So in many ways it actually shapes the English language, how we speak English.” “So when you’re reading through their writings, you hear echoes, the way they construct language, because the King James Version attempts to follow the syntax of the Greek and Hebrew. “The King James Version is the Bible that they would have heard if they ever went to church, and because these are people who make their living by using words and arranging words for poetry and novels, those patterns of speech in the King James Version are unconsciously picked up in their writings,” Haykin said. Eliot and secular authors including Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens were influenced by that particular translation. The English language is peppered with phrases that come from the KJV, and from the 1650s onward, poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake and T.S. The King James Version is the most important piece of literature in the West in the past 500 years, profoundly shaping language and thought, Haykin said. “In the preface to the translation of the Scriptures, the man who wrote the preface, which is not always printed with the King James Version, a man named Miles Smith, who was actually a Puritan, he mentions that it was zeal for the common good that drove them.” “One of the ways in which they could build a solid culture and society was through a knowledge of the Scriptures. “I would seriously doubt that any of the people involved in the Bible translation of the 16th century felt that significant numbers of people who are English-speaking knowing the Scriptures would have a harmful effect upon their culture,” he said. But the goal is always to give the Scriptures to the people.”Īs the translators worked, Haykin said they were aware that a saving knowledge of God, which is given through the Bible, was something that promoted the spiritual health of individuals but also would have a deep impact upon society. “Now, in places, obviously, they try to be true to the text, and if the text is difficult to understand, then there are going to be challenges in understanding sometimes the theology of the Bible. “The goal of that translation is to give the common reader an understanding of the Word of God. “There’s a massive amount of translation activity going on between the 1520s and 1611, and the King James Bible is the crowning achievement of this long period of 80 years of translation into English,” he said. “It’s the Bible Charles Spurgeon would have preached from, and so on.”Ī key thrust of the Reformation was to get the Bible to the people, which required translating it into the vernacular, the speech that people were using, instead of leaving the Bible in Latin, Haykin said. When the modern missionary movement begins with people like William Carey and Hudson Taylor and David Livingstone, this again is the Bible that’s used through the 19th century,” Haykin said. “People like John Wesley and George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards would all have used this version in their preaching. “Until the 1950s, the King James Bible was ‘the Bible.’ It’s the version that English-speaking Christians used,” Michael Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press. (BP)–The King James Version of the Bible, first published 400 years ago on May 5, 1611, is the Bible God used to give believers many of the riches of the Puritan movement, and it was the Bible at the heart of the Great Awakenings of the 18th century and the modern missionary movement, an expert noted. Q&A: King James Bible has strengths that many other translations lack, prof says To read other stories in the package, click these headlines: This story is part of a Baptist Press package on the King James Bible. Editor’s note: May is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.
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