Holy Bible Review

The Spring religious holiday season (Passover and Easter) is here and -- whatever faith you profess -- I wish you happiness and peace during the celebrations which are upon us.  As a Catholic, I will attend the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday evening.  Included in the Scriptural texts will be not only the Easter Passion but also readings from the beautiful Book of Genesis, along with the dynamite story of Moses parting the Red Sea and the flight of the Israelites (always a crowd pleaser). 

Even people like me who don't read The Bible much can appreciate how important The Good Book is.  Truly, it is a miracle ... not just for what it says but for its crucial role in driving along culture and literacy.  The Bible has been translated into 350 languages.  For untold millions of people, this was the only book they ever saw or handled but that anyone got to read the Bible at all is a miracle in itself and a phenomena which included the dedication, dogged determination and even torture and death of many people.

The Opening Gun

Whatever your personal beliefs may be, you have to admit that Jesus had a way with words.  The young Rabbi framed important lessons in the time-honored form of deceptively simple parables vested with such subtle class and sophistication that they bear repeating over and over again.  It doesn't matter that there is not much historical record of Jesus because He lived in a time when no one was keeping track of most people but apparently somebody among his own crew were taking down the Minutes.  The resultant gospels, combined with the later letters of the Apostles, were bundled along with the cherished tales of the Old Testament to create The Christian Bible.  At this point, everything was still couched in Hebrew and Greek. 

The Dark Ages

As the Church gained power, everything was translated into Latin which it was decreed would be read only by the clergy who would then tell the rest of us what it meant.  Things did not go swimmingly for anyone who tried to buck this tide and translate the testaments into English or other languages but even when that was accomplished, the other big churches also considered reading the Bible to be a clergical perogative.  Nobody much challenged this for a twofold reason -- hand-printed books were rare and most people were unable to read for themselves.  That was about to change and all because of a nice ordinary guy who loved to tinker with things.

Power to the People

In 1448, there lived in Mainz, Germany, a man named Johannes Gutenberg who was obsessed with the idea of incorporating the components of movable type, oil-based ink, and a wooden press into a successful working model.  It took years of dedication -- plus a loan from his brother-in-law -- to produce the first printing press.  When Gutenberg finally got the gol-darned thing up and running, one of the first things he started pumping out was The Bible.  Gutenberg's contraption changed things -- as time went by, books became more available and people began to learn how to read for themselves.

Other People Jumped In

The Bible as we know it today is the result of the care and grooming of many people who vested effort (and no small amount of cold, hard cash) in its fine-tuning and perfection, individuals who are too numerous to mention here but who included King James I of England, who marshalled the efforts of 50 scholars to produce the King James Bible, "the translation to end all translations" and what would come to be the Gold Standard for the English language for generations to come.  The Catholic Church also polished and perfected its own English version of The Good Book.  For complicated reasons, the King James (or Protestant) Bible differs from the Catholic one but as someone who is not a biblical scholar, I am not sure what these differences are.  The two versions seem similar to me.

As time marched on, so did added touches and further changes for the Bible, including the addition of the numbering system to make texts easier to find and also the introduction of the "family Bibles" which had blank register pages between the Old and New Testaments for a family to fill in notations about births, marriages, deaths and other personal milestones and have turned out to be motherlodes of information for people who are tracing their family's history. 

Because English is a language which is constantly in a state of transition and change, there have been of necessity revised versions of the Catholic and King James Bibles.  While well meant and sincere, some of the recent versions have appeared to "dumb down" the scriptures resulting in a flat note here and there, (i.e. the grand "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's..." has been replaced with "So pay your taxes ...")

Behold, the International Bible Society!

Founded in 1809, the International Bible Society specialized in publishing ethnic Bibles in a multitude of other languages, provided Bibles to Civil War soldiers and started the practice of placing Bibles in hotels in 1823.

The Gideon Society Checks in at the Front Desk

Founded in 1899, the Gideon Society are the "oldest Christian business and professional men's association in the United States with 130,000 members located in more than 170 countries."  In the old days, the Gideon ranks were richly larded with traveling salesmen who undertook the mission of spreading a little cheer and consolation by placing Bibles at hotel reception desks for the use of lonely patrons who might be comforted by a little inspirational reading. 

MY VIEWPOINT:

If you check into a hotel room tonight and open the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed, I can almost guarantee that you will find a Bible there ... a simple black utilitarian edition whose appearance belies its amazing history.  It is really impossible to calculate or place a price on all the effort (to say nothing of that loan from Gutenberg's brother-in-law!) which has been vested in The Good Book, just so that it would be available there by your bed if you wanted to take a look at it ... so it is sadly ironic that of all the amenities in the modern hotel room, The Bible is likeliest to be taken for granted and nonchalantly ignored by most guests, including Yours Truly.