>I finally found a copy of
>the Cambridge, King James version complete with the Apocrypha. This is
>the one I remember. So I bought it for nine bucks. It had never been
>opened. Inside I found a publishers ad card and a packing slip
>dated 7/8/57, marked as an examination copy. So the book had been sent
>as a promotion for a text. The ad card is titled, The Bible as
>Literature.
Not to make you spend more money, but my profs in "Bible as Lit" classes all recommended the New Revised International version of the Bible for translation accuracy (I didn't find it as interesting as KJ version, with all the "thee"'s and "thou"'s).
>I was talking to a state supreme court clerk Friday about this problem
>of the division between secular and religious laws and he said that in
>his studies in commonwealth law, the church in the the English system
>controlled what we now consider under family law. In other words it
>was mostly concerned with domestic life, rather than public
>life. Wasn't this division what was behind Henry VIII's battle with
>Rome and Thomas Beckette?
Henry's battle with the RC church was, among other things, about the right to marry who he damned well pleased and divorce same. You might be mistaking Thomas A Beckett with Thomas More; the former was another royal pain to the English crown, but way back in the 12th or 13th century. Henry VIII ruled much later (16th cent. I think).
>But here is a rough
>outline. During the middle ages and into the beginning of the
>renaissance all these communities (christian, jewish, muslim) were
>primarily under religious laws of their own particular traditions. But
>as independent state secular authorities began to re-established a
>secular legal system in the late Gothic, these were expanded downward
>into the masses and began to confront religious laws of ordinary
>domestic life. In a sense, these moves would begin to define not just
>the division between secular and divine authority, but also the
>division between public and private.
Not to sure what you're referring to here, but I do know that the RC church did not have the power to punish heretics capitally; they had to turn them over to the secular authorities for that. Is that what you're getting at?
>England never adopted the Roman or Justinian
>codes, since they had their own tradition of common law. Here I have
>to stop because I simply have no idea at all how this was worked out
>in England.
Legal history was never my forte, but considering how thoroughly the south of England was romanized, especially London and environs, I wouldn't be at all surprised that vestiges of Roman secular law remained after the "official" Roman presence was reduced to the religious representatives, by and large. After the Germanic invasions, various Germanic law-codes were written here and there for the independant kingdoms (try reading the laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks to get an idea of how they might have looked; try looking in Bede's History of the English for info on law in England in the Early Middle Ages) which more or less "overshadowed" Roman law (this is an educated guess on my part; it makes some amount of common sense).
>Again my suspicion is that the oft celebrated religious
>freedom theoretically sought by the American colonialists was simply
>the freedom to establish their own authoritarian Protestant religious
>state.
Heh. They wanted the same freedom Capital wants: freedom to order things the way they/it deems best and Devil take the hindmost.
Todd