The King James Bible: Across Borders and Centuries ed. by Angelica Duran (review)

Carrying the momentum established by 400^th anniversary publications and conferences, this book bodes well for the direction of KJV studies, as it becomes a cohesive field in its own right—and not one for just English professors any more. The “world literature” focus of the essay collection helps it bridge the gap between English literary approaches and biblical studies, creating a space for reception history of the Bible to unfold in accordance with individual scholars’ prior areas of expertise and new research directions.

All of the essays make valuable contributions, while one stood out to me as particularly noteworthy and representative of the kind of helpful work that now can be done, building on the foundation laid out in KJV anniversary volumes c. 2011. In “Words ofJustice in a Secular Society: the KJV in Australia,” John Harris ranges in historical focus from colonialism to today, to show the KJV’s role in a not “particularly Christian” place, a British penal colony from the late eighteenth century. While informing the reader of the essentials of Australian Christian history, Harris examines the experience of Aboriginal peoples, who have inhabited the land for 40,000 years, suffered oppression under European colonization, and yet today, after generations of Protestant missions and biblical education, call for the completion of the Bible’s translation into Aboriginal Kriol. This is in part due to the positive influence of Christian advocates for Aboriginal justice in Australia, including Roman Catholic Ben Chifley, of whom one wishes more had been said in the essay, and his use of the Douay-Rheims Bible (p. 166). Harris writes that biblically-educated Aboriginal political activists from the nineteenth century onwards “expressed their frustration with Anglo-Australians whose very descendants had introduced the language and culture that came with the KJV to their ancestors, because many of them seemed so unmoved by it and even ignorant of it” (p. 168). This point resonates with my own experience in undergraduate teaching at an elite American liberal arts college, where students of color are more likely than students of European descent to have prior knowledge of the KJV. This compelling essay, which I will assign in my undergraduate courses, overall represents the exciting and relevant directions of KJV scholarship today and in this volume specifically, where informative and well-researched colonial case studies invite us to reflect on broader issues of so-called “post biblical culture” in all areas of the globe shaped by Christian European colonization.

Other essays show positive developments in KJV research as biblical studies, English literature, and global religious history. Gordon Campbell, a major author and respected lecturer in the 2011 celebrations, explores the sounds and musicality of the KJV—its “rhythmical flexibility”—as heard by seventeenth-century listeners. Campbell acknowledges that most of them could not read, enhancing the significance of the heard aspects of the KJV and challenging still-popular assumptions that sola scriptura Protestantism, having supplanted hierarchical Catholicism, quickly resulted in a much more widely literate population in England. Patricia Demers offers a beautifully researched essay on the KJV in children’s literature, with attention (among many other authors) to the prolific nineteenth-century writings of Charlotte Tucker, who “specialized in novels about abandoned, neglected, but spiritually resourceful waifs in the industrial centers of London and Manchester” (p. 279). Katherine Clay Bassard attests to the continued preference for the KJV in today’s African American churches and congregations and examines it as “a wellspring of linguistic, imagistic, and cultural resources for African American writers” (p. 195). Trevor Cook’s essay explores the role of the KJV in Mormonism, where twenty-four-year-old, self-taught Joseph Smith published his own “plagiarized” (in LDS teachings, inspired) version of the text, known as The Book of Mormon.

The volume’s weaknesses include lack of systematic attention to the following: Catholic Bibles in relation to the KJV, Catholic readers of the version...