A BKJ 1611- Bíblia de Estudo King James com Estudo Holman foi elaborada para apoiar de maneira decisiva o estudo Bíblico. A Escritura é aqui o assunto principal. Todas as características e ferramentas são desenhadas para ajudá-lo a compreender a Escritura e ser por ela transformado. Apontam para outras passagens bíblicas que estão relacionadas com o texto que você está focalizando. NOTAS DE ESTUDO proveem informações históricas, culturais, linguísticas e bíblicas que aumentam a sua compreensão da passagem. As palavras em negrito procedem diretamente do texto da Escritura.

It is important to remember when assessing this 'book' that it is not a book but a 'bible'. It is a collection of books, its title coming from the same Latin root that gives us 'library' (the heritage is more obvious in the French equivalent, bibliothèque). I mention this seemingly trivial fact because it leads into my whole assessment of the Bible. As a self-styled atheist or near-atheist, the Bible only really had an impression on me once I stopped seeing it as the word of God passed down (which can be easily scoffed at) and started seeing it as the words of men, telling stories to try and figure things out. Ignoring a dogmatic approach and appraising it as literature and, increasingly, as philosophy, I think I tapped into the wellspring of why the Bible has endured.

This was strange for me. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion was a formative experience in my teenage years and I've always tried to hold myself to a standard of rationality and freethinking. So it was rather disturbing to me when my open-mindedness forced me to accept that when I actually got around to reading it, I was actually liking the Bible and taking a lot of worth from it.

I had two contemporary aids which I found myself leaning on when trying to understand why this was happening. The first – surprisingly – is the writing of Christopher Hitchens. The arch-atheist and public champion of secular rationality actually wrote glowingly of the King James Version of the Bible (codified in his essay 'When the King Saved God' – https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/05/hitchens-201105) and, certainly, if you want the Bible to have value as literature you have to read the King James translation. It is not up for debate. This is the one with all the seemingly archaic 'thees' and 'thou shalts' and 'cometh unto ye', but such language is beautifully rendered and flows easily from an English tongue. It rings with a cleaner sound than the supposedly more 'modern' translations, which become dated as soon as they are printed, just as a Shakespearean soliloquy can still stir your soul in the 21st century where slam poetry can't. The legacy of this translation in the English oral and literary tradition, from Shakespeare onwards, is unparalleled. If you are serious about literature, you have to read the KJV.

Indeed, my desire to retain my self-respect as an amateur bookworm is what made reading the King James Bible an ambition of mine. To qualify some of the heritage of my language – perhaps the most flexible of languages and certainly the most historically important – was what I expected. And it was what I got. But more than that, I found I was increasingly enjoying the book's lessons, its philosophy and its underlying themes. This is where the second contemporary aid proved useful: Jordan B. Peterson. Less surprising, perhaps, than Hitchens, for those who have engaged with some of this Canadian professor's talks and writings over the last couple of years, but still not entirely regular. Peterson is best-known for his 'self-help' stuff (a massive over-simplification, but I won't go into that here). But he also has a huge body of academic work on the psychology of religion and why such stories resonate with us, and (as a bookworm) it is often this rather than the 'tidy your damn room' stuff which has interested me. I began to find I was reading the Bible – still trying to come to terms with how it was so different from my preconceptions – as literature and as philosophy rather than from the point-of-view of a scofflaw atheist.

And it works on that level. In admiring the Bible, it's not that I've seen the power and the glory and I'm on board with the Light and the Word and I'll be going to church tomorrow, praise the Lord. I won't be. And anyone who thinks I am no longer a rationalist and have become someone who is willing to entertain hocus pocus would be mistaken. But I've been dipping into the Bible on and off over the past year and I have had to admit – at first ruefully and then increasingly unashamedly – that I've really enjoyed it. It's not that I've gone into it thinking, 'this is the Word of God and I have to accept it as truth regardless of what I think'. Instead, it's that I've gone into it and my mind has become shaped by the thoughts: 'these are the words of men and though I don't believe it's literal truth, there is a lot here to appreciate'.

And it is true that there is a lot to scoff at and even some to despise. This is a bible, after all; a library, a compendium, a collection. And like any library, some books on the shelves will be better than others. The Bible starts with Genesis and the four other Books of Moses – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is where it seems that, for many, the Bible's reputation is made. Some original and interesting creation stories, backed with some sound prose, that serves as the strong foundation of the Judeo-Christian faith. These are also the books where there are some rather iffy lines ('thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' is thrown in randomly among a bunch of some-stern and some-innocuous rules in Exodus, for example) and sickening events (Moses' war crimes, for example, or Lot's daughter, who is offered up by her father, the 'last good man in Sodom', to be gang-raped by a mob in order to spare his guests – two angels sent by God – from the same fate) that betray a morality you would not want to abide by. Couple this with some interminable passages in which such-and-such begat such-and-such, son of such-and-such, who begat such-and-such (for pages and pages), and laborious passages on the right way to go about minor rituals about sacrifices and unleavened bread, and you see why atheist mockery has such ample feeding ground. By this point a love-and-hate relationship with the Bible is established with the reader, something reinforced by the books which follow, including the Books of the Kings, which is all more of the same.

Things began to change for me with the Book of Job. Particularly when rendered in the KJV, this book is an absolute masterpiece of literature, and only slightly less so as a piece of philosophy. This was the point where I started to take seriously my reassessment of the Bible and began to embrace its ability to provide for metaphysical and transcendental moments. This is where I began to delve into Peterson's remarks about the Biblical storytelling tradition, particularly when infused into his 'self-help' lectures. From Job onwards, I began to recognize how many of the stories were about challenging God (which is what the name 'Israel' means) and being in conflict with God and, through this fight, becoming someone new and ascendant. There is a strain of individualism that starts to become very apparent, only reinforced by the eloquent and entertaining rants in the books of the Prophets (Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel) which follow. Add to this the lyricism of the Book of Psalms and the Proverbs, and the message throughout that doom will manifest on an individual and societal level if you do not take on this mantle and improve yourself (thanks to Dr. Peterson, again), and by this point I was seriously impressed. If you read only one book in the Bible, make it the Book of Job. It is the key.

This summarizes the thick wodge of paper that is the Old Testament and, to be honest, I actually prefer it to the New Testament. The New Testament is much shorter (about 250 pages compared to the approximately 870 of the Old) but the imperial joy I felt from reading parts of the Old Testament began to dissipate, even though I was completely on board by this point and putting my atheism to the side. The New Testament is still good, and in the figure of the Christ we have the embodiment of the individual 'ideal' to aspire to, which forms a continuation of the strain of individualism I so enjoyed in the Old books. In the story of the crucifixion we have, if not 'the greatest story ever told', then certainly a strong contender for it.

Furthermore, the line from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, when Jesus is being tortured on the cross and cries aloud to God, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), is – especially in context – the most heart-breaking line in all literature. A close second is the scene the night before his arrest, when Jesus, knowing exactly what he is going to suffer on the cross, asks God to remove this obligation from him – "let this cup pass from me" (Matthew 26:39) – but, if He cannot, to give him the strength not to falter ("the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" – Matthew 26:41). Monty Python were of the right mind when they said that Life of Brian evolved from being a lampooning of Jesus to being a mockery of his dim followers because there wasn't really anything funny about Christ, and that he had some good lessons.

Thinking historically and anthropologically, I also enjoyed the lesson that all men are equal before God, relative to their good or bad deeds. It is a hugely emancipating lesson and I don't know if Western civilization would have advanced beyond tribalism and monarchy and rigid class structure if not for the fact that its founding document had this imperishable kernel of the sovereignty of the individual built into it. But if I continue in that vein, I might as well just direct you to a Jordan Peterson video on YouTube, so I won't.

The problem I had with the New Testament is that whilst it is still a case of people telling stories to one another to try and figure things out, the people in question are becoming increasingly aware of that fact. A lot of Jesus' sayings are clearly inspired by passages from the Old Testament (particularly the books of the Prophets), and the secular response would be that Jesus was a man, rather than the Christ, who assimilated and taught the old lessons well, passing them off as his own. But that's fine – Jesus was clearly a man of fortitude and brotherly love, regardless of his divinity or otherwise.

Rather, it is the books of the Bible following the Gospels which disappointed me. I subscribe to what I call the John Lennon school of thought, which is that Jesus is alright but the disciples come along and ruin it. There are still some good lines, but they bastardize the message not only of Jesus but of the better Old Testament books. I didn't mind the Book of Revelation so much, sick and strange as it is, though I wouldn't want John the Revelator looking after any small children. Instead, it is the Epistles of St. Paul and the other contributions by the apostles which are damaging. The increasingly naked anti-Semitism (and I've read the KJV is actually rather tame compared to other versions) placed a grain of evil in Christianity which laid the first slat on the railroad to Auschwitz, the great failure of Western civilization in the 20th century, which we still have not recovered from.

Paul's epistles also introduce a missionary zeal completely contrary to the individualism of both the Old Testament and the example of the Christ. The establishment of the church and the ministry is the other great Christian error. It took away from the individual whom Christ was set up to represent, perhaps irrevocably. 2nd Peter also says that the Word is not up for interpretation (2 Peter 1:20-21), thereby making dogma rather than liberality the Christian code from then on. St. Paul can turn a phrase, but the Apostles did more harm than good. In some crucial ways, they were dim and dogmatic and closed-minded. (C. K. Stead's short novel My Name Was Judas is great on this.)

Thinking about this sad end to the Bible, with its perversion of all that came before, I was inclined to be unkind in this review. But, ironically, it is one of the lines from these later books, the Epistle of Paul to Titus, which encapsulates why I am unwilling to do so. "And let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful," says Titus 3:14, and this is why I am unwilling to judge the quality of the library by its least members. There is a lot to embrace in the Bible, from the archetypal stories to the lyricism to the masterpiece of Job to the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. Not to mention its role as one of the two founding pillars of Western civilization. To return to Hitchens, he wrote a few times of the values of the two cities of Athens and Jerusalem, to juxtapose the values of the Enlightenment to the role of Christianity in Western history. But increasingly, I am of the mind that you need both of these pillars; that a secular rationalism is not enough, and placing all the weight on that one pillar of the Enlightenment and the Classical tradition will cause it to wobble. We saw that in the 20th century, as predicted by Nietzsche, when nationalism and socialism and commercialism failed (and continue to fail) to adequately replace religion as a source of meaning.

There is humanism, of course, which is the right idea, but humanism has to embrace Christianity as much as rationality. It needs to be placed lengthways along both pillars in order to serve as the next foundation. You need the balance. People have a need which is emotional, metaphysical, and spiritual, alongside the intellectual and rational need. I am not in any way trying to explain away the horrors of religion which have been wrought throughout history or, for example, the problems involved in Jesus' injunction to believe solely in him, which could easily lead to the despotic, but the Christian tradition at its best had a deep philosophical meaning and sense of individualism. There's a lot about ascension in the New Testament, birthed from the Old, and not just in Revelation. And Christianity is arguably better than the other religions. Certainly, given its history, it has proven it can work in line with the secular tradition, even if that history has not always been an easy one. The test going forward for a rehabilitated Christianity (for I think that is the best possible outcome) will be in whether it can embrace the second pillar of rationality, whether it can resist the hostility to blasphemy and the overly-dogmatic thinking which characterized it when it was 'in charge' in the West. (One simple test might be: 'Can you laugh along with Life of Brian?')

Some secular atheists say, somewhat complacently, that you can make a believer into an atheist if you only get them to read the Bible. Whilst the opposite isn't true (I'm still an atheist), the near-opposite is. Reading the book from a secular point-of-view leads you to assess it as story: as literature and, through its themes, as philosophy. And it stands. As a piece of literature, it stands. And you might be so caught up in it at times that you believe it's real. That, after all, is what the best stories do to us. ( )

In January 1604, King James I of England convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version of the Holy Bible was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England. These problems included Psalm 28, the Great Bible stated, 'They were not disobedient,' where as the corrected translation was 'They were not obedient.' Completed by the Kings printer Robert Barker in 1611, this King James Bible brings about a whole new look to the Holy Bible. With Daily reading schedules, and extensive Biblical family trees, this bible covers everything and anything. Under strict restrictions from King James, the translators formed a Bible that soon became the Holy Bible that was found on the Pulpit of the Church of England, replacing its predecessor the Bishop's Bible. From the original woodblock printing, we have created an exact reproduction of the original King James Bible. The King James version is the most printed book in history, boasting over 1 billion copies in print, but this 1611 reproduction lets you experience this great work in its original form.

This is a good resource for those who study the history of the Bible, particularly the history of the English translations. Much of the language is of course very antiquated, made even more so because the original translators kept a great deal of the syntax and spelling from the Bishop's Bible, setting it back another fifty years or so.

This is the Bible that I use, and I highly recommend it. It has a great deal of very complicated and controversial history behind it, and because of its fascinating origins, it's in my opinion one of the most notable versions to study. ( )

This translation is originally from 4th. c. "family" MSS translations by Lucian (Antioch), a William Tyndale work mostly, but revised by the Bishops of the Church, and is still the only version approved by Brit Parliament, and endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Has many printing errors that were corrected in later editions to 18th. c. Beautiful Bible, easy to read, the translators notes are very good. Everyone shold have this version so that you can see how modern KJV Bibles have been mutilated by the removal of the chapter summaries, translators notes and the Apocrypha. This is a photo facsimile printing by Hendrikson Pub. and very well done. I have two copies, one signed by the Bishop of Rochester (Kent, UK). ( )