A strange "good book"

My sleep habits are awry after our whirlwind visit to Adelaide, comprising a day in the car, three nights in a strange bed, the disturbing events of Friday morning, and another day in the car returning home yesterday. My poor body doesn’t know quite where it’s at – in more ways than one! – so I find myself wide awake in the middle of the night.

How to spend this time? I very much dislike insomnia; but I remembered one small highlight of our trip to Adelaide, previously overlooked amidst all the other excitement, and most certainly worthy of a brief mention here.

The Barr Smith Library, at the University of Adelaide, hosted an exhibition called “The Book that Changed the World”, a celebration of four hundred years of the authorized version of the Bible.

It was quite a small exhibition, but interesting: there were some exhibits particularly relevant to South Australia’s history, including one with a descriptive passage in Deuteronomy marked “South Australia”; one of the world’s smallest books, 3.5mm by 3.5mm; and old, as well as replica, illuminated texts.

However, my runaway favourite in its obscure quirkiness was a phonetically printed version. Here’s its own description, as printed on the card beside said book:

“Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments: according to the authorized version: arranged in paragraphs and parallelisms, and printed phonetically.” London, Pitman, 1850.

Wow – a 160 year old phonetic text! I wonder who its intended audience was? Was this printing a further attempt at the vernacular for virtually literate lay readers? Or was it intended to calm jittery clergy, whose daily duties would have required reading tracts out loud publicly? The accompanying notes, reproduced above, were unhelpful but left my imagination running wild.

Beneath the glass case, it lay open at the first page of John’s gospel, and I’ve typed out the title line and first sentence here:

ᴆhe Gospel Acordiŋ tw S. Jon

In đe beginiŋ woz đe Wurd, and đe Wurd woz wiđ God, and đe Wurd woz God.

These words are so familiar to me; when I was a Christian, they were imprinted on my mind, at once cosmically grandiose and comfortingly familiar - but in this rendering they have become mysterious and strange. I keep wondering why Pitman publishing printed such an obscure version, and for whom it was intended.

Perhaps this blog posting, reflecting on the Bible and finding that familiar text obscure and mysterious, is as good any to make early in the hours of this, my second Easter “without God”. What was once the ground beneath my feet has become mysterious and strange; finding a 160-year-old Bible which baffles me seems fitting. Was this what drew me to Pitman's strange publication in the first place?

Once more, as so often these days, my musings leave me with more questions than answers. And the world seems a more open place for that.