The AV (Authorised Version of the Bible) and the AV (Alternative Vote)

Several times recently I have picked up a headline or a comment about the problems with AV. Now I know this stands for alternative vote, and refers to a complicated but allegedly fairer way of divvying up the votes post any election. But for some of us the abbreviation has much more powerful and biblical resonances. The Authorised version is 400 years old this year. The distilled essence of Jacobean English was carefully crafted into the finest expression in English' of those ancient documents from the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Many of the best phrases and even passages were lifted near wholesale from the earlier outlawed translation by William Tyndale. But the AV, or the King James Version, remains a classic of the English language, a triumph of committee collaboration, its musical cadences and poetic flow such a contrast to the flat prosaic pedantries of most modern translations. I've read my own copy in chunks this year - a beautifully bound, gilt edged copy presented on my ordination.

The say No campaign has been accused of lying, deceit and misinformation - these three words are close cousins if not synonyms. All three refer to the untrustworthiness of words, or at least the untrustworthiness of those who speak them. So when the AV controversy is simmering or boiling over, a quite other set of responses is needed. Andrew Marr asked Simon Hughes how the Lib Dems can go on working within a Cabinet where senior Conservative Ministers have been accused of an unholy trinity of verbal abuse - lying, deceit and misinformation - each of these describes the abuse of words, their corruption into false rather than true expression, their being turned into weapons that damage rather than social tools that uphold verity in public discourse. No convincing answer was forthcoming from Simon Hughes - caught between the rock of not admitting the coalition partners weren't playing fair, and the hard place that would mean dissolving the coalition and Lib Dems only real possibility of having political clout in the decisions of Government.

The AV (Authorised version) has something to say about the AV spat (Alternative Vote) - an alarming warning for politicians whose primary skill is in making words malleable through repeated hammering with the blunt instrument of party self-interest. Here is James, writing the kind of scathing comment that wouldn't be out of place in a John Pilger column on the calumny of political rhetoric laced with cynicism and untruth:

The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts and of birds, and of serpents and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, but the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poision. James 3. 6-8

   
Now steady on James. Just a tad of overstatement there. Human speech isn't quite in the same league as a Californian or Australian forest fire! Well, that depends. If we corrode the platform on which the integrity of public discourse stands, if we slowly reduce our tolerance to deceit and call it spin, and then get used to spin and then begin to believe it.... So who is telling the truth about AV? How would you know? Whose statements are trustworthy, dependable, information rather than disinformation? The AV (Bible) again this time from Proverbs, one of the first self-help books for aspiring diplomats, politicians and wise leaders:

The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters: and the wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook.

There is one that speaketh like the piercings of a sword;but the tongue of the wise is health. 

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Quite so!

Comments

[ruthg]

We've been attending the recitation of the KJV at the Globe, and heard that section last night. It was very powerful - the whole thing was - to hear words well chosen and then well spoken, with passion, clarity and power; such a relief in a world of over-blown rhetoric.