Posted on 04/14/2010 1:14:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I have only ever learnt two short pieces of literature by heart. One was Lady Macbeth’s speech “Out, damn’d spot”, which I sprinkled liberally across my O-level English literature paper.
Of more lasting impact have been the few verses in Genesis iii describing mankind’s fall. A new vicar at St Nicholas, Chiswick, where I went as a boy, introduced a ceremony of readings and carols that King’s has made famous. As head chorister I was allotted that reading.
The event almost immobilised me with an attack of first-night nerves. But once I was up and reading it was as if I had stepped with Alice into another wonderful world. My voice began to throw out those magnificent phrases that would warm the coldest of hearts. “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field . . .” The spell of the King James language that had intoxicated English men and women down the ages had landed another recruit.
Next year our country will celebrate 400 years of the King James Bible. The translators went about their task with a wonderful self-confidence that allowed them to use much of the pioneering translator William Tyndale’s wonderful text. Indeed, many of the phrases still in use in our language, explained below, are Tyndale’s.
James I saw his task as giving his newly acquired kingdom a beautiful gift that would also serve as a unifying force. It didn’t quite turn out as he wished, but many of those families who left these shores to begin life in the New World took James’s book with them.
The result was beyond what the King could ever have imagined. As James’s Bible spread around the world, Britain established a linguistic empire that has outlasted any imperial power.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Some terms we use in modern writing derived from the King James Bible :
A house divided
Mark iii, 25 And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
Jesus has been casting out devils, which the scribes and Pharisees attribute to the power of Satan. But if this is true, surely Satan’s house and kingdom are about to collapse. Used by historians to describe Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech accepting his nomination as the Illinois Republican Party candidate for the Senate, in which he warns of the dangers of having slave states and free states.
My brother’s keeper
Genesis iv,9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
Cain has murdered Abel and now denies all knowledge. John Steinbeck explores the story in East of Eden, Jeffrey Archer makes a pun of it in Kane & Abel, and Jodi Picoult poses the question of sibling kidney donation in My Sister’s Keeper.
Signs of the times
Matthew xvi,3 And in the morning, it will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
In a version of “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”, Jesus asks the Pharisees why, if they can predict the weather from looking at the sky, they cannot see what He is doing and what it means. The phrase was used by Prince for the name of an album and a film.
Lamb to the slaughter
Isaiah liii, 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
Jesus, also referred to as the Lamb of God in John’s Gospel, has His Crucifixion predicted by Isaiah. Lamb to the Slaughter is a short story by Roald Dahl, made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. The Slaughtered Lamb is the name of the pub in An American Werewolf in London.
Scapegoat
Leviticus xvi, 10 But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.
The scapegoat has the sins of the nation put upon it and is then driven out into the wilderness. The word, which has come to mean a victim who is unfairly blamed, was used as the title of a 1957 novel by Daphne du Maurier, later made into a film with Alec Guinness and Bette Davis.
Swords into plowshares
Isaiah ii, 4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah prophesies that in the last days there will be a time of peace when the weapons of war shall be beaten into farming implements. Turning swords into plowshares has been a dream of radical groups ever since. The phrase appears in the finale of Les Misérables.
AND MANY MORE TOO NUMEROUS TO MENTION.... ( Add yours here )
As an addendum, I’d like to ask the opinion of our esteemed, learned and religious readers at FR.
WHat modern Bible translation retains the dignity, power, understandability and exquisiteness of the King James Bible ?
James, King. The Bible.
I had the great fortune of being able to spend time in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey where much of the KJV version was written and collated. (Also the room where Henry IV died)
Truly inspiring just to be in that spot.
He was burned for heresy, not for translating the Bible. (He was tried and convicted in Belgium; they didn't have much use for English Bibles there anyway.)
Ironically, he was turned in by an agent of the (by then) Protestant King Henry VIII. Tyndale didn't support Henry's divorce any more than the Pope did.
RE: What heresy did they claim?
Following the publication of Tyndale’s New Testament, Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic and Tyndale was first mentioned in open court as a heretic in January 1529.
This site gives the Roman Catholic explanation :
http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=4749&CFID=34753528&CFTOKEN=10133813
EXCERPT :
“Tyndale was an English priest of no great fame who desperately desired to make his own English translation of the Bible. The Church denied him for several reasons.
First, it saw no real need for a new English translation of Scripture at that time. In fact, booksellers were having a hard time selling the print editions of the Bible that they already had. Laws had to be enacted to force people to buy them.
Second, we must remember that this was a time of great strife and confusion for the Church in Europe. The Reformation had turned the continent into a volatile place. So far, England had managed to remain relatively unscathed, and the Church wanted to keep it that way. It was thought that adding a new English translation would only add confusion and distraction where focus was needed.
Lastly, if the Church had decided to provide a new English translation of Scripture, Tyndale would not have been the man chosen to do it. He was known as only a mediocre scholar and had gained a reputation as a priest of unorthodox opinions and a violent temper. He was infamous for insulting the clergy, from the pope down to the friars and monks, and had a genuine contempt for Church authority. In fact, he was first tried for heresy in 1522, three years before his translation of the New Testament was printed. His own bishop in London would not support him in this cause.
Finding no support for his translation from his bishop, he left England and went to Worms, where he fell under the influence of Martin Luther. There in 1525 he produced a translation of the New Testament that was swarming with textual corruption. He willfully mistranslated entire passages of sacred Scripture in order to condemn orthodox Catholic doctrine and support the new Lutheran ideas. The bishop of London claimed that he could count over 2,000 errors in the volume (and this was just the New Testament).
And we must remember that this was not merely a translation of Scripture. His text included a prologue and notes that were so full of contempt for the Catholic Church and the clergy that no one could mistake his obvious agenda and prejudice. Did the Catholic Church condemn this version of the Bible? Of course it did.
The secular authorities condemned it as well. Anglicans are among the many today who laud Tyndale as the “father of the English Bible.” But it was their own founder, King Henry VIII, who in 1531 declared that, “the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people.”
So troublesome did Tyndale’s Bible prove to be that in 1543 — after his break with Rome — Henry VIII again decreed that “all manner of books of the Old and New Testament in English, being of the crafty, false, and untrue translation of Tyndale . . . shall be clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished, and forbidden to be kept or used in this realm.”
Ultimately, it was the secular authorities who proved to be the end for Tyndale. He was arrested and tried (and sentenced to die) in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1536. His translation of the Bible was heretical because it contained heretical ideas — not because the act of translation was heretical in and of itself. In fact, the Catholic Church would produce a translation of the Bible into English a few years later (the Douay-Rheims version, whose New Testament was released in 1582 and whose Old Testament was released in 1609). “
Verily, the KJB rocks.
I don't completely trust any book that was "translated" from old Hebrew and then translated into Greek, etc. Hebrew language was more than written words, it was the sounds that had specific meanings as well, so IMO, there is no possible way that an accurate translation occured. Then, take into consideration that a bunch of white men with agendas translated it into English. I believe the bible contains truth and even words of God, but nobody will ever convince me that it is not full of BS too.
Post #12 is the Roman Catholic account of Tyndale’s translation.
Whether it is a corrupted, anti-Catholic translation or not I cannot answer because I have not read Tyndale’s English translation.
I leave that debate to other scholarly people who have actually taken the time to study it.
ping
Other than the fact that it is a redacted version, it is pretty good.
Well, The New King James Version also uses the Textus Receptus (”Received Text”) for the New Testament, just as the King James Version had used.
The NKJV translators have also sought to follow the principles of translation used in the original King James Version, which the NKJV revisers call “complete equivalence” in contrast to “dynamic equivalence” used by many other modern translations ( e.g., the widely used NIV).
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