Next year our country will celebrate 400 years of the King James Bible. The translators went about their task with a wonderful self-confidence that allowed them to use much of the pioneering translator William Tyndale’s wonderful text. Indeed, many of the phrases still in use in our language, explained below, are Tyndale’s.
James I saw his task as giving his newly acquired kingdom a beautiful gift that would also serve as a unifying force. It didn’t quite turn out as he wished, but many of those families who left these shores to begin life in the New World took James’s book with them.
The result was beyond what the King could ever have imagined. As James’s Bible spread around the world, Britain established a linguistic empire that has outlasted any imperial power. Indeed, the subjects of this English-language commonwealth are bound together by the strongest of bonds, a use and love of the...
Dr. Steven J. Lawson | 3/12/2018
