Proofs of Holy Writ
This was the last story to be written by Rudyard Kipling. It was completed too late for inclusion in Limits and Renewals, his last collection, published in London in April 1932. It was published in The Strand magazine in April 1934, and reprinted in The Strand in 1947 with an introduction by Hilton Brown. It is also to be found in volume 30 of the Sussex Edition.

The story was reprinted in The Kipling Journal in June 1958 and again in December 1965. A limited edition of 125 copies was published by the National Trust in 1981 with an introduction by Philip Mason; this introduction was also published in the The Kipling Journal of March 1988. "Proofs of Holy Writ" was included in Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling in an Everyman Edition by Dent, in 1970, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. It also figured in Mrs Bathurst and other Stories published by Oxford in 1991, edited by Lisa Lewis. We publish it here by kind permission of the National Trust.

"Proofs of Holy Writ" was said to have arisen from a dinner table conversation between Kipling and John Buchan about the process by which the splendidly poetic language of the King James' Authorised Version of the Bible miraculously emerged from a committee of 47 learned men. Might they, Buchan wondered, have consulted the great creative writers of the day, like Will Shakespeare or Ben Jonson ? 'That's an idea', said Kipling, and he went away to turn it into a tale.