(Continued)
Despite his single-mindedness, Tyndale died before completing the Old Testament. At his execution on October 6, 1536, he uttered a prophetic prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” In His kind providence, God worked in the heart of the King of England, causing him to see the value of authorizing an official English translation of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures; and, in an ironic reversal, nearly three-fourths of the wording for this translation would precisely mirror Tyndale’s own. The translators themselves acknowledged this, stating their intent not to create a wholly new translation, but, “to make a good one better.” While King James’ motives were mixed, his authorized translation project answered the final prayer of Tyndale. And the “improvements” of the committee have not only stood the test of time, they have influenced the culture in profound ways, from the 17th century to our own.
The enduring influence of the KJV on theology and the church in the English-speaking world is, quite simply, beyond question. Although the Geneva Bible held a prominent place throughout the 17th century and direct opposition to the King James Version continued into the early 1660s in England, by the 1750s, the King James Version had not only been widely accepted – even by dissenting Protestants – it had also come to be recognized as a great triumph of both translation and literary style. It became the standard Bible for use in the Protestant church and home. Even the Roman Catholic convert Frederick William Faber remarked disconsolately in 1853, “[the] uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the Protestant Bible… the convert hardly knows how he can forgo.”
The dominance of the King James Version as the Bible of the Protestant world meant that anyone who heard the Bible read aloud in English heard the King James Version; anyone who read theological works in English was likely reading arguments based around the King James translation. Outside of theology and the church, even early American school lessons were constructed around readings from the KJV, and phrases such as “skin of your teeth;” “writing on the wall;” “salt of the earth;” “powers that be;” “scapegoat;” “woe is me;” and “you reap what you sow” became part of the vernacular. The influence of the translation on our public rhetoric in America was no less significant, and extends to some of our most famous national addresses.
Abraham Lincoln, our greatest presidential orator, did not often quote directly from the King James Version, but he regularly employed its distinctive style. One can hardly imagine the Gettysburg Address beginning with the word “87” instead of the familiar, and slightly elevated, “four score and seven years ago,” a phrase deliberately modeled on the “three score and ten” used 111 times in the King James Version of 1611. Lincoln’s concluding phrase at Gettysburg, “shall not perish from the earth,” is a direct quotation from the King James Version. As Robert Alter comments, “The sternly grand language of the King James Bible… was a way of giving American English a reach and resonance it would not otherwise have had.”