[SzefciuCba]

"This is great"
Sometime in 1611, a new English Bible was published. It was the work of an almost impossibly learned team of men laboring since 1604 under royal mandate. Their purpose, they wrote, was not to make a new translation of the Bible but “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” What was published, 400 years ago, was indeed one principal good one: the King James Version of the Bible.

It’s barely possible to overstate the significance of this Bible. Hundreds of millions have been sold. In 1611, it found a critical balance in a world of theological conflict, and it has been beloved since of Protestant churches and congregations of every stripe. By the end of the 17th century it was, simply, the Bible. It has been superseded by translations in more modern English, translations based on sources the King James translators couldn’t have known. But to Christians all around the world, it is still the ancestral language of faith.

To modern readers, the English of the King James Version sounds archaic, much as Shakespeare does. But there would have been an archaism for readers even in 1611 because the King James Bible draws heavily from a version of William Tyndale’s New Testament published in 1534 and from translations by Miles Coverdale also published in the 1530s.

Tyndale’s aspiration was to make his New Testament accessible to “the boy that driveth the plough.” Though readers often talk about the majesty of the King James Bible, what has made it live is in fact the simplicity of its language.

Scholars have often debated just how much the King James Bible has influenced the English language. They count the number of idioms — “the powers that be,” for instance — that entered the language from the Bible. They look at how often it’s cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.