Ho history is necessary after this. :)
Thanks for the post. Bless your day.
There is a lot of similarity with The KING JAMES, I am kicking my but because a lot of those Bibles were broken up into pages.
Amen! I’m a King James man. Most atheists prefer the King James. See below:
H. L. Mencken (agnostic):
“It is the most beautiful of all the translations of the Bible; indeed, it is probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world. Many attempts have been made to purge it of its errors and obscurities. An English Revised Version was published in 1885 and an American Revised Version in 1901, and since then many learned but misguided men have sought to produce translations that should be mathematically accurate, and in the plain speech of everyday. But the Authorized Version has never yielded to any of them, for it is palpably and overwhelmingly better than they are, just as it is better than the Greek New Testament, or the Vulgate, or the Septuagint. Its English is extraordinarily simple, pure, eloquent, lovely. It is a mine of lordly and incomparable poetry, at once the most stirring and the most touching ever heard of.”
Christopher Hitches:
“For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, O King. But if not, be it known unto thee, O King, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
In the passage below note the reference to George Orwell:
“A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”
Harold Bloom:
With Shakespeare, the KJV is the sublime summit of literature in English.
The KJV or authorized version is still going strong for over 400 years. No wonder. It’s been a cultural and spiritual cement that never erodes. It’s impossible to know how many times its been quoted at births, burials, marriages, etc. I’ll take it any day. Ever time I pick it up I’m in communion with the saints of humanity. Another thing, I prefer Jeremiah to “Jerry.” Give me that old time religion!
The first mass produced printed book was the Bible, a version based on the Latin edition from about 380 AD.. The Bible was printed at Mainz, Germany by Johannes Gutenberg from 1452 -1455..