THE BIBLE ‘AS A CLASSIC’: LE ROY HALSEY

Byron noted that Shelley ‘was a great admirer of the Scripture as a composition’, and he described himself in the same terms; earlier Knox had used a similar phrase (see above, pp. 288, 290 and 244). The phrase is an almost exact equivalent of ‘the Bible as literature’, which I have used for any seemingly literary response to the Bible, even where that response is no more than a fleeting aspect of quite different concerns. Such a broad usage is the inevitable fate of an easy phrase. But strictly it designates a narrowed approach to the Bible: the most obvious approach, the Bible as religion, is set aside. Moreover, it signals an awareness of this narrowed focus that is rarely to be found in discussions prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. To some extent it is a new phrase for a new phase. Though the new phase easily runs into AVolatry, it needs to be treated separately for two reasons: it often takes little notice of the KJB, and it often involves a non-religious approach to the Bible. These are the very things implied by the phrase: the Bible, not the KJB, as literature, not as religion.

The idea of the Bible as literature is closely associated with school Bible reading, a common enough practice but by no means universal in the British Isles: attempts to promote wider reading of the Bible in schools occurred periodically in the nineteenth century (to look no further).