Jesus Built my Hot Rod

Gunsights made by Michigan arms manufacturer Trijicon have come under fire in the past few days for their inclusion of Bible verses and references on items sold to the American Military.

There's an article and audio commentary giving an overview of this story here.

Some news sources are describing the inscriptions as "secret Bible codes," which is a little misleading. These inscriptions were certainly not hidden or obscured. For example, anyone with scant biblical knowledge might look at the "JN8:12" marking on the side of the Trijicon ACOG gunsight and at least suspect it to be a New Testament reference.

This issue has added fuel to the ongoing debates surrounding religious freedoms in the military, as well as concerns about the overtones of "holy war" between Christianity and Islam that haunt our current overseas campaigns.

The use of religious inscriptions to mark or "bless" material objects, from gunsights to money, certainly raises some even deeper questions than these, of course.

Then again, where is the bright line between a weapon that sports, say, a reference to 2 Corinthians 4:6 ("For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."), and something like the Mossy Oak Brand Camouflage Bible, which says in its introduction,

Life can be much like learning to hunt. God says in 2 Timothy 2:15, "Be diligent and present yourself approed to God..." Good hunters must become skillful, prepared and diligent. The greatest "hunt" in life is seeking a relationship with the greatest huntsmaster of all, Jesus Christ [p. iii].

Imprimaturs and prooftexts for all sorts of lifestyles of violence, here. Where's Stanley Hauerwas when we need him?

Solar Powered Audio Bibles deployed in Haiti

An evangelical organization known as Faith Comes by Hearing has been getting press in these past weeks because of their involvement in getting a number of solar-powered audio Bibles into Haiti as part of the relief efforts sent in the wake of the earthquakes.

This is certainly not the first audio Bible. There are pocket sized MP3 Bibles like the Go Bible that have been on the market for several years. The solar powered angle, however, is a new and intriguing feature.

The main Bible is known as "The Proclaimer," and their website describes it like this:

We consider the Proclaimer to be a gift from God. Why? Because the inspiration for it came during three days of fasting and prayer by the entire staff of Faith Comes By Hearing. The Proclaimer is a digital player dedicated to playing God's Word in the local heart language.

The organization also sells "BibleSticks" - basically MP3 players that contain files for the audio Bible. They currently are marketing a regular version (in white) and a military version (in black).

There are a couple of stories about this on NPR, one for All Tech Considered, and a short blurb from the business news bloc (which was where I first heard about this).

The organization boasts the world's largest catalog of audio Bibles. In looking over their website, they seem to be scrupulous in not letting on their denominational affiliations (although one can discern a bit of this through their links and partners page).

They offer a fair selection of English versions to choose from (including a New American Bible version, which I found surprising at first), as well as a vast array of "heart languages," which are indigenous dialects from around the globe.

The King James Bible: If It Was Good Enough for Jesus, It's Good Enough for CBS

I was skimming the web for references to "black bonded Bibles" just now -- you know, those staid, traditional, non-flashy and quite sober behemoths of days gone by. Heirloom Bibles of stitched and fragrant Genuine Moroccan Leather. Gift Bibles given and given and given from year to everlasting year. What the President gets sworn in with. You know, those kind of Bibles

I had originally intended this to be a short post about the video I came across, which I have embedded below, where Denzel Washington is discussing his involvement in the 2007 audio Bible, The Bible Experience, which apparently has been a runaway bestseller.



After watching the video, however, I began to read the article, from CBS News Online, accompanying it. And, well. suddenly this post became a little more pointed.

The article is largely about the increasing trend of recent years to publish "designer Bibles," something that I certainly enjoy seeing reported. My trouble with the article, though, concerns several grossly misleading and inaccurate statements made by its author, Caitlin A. Johnson.

Let's take this one, for example, from right at the start of the piece:

In the beginning, there was the King James Bible: 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses — usually bound in sober black leather. The King James Bible was the English language standard for more than 400 years.

Okay. Hold on. Never mind the versions in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, used by the Church for over a millennium. A statement like this also manages to erase the long (and thorny) history of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and a host of other lesser-known, but no less influential, predecessors to the King James Version in English.

Now yes, Johnson is partially correct in her characterization of the influence and importance of the King James. If this were the only such statement in the article, and if the article otherwise had carefully-researched claims, I might have let it slide. Not so. Johnson later makes the statement, "For more than 400 years, the King James version was the first — and for many, the only — Bible. "

The first alternative noted in the article does not occur until "September 1966, [when] an alternative was created with today's English version, known as 'Good News for Modern Man,' published by the non-profit American Bible society."

These statements reflect the popular misconceptions surrounding Bible "origins." The notion, as the article asserts, that the Bible has been available for sale "year after year...for 2,000 years" (as Sara Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, claims) is patently untrue. While you can say that commodities that begin to look like what we call a Bible have been part of commerce since before the invention of the movable type press, it is really not until the late 17th century that you can locate the beginnings of "book trade," in the manner that Nelson means.

The last bone of contention I have with the piece comes in response to this:

"It's the best seller of all times," Abyssinian Baptist pastor Dr. Calvin Butts said. "It has to be. It's got everything you would want in a book: sex, violence, intrigue, mystery, the supernatural — it's all here."

The "it has to be" that Dr. Butts asserts is a pretty common sentiment among laypeople in the West. We assume the hegemony of the Bible to be a worldwide phenomenon that simply cannot be touched by any other book.

However, while the Bible is definitely high up there on the list of bestsellers of all time (and the list is, admittedly, a hard one to tabulate - after all, are we talking sales, or copies in print, or...) there is a good chance that another book written in response to a charismatic individual, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, actually holds the title.

Unfortunately, the historical, exegetical, and political complexities that arise in the wake of this tension between Jesus and Mao seem far beyond the ken of the writers and "newspeople" associated with CBS, who cannot even seem to get the facts about the King James right. Shame.

Iconic Books Blog

One of the highlights of the recent American Academy of Religion conference I attended was getting introduced to Jim Watts of Syracuse University. He, along with Dori Parmenter, are the motive forces behind the Iconic Books project:

Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. For more about iconic books, see the link to the Iconic Books Project.

As soon as Jim and I started talking, it was clear we had been approaching the same field of study from differing but complementary trajectories. His project is an exploration of how the books we encounter become themselves objects of veneration and sites of worship. Hence the study of Iconic Books explores the sociological construction of these sites of veneration - that is to say, it looks at how the book exerts power and influence by its physical presence (as opposed to what is often thought to be the proper site of a book's power: "what it says" or "what it means"). I think this emphasis opens up fascinating possibilities for analysis, especially as we move into these questions of the "resurgence of the religious" in public life.

Material Scripture's complementary trajectory attempts to explore Althusser's claim that "ideology has a material existence." Where Watts's project looks at the physical object being transformed sociologially into an ideological signifier, Material Scripture looks closely at how theologies (as ideologies) are transformed into the layered materiality of "book-ness."

In both cases the question of materiality is paramount, but the methodologies are distinct enough to be generative of some deep conversations in the years to come. I am very thankful to my friends Tim Beal (who himself has a new book on the material study of the Bible coming out) and Wilson Dickinson for making sure Jim and I got the chance to meet.

Review of Chuck Zerby's The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

The footnote, like any other significant invention, begins as an idea in someone's swirling gray matter, then seeks a way through human distractions, daydreams, fantasies, arguments and conflicts, and then gets itself transformed into a "thing" [p. 37].

Chuck Zerby's little book, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes, is a book I keep feeling I should have liked more than I actually did.

In the first place, the book is chock full of good and useful information, and not an inconsiderable amount of history and insight. Of particular interest to someone of my odd ilk, Zerby effectively highlights the very deep entwinement the development of the footnote has with the history of the printed Bible itself.

In fact, Zerby makes the claim, based on the available textual evidence, that the first recorded footnote, properly speaking, was placed by one Richard Jugge, in charge of the Bishop's Bible somewhere around 1568 [pp. 19 - 24]. This is of especial interest because, as Zerby intimates, the footnote has never - not from its very beginnings - been a neutral or innocuous addition to a text. Footnotes are always personal, persuasive, and polemical, much to Zerby's delight.

Perhaps it is this delight that I found offputting. Zerby's research is at many points an excuse for some rather precious phrasing and overly-narrated historical asides. E.g., "These details of Crabbe's life, and the ones that follow, have been lifted (as in shoplifted, perhaps) from a consistently amusing thumbnail sketch of him by Michael Schmidt" [p. 122, n. 9]. Zerby does not simply purloin others' bon mots, however. He feels at liberty to develop his own imaginative back-stories to the literary figures he recounts, not always to the credit of the furtherance of the overall argument.

Zerby's research, it should be noted, relies heavily on another volume, oft-quoted on the bottoms of the pages of Devil's Details. This other volume, Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History, functions as a sort of foil to Zerby's text, in that Zerby relies on it repeatedly for information, all the while disagreeing with Grafton's conclusions and methodological assumptions. He admits as much when he avers, "I have borrowed a great number of [Grafton's] facts and his antidotes [sic]; our interpretations of them differ dramatically" [p. 90 n. 2].

The reason for this complex relationship to Grafton's text eventually becomes clear. The question that drives Zerby, at the end of the day, is this: should a footnote be informative or performative? Grafton holds to the former; Zerby clearly opts for the latter. That is to say, for Zerby, the dramatic possibilities of the footnote eclipse its mere discursive possibilities, and he has choice words (nay, paragraphs - even unto whole chapters) for those who would think otherwise.

Thus Zerby's book itself employs and deploys footnotes not only to the end of logging sources, but for the evocation of effect and drama. There are points when this affectation works rather well (and I am still poststructuralist enough in my interests to enjoy a good performative aside every now and then). The difficulty arises when, enraptured with his own joyous prose, Zerby loses sight of restraint and, eventually, the reader. For such a short book, it was, at points, a very tiring exercise when these flights erupted.

That does not mean this is not a book worth laboring through. While I found Zerby's style more off-putting in the early pages, by the time I got to the last third of the book, I had settled into a truce with it, and found the book both informative and entertaining. If I were to compare the book to a movie, I would say its marketers and director were unsure whether it should be a documentary or a romantic comedy. Trying to be both, it ends up falling short of either.

For that shortcoming, however, there are still jewels here. The Devil's Details manages to be a useful history of the footnote, despite itself.

Typography of the Tetragrammaton through the centuries

Kendall Soulen, at Wesley Seminary, recently sent me the following question:

I'm working on a book on the name of the Trinity that touches on how scribes and printers have handled divine names in sacred texts. There's been a fair bit written on nomina sacra recently, but I haven't seen much on handling e.g. the Tetragram in modern european vernacular translations. Can you direct me to a source that traces the history of using capital type for LORD (HERR etc.) in recent centuries? Specifically, I'm wondering whether Luther introduced the practice, or whether it was already current before him. I would be grateful for any help.

I've been doing a little digging, but I haven't been able to find much information on this practice. If anyone out there reading this can point out some good resources on this question, please leave a comment below. Many thanks.

"Let the reader understand" - Red Letter Edition

The origin of "red-letter edition" Bibles - Bibles that print the words of Christ in red ink - reportedly center on an edition conceived and printed by a man named Louis Klopsch right at the dawn of the 20th century. Inspired by Luke 22:20 ("This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you" [NAB]), Klopsch produced both a New Testament (1899) and a full Bible (1901) that used red ink for the words directly attributed to Jesus, as well as those words in the Old Testament quoted by him in the New.

This first red-letter edition was published by The Christian Herald Bible Press, with versions quickly following from the presses of Thomas Nelson, A.J. Holman, and others. Red-letter editions are now a standard of the Bible publishing industry - even to the point that the recently published, environmentally conscious Green Bible mimics the format, printing the words that (loosely) deal with nature and conservation in green.

Several months ago my colleague Jimmy Barker mentioned red-letter Bibles in passing, and I credit that conversation for sensitizing me to what I found recently while leafing through the Gospel of Mark in my Crossway ESV Thinline Bible, which I bought to use in teaching my classes this fall.

Jimmy was mentioning that these red-letter Bibles often print the text of John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life"[NAB]) in red ink, which presents some interesting questions of interpretation for the reader, as the text is not clear in any English version as to exactly which words of the larger passage are direct quotations from Jesus, and which words are narrative commentary about Jesus. (I suggested at the time that he write a post for us about it, and I hope he will once his dissertation is finished.)

It was this observation that made me sensitive to another strange instance of red ink - this time in Mark 13:14 (reproduced here): "But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where he ought not to be - let the reader understand - then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains."

The text, in my Crossway Bible, is reproduced entirely in red. However, the text contains that aside, "let the reader understand," that opens up an entire realm of interpretive complexities.

In many editions, this phrase is rendered as a parenthetical aside that is not logically conjoined with the quotation around it. An editorial addition that came about in the process of writing the account of Jesus' words. While this explanation does not dispel all the interpretive questions that can arise, it goes a long way toward keeping the logic of the passage intact.

To print this aside in red, however, is to make the visual claim that this phrase is a direct quotation of Jesus. This would mean, on the face of it, that in the midst of this discourse about desolation and fleeing to the mountains, Jesus paused a moment and actually said the words, "let the reader understand."

To print these words in red is to gesture toward an entire theology of omniscience on Jesus' part. It is to imply, visually, that Jesus was well aware that his words would not simply be heard in that moment, but remembered, written down, and read in the future. Given the ubiquity of the Bible in our culture, this may not seem as controversial an assumption as it actually is.

To print these words in red ink is to make the tacit claim that Jesus was speaking words that would be heard as a non sequitur to his immediate audience - not a parable or a difficult phrase, but a complete anachronistic gesture toward the written page - for the benefit of future audiences. Some contemporary readers, of course, seem to have no problem with this.

I do, however, especially in light of the very mixed presentation we can observe across the various English editions of the Bible with regard to these passages. Editors and publishers do not have anything approaching consensus with regard to where to put quotation marks or parentheses around these sentences.

Thus the practice of printing the aside in red ink strikes me as somewhat sloppy on the part of Crossway's editors. Perhaps others will disagree with my reading (and I hope you will leave a comment if you do - I'd like to hear your thoughts), but the anachronistic reading (omniscience or no) just seems off to me. I would argue that this phrase would convey a much more consistent visual logic if it were printed in black, while the rest of the words remained red. Barring that, the decision to print in red demands at least an explanatory footnote.

I have been doing some research to see if these matters are being discussed anywhere online or in Crossway's own literature. I haven't found much yet. If anyone knows of any, please add them to the discussion below.

Meanwhile - let the reader understand - I have some mountains to flee to. See ya.