Examining others might make this total fall further. I looked at only five other translations to arrive at this figure. They include how are the mighty fallen, the root of the matter, and a thorn in the flesh. By my count, only 18 expressions are unique to the 1611 version. Rather, they are to be found in William Tyndale‘s version nearly a century earlier, or in the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, or one of the other major sixteenth-century translations. (Other readers with different mindsets might increase this total a little, but not by much.) Second, most of these expressions don’t originate in the King James translation at all. First, there aren’t as many of them as people suggest: I found only 257. To resolve the question once and for all, I went through the whole work looking out for any expression that I felt had come to be a part of modern English, whether people were aware of the biblical connection or not. When I ask people for a figure, I receive answers ranging from a hundred to a thousand. Everyone who writes about the KJB in relation to the history of English quotes a few examples, such as out of the mouths of babes and fly in the ointment, but nobody has established just how many such items there are in the work as a whole.
The King James Bible and the English Language (2010), I tried to put a precise figure on the question of idioms. The King James version also entered auditory consciousness too, for it was frequently read aloud-a practice aided by the punctuation, which is more an aid to speech than a guide to grammar.įor my book, Begat.
One of the first writers to draw on the 1611 version as a source of inspiration was John Milton (1608-1674), many of whose lines show a clear influence, at times to the point of exact phrasing, as in ‘She gave me of the tree, and I did eat’ ( Paradise Lost, Book X). Only after the Restoration of Charles II (1660) did the KJB gain its dominant status in Anglican worship, revered as both a religious and a literary text.
Though now widely known as the Authorized Version, the 1611 translation, while favourably received, was adopted only gradually in the decades after publication as churches replaced their existing copies of the Geneva (1560) and Bishops’ (1568) bibles. When people talk about the influence of the King James Bible they are usually thinking about the idioms it contains, or rather more vaguely about its thematic content, imagery, and rhythmical style. Only the opening verse (‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth’) and verse 27 (‘So God created…’) do otherwise. But what do we find in the opening chapter of Genesis?-thirty-one verses, all but two of them beginning with And-’And God said… And God made…’. Not liked? I suspect many of you were taught that it was ‘bad grammar’ to begin a sentence with And. Not used? Consider a sentence such as ‘In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’, where much of the grammar is obsolete. There are actually many features of KJB style that are no longer used or liked in English. DNA is in every cell we possess but the KJB is by no means in every word we write. A striking metaphor, but a misleading one. In an article in The Tablet (3 April 2010) entitled ‘England’s gift to the world’, the MP Frank Field (the director of the trust established to coordinate the anniversary celebrations) quoted Melvyn Bragg to describe the King James Bible (KJB) as ‘quite simply the DNA of the English language’. What is the influence of the King James Bible (1611) on the English language? The claims have sometimes been quite extraordinary, and with the 400th anniversary of publication falling in 2011, the exaggerations have been growing. Please note: several of the following links to dictionary content require subscriber access to the OED Online.