Inspiration for Bible Sunday

This Sunday is Bible Sunday. The parish where I served in Nottingham, Nuthall St Patrick, was the home of one of the protestant martyrs associated with the Reformation movement to make the scriptures available to people in English. Anne Ayscough (sometimes written 'Askew') lived, for a time, in the small village of Nuthall. She married Thomas Kyme, a Lincolnshire farmer, and had two children. She believed that the ordinary people should be able to hear the scriptures read in their own language. She herself read from the bible, in English, at a lectern in Lincoln cathedral and she became a public preacher. Eventually she was caught up in the unsuccessful plot to have Catherine Parr (Henry VIII's last wife) branded a traitor for religious reasons and she was racked and burned at the stake aged around 26, having refused to give the names of her alleged accomplices. Her story is told in Foxe's Martyrs.

Sitting in the quiet twelfth century church in Nuthall, I used to wonder how such an ordinary girl could have sustained such a passion for people to hear and know the Word of God through the scriptures. In her own way, she took up a cause that she believed would make a contribution to the faith of the ordinary folk of the church at a time when national debate was raging around the Reformation issues we understand through the eyes of hindsight today. Where did her commitment to the cause come from? How was she educated and what well-springs of personal courage saw her through her terrible ordeal? What happened to her children? What did they know of their mother's cause and the sacrifices she chose to make? Not very much is known about Anne and the questions that hang in the air are more tantilising than the facts we have. Her intelligence, theological knowledge and bravery under interrogation and torture were legendary.

At Nuthall, a local farming family gave the lectern bible to the church; as they said, the farmer works to bring bread to people and so it was also appropriate that they should provide knowledge of the true bread of life (one of the ways Jesus refers to Himself in scripture) by giving the bible that was read at very service. The lectern was a particularly poignant symbol in St Patrick's Nuthall, a place where many generations were reminded of the cost of having the scriptures available in translations that everyone can understand.

To read Anne's very moving story, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Askew

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the translation of the King James Bible, a special evensong was held at Ripon Cathedral last Sunday at which the preacher was the Very Revd Dom Henry Wansbrough, a biblical scholar and a Benedictine monk from the community at Ampleforth Abbey. To read about this and to see photographs of the 1611 and 1613 ('Judas') bibles owned by the cathedral Chapter, see
http://www.riponleeds.anglican.org/news-414.html

The Bible in a Digital Age

Codec (n) co'dec:  A device for coverting data from one format to another, esp. from analogue to digital format. In communications engineering, an integrated circuit or chip. The term is an acronym for 'coder/decoder'.

Research Centre in Biblical and Media Literacy
Durham University

 http://www.durham.ac.uk/codec

What difference does the digital age make to the ways we think and do things in our churches and faith communities? We're living through a revolution that will have as great an effect on society as the printing press did - probably much greater and more far reaching, in fact. Whether we understand the digital world and use socia networking media or not, they are having an impact on our lives all the time. Life is speeding up, information about us is held in ways that we don't know about but which shapes our lives, relationships are formed differently and are less embodied, our real and digital identities may not be the same, so questions of authenticity and truth arise. I could go on... The other end of the spectrum leads to the realm of the really quite mind blowing. What does theology have to say about brains that have been digitally enhanced and can therefore out-think everyone who has only a 'natural' brain? It makes in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering seem a bit tame, really! Then there are the justice and power shaped questions about who is included and excluded from the digital world. And the questions about sacramentality in a disembodied world.  

I spent a fascinating day in Durham, yesterday, hearing all about CODEC, a research project based at St John's College, Durham University. It was established in 2008 to develop a national survey of levels of Biblical literacy. Since then it has gone on to gain a national and international reputation in the whole area of Christian communication in the digtal age. The project is asking

• How does the 21st century world interact with the world of the Christian faith and vice versa?
• How do we communicate our faith with its ancient roots in a digital world?
• How do we allow the insights born of faith, discipline and wisdom in a Biblical sense to help us be properly critical of a digital world in which the impetus to react to everything out there, or as much of it as possible, is very strong?  

CODEC has done work for a number of agencies and individuals such as MPs and peers, the Church of England, the Methodist Church, Premier Christian Media, the Bible Society and SPCK as well as contributing to TV and radio in the UK and abroad. It has worked with the Faith and Globalisation Porject at Durham University and the Tony Blair Foundation to establish Faith online 0.2 We benefit from it locally because of the North Yorkshire Dales Biblical Literacy Project which has a project worker, David Wood, working in Swaledale and Wensleydale to promote understanding of the Bible and to reserach how it has an impact on community life in rural communities. 

The Revd Dr Pete Phillips, Director of CODEC
 at Durham University

You might be interested in looking at the BigBible website which has a mass of material about the Bible - events, stories of social action inspired by the Bible and projects focusing on the Bible, including Tom Wright's The BigRead12 - Lent group resources on Mark's gospel.  http://www.bigbible.org.uk/

CODEC also hosts preaching conferences which concentrate on apologetics in a digital age and the use of imagination in preaching. The conferences make use of research and material by some of the leading Biblical scholars. You can find details of these on the CODEC website http://www.durham.ac.uk/codec

The Revd Kate Bruce,
Research Fellow in Preaching,
CODEC, Durham University

This is a wonderful (and very practical) resource for us in North Yorkshire, especially those of us who preach, teach, blog and use other social media. This is the up and coming area of hermeneutic study - the study of interpretation across languages, social groups, media which is at the heart of incarnational theology.

The Bible in Welsh

While on holiday, we visited an exhibition in honour of the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible at the National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru) in Aberystwyth. The parallel story of the first translation of the bible into Welsh was also told. It reminded me that I have very a personal connection with Bishop William Morgan who made the famous 1588 Welsh translation. Born in Penmachno (near Betws y Coed, in North Wales) in 1545, Morgan studied at St John's College, Cambridge, gaining a DD in 1568. He learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic. He was then ordained by the Bishop of Ely, in Ely cathedral, and took his first living at Llanbardarn Fawr, near Aberystwyth. My home parish, where I sang in the choir, went to Sunday School and learned to play the organ, was Llanbadarn Fawr and I, too, was ordained deacon at Ely cathedral, in 1988, exactly four hundred years after the publication of Morgan's seminal translation of the bible.

His was not the first translation into Welsh of the New Testament; this had been done by William Salesbury in 1568. Morgan translated the Old Testament and Apocrypha and revised Salesbury's work to produce the first complete edition of all the canonical scriptures. His bible has been inestimably important for the Wesh language - perhaps more so even than the King James Bible has been for the English language. Morgan created a translation which was both close to the original texts he worked with, and couched in the classical Welsh of the poets. Because so much public business was conducted in Latin or English (incuding property and legal matters which were often not recorded in Welsh) Morgan's translation was instrumental in arresting the decline in Welsh, giving a new dignity and importance to the language and creating the parameters for modern written Welsh. Morgan went on to become Vicar of Llanrhaeadr y Mochnant, Bishop of Llandaff and then Bishop of St Asaph.

Of course, every Welsh child knows the story of Mary Jones who, at the age of 16, walked 25 miles from Llanfihangel y Pennant to Bala to buy a bible from the minister, Thomas Charles. Her story inspired the establishment of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804 which originally set out to address the problem of the lack of Welsh bibles available in Welsh-speaking areas. It grew into the internationally known ecumenial and non-sectarian Bible Society which has overseen the translation of the bible into many languages. The exhibition contains the bible Thomas Charles gave to Mary as well as a second copy he gave her - clearly he had heard of BOGOF and used it as an evangelistic tool! 

Many of the texts from the exhibition can be seen on

www.llgc.org.uk/1588bible  

You can also see texts of the English translations of the bible as well as material about the poet and theologian Ann Griffths (1776-1805) and the hymn writer William Willams of Pantycelyn on the Library's wonderful Digital Mirror - the National Library of Wales is recognised as a leading centre of digitisation in Europe. No doubt William Morgan and John Wycliffe's translations would have been rather different, had they had access to the range of texts today's scholars have! 

www.llgc.org.uk/digitalmirror

   

A Very Norwegian Place to be



The Norwegian Church, Cardiff Bay


http://www.norwegianchurchcardiff.com/

We spent a very interesting few hours at the Norwegian Church in Cardiff Bay, yesterday. Built on Bute Dock in 1868 for the many service men who sailed into Cardiff Bay in an age when Cardiff exported more coal than any other port in the world, the little wooden church is still a distinctive feature of the sky line in Cardiff Bay. Originally it both provided a place to relax and write home for the many Norwegian sailors who came to Cardiff and also acted as the hub for the thriving local Norwegian community. The church fell into disrepair in the 1960's and 70's but was restored in 1982 by a conservation group whose president was the author, Roald Dahl. Dahl was born in Cardiff, of Norwegian parents. Today, the church, which is within sight of the Senedd (the Welsh Assembley Building), has been newly refurbished and houses a cafe and gallery. It was very poignant to be in the cafe, yesterday, as the news of the terrorist atrocities in Oslo was breaking on the BCC's world news chanel. It brought home to us the importance of such missions to seamen all around the world; here was a place where people come together to feel connected with home at times of national anxiety and tragedy as well as at times of rejoicing. Our heart goes out to the people of Norway, a nation well known for its exemplary tradition of democracy. 

The gallery at the church is currently hosting a facinating exhibition of photographs illustrating the message of each of the 66 books in the Bible. Masterminded by Owen Brown, the exhibition marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. I quote from the book which accompanies the exhibits, a paragraph which I think reflects the location of the exhibition at the heart of one of the ports that shaped the Britain and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

'You may think our modern world is founded on secular ideals, but arguably the translation of the Bible not only influenced the English language and literature more than any other book, it was also the seedbed for Western Democracy, the driver for the abolition of the slave trade, the shaper of the British legal system and the framework for the Christian culture of both the British and American empires. And...it is also a book which outsells, is read by more people and is being translated into more languages than any other today.'   

The exhibition takes each book of the Bible and illustrates one verse with a photograph which captures the theme or the flavour of the book. I was struck by the power of this simple idea to communicate something of the essence of the scriptures in a way that gets people thinking and talking and brings out the contemporary relevance of the Bible's themes. You can find more information about the exhibition and see some of its stunning images on

http://www.66portrait.wordpress.com/

King James Bible

In this 400th anniversary year of the publication of the King James' version of the Bible, I've been looking out for phrases and images that we use in everday language which come from this wonderful translation of the scriptures. I'm sure there are hundreds. But, for now, how about

'Eat drink and be merry'
                                                                'Am I my brother's keeper?'                  
                   'The writing on the wall'
                                                                                              'Filthy lucre'
                                                 'A drop in the bucket'

Title page of the 1611 King James Bible

Luke 12.19 (The Parable of the Rich Fool)
 'And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry.' But God said unto him, 'Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?''

Genesis 4.9 (Cain murders his brother Abel and tries to hide it from God)
'And the Lord said unto Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?' And he said, 'I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?''

Daniel 5.5-6 (Daniel interprets a sign given at a banquet in King Belshazzar's palace to predict the King's death which occurs that very night.)
'In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened and his knees smote against one another.'

1 Timothy 3.3 (The character of a Bishop)
'A bishop, then must be...not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre, but patient...'  (It is worth noting that, in scripture, it is not generally money or wealth than is seen a bad or corrupting, but a person's attitude to money.)

Isaiah 40.15 (The vastness of God)
'Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.'

Do comment if you can identify others!

Of course, some phrases that sound as though they come from the King James bible in fact come from Shakespeare, writing for the most part a little earlier than the publication of the bible. Both Shakespeare and the KJB were strongly influenced by the English of John Wycliffe (1328 - 1384) whose translation of the New Testament into vernacular English from the Latin Vulgate heavily influenced most later translations. Wycliffe was born at Wycliffe, near Barnard Castle, in this diocese. St Mary's church, Wycliffe (just over the border of County Durham and on the bank of the swiftly flowing River Tees) is a gem and well worth a visit.  

St Mary's Church, Wycliffe