostle Paul describes himself as “a servant of Jesus Christ” in Romans 1:1, but the Southern Baptists’ Holman Christian Standard Bible has him using the term “slave of Jesus Christ.”

It’s the same in Luke’s famous Nativity account, where the Virgin Mary calls herself “the Lord’s servant” or “the handmaid of the Lord” in most versions, while the Holman Bible calls her “the Lord’s slave.”

The New International Version, a top-selling Bible whose latest edition was released March 1, continues its translations of Paul as “a servant of Christ Jesus,” and Mary as “the Lord’s servant.”

Some African-American leaders have long stayed away from the slave language, and they differ with MacArthur’s view that it’s the best way to relate to God.

“Your will is broken in slavery, and I don’t think God wants to break our will,” said Joseph Lowery, a retired United Methodist pastor and icon of the civil rights movement. “I’m a little slow to accept the word ‘slave’ because it has such a nasty history in my tradition.”

MacArthur argues that using the word “slave” is just one of many concepts in the Bible that might be unappealing—hell’s generally not a crowd-pleaser, either—but are nevertheless key to reading and understanding the sacred text.

“You can’t let the Bible usage of the concept of slavery be informed by the abuses of the African slave trade,” said MacArthur, who devotes pages in his book to describing first-century Roman slavery. “That’s not the context in which it was written.”

But MacArthur said there’s an important theological meaning to the term “slave,” however politically incorrect the word may be.

“You give obedience to the one who has saved you from everlasting judgment,” he said.

When the more inclusive New Revised Standard Version of the Bible was being developed in the 1980s, its translation committee sought advice from African-American scholars about whether to use “slave” or “servant.”

Cain Hope Felder, a New Testament professor at Howard University School of Divinity, recommended “slave” when describing the institution of slavery, which was a part of the Greco-Roman world known by biblical writers. But he said descriptions of church leaders are “a totally different matter” and “servant” is more fitting.

Mitzi Smith, an associate professor of New Testament at Detroit’s Ashland Theological Seminary, said it is inappropriate to “sanitize” the word by changing it to “servant,” but she disagrees with the idea that the master-slave relationship is the ideal image for God and Christian believers.

“We have so many more examples to show how to be in relationship with God,” she said. “A slave-master relationship is not one of willing obedience and what God seeks is willing obedience and a relationship of love with us.”

Other African-American leaders, however, embrace both the use of “slave” throughout the Bible and MacArthur’s interpretation of it.

Dallas H. Wilson Jr., vicar of St. John’s (Episcopal) Chapel in Charleston, S.C., hosted a three-day work-shop in early February to promote MacArthur’s book.

“I think what we have done is we have translated slavery ‘servant’ and watered it down,” said Wilson, who leads a predominantly black congregation of about 70 people.

“Instead of condemning the system, we should condemn the abuses.”

WACO—Regions Martin Luther never knew have embraced biblical books the Protestant reformer never liked, author and educator Philip Jenkins said.

“If Luther hated it, it goes down great in Africa,” said Jenkins, professor of humanities at Penn State University and co-director of the program on historical studies of religion at Baylor University. He spoke at a conference at Baylor marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The earliest copies of the King James Bible included the Old Testament Apocrypha—books the church considered valuable but did not accept as inspired Scripture.

Luther’s earlier German translation of the Bible also had included the Apocrypha, segmented from the Old and New Testament to indicate its content did not carry the same weight.

But Luther took an additional step. He placed books he considered of little value—notably Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation—at the back of the Bible to indicate they occupied “an inferior category,” Jenkins said.

Eventually, Protestant Bibles dropped the Old Testament Apocrypha, particularly after the English Bible societies began printing copies of the Scripture without those disputed books.

“The Bible the British spread around the world lacked the Apocrypha,” Jenkins said.

If the printers and distributors of Bibles had dropped the books Luther segregated in his translation, 21st century Christianity in the global south might look different, he asserted.

When, in their introduction to the King James Bible, translators wrote about the Bible “manifesting itself abroad in the farthest parts of Christendom,” they never envisioned how far some of those parts might be, Jenkins said. Today, the largest markets for Bibles are Brazil, India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria, he noted.

Luther considered the New Testament book of James an “epistle of straw” that emphasized good works and contradicted the Apostle Paul’s teachings on justification by grace through faith.

African, Asian and Latin American Christians, on the other hand, view James as “a practical manual for living as a global south Christian in a society marked by the sharp stratification of wealth and by scarcity of resources,” said Jenkins, author of The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.

The pithy proverbs of James communicate well in preliterate oral cultures, and its teachings translate well into cultures where Christianity is a minority religion, he observed.

Asian Christians can witness to their Buddhist neighbors on common ground when they share James’ description of life as “a vapor that appears for a little while and vanishes way.” And Christians in Islamic countries can earn the respect of their Muslim neighbors when they heed James’ admonition not to presume upon the future but to say, “If God wills, we shall live and do this or that,” Jenkins added.

Christians in North America and Europe have difficulty relating to the sacrificial systems central to the New Testament book of Hebrews, but African Christians relate readily to it, he noted.

“Hebrews might be considered the national epistle of Africa,” Jenkins said. “Sacrifice is everywhere.”

In cultures where people understand firsthand the prevalence of animal sacrifice and the reality of genocide, Christians are drawn to Hebrews and Revelation—“the bloodiest books in the New Testament,” he said.

African and Chinese Christians understand Revelation as a message of hope to persecuted people today, not just a description of events at the end of time, Jenkins noted.

“Different books speak differently to different people,” he said. “What people hear depends on who is doing the hearing.”

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (RNS)—Even long before the times of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, Malta was the rocky knob at the western edge of the Roman Empire, the place where the leftovers of the Mediterranean Sea washed up and dug in.

And Malta is the site of what Huntsville, Ala., software salesman John Harkins believes will be the last and best quest of his life.

Harkins, a mild-mannered, Bible-reading, Church of Christ deacon and marine biologist, is determined to be the first person since the New Testament writer Luke to see evidence of the ship that carried Paul nearly to Rome.

“I’m quite in the minority in thinking there might be some remnant,” Harkins said, unrolling charts of the island on his desk at work. “But I know we’re going to find something, though it may not be from Paul’s wreck.”

According to Acts 27, a chapter in Luke’s history of the early Christian movement, a huge ship loaded with grain, sailors, soldiers, prisoners and other passengers crashed into the coast at the end of a 14-day storm. The ship broke in half, spilling everyone into the sea.

Miraculously, the entire crew was able to struggle to shore, where they were met by the inhabitants of the 200-mile-long island, who built them a fire.

Harkins said Malta’s government places a high value on caring for and understanding relics washed on its shores. Museums catalogue ancient weapons, structures, tools and, of course, fragments of the shipping trade that made Malta a crucial outpost of vessels attempting to round the Italian boot to get to Rome.

“God put that ship there, and I figure he put it where he wants it,” Harkins said. “He gave it to the Maltese people, and frankly, he couldn’t have given it to people who do more to preserve their heritage—and it’s their heritage, along with the rest of us.”

Harkins can’t remember a time when the story of Paul’s shipwreck didn’t fascinate him. It was one of the stories that leapt out of the dim and musty antiquity of ancient stories to snap into Technicolor.

He hopes to help other people overcome doubt if he finds evidence confirming Luke’s account.

“It could be one more thing where somebody said something didn’t exist, and we can say, ‘Yeah, it did,’” Harkins said. “Maybe it will help someone who has lost their faith and wants to come back.”

When Harkins and his partners return to Malta in May for what will be his third visit to the island, he hopes to map the sub-bottom profile of areas he’s decided are likely shipwreck locations, given prevailing winds and the land forms.

Among the experts he has consulted are second-century essayist Lucian and a 19th-century book by the preacher son of an East India Company merchant. His bookshelves also bulge with various doctoral dissertations on relics found underwater and other books on archaeology, sailing and diving.

Gordon Franz, an archaeologist at the Akron, Pa.-based Associates for Biblical Research, remembers responding cautiously to Harkins’ first letters some years ago.

“We get all kinds of crackpots who contact our office about their crazy ideas or discoveries,” Franz said. “After a few exchanges, I realized this fellow knows what he is talking about, so I called him. We talked for about an hour, and he shared some nautical insights into Acts 27 which I had never considered before.”

Shipwrecks older than the one Harkins seeks have been found, Franz said. But if Harkins can find the remains of an Alexandrian grain ship, like the one that carried Paul, it would be a first.

“It would add to our knowledge of the grain ships and the grain trade in the Roman world,” Franz said. “Finding the wreck would put the Acts account on solid historical grounds.

And what if Harkins finds nothing at all, despite self-funding his search and taking time away from family and work?

“I believe we all have to search for something,” Harkins said. “And one of the reasons I’m doing this is because who else would do it? It’s not important to other people who would rather search for sunken treasure.

“The most important thing is the searching, and you have to find something you think worthwhile to search for.”