Rogue Bibles

• The Wicked Bible 1631 Thou shalt commit adultery [Exodus 20:14]
• The Fool’s Bible 1634? The fool hath said in his heart there is a God [Psalm 14:1]
• The Unrighteous Bible 1653 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God? (Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?) [I Corinthians 6:9] Neither yield ye your members as instruments of righteousness unto sin. (Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto) [Romans 6:13]
• The Judas Bible 1614 Then cometh Judas with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. [Matthew 26:36]
• The Sinners’ Bible 1716 Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin on more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. [John 5:14]
• The Vinegar Bible 1717 The Parable of the Vinegar [chapter heading for Luke 13:6-9]
• The Forgotten Sins Bible 1638 Her sins, which are many, are forgotten [Luke 7:47]
• The Bishops’ Bible Third edition 1572 The incipits were elaborate decorations, left over from a printing of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The beginning of Hebrews was illustrated with the seduction of Leda Zeus disguised as a swan.
• The Camel’s Bible 1823 And Rebekah arose, and her camels, and they rode upon the camels, and followed the man [Genesis 24:61 damsels]
• The Standing Fishes Bible 1806 And it shall come to pass that the fishes shall stand upon it. [Ezekiel 47:10 'fishers']
• The Placemaker’s Bible (Geneva Bible, second edition) 1562 Blessed are the placemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. [Matthew 5:9]
• The Bug Bibles 1535 (Miles Coverdale) and 1537 (Thomas Matthews) Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night [Psalm 91:5]
• The Printer’s Bible 1702 Printers have persecuted me without a cause (Psalm 119:161)
• The Breeches Bible (Geneva Bible) 1560 they sewed fig tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches [Genesis 3:7]

Feed the World
When I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint; but when I ask why people are poor, they call me a communist.

Dom Hélder Câmara (1909-1999), Archbishop of Recife, Brazil

The Current Scientific Understanding of the Creation of the World

In the beginning was nothing at all; which then exploded.

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies, 1992

Not understanding the past

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination. That’s a harder thing to do than [many] seem to think.

Paul Fussell, ‘Thank God for the Atom Bomb’ in Killing in Verse and Prose and Other Essays, 1988

A Good Emperor?
Edward Gibbon on the emperor Septimius Severus:

“He promised only to betray, he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.”

Quoted in ‘Yes, I am a walking advert for reform’ by the Earl of Onslow, The Guardian, 26 November 2003

The Failings of Secularism

The remedy for the shortcomings and sins of Christian peoples is surely not to substitute
secularism for godliness, human vagaries for divine truth, man-made expedients for a God-given standard of right and wrong. This is God’s world and if we are to play a man’s part in it, we must
first get down on our knees and with humble hearts acknowledge God’s place in His world. This, secularism does not do.

On Secularism, The Annual Statement of the Bishops of the United States, 14 November 1947

The Worshipping Assembly

The worshipping assembly is neither a machine nor a species of plant. It is a human society suffused with the unpredictable presence of One who is not content with remaining a first principle, a ground of being, or a transcendent way, but who had the effrontery to take flesh and pitch his tent beside ours. And whom we crucified. This endows the assembly with a certain wariness.

Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York : Pueblo,c1984), p94

Muddled Disagreement

The Daily Telegraph found one priest in the diocese of Newcastle, the Rev George Curry, to condemn the idea: “You cannot have the Church endorsing immorality particularly in a marriage ceremony which in the eyes of God is an adulterous union. The church is getting muddled in our moral views.”

I love this use of “muddled” to mean “people are disagreeing with me.”

Andrew Brown, The Church Times, Friday, 6th November 1998

How to treat false prophets 2

I read in one of Montaigne’s essays an account of what the Scythians used to do to makers of false predictions. They bound them, he says, hand and foot, laid them in an ox-drawn cart filled with brushwood, and burned them. What a relief for some of our own cherished pundits that such practices never caught on in Britain.

David McKie ‘Clouded crystal balls’ The Guardian, Thursday 6 November, 2003

How to treat false prophets 1

Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture. Among the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with furze and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death. Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michael Montaigne (1533-1592) Essays (1575) ‘Of Cannibals’