The Other Life of the King James Bible

The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner Lecture 2012, on 20 March, was given by Lord Bragg of Wigton, otherwise known as Melvyn Bragg, award-winning documentary producer and presenter, historian and author. Melvyn Bragg’s most recent book The Book of Books – A Biography of the King James Bible 1611-2011 formed the background to his address. Lord Bragg was introduced by the NSW Premier, The Hon Barry O’Farrell MP and the vote of thanks was given by Carolyn Kay, a member of The Sydney Institute’s board. The address published here is taken from an edited transcript.

THE OTHER LIFE OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE

MELVYN BRAGG

Premier, your eminence Cardinal George Pell dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, I’m honoured to be invited to give this lecture for The Sydney Institute, and I hope I can do the Institute justice tonight. Thank you for such an erudite introduction; I was beginning to think my speech was going to be rather redundant. It was extremely fluent and very impressive, as most things about this country are. I’d particularly like to thank Gerard and Anne Henderson for the warm welcome here and encouragement in London, for permission to let me make this particular speech, for meeting their friends over the last day or two, and having such a good time in the short time that I’m here.

I’ve been to Australia a great number of times – my wife was brought up here for many years, in Parramatta. And every time I come it gets better. That’s not just a complement because you’re here, it’s true. It just gets better and better. It’s an extraordinary country. I just missed coming here because of my mother’s obstinacy. My father and his brother were to set off and my brother made it but my father didn’t. So there you are; I could have been a contemporary of Clive James. And I suppose I am, really.

I’m going to talk about the King James Bible, published in 1611. Its 400th anniversary was, obviously, a year ago. It came out and was spectacularly successful. It was the greatest selling book of the last 400 years for whatever faith, by a long way. It benefited from being a book of two empires and a book of many nations, and it benefited from contributing to, and being part of the lift-off – this great explosion of the English language after years, and even centuries, of oppression. It leapt out of change almost literally.

For instance, in 1066 Harold Godwinson (the Harold who was struck through the eye by an arrow in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings) was crowned King in Westminster in the English language. It took 333 years before the English language was employed in a similar capacity in Westminster Abbey. It was a suppressed language. Out of that, like any great suppression, it erupted with Chaucer, then with Shakespeare, then with this great Bible – and spread all over the world. My work is about its impact on civil society, not on religions. This book affects all of us, whether we’re a denomination of Christianity, or whether we’re anti-religious or of other religions or atheistic; it doesn’t really matter.

The Bible in the vernacular is the most spectacular example of unexpected consequences I can think of. The impact of the Bible (putting religion aside) on language, on society, on democracy, on slavery, on science has been quite extraordinary. When you look, however, at the way our history has been written, particularly over the last 50 years, even the last 100 years, the impact of the Bible has been airbrushed out of history.

There is talk of the Enlightenment, there is talk of economic change (there always is), there is talk of society moving forward (there always is), but the idea that at the centre of it was a book, a book which expressed a religious point of view, has been quietly (and not so quietly) pushed away. We are a very secular society in Britain, and do not want to see the past like that. We always write the past in our own image and the Bible does not fit in. Atheists have got hold of the megaphone and they do not want a Christian past or any religious past or any religious influence in any benign way whatsoever.

When I came across that realisation a few years ago, I had just completed a long novel that seemed to have completely finished me. But I wanted to write on because I like writing and being at my desk every morning. I thought of doing something on the Bible as an act of restoration. A book of history.

Whatever your personal religion or non-religion is, it is absolutely no concern of mine. I know people of all denominations as well as several atheists, who are fine, or not fine, depending on what they are as people. History, though, is something different. History belongs to all of us.History you must look after, because if you do not look after your history, if you don’t tell it as it really is, it comes back to bite you in the neck.By amputating the past, you condemn yourself to be embalmed in the superficialities of the present. So, that’s what I’m trying to do. What happened in the last 400 years happened, in many cases, because of the impact of the vernacular Bible on people who didn’t believe in the Christianity, or the faith in this book. But it had an impact, nonetheless. It is the most extraordinary phenomenon.

The first battle was getting the Bible into English and it took about a couple of hundred years. In 381 AD, the man who became known as St Jerome had translated the Bible into Latin. It was known as the Vulgate. Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and most people understood Latin. When the Romans then conquered the known world, Christianity held on. It held on through the Holy Roman Empire, and continued on when that disintegrated too. It held even when nations states developed. It held because it was a sacred text.

The Bible has become a great sacred text in Western civilisation. Sacred texts have power, enormous power. We look at Egypt, for example. The sacred texts held there, and the priests were the real rulers. They were interconnected, as were the Aztecs. And so it was in many, many civilisations.

One of the things that power tries to do is to exclude – as many people as possible. Keep the truth, keep the power, keep the juice to yourself. So it was with this sacred text guarded by an extraordinary empire, the empire coming from the Vatican. It was a benign empire, a massively influential and successful empire in its own right, exploring every part of human nature. Its knowledge gathering was second-to-none. It knew about the sexual life of people in tiny villages in North Britain. It knew about what was going on in different parts of its empire. It was a great empire, and its leaders were the keepers of the sacred texts. Latin had become the great language of state between European powers. Still, few people understood it by that time. Few people could write it by that time; it was kept close. It was a big nut to crack.

What I want to say now is something that I hope applies to the whole of this talk. It has to do with imagination. When Albert Einstein was asked what was the most important thing that prompted him to be the scientist he was, he didn’t say his teachers, he didn’t say Isaac Newton, although he thought that Isaac Newton was the greatest mind that had ever been. He said: “Imagination. Above all, imagination.”

Many of you know that, from whatever walk of life you’re in, whether it’s business or politics or whatever, it is all very much about imagination. Taking a leap into a future that is not defined. But I am not asking you take a leap forward; I am asking you to take a leap back. Because, that is equally important. We simply cannot understand history unless we use imagination; it is pointless if we do not.

For most of the time I will be talking about 1611 to 2011. In that time, practically all people, for all intents and purposes, absolutely believed that the Old Testament was the history of the world; that it told, precisely, the history of the world. Isaac Newton believed that, Shakespeare believed that, Francis Bacon believed that; they believed the Bible was the history of the world. We have to remember how important it was to them. They believed that, in the New Testament, God had sent his only son to redeem the world, another axiomatic belief. It was what we now call a mind-set; powerful, widespread and it forms the background to what I’m going to say. It was such a strong force, but a force that was being challenged. It was being challenged by people who wanted to be able to read and understand the Bible in their own language.

This was happening in many different places in what we call Europe, but it happened most fiercely in Britain. It began or got underway with a man called John Wycliffe around the end of the 1370s and early 1380s. Wycliffe was a Roman Catholic divine based in Oxford University who wanted the Bible translated into English. He set up a scriptorium in a couple of colleges in Oxford. You can see to this day the desks where these young undergraduates copied out – it was pre-printing – the Bible. They had a system going, a line system. They then strapped these pages around them, put on long grey cloaks and went into the byways with their translations into English. It was all very underground.

Wycliffe was found out as being deeply implicated in this. There was a show-trial at Blackfriars in London, and he was condemned to death. He would have been burned but for the intervention of a man called John of Gaunt, who was Regent of England to the boy-King Richard II. John of Gaunt saved Wycliffe who was placed under house arrest for two years during which time he died.

Forty years later the Church authorities dug up Wycliffe’s bones and burned them. They did that because they wanted to ensure that when salvation came his body would not be able to join his soul. That was John Wycliffe’s final punishment. Meanwhile, his younger scholars continued their work. We think of Oxford Scholars at that time as, sort of plumped and privileged people who went there to get good degrees in law, enter the Church and rule society without much effort. It was not like that.

In the records that we have, for the last third of fifteenth century, for instance – albeit a small population base – that show for the last third of the fifteenth century, at least 150 of these young men were tortured and burnt at the stake. Many more were tortured but not burnt and so on. But this did not stop their work of translating the Bible, because they wanted it to be in the English language. So the English language Bible was created not only from people who wanted it for their religious purposes, but also because they wanted it to be the language of the people.

Then, along came one of the two great geniuses in the English language. And I would hope I can say that unequivocally. One of these two was William Shakespeare – who’s a genius of the imagination. Shakespeare has contributed more words to our language than anybody. And according to great American scholar Harold Bloom, his is the greatest mind we will ever know. There was also a second genius – William Tyndale. He was a genius of translation.

Tyndale was a wealthy young man, and an Oxford scholar. This is a bit of an Oxford story because there were only two English universities at the time and Oxford did religion better than any. Tyndale went to Oxford when he was about 14. By the time he left Oxford, at 21 or 22, to go to Cambridge for a year he knew Anglo-Saxon, French, German, Italian, Greek, Latin and he was supposed to be the first man in Europe to teach himself Hebrew. He was extraordinary in what he did with learning. But he was even more extraordinary in the way he wrote it down.

Tyndale had tried to get a job in London. He had seen a Bishop in London and been interviewed. At that time, the state was all powerful with many interventions. Nothing moved without being reported. The spy systems of the Tudors were formidable – they could make the KGB look to its laurels. Everything that happened of importance was recorded by scribes. Tyndale was known as an extraordinarily brilliant young man; he didn’t want to stay at Cambridge or Oxford but to work in the Church. And he wanted to continue with his passion, which was to translate the Bible into English. He’d read a little of what Alfred the Great had done, and that’s what he wanted to give his life to.

During Tyndale’s meeting with the Bishop, he didn’t lose his temper, we’re not told that, but he grew angry when the Bishop called him terrible names. These reports are quite hair-raising. The Bishop challenged him about this dreadful work he was doing. He was accused of being destructive, of attempting to bring down the state, of being rebellious beyond measure by translating the Bible into English. It’s difficult to imagine all this today. Tyndale’s response was to reply to the Bishop by saying: “I will teach a plough boy to know the Bible as well as thee.”

Now, that was a brilliant retort. The plough boy was the Medieval idea of the perfect person. A young man, not formed, working on the land, feeding people, with his direct link back, as they thought, to Christ’s Apostles. But, much more important and more relevant for all of us here and for the future of the English language, the plough boy was illiterate. Tyndale had suggested that he could write a Bible for people who could not read. It would be a Bible to be preached, a preaching Bible. Tyndale never lost sight of that.

Such was Tyndale’s genius he didn’t just say, “I’m going to do that”, – he found a way to do it, and he found this way to do it. Through the language of his translation. Language like – “All things were made by him. In him was life, and the life was the light of man.” And its idioms. He contributed more idioms to the English language than anybody before or since, and we use them in one way or another every day. Here’s a few: “Let there be light”; “Fell flat on his face”; “Signs of the times”; “To rise and shine”; “A thorn in the flesh”; “The salt of the earth”; “The blind lead the blind”; “Cast the first stone”.

Every word I’ve said is a monosyllable. Every single one of those words is a single syllable which can be understood by anybody, and the Bible is riddled with it, and so is Shakespeare, who took a lot from Tyndale through another Bible. And, of course, so is English language literature. It’s the great force of it: “To be or not to be”. It can be extraordinarily complicated, but it’s also the effect of monosyllables. So it can be understood.

Tyndale next began to translated his Bible into Greek, then he fled to the Netherlands in his late twenties. He went from safe-house to safe-house. He finished his Greek translation, and sent copies to England. He did this with the help of powerful friends in England, rich friends. There continued to be fierce opposition to any translation of the Bible from the Latin. For example – and this is completely attested. On one occasion, the Bishop of London bought 6000 copies of the translated Bible which over three days, he burned them on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was to show the people what would come to them if they got hold of this book. On another occasion, Henry VIII sent out a row of ships to stop Bibles from entering translated England. And so on and so forth. The English authorities were furiously determined not to have vernacular Bibles in their midst.

Then Henry VIII had a deep night of reconsideration and decided to leave the Catholic Church and become a Protestant. And so the English language translations came into the country, but not Tyndale. He became such an object of hatred. The saintly Sir Thomas More talked of Tyndale in words you would not repeat in a bad nightclub. They were loathsome, horrible, disgraceful words against about this gentle, dedicated, deeply Roman-Catholic scholar, Tyndale.

Tyndale was spied on by the networks of the Holy Roman Empire and the Tudors and eventually betrayed by another Oxford man. He was thrown into a dungeon for 18 months, even as the Reformation was widespread. He was given a show trial, found guilty. Before he was strangled he said, “May the Lord open the eyes of the King of England.” Then he was burnt at the stake, it is said with green wood so that he burned more slowly. At the time of his death he was in his late thirties.

Tyndale’s legacy to us is the New Testament and the first five books of the Old Testament. King James VI of Scotland, made King of Scotland when he was one year old, and aged 36 when he became James I of England, was a great Biblical scholar and known throughout Europe for his Biblical scholarship. When it was suggested by a Presbyterian that King James might have a new Bible he seized on the idea. A new Bible was put together in a few years by 52 scholars. This, by the way, could be said to encourage every Hollywood producer ever since say to say, you can have as many writers as you want since the greatest book in the world was written by committee.

In this undertaking, the scholars leant heavily on Tyndale. Tyndale’s influence on the translation is powerful and persuasive. When those scholars, four groups of them, finally sat down in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey and put the final book together, what did they do? They didn’t pass notes around to each other, they read it aloud to each other. The King James Bible thus was from the outset a preaching or speaking Bible. When the King James Bible emerged in 1611 its first impact was on language.

Shakespeare died in 1615 and the King James Bible came out in 1611. But Shakespeare had heard earlier versions in his Church, in his school, of this great translation. Translations like  the Geneva Bible. Or the Great Bible. Both stolen wholesale from Tyndale. In fact, there’s almost more Tyndale in the Geneva Bible, which Shakespeare heard, than there is the King James Bible. There are 1350-odd borrowings from the Bible in Shakespeare. Quotations, allusions, stories, sentences, all words he pinched. He was one of the great stealers, one of the great plagiarists of history. But he turned it to his imaginative ends, turned it into political plays without a qualm. And once Shakespeare got hold of it, the gates opened.

But I want to say one thing about the people to whom the Bible was addressed, this speaking Bible, and how the gates, the eyes and ears, opened. The effect of the King James Bible in English was to give the English speaking people permission to think, rather than the duty to believe.

The place and power of the King James version was that it became the medium through which thought was liberated. Imagine it! You’ve been an intelligent person. You’ve heard scraps of the Bible, if you’re lucky enough to be in York or Norwich, at the Miracle Plays. You’ve been behind the screen of the Cathedrals and heard mutterings of Latin, sometimes ill-said by people who didn’t know much Latin. Then, suddenly, you get this treasure chest poured on your head. All these words, these stories; Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Salome! All the arguments in the Bible, the proverbs, the wisdom, the psalms, the poetry, the erotica, and so on. You get the Sermon on the Mount, it’s all there. It’s as if there’s been a cavity in your mind to put words to thought, all of the sensations you’ve had can now be turned into words. And they can turn into other words and other sensations. It must have been extraordinary. This drove this Britain into an excess of activity in so many ways in the century or two after the Bible.

And so to literature. Here there doesn’t seem to be any finish. Apart from Shakespeare, there’s John Donne. There’s John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, at one time the world’s second-best seller, second only to the King James Bible. There’s Daniel Defoe, who was trained as a Presbyterian priest. In Robinson Crusoe, he goes back to the ship  for anything he can use to build a refuge on his island and he takes the Bible – it’s very important for him to have the Bible; William Blake, of course, the Bronte sisters. Charles Dickens wrote: “The New Testament is the greatest book that ever was or ever will be written.” On to William Golding. In America, Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick – “Call me Ishmael” is its first line. You had to know who Ishmael was to understand this. You had to know that Ishmael was the illegitimate son of Abraham’s second wife, a slave called Hagar, whom he married, or took to himself, because Sarah was sterile. – and readers knew all this from their Bible. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is based on the Bible’s David and Bathsheba; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – 12 people on that lorry going across America, the 12 tribes of Israel, there’s even a Noah there as well. And East of Eden, the Cain and Abel story told twice inside that; Tony Morrison in Beloved where they speak in the voices of the New Testament, and T.S. Elliott.  In this country, Helen Garner’s The Spare Room – she spent months reading the King James Bible in preparation for that; Patrick White’s Tree of Man and Voss; Thomas Keneally, a Catholic but he pays enormous tribute to the King James version; Colleen McCullough, and on it goes.

For me, the most surprising thing when I look at the impact of the Bible, is the effect it had on slavery. I’d been told at university that the end of slavery came about through a combination of enlightenment, economic conditions and such. No one mentioned the Bible. It’s very bad when, because of the times, you cut knowledge out. So when I came across what really happened in the move against slavery, I was amazed by it, by the impact on it.

Slavery has been in the records of every civilisation that kept records. Everywhere you look: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, right through. Slavery was in England up to the fifteenth century – the Tudors had slaves. It still exists. There’s still slavery around the world, but what has changed for us is the idea of slavery being part of human nature, something that is inevitable, something that was good, something that was blessed by God. That has gone. And, it has gone because people used the New Testament to make it go. That’s what happened when you look at the evidence.

It’s a scandal that this has not been not brought into the light, because it matters. Whatever your religion or no religion, it matters. And there are two or three ways to look at it. Let’s start in London with William Wilberforce in 1789 in the House of Parliament. He made a four-hour speech, brilliantly transcribed. It’s supposed to be one of the greatest speeches ever made in Parliament. It’s a little book, really. He’d done masses of research on what the slave trade was like. Wilberforce was a very wealthy young man, who’d had a dissolute time at Oxford. But he made a friend of the man who became the youngest prime minister in England, the younger Pitt. Wilberforce could not have manoeuvred his way forward without that help.

Wilberforce dedicated himself to the abolition of the slave trade. Now this was, again, very clever. The idea of abolishing slavery was as if you were saying to people at the time, that soon they would be travelling by jet aircraft. It was unthinkable. But getting rid of the slave trade was at least possible and there were reasons for it. Wilberforce argued that slavery was a hideous, horrible transaction and he was opposed mightily. Nelson, the Great Nelson of Trafalgar, said that Wilberforce should be whipped and dragged through the seats. He was spat at in the streets, and paid for protection out of his own pocket. He ploughed on.

Wilberforce was a convert to the New Testament in a passionate way. He read it every day, he lived by it. His advance against slavery was a crusade to force an idea in the New Testament, a thread all the way through the New Testament, the thread of egalitarianism. A message that says all people are equal. Wilberforce spoke of texts like that in Revelations: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” He used these texts against the texts of those who wanted to keep slavery. And there were plenty of them that supported slavery. Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham and all his offspring and condemned them all to slavery, and on it goes.

So, it became a battle of two books, the Old and the New Testament. And Wilberforce forced it through. He was a bold man, as well. In his first speech he called in the Liverpool merchants who were making a fortune out of the slave trade, as were the Bristol merchants – somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent of British commerce. They sat in the parliamentary gallery and listened. It’s reported at the end they wept, whether because they thought they’d lost the case, or they were moved isn’t recorded, but it happened. And Wilberforce drove his cause with the New Testament.

And in 1807 the world changed. The British slave trade was abolished. William Pitt, Wilberforce’s  friend, sent the Royal Navy into the North Atlantic to stop other countries taking slaves to America. It’s one of the purest acts in British history and we ought least to acknowledge it. A slow domino effect went around the world from there. And, that came principally from the King James Bible.

But there was another effect of the King James Bible. That was the Afro-Americans who remained to develop the USA. The slaves who had gone over, hundreds of tribes with different languages; there’s never been anything like it in history. Millions of people taken over, year after year, a lot by the Brits. All the North West Atlantic countries were at it, taking slaves to America. As they survived in their alien world, trapped by their language, they came to hear the King James Bible, evangelised by white Wesleyan, Methodist, English, Oxford, preaching scholars who went to America. George Whitefield and the two Wesley brothers – John and Charles – from the great awakening.

The Puritan settlers from Britain had felt the grip of the Bible, puritan settlers who had gone there for a New England, they were the people of the book, they wanted a new start, they wanted to be in God’s country. They felt that power and goodness were slipping from them so they had a revival. Whitefield preached to 30,000 people at a time. Benjamin Franklin, the great scholar, went to his meetings. He was a Christian, but not an active Christian, and was amazed by the power Whitefield had.

The Wesley brothers, taking their lead from Whitefield, went into the black areas. You can’t call them communities, they were plantations. Here Tyndale struck again. Some of these enslaved people were extraordinary intelligent, although mostly they were illiterate. But they had great muscular memories of an oral tradition. And when the Bible was spoken to them, when the words were heard, they remembered the phrases. They talked about it to each other; and they took it with them when they built their own churches in the swamps. Some of them are still there.

These black newcomers to America talked the stories of the Bible; they taught it to their people. And what the King James Bible gave to the black Americans was several things. First of all, it was the beginning of a coherent language. The English Bible became a cohering and coherent language for all these different tribes whose past till then could only be expressed in different ways because of their diverse backgrounds. There it was at last, a cohesive force. Secondly, they heard, that you could praise God by singing, and by spiritual values. And they knew about that. They knew about songs, they knew about spirits, they had spirits in their own religion. And there were spirits here, there was a holy ghost. There was a spirit coming down when Christ was baptised by John, and on it went.

But, most of all, the Bible’s impact was a liberation theology. They, like Isaac Newton, believed that the Old Testament told the truth of the world.And they heard that Moses had gone to Pharaoh, and said, “Let my people go.” And Pharaoh, because God had commanded Moses, let them go. And they didn’t see why they shouldn’t do the same. From then on it became a liberation theology. And they worked at it, right up to Martin King, and Martin Luther King Junior. They took the Bible message forward, and that dynamically changed America.

Thus, because America came to so dominate the globe, this in time would change the world. And it came from those preachers, with that Bible, based on Tyndale, and based on the words he wrote. As you can hear this in the songs: the Gospel songs, the spiritual songs, “Go down Moses”, right up to rock ‘n’ roll songs, they’re still there.

There are other areas where the King James Bible mattered a lot. One, and you might be surprised by this as I was, is science. I take my authority in this from a man called Lord Reece, Martin Reece. He’s just retired as President of the Royal Society; a Master of Trinity College and Cambridge, he’s one of the greatest astrophysicists of the world. Reece is not a Christian as such although he was brought up a Christian as I was. He now has what he calls a respect for the tribe, for the book of knowledge, and for the tribal meeting at parish churches, now and then.

There was something Reece said that has always stuck me, and Stephen Hawking said precisely the same thing on a different occasion when I talked to him. And they were both very very firm about it. They told me that there are things that we will never know. Our brains are wonderful, but there are things which will be way out of reach to them. And we have to bear that in mind. Things are going on that are inexplicable to our understanding in our lifetimes. We have little pulses when we’re state of passion, or depression, or excitement, which we can’t track down to any notion of reason, but they’re there.

That seems to me to be saying, be warned. Science is not the end of it but an enquiry into something. And that’s the greatness of it. It keeps being an enquiry. And new discoveries are made so people say we’ve solved all this. The world believed Newton had solved all that, with his view of the universe. For 300 years, nobody dared questioned it. We could still get rockets to the moon on Newton’s science. Then Einstein came along and changed what we knew from Newton. And somebody will come along and change Einstein. That’s what happens when you do enquiries, things change.

The Royal Society was formed in 1660, again in Oxford, the oldest scientific organisation. But Martin Reece pointed out that, when Newton started to examine the universe with all the new implements, everybody involved was profoundly religious. They didn’t do it on the side. Robert Boyle, for instance, founder of chemistry and son of the Earl of Cork, wrote more about religion, than he did about chemistry. But the major figure here is Newton. Reece pointed out that Isaac Newton found the universe to be ordered, with the first cause laid out in a particular way. It was very like religion where God decides this; the waters are divided, there’s day and night, things are organised. Newton found the template for his discoveries in outer space in the Bible. He said himself, that his great unifying principle was almost mind defying.

Darwin said that it was the greatest act of thought and imagination that there would ever be, a notion of gravity. The way that gravity controlled the universe and controlled the glass in one’s hand, everything. And Newton said gravity is God. So the idea of God driving his idea of universe is there to be read. Religion continued in science, and with other scientists.

Another area where you will get very little mention about the effect of religion is with the empowerment of women in the nineteenth century. This was very real in the nineteenth century with the growth of the power of women. They were quitting the home in numbers, going to work and into society, into politics. And this was driven by the Bible. Some of the great women reformers were close followers of the Bible – Octavia Hill was a Christian socialist like John Ruskin and Charles Kingsley. They believed that their socialism, their politics and their religion should act together on society.

Octavia Hill was running a toy shop in London when she was 14. She devoted her life to clearing the slums. And she cleared them by social policies. She wanted trees, she wanted to have gardens. She took the Bible into every home and she made the occupants pay for it, believing that if they got it for nothing it wouldn’t work. And then there were the slum sisters, who went into the worst slums in that tradition. Bible women. Catherine Booth, the wife of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, was the first women to preach publicly in Britain. Using the Bible, female social reformers believed that Bible called on them to do this work, empowered them to do it. The Bible took these women into the heart of politics.

Josephine Butler, for example, whom King Leopold of Belgium called the most beautiful girl in the world, was the cousin of Earl Gray, the Prime Minister. From the age of about 17 she devoted her life to ridding the London brothels of children, girls who worked there. There were about 2,000 brothels in London in the 1880s and most of them were populated by girls under 14. Butler was attacked in the streets, spat at, derided in the newspapers, but she kept at it. Like William Wilberforce, Butler came from a very rich background. And she changed the laws about what was permitted for children of a young age.

I’m going to say two things about Richard Dawkins. I know Richard Dawkins, and I like him, despite everything. I think he’s a brilliant populariser of science, not an original scientist but a brilliant populariser of science. If you read his book on the way the eye is formed, it’s just wonderful. I just wish he hadn’t got involved in religion. And not because I disagree with his atheism.

Richard Dawkins’ ideas on how there isn’t really a God, are the sort of ideas that everybody in this room discovered with when they were 15 or 16. There’s nothing new there. But that’s not my point. I see the problem as two things – first of all his nastiness to Christianity in particular and, secondly, his ignorance.

Dawkins’ nastiness is the way he holds religion, Christianity in particular, responsible for all the violence and destructive atrocities in the world. This is simply, however, wrong. Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages, and his armies of Mongols, are reported to have killed more than 20 million people. This was a time when the population of London was 70,000. So you imagine how great a destruction 20 million must have been. Genghis Khan wasn’t much of a Christian.

In the eighth century in China, there were wars which went on and on. It has been estimated an eighth of the world’s population was slaughtered. This had nothing to do with Christianity. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao, had nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion. More importantly, behind these facts is another fact.

The idea that Christianity is a cause of atrocities is wrong. The cause of atrocity is us. Basically, men or women, who want power over other men and women. People who will take power however they can get it. Even if it means grinding people down and slaughtering them, they will do that. That’s what you see with Genghis Khan, that’s what you see with Mao, that’s what you see with Hitler. They want power. In certain cases they’ve used religion, because they’ll use anything. Any ideology, any supporting army. And religious ideologies are wonderful because it makes the dominant leader stand above the fray.

So you find, again and again, in empires, people wanting to be gods. The Aztec Empire, produced its leader gods. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, turned himself into a god after about three years. These despots use religion as an excuse, a camouflage, because it aggrandises what they do. They are not triggered by religion; they are using it for a negative human impulse.

One more thing, and that’s to do with Australia. I don’t choose it because I’m in this country now – I’ve written about it. Dawkins says the Aborigines were miracles of survival but they had useless clutter in their heads called Dream Songs. This is a deeply disreputable comment for a scholar to make. This is a body of knowledge. Like the Kings Jame’s Bible is a body of knowledge, like the Greek myths are a body of knowledge. These are great bodies of knowledge and the Dream Songs are doing what the Greek myths did, what the Pharaonic writings did, what the West has done in different ways. They’re trying to understand the condition in which people find themselves. They’re asking precisely the same question we’re asking now. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Why does the sun come up? Why are there earthquakes? What’s happening?

Homo sapiens progress by being a curious species. His curiosity, her curiosity has been a driving point. To say the Dream Songs are useless clutter, is ignorance. Maybe it’s because of the Dream Songs that they could survive.

I’ll conclude here. There were two great impacts of the King James Bible. One was on slavery and the other was on modern democracy. Premier Barry O’Farrell referred to the democracy of Athens, done and died away. But in the seventeenth century modern democracy was reforged, rediscovered, and set on a course that it is still following around the world, as we can see on our news bulletins. It needs to become a creed and a cry because it has the basic elements of egalitarianism, and humanitarianism in it. And the bible, the King James Bible, was there when that was initiated.

I’m being elliptical but accurate. In the British Civil War in the 1640s, the real problem was that we had a divine King, just as divine as any pharaoh. King Charles I thought that he was divine. His father, James I of the King James Bible had told him so. He said, “God speaks only to Kings; only a King can speak directly to God.” But James I was a crafty old chap, and he managed to surf that a little bit. Charles I, on the other hand, believed it axiomatically. That he was divine and he could not be touched. But there was a desire to change, a desire, developed out of a Bible that spoke directly to the listeners. They were equal to everybody, they could talk back to God, is how they saw it. They wanted to challenge that the King, alone, was divine, and he alone could talk to God. They could all talk to God now.

Henry VIII, towards the end of his reign when the Bible in English was taking on force, spoke to Parliament with tears in his eyes, wishing he’d never let this happen. He reflected how now, every pot boy in the country will talk about the word of God, and then there would be terrible trouble and disruption. He was right. What happened with the Civil War is that the revolutionaries had to find away to get rid of a divine King. The tried and tested method was assassination. But they didn’t want to do this. These were law abiding religious folk, and they wanted to do it through the law. They wanted the law to take over, common law, contract law.

So they argued through the Bible. For instance, they would say that from Malachai, an abomination is committed, Judah hath married the daughter of a strange God, the Lord will cut off the man that doeth this, meaning Charles. Charles fought back through the Bible. The authority of obedience and to Kings is clearly warranted and strictly commanded in both the Old and the New Testaments, he said. Adding: “Where the word of the King is, there is power and who may say unto him, what dost thou.” It was a battle of interpretations of the Bible. As would happen with the slave trade. One of the great virtues of the Bible is that it is absolutely packed with contradictions, and that’s been very useful for many people through the ages.

There was a trial by jury of the divine King in the Great Hall, in Westminster. King Charles I was found guilty by a jury. Three days later, he was executed, and again the world changed. A few years later, up the River Thames, the Putney debates saw democracy debated openly. In America, founded for England by one of the great literate exoduses in the world as New England, they organised democracies inside their assemblies, all the way along the east coast. The settlers saw this as liberation, and they moved those assemblies into society. And with that slow, inexorable march forward, a democracy began, triggered by the Bible.

President Obama came to talk to the British Parliament, about a year ago. In that same great hall – the biggest hammerbeam hall in the world built in the late thirteenth century. The one part of Westminster not destroyed and rebuilt. Obama spoke well about democracy, in a very American-centred way. He’s a remarkable man whatever your politics. It’s a remarkable thing he’s done, just by being there.

And just three tables from where he stood, a divine appointed King was tried by the Common Law and found guilty and executed in the legal terms of the time. That is like the shot at Sarajevo that started the First World War.

And we could have said to Barack Obama, if you go up those stairs behind you, Mr President, and walk into that building (reconstructed) that’s where a man called William Wilberforce, in 1789, started the ball rolling for the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of the slaves and your eventual arrival in the White House.

And just across the road, through that door, is where James VI of Scotland became James I of England and a few months later said there will be a Bible, a King James Bible. And, finally, if you want a symbol of your past Mr President, a view of what the future should be to your people and to the world, and you wanted to ally yourself with Abraham Lincoln – thought to be the greatest President ever of the United States and President when the slaves were emancipated – it would be a photograph taken of you swearing the oath of allegiance on the Bible that belonged to Abraham Lincoln, the King James Bible.