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One summer in the early sixties, I went witnessing by myself through the countryside north of the Hokianga Harbour. There was then no congregation of Jehovahs Witnesses in that area and calls had not been made there for many years. I went home to Dargaville each weekend and during the week camped in an empty house of which there were many in that area. Everywhere there were signs that the great days of the north were past. The rot was evident wherever one went and I am inclined to find decline of any sort extremely depressing. One house in every three that I called at was empty and this was by my actual count . Their mostly good condition suggested that they had not been empty for too many years. The slide had been relatively recent. The town of Kohu Kohu on the north side of the harbour, once of importance in the timber days, and typical of others in the region, had clearly outlived its usefulness. I passed through it each week coming and going because the car ferry, the only way across the harbour, picked up and dropped cars at a landing nearby. The town still had McAndrews’ general store but, as far as I could see, no longer had any other businesses. A very large and sound kauri house, a near mansion, could be bought for 500 pounds but with a town that would clearly continue withering, was remote, and of difficult access, this was hardly an attraction even for those in retirement. Work there was none. One day I was calling at homes on a side road the location of which I can no longer recall. A particular call though I well remember. My tendency is to go to the back door particularly when out in the country since it is the generally the only one used by the householder—that is where the gumboots are—which is why I was knocking on the back door. I was hailed from some distance away. The section had a gradual rise behind the house and was entirely in garden apart from the paths which were hard-trodden clay that gave weeds no opportunity to get established. The man coming down towards me had all the appearance of a Hebrew patriarch of Bible times or at least as an artist imagines him to have looked, with his flowing robes, his untrimmed sun-bleached hair and beard, with the crooked staff on which he leaned to assist his steps. I was to find that he was not really as old as his appearance at first suggested. One meets all types and, for a start apart from the obvious eccentricity, I did not suspect any mental unsoundness. On finding my reason for calling he invited me into the house. Its furnishing was spartan but the place was much more clean and orderly that the usual bachelor establishment. It was not wired for electricity, had no radio and no telephone. The power had only come to that part of the North in the 1950s and was even more recent on that road. The Bay of Islands Power Board would not install a line down the road without payment and the man who lived at the far end of the road had canvassed his neighbours all of whom said that they did not want the power. He had paid to have the line installed whereupon all of his neighbours bar the patriarch had decided that they wanted the power too and had jumped in and got connected to his paid-for line. He was my first call on that road and, still being very angry, had told me about it at length. Actually, under the Supply Regulations, the Power Board should have exacted a contribution from everyone connecting to his line and reimbursed him. He didn’t know this but neither did I at the time. My conversation with the patriarch seemed at first to be on rational lines even though it had quickly became clear that he had deliberately sought to cut himself off from the world. He quite obviously had a keen interest in and some knowledge of the Bible although we amicably agreed to disagree on certain doctrinal matters. He was not interested in any of the literature that I was offering but did say that he was in need of a new Bible, the Bible being apparently his only reading matter, and showed me his which had had much hard use. There were almost more loose pages than those that still clung to the spine. I was using at that time The American Standard Version of 1901 but this was not the real Bible as far as he was concerned. Like so many others he considered the Authorised Version of King James to be the only true Bible and it to be particularly inspired. I had a new one out in the car. Many people seem blind to the fact that Jesus and the apostles spoke the common Greek of the day and those before them spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. 17th century English with its ’thees, ’thous’, and ’thines’ has somehow come to be seen as holy language, the language that Jesus used. One churchman, in rejecting a new modern translation, wrote, “If the Authorised Version was good enough for Saint Paul, then it’s good enough for me.” The truth is that, although the King James translators did make comparison with the handful of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available to them, copies of copies and none older than 1000 AD, the work is largely that of earlier translators. Previous translations into English, those of Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, and Matthew’s Bible of 1537, had been condemned by the church which saw danger in having the common people able to understand the scriptures. The first authorised version was the Great Bible of 1539 to be followed by the Geneva Bible in 1560 ( the first English Bible to use both chapter and verse numbering ) and the Bishops Bible in 1568. The instructions that King James gave to the new translators were and I quote “The Bishops Bible to be followed, and as little altered as the Original will permit. And these translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops Bible–namely , Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s, Geneva.” unquote. Thus, the Authorised Version is, in a large part Tyndale and Coverdale with the translators making improvements in word choice, enhancing the literary style and rhythm , and providing a somewhat superior accuracy but still far short of that obtaining today when large numbers of original language copies have been discovered that more closely approach the time of writing. The new translation was far from popular when it appeared. The Geneva Bible had by then come to be considered as THE BIBLE as the King James is now. I have explained the ancestry of the Authorised Version at length for a reason. I brought the new copy in from my car and handed it to the patriarch. He was not immediately prepared to accept it as authentic and began to read aloud from the title page. It says in part, ‘THE HOLY BIBLE containing THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS-Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and…revised…At the word ‘revised’ he stopped dead and handed the Bible back as though it was red-hot and dangerous. “They’ve changed it,” he said. ‘That is not the true Bible." " What is the true Bible? Who Has it then?" I asked “The Israelites of course!” the answer was emphatic and scornful at my ignorance. Even without explanation it was clear that he did not mean the Jews but rather some shadowy order that had been given the unique stewardship of this true Bible. " Well if they have the only true Bible. How are we to know what God wants of us if we don’t have it? Why don’t they make it available to us?" That made him very angry. “What right have you got to question the Israelites?” My questions were blasphemous. I did not think to ask to see if the title page still remained in his old Bible. If so, it would have said exactly the same thing as in my copy making it by his rules also not the true Bible. Actually, in the first 150 years from its publication, the Authorised Version went through five revisions the first of these coming after only two years. The Committee on Versions of the American Bible Society found that there were 24,000 variations over the six different editions. This would hardly argue for any divine inspiration in the original translation. The English of the Authorised Version as we know it today might be archaic but it is far removed from the English of King James’ day and that of his authorised original. Somehow, I got back on side with him and he was eager to expound his beliefs. I let him have his head. He believed that the present world system was wicked and was coming to an end but not for any reason that I could have imagined. He had a thing about oil. Everything, he said, has oil and needs oil. We have oil in us. If you put a rose petal on the surface of a glass of water you get a very fine film of oil from it. The planet earth needed to retain its oil for its own physical health and by continuing to remove its oil we were killing it and heading for catastrophe. Neighbours told me later that they had long since given up offering him a lift when they found him walking to the distant store. He would be incensed at their offer. Their cars ran on oil products and he would have no part with them in destroying the earth. I have wondered since what he did for lighting since he had no electricity. Kerosine would be out. Even store-bought wax candles would have to be a no-no since that wax comes from oil. Did he use bees-wax or tallow candles? Or did he go to sleep with the sun? The other thing that was leading us to destruction was that a malevolent ’they’ had altered time. If I remember rightly, his concern stemmed from Daniel chapter 7 verse 25 which says of a king that was to come, ‘And he shall speak great words against the most High, and think to change the times and the laws:.’ To the ‘patriach’, the Gregorian calendar and the old Julian calendar, both having leap years were part of a vast and sinister plot. They fiddled with time. And it had to be a long-lived plot. Julius Caesar who introduced his Julian calendar in 45 BC and Pope Gregory XIII who introduced his revision in 1582 were somehow in collusion with evil men of the present day. The Patriarch was apparently unaware that even in Daniel’s time the Hebrews were adding an extra lunar month, Veadar, meaning second Adar, seven times in every nineteen years to keep their lunar months in time with the sun and its seasons. The Patriarch was operating on a butcher’s calender from 1941 when the area still had its own butcher’s shop. 1941 was in some way a pure and special year. In such a non-leap year, December 31st and January 1st occur on the same weekday, it has 52 weeks and one day, but he had apparently been able to make adjustment for this when continually recycling that same year. “They try to tell us,” he said, “that if we don’t have leap years the seasons will gradually shift. But they know quite well that none of us are going to live the hundreds of years that would be necessary to prove that they’re lying to us.” I could see no point in trying to tell him that the Julian calender had been brought in for the very reason that the seasons had noticeably shifted and the Gregorian later because they were still shifting though not then as fast. He took me to the window and on the sill were two matches that had obviously been there for many years. “In mid-winter,” he told me, " the sun rises exactly in line with this match and in mid-summer it rises exactly in line with this other match." Again I could see nothing to be gained in pointing out that the slightest change in head position could accomplish this. One could not be sure of standing in exactly the same place from one year to the next or even from mid-winter to mid-summer. I couldn’t see how this any of this was supposed to presage the end of the system of things and he apparently could see that I was far from convinced. Yet we parted on good terms. I tend to get on well with people like him and have no problem in treating them with respect. He needed an ear and I had listened. I must have been accepted. He told me the secret that he was not going to tell anyone else. Soon, King Edward was going to come out to New Zealand and the two of them were going to judge the government and people of this country. Naturally, being curious, I asked the next neighbours that I called on about him. He had not always been this way. He had once been an average farmer, quite normal, but had suddenly stopped farming his land. The general opinion was that there had been a woman involved: that he had been unlucky in love. One might guess that this happened in 1941 though I would rather doubt the whole scenario. This was surely someone’s surmise that time had hardened into fact. She would have had to be local, he had never been away from the locality, but no-one seemed to be able to put a name to her. And why was he unaware of George the Sixth and Elizabeth. He had become hostile to government, both central or local. He saw it as evil like the rest of the world and he refused to pay taxes or rates. I am not sure that he could have paid them since his land was not being worked and I would doubt that he was old enough at that time to get government super. But he must have had a little money. He did have enough to buy a Bible. The extensive vegetable garden leads me to think that this was his primary, perhaps only, source of food. The County Council had at one stage obtained a court order allowing them to remove the wool stored in his woolshed in lieu of payment. But since then, the authorities had apparently decided that it was simpler just to leave him alone and pretend that he didn’t exist. Myself, I rather liked him while at the same time feeling sorry for him.