Name that Bible!

The English Channel island of Guernsey, just off the coast of France, is  British but actually not part of the United Kingdom. It’s a bridge to the continent of Europe, if an island can be called a bridge. Guernsey makes for an ideal  vacation spot and I was there last week, basking in the hot summer sunshine on offer.

On holiday you can browse through second hand shops to your heart’s content, and so I did. I chanced upon a Bible I had published way back in 1982. It was in good condition and a snip at just one pound. The Revised Authorised Version was the first British text edition of what most of us know now as the New King James Version, and I released it under the venerable Samuel Bagster imprint.

How we struggled to find a good title for the NKJV which British readers would accept! We never called the King James Bible anything but The Authorised Version. The RAV was not a success as a name or indeed as a British text version and it took over ten years for the now re-named NKJV to make any headway in the UK.

To me,  the great appeal of the NKJV is that it is a ‘bridge’ version. It sounds and reads like the KJV, but is more contemporary. Ironically, the translators made it more olden by setting the pronouns and possessive related to Deity ( Him, His) in capitals, something which the 1611 KJV never did, and is quite out of fashion today.

Guernsey is a small island paradise for British and French visitors – with the best of both cultures. The NKJV has that richness too, a sense of majesty in a modern setting, a bridge between the old and the new. No wonder it is such a popular Bible choice for many readers.

Nicholas