Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Butcher's Bible

Playwright Howard Brenton and his father have a discussion with the local butcher:

The butcher would have none of this. Everything in the Bible was true: the Red Sea literally parted, Lazarus rose from the dead, the disciples saw the resurrected Jesus ascend into heaven. The Bible is the word of God, end of argument. A realisation began to dawn on my father, and he said something like "but it is only a translation, from Hebrew and Greek". The butcher exploded. Translation? No! He believed Jesus and the disciples actually spoke the words of the King James Bible. The language of biblical Palestine was Jacobean English.

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