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"I try to publish quality books," he says. "This is probably the best book of all time." I ask him how it fits Grove's market. "The market for the Bible is everybody," he tells me. And the Pocket Canons? Are they targeted, as most books are, at a specific subset of everybody? Entrekin tells me a story about sitting on a airplane next to two nuns. He says he was minding his own business, reading a Pocket Canon. The nuns got interested. They wanted to see. They wanted to know where they could get some Canons of their own.

What Entrekin says is true: Everybody is smitten by these books. (He's no exception. When, at the Frankfurt Book Fair a couple years ago, the editor of Canongate -- the British publisher of the Pocket Canons -- showed him the first rough mock-ups, he bought American rights on the spot.) But nuns are not Grove's core audience. Nor are bookstores in places like Nashville. But the orders keep coming. It was Entrekin who first called the Pocket Canons "the most radical approach to the Bible since Gutenberg." As I've said already, a single night at a terminally hip bar convinced me that he was right. But only after talking to him about their genesis -- and their exodus from the U.K. to America -- can I fully appreciate why.

"The moment I finished reading Charles Johnson's introduction to Proverbs in manuscript," Morgan confides, "I had someone run to the bookstore to buy me a copy. I'd never read Proverbs before. I always thought it was so old-fashioned." Proverbs was a book of the Bible I'd never taken the time to read either. Certain proverbs are as familiar to the Western ear as classic Madonna ("As you sow so shall you reap."). But 31 chapters of advice more sensible than your great aunt's shoes? Anyone who can find the poetry in that deserves a National Book Award.

Charles Johnson won the National Book Award in 1990, we're told in an author bio printed opposite the first page of his introduction. We also learn that he's a "widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, essayist and lecturer," and that he's "one of twelve African-American authors honored in an international series of stamps celebrating great writers of the twentieth century." Already Proverbs assumes a certain appeal: Johnson's name on the cover serves as a sort of testimonial, a thumbs-up from the world of literature and philosophy (and cartooning). Charles Johnson is respectable because he appeared on a postage stamp; Proverbs is respectable because a man of postage stamp stature likes it.

But the sales pitch is more nuanced than that. From Johnson's essay, we learn that he's a Buddhist, and, even more compelling, one who converted from African Methodist Episcopalianism. Alone among religions, Buddhism has achieved a sort of diplomatic immunity in our culture, or, rather, Buddhism is the Switzerland of religions. Buddhists are respectable in both the religious and secular worlds. We suspect practicing Episcopalians of zealotry, whereas we esteem practicing Buddhists for their enlightenment. And a practicing Episcopalian turned Buddhist? Thy will be done.

Yet Charles Johnson hasn't forsaken Proverbs. In fact, he finds that it complements his new faith:

In the world's religious traditions, eastern and western, the Way of understanding and wisdom begins by sumptuously feeding the spirit and starving the illusory sense of the ego into extinction ... and is realized through a worldly practice that gives priority to the experience of our elders (our global inheritance) over ephemerae in a life that embodies humility, service, and a culture's loftiest ideals

If this Buddhist, this man who our society can admire for his faith without condemning him for his religion, sees our global inheritance in that old testament verse, who are we to dismiss it as old-fashioned? Or, as Proverbs says, "Doth not wisdom cry?"

Johnson's religious affiliation and his literary reputation lend Proverbs just the sort of respectability it needs in the wake in the Good News Bible, the Gideons and the fundamentalists, but in all this smug consideration of packaging, it's easy to lose sight of the most pressing point: What he says is right. Proverbs does feed the spirit, and sumptuously. Of course we already know the lessons. We know that good is good and bad is bad. But, like any cliché, it's so commonplace that the truth of it loses friction. Proverbs revivifies the obvious by rejecting its everyday clothing in favor of its Sunday best:

My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.
If they say, 'Come with us, let us lay wait for blood,
let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause':
Let us swallow them up alive as the grave;
and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
We shall find all precious substance,
we shall fill our houses with spoil.
Cast in thy lot among us;
let us all have one purse;
My son, walk not thou in the way with them;
refrain thy foot from their path:
For their feet run to evil,
and make haste to shed blood.

Good is good and bad is bad: that's the gist of those 13 lines, of Proverbs, of the whole fat Bible -- but to leave it there makes about as much sense as reducing the whole of Shakespeare to a one-line executive summary.

To call the Bible great literature is not merely to speak of its superior sentence structure. Proverbs is part of a much larger project. Somehow we forget: The Bible is our moral heritage. Its moral authority grows out of its literary merit, and its literary merit grows out of its moral authority. These two sides are as inseparable as the front and back of the same page.

Perhaps we don't need to read the Bible to accept that good is good and bad is bad, but unlike the Christian right's knee-jerk ploys, the Bible demands of us more than acceptance. Jesus spoke in parables not because they made it easier to understand his message, but because they made it more difficult. Beyond mere acceptance, the parables demanded engagement by his disciples.

Just so, the Bible, with its myriad contradictory stories, its archaic and often temperamental phrasing, its anachronistic opinions on slavery and women, its half-truths and outright lies, requires of us something quite apart from belief in any specific religious system. To read the Bible is not, as the fundamentalists would claim, to learn how many years ago the Earth was created, or even necessarily to accept the existence of God, but to fight for clarity in confusion, for light in darkness. In film, theater, painting and literature, we find truth in falsehood through the alchemy of art. We earn truth. We achieve wisdom.

The real importance of the Pocket Canons lies in their own lie, the act of cultural subversion that has Lauren chasing after John. Of course the Bible is no better because a Buddhist postage-stamp model with a National Book Award approves of Proverbs or because Revelations bears a René Burri image of a mushroom cloud on its cover. But a deluge of 600,000 clever, jaunty Pocket Canons with their trumped-up hipper-than-thou posturing may just break the spell cast on the Bible by the fundamentalist right. If so, it won't just be Genesis and Exodus, Job and Proverbs, Luke and John, we'll rescue from the land of the dead, but -- freed of its own dirty, inbred, small-minded, vinyl-covered, polyester-suited reputation -- morality itself.

Let us pray.
salon.com | Nov. 29, 1999

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