This King James Bible was translated at a fortuitous time.
The rise of the English empire.
“England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.” – Victor Hugo
English colonies were beginning to spread around the world in 1611. A settlement was already developing tentatively in Virginia (from 1607), with Massachusetts only a few years away. The translators’ timing was perfect, how providentially.
Over the coming centuries, the Christianity of the British Isles would become a driving force in Christian expansion worldwide – in North America, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in South Asia. Wherever England went, they brought with them the King James Bible.
The rise of the English language.
“This translation was completed at a fortunate time. The English language had passed through many significant changes and had finally reached the pinnacle of its purity and strength. The Bible has since remained the paramount English classic, standing as the noblest monument to the power of the English language. It serves as the pattern and standard of excellence within it, representing the most comprehensive and invigorating source of unblemished English expression. It has bestowed a permanent character upon our language, remaining as intelligible now as when it was first printed, and will be equally comprehensible to readers of future centuries as it is to those of the past and present.”
The Translators Revived
That King James’s scholars wisely clave to the language of the cottage and the marketplace.
“The language of the common people is generally the best of any shire in England. A proof whereof, when a boy, I received from a hand-laboring man therein, which since hath convinced my judgment. ‘We speak, I believe,’ said he, ‘as good English as any shire in England; because, though in the singing-Psalms some words are used to make the metre, unknown to us, yet the last translation of the Bible, which no doubt was done by those learned men in the best English, agreeth perfectly with the common speech of our county.’” – Thomas Fuller
The King James Bible was written in a standard literary language, free from confusing variations of local dialects. (McGrath, 2001). The central objective of the king’s translators was scholarly accuracy – the finding of proper English words and phrases to render the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Sense and meaning took priority over elegance. We have abandoned today many fine points of English grammar commonly used in 1600. For example, we forget that “thee,” “thou,” and “thine” were used to express the second person singular, with “you,” “ye” and “yours” reserved for second person plural. Today we use “you” indiscriminately for both singular and plural, thereby missing some of the precise meaning of many texts of Scripture. What was once scorned as the barbarous language of plowmen became esteemed as the language of patriots and poets – a language fit for heroes on the one hand, and for the riches of the Bible on the other. (McGrath, 2001)
The rise of spirituality in England, with revival.
In the early 17th century, church attendance was compulsory in England and knowledge of the Bible was pervasive. Agree or disagree with compulsory church attendance one cannot argue that this produced a biblically knowledgeable citizenry. (Cloud, 2006) There was also a climate of earnestly contending for the Protestant Christian faith and a bold opposition to Romanism, atheism, and other enemies of the faith. It was not a day of spiritual neutrality. The reformation urged all Christians to read and value the Bible, and act on what they found within its pages. (McGrath, 2001)
With religious tensions (Anglicans, Puritans, Presbyterians) growing in England at the time of King James accession to the throne, the image of the King giving the Bible to his people an essential means by which national unity might be secured at a time of potential fragmentation.
King James resolved that:
A translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service. (McGrath, 2001)
This would unify Protestant England, united around an agreed translation of the Bible. His hope was that this new translation of the Bible would be a powerful factor in creating a cohesive English national identity, especially over and against Roman Catholicism.
The educational climate at Oxford and Cambridge was serious in the extreme.
Biblical scholars of that day grew up with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and were as at home in these languages as in their mother tongue. At Oxford and Cambridge in the 1500s and early 1600s, all the printed texts were in Latin. All the compositions, lectures, and disputations were in Latin. The education system was filled with debate and discussions over ideas.
College and most educational institutions nowadays are focused on things like social justice, identity politics, transgenderism, critical race theory, instead of what they were created for, education, reading, writing and arithmetic.
The proliferation of the printing press.
The need for Bibles and other religious literature, especially in the new world, was one of the principal factors that brought printing into the common world. By 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies.
“Gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and found the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites.” – Karl Marx
Fun fact, it is estimated that more than 1 billion copies of the King James Bible have been published.
Conclusion
The timing of the translation of the King James Bible could not have been more fortuitous.
- The English language was at its peak.
- Spirituality was on the rise thanks to the Reformation.
- There was a strong foundation in place thanks to Wycliffe and Tyndale.
- The printing press was able to mass produce the King James Bible.
We covered a lot.
We started with how important it was to have an instruction book, in a language that we could understand, so we could make sense of them. We related that to the world we live and the God we worship, and how He gave us His Words, in a book, the Bible, to help us make sense of this world, understand who He is, and what He wants from us. We showed how God promised to preserve His Word
Using a different translation than the King James Bible? I would challenge you to run it through this rubric, see where it lands.
It is my hope and prayer that the next time you sit down to read your King James Bible, you will be confident that you are reading the best translation of God’s preserved words, in the English language.
I promise you it will lead you to a deeper understanding of God, and what His desires are for us, far and beyond any other translation.
And who wouldn’t want that?
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