Keep the King James in Christmas

I was reading a new Advent calendar to my family the other day. We always enjoy the rituals of this time of the year, and the countdown to Christmas is a highlight of every morning. But this new calendar was not so merry and bright. I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my ears. “Listen,” the angel said, “You will become pregnant and have a baby boy.” Listen ... pregnant ... Humbug! And then came another unwelcome visitor—“Caesar sent out an order, that everyone’s name must be put on a list.” Put on a list? And wasn’t this Caesar formerly known as Augustus?

It all leaves me asking, whatever happened to Christmas?

The crown jewel of the English literature is the King James Bible. It still remains a top-seller in the Bible markets, and it is still the most widely used by English-speaking churches. Its prose is classic, a stabilizing feature of not only literature but of culture. It formed the English nation, and then it migrated to North America where it found its way into the mouths of John Witherspoon, Abraham, Lincoln, Johnny Cash, and Linus Van Pelt. Every year in December, millions of Americans have used the text of the King James in their Christmas carols, their seasonal devotions, and in their Christmas Eve services. It is part of who we are. But now we seem to giving this heritage away.

We all know the excuses. It’s old-fashioned and hard to understand. But of course, when it comes to Christmas, being old-fashioned is a strength and not a weakness. Auld acquaintance and all. The whole point is to remember, to place our focus backwards. If at no other time, surely the winter holidays call for “that glorious song of old.”

What about the supposed difficulty of interpretation? It has to be acknowledged that there definitely are passages in the KJV that require some extra training. Even a traditionalist Anglican smirks when they have to read “superfluity of naughtiness.” But thankfully, when it comes to Christmas readings, we can figure them all out easily enough. The context is familiar, and the virtue of seasonal repetition and public religion has quite simply drilled the second chapter of the gospel of Luke into our bones. For Christmas readings, we know what we're hearing.

The worst argument of all comes, as it not infrequently does, from the religious academy. It argues that the newer translations, while admittedly tinny and unlikely to endure, are still nevertheless more accurate. And so instead of “only begotten Son,” we should use “one and only” or “unique.” Your hymns and creeds and heirlooms might all have to go, but at least we will have accuracy. Mercifully, this particular example has already started to lose ground. “Only begotten” is currently enjoying a renaissance among the historians and linguists, and so the rest of us can be spared.

Another intolerably intellectual claim is that “Peace on earth, good will to men” should really be “on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased.” Now, this case depends upon a debate over textual reception, whether to prefer one set of papyri to another. It’s a debate beyond most people’s capability. But even with that, is the new version truly any kind of improvement? Does it add clarity? Upon whom does God shower His pleasure? The older answer was the human race. This was indicated by the fact that God sent His Son to take on human nature. Now, a few especially persnickety Calvinists no doubt enjoy this new ambiguity, but most modern translations still arrive at the old meaning. Take the New English Translation as one example: “peace among people with whom he is pleased.” After all that work, the meaning is virtually the same. It just sounds worse and invokes some grammatical pedantry.

The poet W. H. Auden once offered some famously curmudgeonly remarks about religious language revision. In the process he also gave one of the best defenses of the of the KJV. Auden explains:

Our Church has had the singular good-fortune of having its Prayer-Book composed and its Bible translated at exactly the right time, i.e., late enough for the language to be intelligible to any English-speaking person in this century (any child of six can be told what ‘the quick and the dead’ means) and early enough, i.e., when people still had an instinctive feeling for the formal and the ceremonious which is essential in liturgical language.

The KJV really is intelligible, certainly in its most famous parts. Your grandparents managed it. As a Mississippi schoolboy in the 1990s, I could sort it out. Countless working-class communities still make it work today. And the Christmas season is one of the last cultural artifacts that can make a credible claim to being a public liturgy. As such, it deserves an appropriately liturgical language. Even if you can't bring yourself to use it for regular bible study, at least use the KJV for your pomp and ceremony.

We are already in the habit of artificial holiday uniformity. People in Arizona have snow globes. Holly and ivy show up in California, in Montana, and in Florida. For some reason, we keep drinking eggnog. Antique? Perhaps. Odd? A bit. Virtuous? Without a doubt.

Deep down, you know it’s right. The King James Version is the only Bible that can be called the English and American family Bible. It’s what you are used to hearing this time of year. It’s what the season calls for. It just sounds better.

And so do it for the holly and the jolly. Do it for Old Blue Eyes. Do it for your forefathers and do it for your grandchildren. Please, for Christmas this year, stick with the King James.