2 Peter Ascribed to Peter but probably written by another author early second century A.D. Christians are exhorted to behave rightly, avoiding the sins of scoffers, evildoers and false prophets, in order to prepare for the Day of the Lord. Then judgment will be rendered and a new heaven and earth will be instituted. The Day has not yet come because God in his patience wishes all to repent.
John, the Letters of These three letters may have been written toward the end of the first century A.D. The first and longest asserts Jesus’ role as the son of God who became man, the source and beginning of Christianity, and the bringer of eternal life; those who believe in him are the children of God and should not behave as sinners do. 2 John is a very brief letter addressed to “the Lady chosen by God and her children” (possibly a symbolic reference to churches) that emphasizes the importance of obeying the command to love one another, and to acknowledge that Jesus has come in human form. 3 John, also brief, is addressed to a Gaius: it commends him for his kindness and hospitality to fellow Christians, and criticizes a church leader who has not received others appropriately.
Jude Traditionally ascribed to Jude, a brother of Jesus; exhorts the faithful to be steadfast against heretics and false prophets in their midst. With their manifold personal and religious sins they are condemned, as were the false
prophets of the Old Testament. The date of this short letter is unknown; it refers to remembering the words of the apostles, suggesting post-apostolic times.
Revelation Written about A.D. 95, John’s revelations of visions from Christ were accepted as prophetic by the early church; this John is not the same as the author of the Gospel or the letters. The book describes allegorically the struggle between good and evil, reflecting the actual conflict between Christians and the Roman Empire. The vivid images include angels, the scroll with seven seals, savage beasts and plagues, the battle of Armageddon, and John’s final vision of a new heaven and earth: a New Jerusalem, the rule of God, and the salvation of his faithful people.
Apocrypha The Apocrypha, originally scriptures of the Septuagint, were part of the early Christian Bible. They remain part of the Roman Catholic Old Testament and, with some additional books, of Orthodox Old Testaments, but are noncanonical (although of historical interest) in Protestant churches. Of Jewish origin, they were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek during the period 300 B.C. to A.D. 100, and mostly from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 70 (the date of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans). They do not form part of the standard Hebrew Bible, which under rabbinic influence after A.D. 70 was standardized on the principle that revelation, beginning with Moses, ended with Ezra. The Apocrypha are listed here with the names and in the order used when they are printed in a separate section in Protestant Bibles.
The First Book of Esdras Focuses on the temple and temple worship, including a Passover celebration after Josiah’s religious reforms (ca. 620 B.C.); the restoration of the temple (520–516 B.C.); and, years later, Ezra’s preaching against mingling with the heathen local population and taking non-Jewish wives. An alternative version of part of 2 Chronicles, all of Ezra, and part of Nehemiah, probably dating to the late second century B.C.
The Second Book of Esdras A Jewish apocalypse written under the name of Ezra after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70). Its seven visions (the beginning and ending parts of the book are Christian additions) deal in allegorical form with the suffering of God’s chosen people, his slowness in bringing justice, Ezra’s dictation of the Hebrew holy books destroyed in Jerusalem, and the last times: the messianic age, resurrection, and final judgment.
Tobit Concerns the sufferings of Jews in the diaspora. God hears the prayers of the pious blind Tobit and his relative Sarah, beset with a demon. The angel Raphael, in disguise, helps Tobit’s son Tobias, who marries Sarah, to defeat the demon and restore Tobit’s sight. Thus God helps the righteous, and Jews will one day reunite in Jerusalem. Probably in written in Aramaic before the second century B.C.; the setting in eighth century B.C. Nineveh is anachronistic.
Judith A message of faith in God’s deliverance of oppressed Jews. A beautiful and pious widow, Judith goes to the camp of Holofernes, the Assyrian general besieging Bethulia, arranges to be alone with him and decapitates him. The Assyrians retreat, Judith is honored, and celebrations and offerings are made at the temple. Possibly written in the Maccabean era (second to first century B.C.).
The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther These additions provide religious content to Esther’s story, which in the original Hebrew does not mention God. The additions include a dream of Mordecai and prayers of Mordecai and Esther. God responds to Esther’s piety and saves his people from the destruction planned by Haman.
The Wisdom of Solomon Praises wisdom and righteousness and warns against the evils of injustice and idolatry. The wicked may prosper in this life, but they face condemnation at the heavenly judgment, of which they are unaware, and at which they will witness the final salvation of the righteous and oppressed. Other themes are the role of wisdom in governance and in history, and the origins of idolatry. Written in Greek, possibly first century A.D., probably to support Jews in a time of persecution.
Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach. A lengthy treatise on morals and behavior written by a tutor to the wealthy in Jerusalem about 180 B.C., it provides a picture of Palestinian Jewish society prior to the Maccabean revolt. Its primary purpose is to give advice on a huge range of matters great and small, from the fear of the Lord to good table manners. Jewish heroes are described in a section beginning “Let us now praise famous men.”
Baruch From Babylonia Baruch sends the temple vessels back to the high priest in Jerusalem, along with the people’s funds for sacrifices. There is a prayer of confession and repentance for the people’s falling away from God; a hymn to wisdom, personified as a woman and identified with the Torah; and a psalm of comfort for those in exile. Possibly second century B.C. and anachronistically ascribed to Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah, A Letter of A diatribe against idols: they are constructed by Gentiles of metal, wood and stone and thus, human-created, could not be gods; Jews must avoid them and believe instead in the true God of Israel. Probably fourth century B.C., possibly in Babylonia but attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, late seventh to early sixth century B.C.
Times focus
Thou Shalt Not Be Colloquial: Why the King James Bible Endures
By CHARLES McGRATH
The King James Bible, which was first published 400 years ago, may be the single best thing ever accomplished by a committee. The Bible was the work of 54 scholars and clergymen who met over seven years in six nine-man subcommittees, called “companies.” In a preface to the new Bible, Miles Smith, one of the translators and a man so impatient that he once walked out of a boring sermon and went to the pub, wrote that anything new inevitably “endured many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition.” So there must have been disputes—shouting; table pounding; high-ruffed, black-gowned clergymen folding their arms and stomping out of the room—but there is no record of them. And the finished text shows none of the PowerPoint insipidness we associate with committee-speak or with later group translations like the 1961 New English Bible, which T.S. Eliot said did not even rise to “dignified mediocrity.” Far from bland, the King James Bible is one of the great masterpieces of English prose.
The issue of how, or even whether, to translate sacred texts was a fraught one in those days, often with political as well as religious overtones, and it still is. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, recently decided to retranslate the missal used at Mass to make it more formal and less conversational. Critics have complained that the new text is awkward and archaic, while its defenders (some of whom probably still prefer the Mass in Latin) insist that’s just the point—that language a little out of the ordinary is more devotional and inspiring. No one would ever say that the King James Bible is an easy read. And yet its very oddness is part of its power.
From the start, the King James Bible was intended to be not a literary creation but rather a political and theological compromise between the established church and the growing Puritan movement. What the king cared about was clarity, simplicity, doctrinal orthodoxy. The translators worked hard on that, going back to the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, and yet they also spent a lot of time tweaking the English text in the interest of euphony and musicality. Time and again the language seems to slip almost unconsciously into iambic pentameter—this was the age of Shakespeare, commentators are always reminding us—and right from the beginning the translators embraced the principles of repetition and the dramatic pause: “In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.”
The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of idioms from it that have slipped into everyday speech, taking such deep root that we use them all the time without any awareness of their biblical origin, is practically endless: sour grapes; fatted calf; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; skin of one’s teeth; apple of one’s eye; girded loins; feet of clay; whited sepulchers; filthy lucre; pearls before swine; fly in the ointment; fight the good fight; eat, drink and be merry.
But what we also love about this Bible is its strangeness—its weird punctuation, odd pronouns (as in “Our Father, which art in heaven”), all those verbs that end in “eth”: “In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth vp; in the euening it is cut downe, and withereth.” As Robert Alter has demonstrated in his startling and revealing translations of the Psalms and the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible is even stranger, and in ways that the King James translators may not have entirely comprehended, and yet their text performs the great trick of being at once recognizably English and also a little bit foreign. You can hear its distinctive cadences in the speeches of Lincoln, the poetry of Whitman, the novels of Cormac McCarthy.
Even in its time, the King James Bible was deliberately archaic in grammar and phraseology: an expression like “yea, verily,” for example, had gone out of fashion some 50 years before. The translators didn’t want their Bible to sound contemporary, because they knew that contemporaneity quickly goes out of fashion. In his very useful guide, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, Adam Nicolson points out that when the Victorians came to revise the King
James Bible in 1885, they embraced this principle wholeheartedly, and like those people who whack and scratch old furniture to make it look even more ancient, they threw in a lot of extra Jacobeanisms, like “howbeit,” “peradventure, “holden” and “behooved.”
This is the opposite, of course, of the procedure followed by most new translations, starting with Good News for Modern Man, a paperback Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1966, whose goal was to reflect not the language of the Bible but its ideas, rendering them into current terms, so that Ezekiel 23:20, for example (“For she doted vpon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses”) becomes “She was filled with lust for oversexed men who had all the lustfulness of donkeys or stallions.”
There are countless new Bibles available now, many of them specialized: a Bible for couples, for gays and lesbians, for recovering addicts, for surfers, for skaters and skateboarders, not to mention a superheroes Bible for children. They are all “accessible,” but most are a little tone-deaf, lacking in grandeur and majesty, replacing “through a glasse, darkly,” for instance, with something along the lines of “like a dim image in a mirror.” But what this modernizing ignores is that the most powerful religious language is often a little elevated and incantatory, even ambiguous or just plain hard to understand. The new Catholic missal, for instance, does not seem to fear the forbidding phrase, replacing the statement that Jesus is “one in being with the Father” with the more complicated idea that he is “consubstantial with the Father.”
Not everyone prefers a God who talks like a pal or a guidance counselor. Even some of us who are nonbelievers want a God who speaketh like—well, God. The great achievement of the King James translators is to have arrived at a language that is both ordinary and heightened, that rings in the ear and lingers in the mind. And that all 54 of them were able to agree on every phrase, every comma, without sounding as gassy and evasive as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is little short of amazing, in itself proof of something like divine inspiration.
The Song of the Three Includes a prayer for forgiveness and salvation, brief narrative material, and a hymn sung by three youths as they survive the fiery furnace. Probably added to the earlier versions of Daniel between the Maccabean revolt (167–164 B.C.) and the publication of the LXX translation of Daniel (100 B.C.).
Daniel and Susanna The beautiful Susanna is falsely accused of adultery by two lecherous elders who covet her. Condemned to death, Susanna calls on God in her innocence; Daniel intervenes to save her by confronting the elders and exposing their lies. An addition to Daniel, probably second century B.C.
Daniel, Bel, and the Snake Daniel, a valued counselor, proves to the Babylonian king that the idol Bel is not a god; sacrifices are actually secretly eaten by the priests. He also shows that a living snake is not a god by killing it with cakes of pitch. But for worshiping Israel’s God he is thrown into the lion’s den; he survives with God’s protection. Probably added to the earlier versions of Daniel between the Maccabean revolt (167–164 B.C.) and the publication of the LXX translation of Daniel (100 B.C.).
Manasseh, the Prayer of This short prayer of repentance asserts God’s majesty and compassion and asks forgiveness for the supplicant’s transgressions.
The First Book of the Maccabees Details the history of the Jewish revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Seleucid King of Syria, whose reign began in 175 B.C. and who repressed Judaism and instituted Hellenistic cults. The family of the Maccabees took the lead in winning Judean freedom, and this book, with many references to Jewish history, attributes the revolt’s success to their leadership and faith in God. Written between 104 B.C. and the beginning of Roman rule in 63 B.C.
The Second Book of the Maccabees 2 Maccabees focuses on the defilement of the temple, for which Jewish Hellenizers are held responsible. God sends punishments upon his people for these sins; but repentance brings redemption in the revolt led by Judas Maccabeus. This book promises the resurrection of the righteous dead, a theological idea of late Judaism.