Northrop Frye Approach to the Bible

 Northrop Frye was an eminent Canadian literary critic and theorist.    A decade or more ago, I requested one of his books from the library and read part of it; I don't remember which one it was or why I wanted to read it.   It might have been The Educated Imagination -- at any rate, that one looks interesting!

Today I listened to a Big Ideas podcast:   Northrop Frye on An Approach to the Bible.    Apparently it was the first lecture in a hugely popular course he gave on the Bible and LIterature.   You can see a summary of the classes here.    There is more here,

Frye explains why a course on the Bible is important in the literature field.  Many students nowadays, reading literature such as Milton's Paradise Lost, are boggled because they aren't at all familiar with the contents of the Bible.

Courses in the past (that he was talking about) tended to be inadequate because they just excerpt bits like Parables of Jesus or Book of Job.    Frye believes that to even approach understanding a book you have to start at the top left of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right of the last page.

If you start reading the Bible, a question arises as to whether the Bible is really a Book or something like a small library or compendium.    The books are distinctly different one from the other.  Most people give up around Leviticus.

He maintains that the Bible should be treated as whole and one, because of two kinds of unity.  One kind of unity is temporal in form.  The Bible starts with the beginning of the world, with creation, and it ends with the end of the world.   Obviously there are some gaps between the time of the apostles and our time, but the big picture is covered.

The other form of unity is thematic.    Certain words are used throughout and acquire layers of meaning throughout the whole.  Blood, Lamb, Bread, Adam, World are only a few.

The rest of his talk was a kind of summary of the history of Biblical translation.   You can find an outline of the substance of the history of translation at Wikipedia.     His telling went like this:

1. Original Hebrew Old Testament written/compiled
2. Septuagint (translation into Greek of the OT as the civilized world became Hellenized).
3. Koine Greek New Testament written.
4. Translation of the complete Bible into Latin by St Jerome in the version known as the Vulgate.   He called it probably the most amazing scholarly achievement by one man in all of history.
5. Wyclif Bible -- first translation of the Vulgate into English (almost all translators until the 19th century used the Vulgate as their source).
6. After the Reformation, several Bible translations.  Luther had a German translation (which he points out became the cornerstone of German literature).   There were two English translations, the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible.  The Bishop's Bible was the Anglican official version; the Geneva version contained lots of notes and commentary from a Calvinist perspective and was used by the Puritan arm of the English church.
7. The Douay-Rheims, commissioned in France, was a Catholic translation of the Vulgate into English which as is traditional for Catholics contained the Apocrypha as part of its contents.  Protestant Bibles of the time generally contained the Apocrypha as some kind of appendix.  He points out that most English of the time were familiar with these books, as in Merchant of Venice, where Shakespeare has Rebecca say that a lawyer is a very Daniel (Daniel in his role as lawyer only appears in the Book of Susannah and one other in the Apocrypha).
8. The King James translation came about because King James wanted to settle the difficulty between the conservative Anglican branch and the Puritans.  He tried to steer a sort of middle course.
9. Frye specifically mentions the Preface to the King James edition of 1611 in order to make a distinction between academic type translations and more literary ones.    There is a commentary here which is framed as a criticism against KJV-only ideological types.
10. Frye plans to use the King James translation in his course though for private study he says he uses the Revised Standard Version which is a closer translation.    The reason to use KJV:  because it is unparalleled in its acute "ear" for oral language.   It was arranged so that every sentence is a paragraph in order to make it easier to read it aloud.  Its rhythm has soaked into the English literary language.
11. In the 19th century there were several attempts to make a new translation based on new scholarship.   He points out the British revised version as a flop because of dreadful clunkers like writing  "Jehovah of Hosts" to translate Yahweh Sabaoth.    The KJV in contrast renders it Lord God of Hosts.
12. He talked briefly about 20th century translations.  When he was giving the lecture I guess Catholic liturgy still used the Jerusalem Bible; now it is the New American Bible, which has some of that aforementioned clunky goofiness.    I use the RSV version published by Ignatius Press and so do my kids.  Before I converted I used the NIV, as I suppose many evangelical Protestants do.
13. Sometimes I refer to the Douay Rheims as well for its more poetic style; though the language is of the same venerable historical period,  I can't quite accept it as a substitute for the King James, which is always the version I hear ringing in my ears when I am at a life moment where Scripture comes to my mind.  And now I know why, because of the auditory beauty of the translation.   It has soaked in.

All in all it was an excellent use of 45 minutes.    I didn't hear anything that offended my sensibilities.  Some Bible as Literature scholars can be clunky and offensive.  He was not at all, probably because of his excellence as a literary critic.    I would like to listen to him on The Shape of the Bible   as well.

Apparently the last book Northrop Frye wrote was Words of Power which was apparently a second take on a book he wrote called The Great Code which expresses his thesis that the Bible should be considered as a unity rather than a sort of anthology as is the Bible-academic consensus.

Other notable works were The Anatomy of Criticism in which he expressed his theory of Archetypes.     I would like to read these, but they will have to go down later in my list since I already have way too much on my book pile.