Erik Davis reminded me of Finis Jennings Dake today:
My favorite relic of those months is a version of the King James Bible I picked up at a Christian bookstore at a strip mall near the coast. The store, which I visited a number of times and was more important to me than any particular church, was one of the many nondenominational Christian shops that popped up in the 1980s, paralleling the New Age stores of the era with their spiritual lifestyle blend of books, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, statues, jewelry, and inspirational wall art.
The Bible in question, which I still own, was a more old-school affair: a faux-leather-bound copy of the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. On its thin scritta pages, the 17th-century King James prose was copiously, almost talmudically broken down with over 35,000 notes and commentaries crammed into side columns and myriad appendixes. Its author was one Finis J. Dake, a Pentecostal evangelist from Missouri who, after violating the Mann Act in 1937, became the first Pentecostal to publish a scriptural reference work on anywhere near this scale. Imagine a listaholic fusion of Jack Chick and Charles Kinbote, the deranged literary critic who animates Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and you would not be far off.
My dad had one of those. In fact, I may have been the person who bought it for him. Even for us self-taught, Spirit-drunk fundamentalists with a rainbow coalition of bizarre ideas, Dake was a bit out there. He was never openly promoted. The people who read him tended to discover each other, like Freemasons noticing each others’ rings. We’d be deep into our Sunday night fast food burgers when someone would say, “what do you think about the pre-Adamite world?”