See, I'm Right [Again]!

As I've told you again and again, it's Christianity, primitive, Judaic Christianity, that is at the root of the decline from the 1400s high point of European Man and indeed of all our problems today.

If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe Rich Lowry, idiot-in-chief over at the NeoCon, I mean, National Review Online.

Rich begins, of course, by giving the Rabbis' feet the rich tongue bath they demand as a show of good faith:

As Benson Bobrick notes in his history of the Bible in English, Wide as the Waters, the King James Version stayed true to Hebraic turns of expression and kept language that was already archaic in the 17th century. All of this gave it a majestic lift that swept away all competition in both England and America.

Translation: Hebrew is an incredibly primitive language, whose meager syntactic resources are limited to independent clauses connected, if at all, by a single conjunction, 'but.' So meager are its resources, in fact, that poor 'but' is pressed into further service, being prefixed to a verb to in effect reverse its tense, past to future, say. Thus, almost every Hebrew sentence begins with 'but,' perhaps the origin of the annoying way Jews talk today.

This even seeps over into the Greek written [if you can call it that] by most of the authors of the New Testament, especially the more simple-minded ones, like Mark or the John of the Epistles [who on this ground alone cannot be the author of the Gospel of John]. It's like being able to tell, not just from accent but from the kind of grammatical mistakes made, what someones first language was when speaking English.

Turning from the extensive verbal system and rich layering of subordinate clauses of Classical Greek to New Testament Greek is like turning from Henry James to something in ebonics.

A similar process beset the superstitious yokels who 'translated' the Bible for King James. Believing it to be, as a Hebrew instructor used to say when starting his classes, "the language God spoke," they proceeded to imitate the archaisms, especially the 'buts.'

To show the problems this creates, consider many English proverbs, that date from a similarly primitive level of the language.

Is it "feed a cold [and] starve a fever," or the other way round? And, above all, why? Well, what it means is, using our more advanced syntax, "If you feed a cold, then you will have to starve a fever, since your fever will increase, while you will have eaten all your food."

Even more primitively, no on remembers "Eat your cake and have it too" correctly, since it really means "If you eat your cake now then you will not have it later."

In accordance, I suppose, with the Christian principle that the poor and stupid are ipso facto better than the smart guys, the Roundheads slavishly copied every primitive feature of the Hebrew and Hebraicized Greek text, as if that was the sign of its special holiness. The result was a fake, phony kind of "Biblical" diction that has plagued us ever since, from Hemingway's laconic, "manly" and so easily parodied style ["And the sun also rises, and the sun goes down" (Kohelet 1:5)] to the plummy vicars of various Monty Python skits.

Oh Lord, please don't burn us.

And of course, when Joseph Smith faked the Book of Mormon, he did so in a Pythonesque pastiche of King James English, Hebraicisms included, although supposedly translated from "Reformed Egyptian."

But Rich has bigger fish to fry than some poufy reflections on "the level of poetry." Getting back to his boy Bobick [no relation to Baldrick, I assume], we learn that The Goode Booke was the motivating factor for the whole modern Degeneration of the Castes:

The availability of the Bible in English, Bobrick notes, fostered commercial printing and a culture of reading. It created space for people — ordinary people, needing no official sanction or filter —

"The common clay of the New West."

to read and think about their faith and life’s profoundest questions. Ultimately, that undermined the authority of, to take another phrase from the King James Version (Romans 13:1), “the powers that be.”

“Free discussions about the authority of Church and state,” Bobrick argues, “fostered concepts of constitutional government in England, which in turn were the indispensable prerequisites for the American colonial revolt. Without the vernacular Bible — and the English Bible in particular, through its impact on the reformation of English politics — there could not have been democracy as we know it.”

And Democracy, as Mencken knew it, means the people know what they want, and should get it -- good and hard.