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With their bright vinyl covers and the plain-spoken pages in between, those Gideon Bibles matched the traveling salesman sensibility the way a Prada bag fits a Condé Nast girl. The Gideon Bible gave all Bibles a bad name for me the way one poisoned batch of Tylenol sometime in the early '80s has made me forever wary of acetaminophen.

And had it not been the Gideon Bible, it could have been virtually any other edition in print in the second half of this century. Packaging a Bible to fit the churchgoer sensibility is like preaching to the converted. More crucial, translations into a familiar vernacular make Jesus sound like the idiot savant pseudo-Messiah he almost certainly was and lend God all the apparent moral authority of, say, Rudolph Giuliani. Biblical stories simply don't work when the players are mortal, life-size, familiar. Told in remedial English, the miraculous sounds inane. Consider the astonishing appearance of Jesus, risen from the dead, in the final chapters of John. First, the King James translation:

Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three, and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken. Jesus saith unto them, 'Come and dine.' And none of the disciples durst ask him, 'Who art thou?' knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.

Now the same story, as told in the "Good News New Testament" (text copyright 1966 by the American Bible Society):

Simon Peter went aboard and dragged the net ashore full of big fish, a hundred and fifty-three in all; even though there were so many, still the net did not tear. Jesus said to them, "Come and eat." None of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" because they knew it was the Lord. So Jesus went over, took the bread, and gave it to them; he did the same with the fish.

"Come and eat," Jesus tells his disciples in "a translation that is at the same time faithful to the original text as well as clear and natural to the reader." This guy is the Messiah? He sounds more like my mother.

Partially it's a matter of my "Masterpiece Theater" complex: Like all too many Americans, I've been conditioned to believe that something old and European is culturally superior to something new and American, regardless of its actual quality. Certainly it's true that the language of the King James Bible would have been more commonplace to a reader in 1611 (the year the King James translation was completed) than it is to somebody today. But the miraculous, too, has grown foreign to our ear. More important is the simple truth that no translation before or since 1611 has given the Bible the authority of perfection. Here is the voice of God; if King James's translators had themselves been omniscient and omnipotent, they could have done no better.

Put another way, later translations, while more secular in their language, are less so in an essential respect: In 1611, the Church may have been fractured but religion enjoyed a universality it has never seen since. To translate the Bible in the 20th century is to set it against the prevailing culture, to wage a holy war on behalf of Christianity generally, and one particular sect of Christianity specifically. The translation found in, for example, the Gideon Bible, carries a missionary burden. Of course the King James translation did, too, but it was written free of the propagandistic demands placed on later translations; the King James translation had the luxury to serve literature and art as faithfully as it served the church. In the Gideon Bible, belief is a necessary condition; in the King James Bible, as in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" or Gibson's "Neuromancer," suspension of disbelief is sufficient.

Next page | Will the Bible make me fat and ugly?