(Top: Cambridge King James Bible, Cameo Reference edition, being held. Above: The Orthodox Study Bible. Below: Title page of the English Hexapla, originally published in 1841 but with reprints since, which has six classic English translations of the New Testament presented in parallel with the original Greek.)
Today by coincidence as I was preparing for the Bible and Literature course I’m teaching next semester, on St. Andrew’s Day amid the Nativity Fast, I received two Bibles in the mail.
One is a beautiful King James Bible from Cambridge University Press, maybe the most classic English Bible in print today, the Cameo reference Bible. It came in a special box with the British coat of arms on it, commemorating the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom in 2023.
The other was entitled The Forgotten George Washington Bible, a facsimile with historical articles of the “Brown Self-Interpreting Bible” of 1792, to which Washington as President was lead subscriber. On its cover is a picture of Washington resolutely crossing the Delaware, American flag flying behind him.
Together with news reports about President-Elect Donald Trump’s renewed promotion of the God Bless the USA Bible, also like the Washington Bible a King James translation (but both lacking the so-called “Apocrypha” of earlier versions of the same and the edition I received from Cambridge), these reminded me of the way in which English-language Protestant Bibles in particular partake of certain connections to country.
The “Trump Bible,” now available in a special innaugural commemorative edition with the returning President’s signature (and as before the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence bound in along with the lyrics to “God Bless the USA”), may seem weird, to borrow a term in its modern usage from the President’s election opponents this year. But, actually, the older Bibles mentioned display their own types of patriotism and relations to national leaders. (And the oddity of the U.S. founding documents being included in the binding of a Bible has precedent at least in recent publications of the so-called American Patriot’s Bible and Founders’ Bible and probably other titles.)
In fact, the King James Version invariably includes a letter to King James from the translators, recognizing his patronage and pious devotion to Holy Scripture, not to mention the additional aspect of the commemorative cover box dedicated to King Charles III and Queen Camilla in my recent edition.
The George Washington Bible in its original appearance was promoted with help from President Washington’s name, also subscribed to by many of America’s prominent founding fathers, and featured in an advertisement in an early U.S. congressional publication.
But from an Orthodox Christian perspective, all these Bibles also are problematic in their content. The “George Washington” and “Trump” Bibles lack books of Holy Scripture included by ancient Church councils and Orthodox Tradition, namely the texts labeled “Apocrypha” by Protestants and “Deuterocanonical” by Catholics. Those texts, such as Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees, are not segregated in a middle section of the Orthodox Scriptures as in the 1611 King James Version and the current-day Cambridge Cameo edition, but are included with other sections of biblical books, such as Maccabees at the end of the historical books.
There is a bigger issue, though, and that is that all of the above “patriotic” English Bibles also reject the Septuagint Old Testament used by the One Holy and Catholic Apostolic Orthodox Church from Gospel days to the present. True, the King James or Authorized Version translators did consult the Septuagint Greek text, as when they translated Isaiah’s prophecy of the Incarnation as a virgin shall give birth (following the Septuagint, rather than the Hebrew Masoretic text usually translated as “a maiden” shall give birth). But the Hebrew Masoretic text followed in the English Bibles coming out of the Reformation ironically survives in manuscripts later than those of the Septuagint, and the latter seems to contain older texts and versions, which also are not provocative of concerns that later Jewish scholars of the Masoretic text may have made editorial decisions unfavorable to Christian prophecy. For indeed, again, the Septuagint is the version of the New Testament.
Beyond this, the Orthodox Holy Scriptures, usually for liturgical purposes in the separately bound Gospel book, a book of the Epistles and Acts, and the Prophetologion or Old Testament readings for services, feature no dedicatory material to a king or president. Holy Scripture is integrated Church Tradition that includes what is called the Bible in the West, rather than the Protestant sola scriptura approach, which tailspins into the “self-interpreting” framework promoted in the subtitle of the so-called Washington Bible. The Bible on its own is not as an object revelation, although the Gospel book is venerated (not worshipped) as an holy liturgical item and out of respect for the inspired words of God therein, just as Orthodox Christians venerate books of Scripture by making the sign of the Cross and kissing the book when reading, as well as saying a prayer to God for understanding.
The revelation lies in the illumination by the Holy Spirit of those holy prophets and saints to whom the revelation was received from God, written, and then sanctioned by Church Councils under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and in apostolic succession. This is where the heart of readers can be touched, with God’s grace, by the Word of God. Scripture in Orthodoxy is understood both literally and symbolically, or as St. John Cassian put it, historically/literally, morally, allegorically, and mystagogically/eschatologically. But those readings all require the guidance of the illumined Church Fathers and Holy Tradition for right spiritual development toward our hoped-for salvation in Jesus Christ.
All this said, as I have noted elsewhere, there is a fascinating tale behind how America in many ways made the King James Bible her national book. The American Revolution rejected monarchy. Yet what became the classic American Bible is named for a Scots-English king. However, the rejected monarch was the German George III and his dynasty, not the Stuarts of whom King James was a part. In fact, the Jacobite tendencies of the Scots-Irish and fellow travelers in the American heartland of Appalachia extended to a spirit of subversive monarchism that ended up recognizing Jesus in King. Perhaps there is a typology there for how, within the true Church, many Russian Orthodox Christians, at the time of the takeover of their country by the Bolshevik atheist cabal and its execution of the Holy Royal Martyrs, embraced a rediscovered icon featuring the Mother of God as Queen. Indeed, the American Declaration of Independence’s mentions of Deity, including an un-Deistic reference to divine Providence, could not exist without the biblical Christian culture of America. That bases the famous statement that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” (not that all men are equal, but that they are created equal and endowed by rights that are gifts from God, a significant Christian distinction). Even the U.S. Constitution is signed over the phrase “in the Year of our Lord.” It also evidences a distinctively strong executive in certain respects echoing monarchy, but in a system of checks and balances and federalism also evidencing Neo-Stuart distrust of human nature albeit in an highly secularized context.
In the Orthodox Christian understanding of the Church as today Israel, a transfiguration that occurred in the epoch stretching from the Virgin Mary’s entrance to dwell in the Holy of Holies of the Second Temple, all the way through Pentecost and to the present day, the community believers of the Church are the Bride of God, no longer the inhabited land of Israel. But this does not rule out the love of country and attachment thereto. The Church as Israel is also in a sense a fractal, with many parishes and temples around the world, each becoming a portal to the Kingdom of God when the Holy Gifts of the Eucharist are presented to the people, who come up to partake of the Lord’s Eucharist, His pure Body and Bood, before the royal doors opened toward a renewed Paradise.
Metropolitan Philaret of blessed memory, the leader of our beloved Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in exile in the diaspora in the period roughly of the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, reportedly called the King James Bible “heretical,” because no doubt of its being a product of the heterodox without the Septuagint.
Yet Priest John Whiteford, one of the finest biblical apologists in ROCOR attested to the beautiful English translation of the King James Bible in the very Cambridge edition I just received. Indeed, the King James style of language, or derivatives therefrom, is the liturgical scriptural approach of choice in English among parishes of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia to which I belong, although Old Testament selections draw on the Septuagint.
The difference in perspectives may be similar to how some monastics and elders in Orthodoxy regard literature and cinema as demonic, while the unforgettable Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of blessed memory saw certain types of Christian-influenced literature and film as sometimes important to the development of converts, seminarians, and hopefully those in need. They can both be right in different particular applications of oikonomia or condescension, the applicability of divine grace. (The English Hexapla, a volume that includes the six most important English translations of the Bible, mainly Protestant but including the Catholic Douay-Rheims, also includes the original Greek text, for example illustrates how an interest in older heterodox English translations can connect also with the original Orthodox version, and the King James Bible, for example, often is noted as having a mostly accurate translation of the Greek original.)
In my case, fascination with the language of the King James Bible was fed when my mom would take me as a child to the old North Park College bookstore (North Park being a Swedish Covenant college with ties to her family’s Swedish heritage, in an old Swedish neighborhood in the city). She encouraged me in my interest in the old-language Bible, being herself a fallen-away Christian Scientist, an American heterodox cult that nonetheless spotlighted the King James Bible along with its own heretical interpretive companion book (like the Latter-Day Saints or Mormons in that regard), each bound in leather in companion volumes.
Although I as a young person was brought up in two Unitarian-heterodox and essentially gnostic faiths, in an agnostic-leaning family where generally I felt the need to read the Bible at home secretly, the heritage of the old language of the King James Version and its content appealed to me, as someone also raised in an historically and genealogically minded family of readers. Related to my interest in the older-English Bible was my youthful interest in Latin and Old English and early Welsh, all of which had gained literary currency originally as Christian tongues. The resulting reading of Scripture did feed my faith, though also in heterodox ways, from which by God’s grace unworthily I a sinner was delivered most unworthily after years of wandering, to the ark of the Orthodox Church in holy baptism and chrismation.
Today, as an Orthodox priest who leads Bible Study and Catechumen discussions, and gives homilies at our mission often, and teaches the Bible as Literature course at my secular university, my “kit” of Holy Scripture (from which I pull volumes for my own prayerful reading with the Church Fathers as well as to prepare for that teaching) lies in a slim briefcase purchased from a local Mennonite office supply store. Inside are the small Cambridge King James Bible (which I use for reading the New Testament and “Apocrypha” in what I still consider to be the most beautiful English translation, an Orthodox translation of the Psalms from the Septuagint with patristic commentary on each Psalm, and the Orthodox Study Bible, a New King James style translation that in the Old Testament follows the Septuagint, and includes (sometimes sparse) Orthodox notes and commentary. As Orthodox Christian missionaries in the U.S., with God’s grace, in our Scriptural study and meditation, and apologetics, we display our allegiance to the “another country” of the Church as Israel, while praying for God’s blessing on America, a country we love in our Northern Appalachian mission in all senses of the word country: Rural countryside, nation, and culture deeply rooted in local landscapes of God’s Creation, which from the perspective of the Orthodox Church’s Tradition offers alongside Holy Scripture additional contexts for understanding HIm, too.