Glory to God! We have our weekly Bible Study in the Bucknell University Barnes & Noble Bookstore cafe (which itself is a Starbucks franchise under Barnes & Noble btw). So it is a corporate bookstore environment. But they are very hospitable to us, even if we aren’t the typical event group, as a hybrid Bible Study of our local Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church and the Bucknell Orthodox Christian community. Among other things, the management turns down the background music when we are there to make the discussion easier, and often has small tables grouped together for our group.

We are in a bookstore that includes a wide range of products and books, including ones on topics such as witchcraft and pansexualism inimical to Orthodox Christian beliefs. But we are in the front window in a good accessible location for a Bible Study that is Orthodox Christian but includes the campus and local community. Anyone who wants to join in can, so the location works well that way. Actually, the Bible Study, which has been ongoing since about 2018, originated from a homework project for the Pastoral School of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, in thinking of an outreach project appropriate for our mainly Protestant area, where, although biblical literacy probably has declined as elsewhere in the U.S., Bible-reading and study are still fairly popular activities.

The other bookstore in town, an independent used operation that is carefully curated and looks charming, nonetheless appears to be something of a local hotbed of activism steeped in ideology hostile to traditional Christianity (although its manager too seems kind and thoughtful, and it has its own various substantial books of all kinds, including a helpful reference book on Church history that I once found there at a bargain price).

All this is to say, ironically choices are limited in the global West. And the beautiful small town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, home to a thriving university and near our Church, economically and culturally is both historic to the region and a type of colonial outpost of the global West in northern Appalachia, as I noted in an essay in First Things a while ago.

In any case, all of this provides the setting for a discussion of the term “Holy Ghost” in English Bibles, although it will take until almost the end of this not-long article to get to the significance of that fully. For now, consider the use of the name Holy Ghost as a marker for a traditional English translation. Indeed, if you go to the religion section in the Bucknell Barnes & Noble, as I have often done after our Bible Study discussions, the only “old” Bible you will find referencing the Holy Ghost — as distinct from the preferred modern translation “Holy Spirit” — is the King James Version.

But even the lonely KJV there is very different from the actual King James Bible or Authorized Version that was first published in 1611. This has led me to tease (or probably annoy) our Bible Study group about enlisting members to join me in a class-action lawsuit against Barnes & Noble. For the King James Bible sold there arguably is not the King James Bible, and there is no note to that effect. False advertising! The vanishing King James Bible is, from an Orthodox Christian standpoint, a bit like the Protestant idea of the “invisible church” I suppose. Somehow the original Church got lost historically (supposedly). Apparently the King James Bible went missing with it.

I’m kind of kidding about that and the idea of the class-action suit. But still…

The problem of course is not an issue of Barnes & Noble, which does hold the fort for brick-and-mortar bookstores against the Amazon tidal wave, despite some questionable merchandise from an Orthodox standpoint. The altered King James Version is endemic to Bible publishing in English, in which by the way the KJV has lost ground to less noble upstarts, looking at the New International Version, which deserves to be given a wide berth due to its non-traditional editing and translating approach.

So, what is missing from the so-called King James Version (KJV) that you’re likely to find at a bookstore or on Amazon today, without any notice to would-be readers or purchasers that it has been significantly altered?

In terms of the most significant text alteration to the King James Bible in content in modern versions for sale, the so-called Apocrypha section of the KJV has disappeared from most marketed editions today without a trace. That means that a number of “books” within the 1611 version (traceable back to the Septuagint that the Orthodox Church uses) are no longer there. There are KJV editions with the Apocrypha, but they are hard to find, usually pricey, and the difference is not clearly labeled for those editions lacking that section.

Then there usually is the cleaning up of spelling, and especially lettering and typesetting, from the original.

As part of that, original annotations and cross-indexing usually are dropped without mention.

Not to mention how the long article “From the Translators” to the readers at the start has disappeared without notice.

Again, for the average peruser of Bibles in a major bookstore, or online for that matter, there is no notice of these significant changes. (One notable and reasonably priced nicely done exception to most of the above points: The Thomas Nelson “leathersoft” 1611 edition; except for the “Roman” typeface, it is pretty much an exact readable small-size replica, well designed.)

The above issues all may seem pedantic. But the result for most commercially available King James Bibles is in many ways a significantly different book, with readers usually none the wiser to the differences, despite the fact that the doctrine of many Protestants remains at least in culture “sola scripture,” elevating the Bible above the historic Orthodox Church.

I could imagine the fictional character Winston Smith in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 working away editing the King James Bible at the Ministry of Truth, altering biblicaltexts without anyone noticing, as he did in the original novel with news stories and biographies (an approach to vanishing history all too possible today with online texts and AI-based information).

From an Orthodox Christian standpoint of course, while many of us like and use the King James for the New Testament (although even there for us it has its Protestant Western quirks alongside its beautiful poetic and classically archaic language), the most major issue is that the original 1611 version itself was missing the Greek Septuagint text as the main source for for the Old Testament as a whole, let alone the Apocrypha issue in modern KJV versions. That biggest issue remains.

That is the version that survives in the oldest extant Old Testament manuscripts, older than the surviving Hebrew Masoretic manuscripts by centuries, although the latter were seized upon almost solely by reforming Protestant translators to produce English Bibles in their zeal to “get back to the original.” Yet it was the older Septuagint that the Apostles relied on in compiling the New Testament. The King James crew chose to not use the Christian Old Testament. But that’s also a topic for another day.

Now, here is another issue, that to their credit many or most event modernized KJV editions avoid: Most modern English translations of the Bible have changed the early English “Holy Ghost” to “Holy Spirit,” thus changing the Anglophone name for one of the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity without any or many readers and worshippers even being aware of this today. The 1611 version used “Holy Ghost” in many references, along with some references to the “Holy Spirit” also. “Holy Ghost” follows from early English and Scriptural translation dating before the Great Schism, a significant milestone for Orthodox Christians. I would argue that the practical extinction of that phrase in English biblical terminology today, without any awareness, is emblematic of the depletive smoothing of biblical language over time (see the earlier KJV usage in the image below), and significant in that way.

“Holy Ghost” was a common English name for the Person of the Trinity Who, according to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (in original Orthodox form), proceeds from God the Father, and is the “Lord and giver of life,” “Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.”

“Ghost” was a primary early English translation for the Greek pneuma, which is why it was used often in the original King James Bible. Then it too began to disappear.

The term “Holy Ghost” derived from the Germanic geist in older English, going back to pre-Schism days. Like the Greek pneuma it had varied meanings, such as breath and spirit.

However, in modern generations it became most famous as the source of the term “ghost” as in a Halloween-like phantom in Anglo popular culture that tended both to make light of the spiritual realm and also ignorantly dabble in the occult to its detriment. Because of that association it was dropped.

That said, I still prefer the translation Holy Ghost. It has an otherworldly edge that is also personal, and thus indicative of the Divine Person Who is the Holy Ghost. All that deserves reclaiming.

And the Germanic root geist retains famously its connotation of an overarching spiritual presence secularly in the term Zeitgeist, still used in English to mean “the spirit of the age.”

I like to think that the popular medievalist-philologist-writer J.R.R. Tolkien (although a Catholic) would join me in preferring Holy Ghost today, if he were still around.

Like Orwell, he preferred in English writings Germanic words rooted in Old English, because of their distinctive crisp and concise and historical character for English speakers. And that applies to this translation issue certainly as well.

Meanwhile, the 1611 King James Version of course isn’t totally extinct. For one thing, cyberspace (such a two-edged sword) does keep the original text alive online, although not as fixedly as if it were on physical pages. Replica print versions exist, including what looks to be a new beautiful but costly edition from Easton Press. But for most people casually strolling through bookstores or scrolling through Amazon, there won’t be notification that significant aspects of the original are missing in most editions. That is bothersome to this medievalist academic who is an Orthodox Christian with a fondness for the classic Elizabethan-era translation. It was so influential in Anglophone literary culture, poetics and rhetoric. Tor example, Abraham Lincoln kept a copy of the King James Bible on his desk in the White House with only a complete version of Shakespeare and a collection of federal statues alongside it.

Even so, Metropolitan Anastasy of ROCOR, of blessed memory, called the King James Bible “heretical,” presumably mainly because it bases its Old Testament on the Masoretic and not the Septuagint text favored historically by the Orthodox Church. In addition, most modern editions of the King James Bible include a rather sycophantic tribute to King James in the opening, while leaving out the Translators letter, which itself unfairly disses the Septuagint, however. The scholarship was not as great as the Reformers thought, and the process for the translation, while yielding beautiful English prose in the era of Shakespeare, was political in that the group of translators balanced the “Episcopal” and “Puritan” factions in English religious life under the watchful eye of King James, who had political concerns with all that. The whole project undoubtedly was done prayerfully by the heterodox translators, yet lacking what Orthodox Tradition describes as the miraculous inspiration experienced by the group of translators of the Septuagint in ancient Alexandria.

Still the beauty of the English in the KJV combines with an archaic language suitable for liturgical use by Orthodox from the New Testament (a bit like the difference between Slavonic and Russia).

Regardless, though, in terms of actual Orthodox Christian teaching on the Bible, feel free to join us at our Bible Study if you’re in town, you can find more information on it here. You can bring any version of the Bible. We use the Orthodox Study Bible from Thomas Nelson that is based on the Septuagint Bible and is clearly marked as being in New King James style. However, even “our own” version uses “Holy Spirit” as befits Thomas Nelson as a corporate publisher. There’s always something, but we’re grateful to have the OSB nonetheless. (Perhaps we should ask the bookstore to carry it, but we usually give out copies at our Bible Study to people who don’t have one.)

May the Holy Spirit guide us along with the Church Fathers in understanding the Word of God expressed in the words of Holy Scripture in Church Tradition. As Orthodox Christians, we read the Bible both literally and symbolically, beginning and ending our reading and study of Scripture with a prayer, and under the guidance of inspired Tradition, not in terms of our own individualistic and straying views (speaking most of all for myself, the sinful Priest).

For more on Orthodox Christian Bible Studies, please see the collection of articles here, which includes insights from both the St. John’s mission Bible Study and my classes on the Bible as Literature at Bucknell.

Glory to God, and may the Lord give us good wisdom!