I saw in today’s Tribune there’s new mafia movie out called “Gomorrah.” You just wonder how many Americans under 30 even know what the title is referencing.

In a sermon I have on cassette, randomly pulled from a storage drawer the other night, Jordan talked about a fellow preacher in Wisconsin (Dan Gross) whose son, as a new student at Northwestern University, was required by his freshman literature class to have a King James Bible.

Jordan commented, “Now, understand, Northwestern’s not doing that because they want to teach the King James Bible. They want to read a KJB because of the literary impact. In fact, people in that university will tell you, and people who teach at those levels in the humanities, I’ve heard them say many times . . .

“I heard a book professor on C-SPAN maybe two years ago on ‘Book Notes’ with Brian Lamb who made the point, ‘Your education is not complete unless you’re familiar with the stories and the accounts in the King James Bible. Western civilization is built on it.

“We have laws on the book—I head it debated this past week on WGN on the radio . . . One of those loud-mouthed guys on in the morning was hollering about somebody

who didn’t stop and help somebody on the side of the road after a car wreck, and he was talking about what he would have done and all that stuff.

“But somebody called up and said, ‘Well, we used to have Good Samaritan laws but they’ve been kind of vitiated now.’ If you don’t know who the Good Samaritan is or where it came from then you don’t know something about the culture and mental attitude of the culture that you live in.

“The gospel account of the Good Samaritan is not just one of the great stories of the Bible, it is in fact one of the great stories of literature, and it’s one of things people miss when they don’t learn the Bible at least as literature.”

*****

Just the other week, after treating myself to my favorite breakfast of Smoked Salmon Benedict and potato sausage at the classic Swedish café Ann Sathers on Belmont Avenue, I popped into a used book store two doors away that I’ve been frequenting since first moving to Chicago from Lexington, Ky. in 1990.

Scanning the ceiling-jammed shelves of the narrow-aisle old establishment, I came across a neat book from 1969 in the Literary Reference Section entitled Whose What? Aaron’s Beard to Zorn’s Lemma.

Inside the jacket’s front flap was the summary, “For the crossword puzzle and acrostics fan and for the just plain curious, Whose What? fills that frustrating gap on the library shelf that turns up when someone says, ‘What exactly was Balaam’s ass? Or Dido’s lament? Or Job’s tears?’ Perhaps most people have a vague idea of such things, but the specific origin of the term, its history and background are sketchy.

“Dorothy Rose Blumberg, the author and compiler of Whose What?, has set certain criteria for the items she has included—the ‘who’ must be a real or legendary person; the ‘what’ is something named, either literally or figuratively. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, for instance, refers to the World War I peace plan submitted to the United States Congress by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Joseph’s coat recalls the biblical story of the many-colored robe presented to Joseph by his father.”

Interestingly enough, the items listed which find their genesis in the Bible about cover half the alphabet. A smattering of examples: Adam’s Apple, Belshazzar’s Feast, Caesar’s Wife, Fox’s ‘Martyrs’, King Solomon’s Ring, Lot’s Wife, Potiphar’s Wife, on and on.

*****

Just today in Jordan’s Sunday morning radio program (WYLL 1160 AM at 8:30) he addressed the widespread Christian mocking of those who believe the King James Version to be the only authentic English Bible, reminding listeners of the old joke by NIVers and the like who says KJVers must have been reading their ‘perfect Bible’ since Paul did.

Jordan recalls in my sermon on cassette, “I heard a guy on the radio just the other day pounding on the KJB because it’s Elizabethan English, which it isn’t. He had a cute little thing he said: ‘The begats and the begots and I be gone.” You know, that’s the old emotional stuff where, ‘Well, you know, those people think Paul read the King James Version.’ It’s just emotionalism.

“When you hear somebody talk about it being Elizabethan English, go back and read it. Elizabethan English doesn’t read like the KJB. If you read the dedication of the translators to the readers—the preface of the KJB—you see how they wrote and talked. And then you read the Bible text and see it’s quite different.

“You know who C.S. Lewis was? He was a professor of literature in England and he wrote a booklet called The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version. It was designed to demonstrate that the KJB is not Elizabethan English. It’s what he called ‘bible English,’ and it isn’t the kind of language that the people of that day spoke in.

“It was a language that was used to translate God’s Word into English and the English in your Bible is more governed by the Greek text and the Greek language than it is the English language of that day.

“But people don’t know that because it’s got the old verb endings. The didst and shouldest and the thees and the thous, and people don’t know what those things are so they get all bent out of shape.”