IN THE BEGINNING: A HISTORICAL FICTION

By WELBY THOMAS COX, JR.

There is and always has been a great deal of speculation in regards to the origin of the human species, homo sapien. There are those who want you to believe that it was God who created the universe and all in it. In this book, I do not seek to make a definitive statement about my beliefs. As a journalist it is my duty to give all sides and let the reader make his or her own determinations. It is a complex, and yes a most controversial subject.

This little book provides several flaming questions...most essentially as we end the year 2020 amide a major pandemic which has nearly brought our world to a screeching halt even as we prepare to send tourist into space in 2021, the overriding question is this; If God created man in his own image who created aliens... if they exist?

There is a conflict among the great minds of science, religion and the ordinary citizen. This book does little to settle the question. After all humanity has only been attempting to answer these questions through research and prayer for thousands of years. The goal of this book is not to answer but to probe, to question, to present...even the most extreme positions.

Let us open our minds to some eventual answer...the journey will be swift and neither the reader nor this lonely scribe will be here when the truth of the matter has finally been resolved and accepted by all. Certainly, I admit my brain does not function in the area of mathematics and while I love reading and writing about the amazing facts in science...I can only write about it but not conjure any relevant facts on my own.

So, with these humble admissions, let us explore together...In The Beginning!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Oct 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649693266

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE BIG BANG

Let’s pretend, in the beginning there was no planet called earth… According to biblical scholars, Genesis falls into two unequal parts. One deals with the primordial history, which introduces the believers to the story of salvation, and they search back into the origin of the world and survey the entire human race as seen through the eyes of the bible. They tell of the creation of the universe and they tell of the great flood which destroyed all God had built except two of every living thing. The repopulation of the earth thus begins with Noah, the prototype ancestor of Israel but this is oxymoronic if you breathe the scientific view which says Noah sprang from an African.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, and there was darkness over the void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water. That’s cool…but science takes a different view… it says that earth wasn’t the first planet in the universe and actually did not exist until some 13.5 billion years ago when matter, energy, time and space came into being as a result of what science calls, The Big Bang, and the story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics…not Genesis!

About 300,000 years after this experience and the newly formed planet Earth came to be as a shecht in the vast universe, nature began to coalesce into complex structures causing matter and energy to form atoms which then combined into molecules. These combinations and their interaction in science is called chemistry. Now, things are really jiving out there dude…left along for ten billion years, about 3.8 billion years ago, on this planet we call Earth certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures (get ready for this) called organisms and this process we label as biology! Think of that…WOW, physics, and biology, not Genesis!

But there is more as you might think skip forward 70,000 years ago these large structures, these organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens began to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is known in our world as history. And…there have been three important revolutions which have shaped the course of history: This is heavy dude…follow me now! Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago began the modern human. The point at which it is believed that man began to reason within a developing brain. Next up…Agricultural Revolution, next up some 12,000 years ago, and, finally the Scientific Revolution which got under way some 500 years ago which nearly didn’t happen because those creatures of Genesis would not believe God would create a world for them which was round! As a matter of fact, these wise men did not believe much of any thing which did not contain some element of voodoo.

God willing, the book I hope to write and share with you will follow the history of how these three revolutions have impacted humans and their fellow organisms in the 21st century.

Let us remember, according to the best science, there were humans before recorded history. But since it is the belief that animals first appeared about 2.5 million years ago, and Homo sapiens 70,000 years ago there is a question in this scribe’s mind about any connection between humans and chimps? It just doesn’t make sense to me that it would have taken that much time to interject the possibility that man transcended from an ape. Moreover, it is known that for countless generations animals did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats. I do not believe they shared their beds!

Long before the modern man’s lust for the safari…back some two million years ago you might well have encountered a familiar cast of characters: Mothers fretting about this and that…wondering about where she would scrounge enough food for the evening meal. Dirty children playing among the filth and old folks swatting flies as they attempted to catch a never-ending nap below a monster shade tree dripping monkey waste. No doubt young men flexing muscle in sight of some babe he hoped to lure into the bush as mother’s watched, knowing the babes would go since they themselves had done it all. Experience does not learn nor teach when there is little else to entertain.

These archaic humans lived life as we do, fussing, fighting, working, stressing, loving forming close bonds and fought for status and power. Just as the animals did, and in point of fact, before wisdom came there was nothing which set the human apart from the chimp. Not a single human at that time could conceive of man walking on the moon, split the atom to create devastation capable of ending all of life on earth and perhaps beyond. The most essential element to remember about prehistoric humans is that they were as insignificant as animals with no more impact on their environment as a jellyfish.

Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals they say belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring. But sometimes things go haywire…let us take a look at horses and donkeys as an example: They have a recent ancestor in common and share many physical traits, but they show little sexual interest in each other. They will mate if induced but the offspring, called mules…will be sterile! Mutations in donkey DNA may never crossover to horses or to the donkey. The two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along separate evolutionary paths. Could this be true in humans as well. Are there human species who can mate if induced but producing nurtured or biologically incapable of production or perhaps even worse, producing offspring capable of reproduction but passing a deadly gene?

Is this the reason the bible admonishes, Stay in your father’s house? 

Species which evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading ‘genus’. Thus, lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are different species within the genus Panthera. Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species. Therefore, my guess is that everyone reading this intellectual treaty is a Homo sapiens- the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).

Homo sapiens belong to a family. This fact used to be one of history’s most closely held secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, not belonging to anyone, even lacking siblings or parents. But as we all know this just didn’t fit. Like it or not we must all buy into being members of a large family. Now, here is where the rubber hits the road and we get down to the rim of it…according to legend, six million years ago, Jane, a female ape was impregnated by someone or something and she had twin females. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees…and the other is our grandmother?

This of course flies in the face of earlier testimony that Homo sapiens came to be 70,000 years ago, not six million years ago. I suggest here, at the risk of being ostersized from all scientific luncheons at the Harvard Club, that Jane was impregnated by a deformity, delivered twin females, one an ape and the other became known as a chimp, todays modern negro!

This isn’t the only disturbing secret. Not only do we have a basement filled with troubled cousins, once upon a time we had an abundance of inbred brothers and sisters of mixed parentage. We are quite adept at thinking we are exclusively purely driven at copulation and that we are the only humans, because in fact for the last 10,000 years we have been the only species hitting the ball out of the park. Yet, the real meaning of the word human is an ‘animal belonging to the genus Homo and as I have cited there used to be many other species of the genus besides Homo sapiens. Prediction, just as nature found its door to Homo sapiens within Earth, it is entirely possible with all the universe exploration we may very well, once again, have to contend with the reality of non-sapiens humans here and on other planets yet to be discovered! (Welby Thomas Cox, Jr. October 15, 2020).

Though there is conjecture over the evolution of human, it is the majority of scientists who believe it took place in East Africa. The more daring suggest that the modern human evolved after the great flood in the Caspian Sea or ‘Ponto Caspian’ or Eurasian continental interior. Once again ‘scientific consensus’ does not yet recognize there was a flood. Yet there are whispers near Azerbaijan that human bones have been discovered in a deep hole which may be ‘the modern man.’

Chapter 2

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CARL SAGAN

Please permit me to digress on this Sunday morning as I watch the sun rise at 6:39 am. I would like to share a few thoughts about one of the worlds great thinkers, Carl Sagan.

We live in Carl Sagan’s universe–awesomely vast, deeply humbling. It’s a universe that, as Sagan reminded us again and again, isn’t about us. We’re a granular element. Our presence may even be ephemeral—a flash of luminescence in a great dark ocean. Or perhaps we are here to stay, somehow finding a way to transcend our worst instincts and ancient hatreds, and eventually become a galactic species. We could even find others out there, the inhabitants of distant, highly advanced civilizations—the Old Ones, as Sagan might put it.

No one has ever explained space, in all its bewildering glory, as well as Carl Sagan did. He’s been gone now for nearly two decades, but people old enough to remember him will easily be able to summon his voice, his fondness for the word billions and his boyish enthusiasm for understanding the universe we’re so lucky to live in.

He led a feverish existence, with multiple careers tumbling over one another, as if he knew he wouldn’t live to an old age. Among other things, he served as an astronomy professor at Cornell, wrote more than a dozen books, worked on NASA robotic missions, edited the scientific journal Icarus and somehow found time to park himself, repeatedly, arguably compulsively, in front of TV cameras. He was the house astronomer, basically, on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Then, in an astonishing burst of energy in his mid-40s, he co-created and hosted a 13-part PBS television series, Cosmos. It aired in the fall of 1980 and ultimately reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Sagan was the most famous scientist in America—the face of science itself.

Now Cosmos is back, thanks largely to Seth MacFarlane, creator of TV’s Family Guy and a space buff since he was a kid, and Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow. They’re collaborating on a new version premiering on the Fox Network on Sunday March 9. MacFarlane believes that much of what is on television, even on fact-based channels purporting to discuss science, is fluff. He says, That is a symptom of the bizarre fear of science that’s taken hold. The astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, serves as narrator this time, giving him a chance to make the case that he’s the Sagan of our generation. ‘Cosmos’ is more than Carl Sagan, Tyson told me. Our capacity to decode and interpret the cosmos is a gift of the method and tools of science. And that’s what’s being handed down from generation to generation. If I tried to fill his shoes I would just fail. But I can fill my own shoes really well.

It’s an audacious move, trying to reinvent Cosmos; although the original series ran in a single fall season—and on public television! —it had an outsize cultural impact. It was the highest-rated series in PBS history until Ken Burns took on the Civil War a decade later. Druyan loves to tell the story of a porter at Union Station in Washington, D.C. who refused to let Sagan pay him for handling luggage, saying, You gave me the universe.

The revival of Cosmos roughly coincides with another Sagan milestone: The availability of all his papers at the Library of Congress, which bought the Sagan archive from Druyan with money from MacFarlane. (Officially it’s the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive.) The files arrived at the library loading dock in 798 boxes—Sagan, it seems, was a pack rat—and after 17 months of curatorial preparation the archive opened to researchers last November.

The Sagan archive gives us a close-up of the celebrity scientist’s frenetic existence and, more important, a documentary record of how Americans thought about science in the second half of the 20th century. We hear the voices of ordinary people in the constant stream of mail coming to Sagan’s office at Cornell. They saw Sagan as the gatekeeper of scientific credibility. They shared their big ideas and fringe theories. They told him about their dreams. They begged him to listen. They needed truth; he was the oracle.

The Sagan files remind us how exploratory the 1960s and ’70s were, how defiant of official wisdom and mainstream authority, and Sagan was in the middle of the intellectual foment. He was a nuanced referee. He knew UFOs weren’t alien spaceships, for example, but he didn’t want to silence the people who believed they were, and so he helped organize a big UFO symposium in 1969, letting all sides have their say.

Space itself seemed different then. When Sagan came of age, all things concerning space had a tail wind: There was no boundary on our outer-space aspirations. Through telescopes, robotic probes and Apollo astronauts, the universe was revealing itself at an explosive, fireworks-finale pace.

Things haven’t quite worked out as expected. Space Age is now an antiquated phrase. The United States can’t even launch astronauts at the moment. The universe continues to tantalize us, but the notion that we’re about to contact other civilizations seems increasingly like stoner talk.

MacFarlane, Tyson, Druyan and other members of Sagan’s family showed up at the Library of Congress in November for the official opening of the Sagan archive. The event was, as you’d expect, highly reverential, bordering on the hagiographic. One moment reminded everyone of Sagan’s astonishing powers of communication: After the speakers finished their presentations, the organizers gave Sagan the last word, playing a tape of him reading from his book Pale Blue Dot.

Recall that in the early 1990s, as Voyager I was heading toward the outer reaches of the solar system, Sagan was among those who persuaded NASA to aim the spacecraft’s camera back toward Earth, by then billions of miles away. In that image, Earth is just a fuzzy dot amid a streak of sunlight. Here’s Sagan, filling the auditorium with his baritone, lingering luxuriantly on his consonants as always:

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives...[E]very king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

***

He started young. In the Sagan papers, there’s an undated, handwritten piece of text—is it a story? an essay?—from the early 1950s in which Sagan, then an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, sounds very much like the famous scientist-essayist he would come to be:

There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty.

This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe.

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, I am the great silent spaces between worlds.

Carl Edward Sagan was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, the son of a worshipful, overbearing mother, Rachel, and a hard-working garment industry manager, Samuel, a Ukrainian immigrant. As he entered adolescence, he became an avid reader of science fiction, and gobbled up the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about John Carter of Mars. His family moved to New Jersey, and he distinguished himself as the Class Brain of Rahway High School. In his papers we find a 1953 questionnaire in which Sagan rated his character traits, giving himself low marks for vigorousness (meaning, liking to play sports), an average rating for emotional stability and the highest ratings for being dominant and reflective.

The adult Sagan always sounded like the smartest person in the room, but in the papers we encounter this interesting note in a 1981 file, right after Cosmos hit it big: I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding.

After earning his doctorate Sagan began teaching at Harvard, and as a young scientist, he earned notice for research indicating that Venus endured a greenhouse effect that roasted the surface—hardly a place congenial for life. Later he would make strides in linking the changing surface features on Mars to planetary dust storms—dashing any hope that the markings were linked to seasonal changes in vegetation. It’s an obvious irony of his career that two of his major hard-science achievements showed the universe less hospitable to life, not more.

His speculative nature—freely discussing the possibility of life beneath the surface of the moon, for example—disturbed some of his colleagues. He seemed a bit reckless and had a knack for getting quoted in newspaper and magazine articles. He published in the popular press—including writing the life entry for Encyclopedia Britannica.  His own calculations in the early 1960s showed that there could be about one million technological, communicative civilizations in our galaxy alone. And yet he thought UFOs a case of mass misapprehension. Among his papers is a November 1967 lecture Sagan gave in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Associates program. The very first question from an audience member was: What do you think of UFOs? Do they exist?

Though a skeptic about UFOs, Sagan had a tendency to be squishy in his comments about flying saucers, and at first he equivocated, saying there’s no evidence that these objects are alien spacecraft but leaving open the possibility that some small fraction might be space vehicles from other planets. But then he launched on a protracted riff about all the ways people get fooled.

Bright stars. The planet Venus. The aurora borealis. Flights of birds. Lenticular clouds, which are shaped like lenses. An overcast [night], a hill, a car going up the hill, and the two headlights of the car reflect on the clouds—two flying saucers moving at great velocity in parallel! Balloons. Unconventional aircraft. Conventional aircraft with unconventional lighting patterns, like Strategic Air Command refueling operations. The list is enormous.

Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard in 1968 but was quickly scooped up by Cornell. When not teaching and writing, he helped create plaques for the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. The plaques notoriously depicted a naked man and woman, with some graphical descriptions of the position of the Earth in the solar system and other scientific information—just in case the spacecraft bumped into alien scientists out there somewhere.

To go a step further, It seems appropriate to use this a moment in the history of science when we are awakening to the other forms of consciousness on this planet, the ways of being alive and of understanding the environment on the part of other life forms here on earth..

Inevitably, if you’re interested in astrobiology and you’re interested in the question of intelligent life elsewhere, it requires a certain degree of self-consciousness about the lives we share on this planet.  So, let us explore what is called exoplanets, and, imagining the deepest human future possible. Of course, inevitably, it’s also examining the shadow on that future which many informed people feel. 

It seems to this lonely scribe that the flaming question to middle planet Earth should be… are we ever going to be able to take the revelations of science to heart in the way that we take art to heart, the way that art affects us? Will we ever be able to really feel those things and awaken from our stupor and act? That’s the big question, I think, of our moment in history. Is there anything that can make us value the things we need to live — our air, our climate, our water — more than we value money? That’s the big challenge. Is there anything that can make us think in the timescales of science, not the timescale of the balance sheet?  We must live with our descendants in mind, and this includes a responsible piece of legislation on our combined use of the environment. This legislation must be fostered by a committee of the whole to include scientist, biologist, accountants, lawyers, and regular folk to clean up and protect the world in which we live and are now systematically destroying.

In the 70’s Carl Sagan, collaborated with fellow astrophysicist Ed Salpeter, to design life forms with plausible evolutionary histories for long term survival in the rolling clouds of Jupiter. Among them were ‘floaters,’ vast hydrogen blimps pumping helium and heavier gases out of their interior to retain only the lightest gas, hydrogen.

It was always in Sagan’s long-term plan in collaboration with Dr. Steven Soter of doing a series called Ethos. Each of them would have been, in their own way, kind of a season of Cosmos. But that was, tragically, not to be.  After Sagan’s death, some wanted to do another season of Cosmos.  Steve Soter Neil deGrasse Tyson joined Sagan’s widow to create an outline for a new season of Cosmos, and for several years, they went from network to network, three in all. I think much to the horror of Steve and Neil and our other colleague, Mitchell Cannold, every network wanted to do Cosmos, but none of them would give complete creative control to Sagan’s widow, nor would they give her the money necessary to create the kind of cinematic, transporting experience that she felt very strongly Cosmos had to be. 

Since she was representing the deceased, and was not a scientist, she was driving these guys crazy by refusing to step aside and let the pros have the control. So, it didn’t happen for several years, until she met Seth MacFarlane. Who promised her he would send the concept to the stars, that he would bring in Peter Rice, who was then the head of the Fox television network?  Seth kept every single one of those promises. He was passionate in his desire to see Cosmos. Not just that Cosmos would be a new season, that Cosmos would be produced, but that it would be on Fox, which was such an irony.   

When Carl Sagan was alive, he didn’t write for the scientific publications alone.  He wrote as well for Parade magazine, which is a Sunday supplement that reached 70 million ordinary people. He wrote about climate change, and a piece called The Warming of the World. This goes back to the ’80s. Disappointing to think how this great mind, this courageous individual would take the time to warn of a coming environmental disaster and how other scientists have been warning about the greenhouse effect of the building-up of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, only to be ignored by the political machine protecting the pockets of those who endow them through corruption.

Peter Rice had missed the first run of the original series and was kind enough to say he would watch the DVD. He watched it with his kids, who were horrified that they were going to be forced to watch what was then something like a 30-year-old science documentary. 

But the thing that really turned Peter around was his kids, after some chuckles at the beginning about Carl’s sideburns or whatever, they became obsessed with the show. They would call him at work and say, "Daddy, when are you going to come home? Can we watch another Cosmos?" That immediately persuaded him that it was time to do it. 

Chapter 3

EVIDENCE SUPPORTING BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION.

A long path leads from the origins of primitive life, which existed at least 3.5 billion years ago, to the profusion and diversity of life that exists today. This path is best understood as a product of evolution.

Contrary to popular opinion, neither the term nor the idea of biological evolution began with Charles Darwin and his foremost work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Many scholars from the ancient Greek philosophers on had inferred that similar species were descended from a common ancestor. The word evolution first appeared in the English language in 1647 in a nonbiological connection, and it became widely used in English for all sorts of progressions from simpler beginnings. The term Darwin most often used to refer to biological evolution was descent with modification, which remains a good brief definition of the process today.

Darwin proposed that evolution could be explained by the differential survival of organisms following their naturally occurring variation—a process he termed natural selection. According to this view, the offspring of organisms differ from one another and from their parents in ways that are heritable—that is, they can pass on the differences genetically to their own offspring. Furthermore, organisms in nature typically produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce given the constraints of food, space, and other environmental resources. If a particular offspring has traits that give it an advantage in a particular environment, that organism will be more likely to survive and pass on those traits. As differences accumulate over generations, populations of organisms diverge from their ancestors.

Charles Darwin arrived at many of his insights into evolution by studying the variations among species on the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador CHARLES DARWIN

Charles Darwin arrived at many of his insights into evolution by studying the variations among species on the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.

Darwin's original hypothesis has undergone extensive modification and expansion, but the central concepts stand firm. Studies in genetics and molecular biology—fields unknown in Darwin's time—have explained the occurrence of the hereditary variations that are essential to natural selection. Genetic variations result from changes, or mutations, in the nucleotide sequence of DNA, the molecule that genes are made from. Such changes in DNA now can be detected and described with great precision.

Genetic mutations arise by chance. They may or may not equip the organism with better means for surviving in its environment. But if a gene variant improves adaptation to the environment (for example, by allowing an organism to make better use of an available nutrient, or to escape predators more effectively—such as through stronger legs or disguising coloration), the organisms carrying that gene are more likely to survive and reproduce than those without it. Over time, their descendants will tend to increase, changing the average characteristics of the population. Although the genetic variation on which natural selection works is based on random or chance elements, natural selection itself produces adaptive change—the very opposite of chance.

Scientists also have gained an understanding of the processes by which new species originate. A new species is one in which the individuals cannot mate and produce viable descendants with individuals of a preexisting species. The split of one species into two often starts because a group of individuals becomes geographically separated from the rest. This is particularly apparent in distant remote islands, such as the Galápagos and the Hawaiian archipelago, whose great distance from the Americas and Asia means that arriving colonizers will have little or no opportunity to mate with individuals remaining on those continents. Mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural barriers also account for geographic separation

Reviews for IN THE BEGINNING

[polingspig · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderful book to give anyone with the KJV only attitude. I love the KJV, but I undrstand it is just a translation. The history of that translation process is laid open by McGrath. He respectfully tells the story and keeps it interesting.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not a Biblical scholar or an authority on the history of the English language although both subjects are of interest to me. This is not a book for those looking to discredit Bible translation as a way to discredit Christian faith. Obviously, the author has a great deal of respect for those that took on this task. However, he doesn't shrink from telling all the "dirty laundry" associated with the translation and the acceptance of the KJV. If we think politics and religion get all mixed up today, we only have to read this to find that there is nothing new in the world.All in all, I found this book interesting, easy to read (except for a few places), and enlightening.

[waltzmn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The King James Bible: The noblest work of religious prose in English. The most beautiful translation of the Bible ever made in any language. One of the landmarks of early modern English.An inaccurate translation of a corrupt Greek and Hebrew original.This is the sad dilemma facing anyone choosing an English Bible today. The scholars who translated the Hebrew Bible simply did not have enough knowledge of Hebrew to do well, and those who translated the New Testament worked from the Textus Receptus of Erasmus, prepared almost a century before, and written under a printer's deadline. Erasmus was a great man, but he admitted that his text was "precipitated rather than edited"; it was based on a handful of bad manuscripts. The bottom line is, The King James Bible, for all its beauty, does not represent the original Bible at all well.Scholars and lay people can (and assuredly do!) differ on how much this matters. Theologically, it isn't tremendously important; most of the differences between the Authorized Version and the modern translations have no doctrinal significance. But to tell this tale without emphasizing what we now know is to omit a very important facet of the modern debate over the King James Bible. Admittedly this is a history of a translation, not a commentary. And it is a good history within its bounds. But its bounds are too narrow.

[biblequestions · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just finished reading Alister McGrath's book "In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture". Even though I've read over a dozen books on the topic of English Bible translations, I was suitably impressed with the information in the book. I'd expected the book to be a review of information I was already aware of, but McGrath added pieces to the puzzle I was unaware of. McGrath went into some political and religious areas to explain what happened to the KJV after pupublicationand part of the book was the influence the King James Version had on the American colonies. I was a bit disappointed the book didn't discuss into the successors of the KJV, such as the RV, ASV, RSV, NKJV, etc.All-in-all, this is a 5-star book. This would be a good choice for a layperson who wants to learn about the history of English Bible translations.

[imnotsatan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The subject is fascinating. The writing isn't. I'm sure this would be a great resource for Biblical scholars, but it's not so great for the casual reader.

[deanc_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

McGrath presents a riveting account of the history of the King James Bible and its significant impact on the English language. Beginning with Gutenberg and the origins of printing, and the religious-political developments of the 16th century, the author establishes the context for the emergence of the Authorized Version and how it came to supplant the Geneva Bible in popularity and influence. This 300-page book has an extensive bibliography and a substantial index. I believe any serious student of biblical studies, church history, or English literature would benefit from it.

[leandrod-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very entertaining and informative; I ended up wishing for more information.

[docliz_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent book written by Alistair McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford.It looks not only at the development of the King james Bible and the history of the times but it is a fascinating study of the development of the English language.to quote: 'those translators produced a literary milestone' ; 'The true heirs of the King James translators are those who continue their task today, not those who declare it to have been definitively concluded in 1611'.