Startled in the Primeval Forest

In a book I was reading by a distinguished professor, historian, and priest of the Church of England (Owen Chadwick), I came across a quote from the Bible that sounded unfamiliar. I followed the footnote to the back of the book and discovered that the quote came from Wisdom 3:1-6. I was startled, but only a little, because somewhere in my depths I knew there was a Book of Wisdom, something to do with Solomon. The Layman’s Parallel Bible lies within my grasp (four versions: King James, The Modern Language, The Living Bible, The Revised Standard Version). I knew that it didn’t have that book in it, but I checked it anyway. I was right. Odd. Odd because, Chadwick introduced his quote by saying:

When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day…

This suggested to me—that phrase of his, “a Bible”—an ordinary Bible. And in the household of an Anglican priest that would be the so-called Authorized Bible, therefore the King James. Puzzled now, I went off to find my Jerusalem Bible, a modern translation that appeared in the 1960s. And yes. There, in that Catholic Bible, there it was, the Book of Wisdom, sandwiched between the Songs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes.

Several questions now arose. Why did an Anglican, on October 31, 1941, find the “lesson for the day” pointing to verses in the Book of Wisdom, a book that is missing in what for Anglicans is the authorized KJ version...unless, as might be, he was using the Bible as an oracle and opening it at random. My next task was to run all of this down. In doing so I found myself in the primeval forest of the western religious tradition, an amazing, fascinating ecosystem, if you like.

It turns out that the Book of Wisdom first appears in the second of three major versions of the Bible, the Septuagint. That book was created by translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long ago. Precisely (if that’s the word) during the third and second centuries BC. The translation was completed in 132 BC. Now one oddity here is that this Greek translation has a Latin name. Septuagint means seventy. This version came to be known, later, to Latin speakers, as “translation by seventy men,” of which the word “seventy” became the abbreviation used in ordinary speech and writing. The seventy translators incorporated several books into this version not present in the Hebrew original. The Book of Wisdom was one of these; it was originally written in Greek. The third major version is the Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, derived from versio vulgate, the “common version,” thus understood by everybody—at least in the fourth century AD when it was commissioned. Of this word we still retain the English “vulgar,” thus common with an attitude. The Vulgate also contains the Book of Wisdom and twelve other books called deuterocanonical in the Catholic tradition; these same books, plus four others, are part of the Authorized King James Bible, but not the King James Bible “Lite,” as it were. On that more soon.

Before I discovered KJV Lite, I had to learn what “deuterocanonical” meant. Turns out that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, thus of the Old Testament, are part of the official canon of the Catholic church. The books included in the Septuagint in addition came to be labeled as part of the “second canon”—thus also officially recognized as inspired. The word therefore means “belonging to the second canon.” This is a primal forest. We should not expect things to be simple. In the Protestant tradition, the word Apocrypha has come to be used. The word means hidden or obscure or, perhaps, more obscure books. Whatever the name used, these books are not recognized by Protestant churches as part of the canon; thus they are not viewed as divinely inspired. Protestants stick with the Hebrew Bible. And this stance, in part at least, explains why the King James Bible no longer carries the Apocrypha. The other part of the explanation is economic. Startled by that? Or just bemused? The latter, in my case.

Beginning in the 1770s, innovations in printing began to make large print runs possible. To reduce costs—and in efforts to attract a large Protestant market for the King James Version—publishers began omitting the Apocrypha from the book. Those active in the Church of England, like professor Chadwick, continued to use the “full” editions for good reasons. In the life of the Anglican Church, some “lessons for the day” referred to these books, and it is then startling to open the Bible and find them missing.

The realms of faith are just as vast, complex, and organic as all the rest of reality. It’s life, once more, if on another level…

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Chadwick's book referenced above is The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1975.