Restoring holy order: Is the King James Bible the only version we should celebrate?
The King James Bible speaks across boundaries of race, class and education. Its colloquialisms, allusions and proverbs have entered into common speech." That's what PD James wrote in a column entitled "Millennium Masterworks" in a Sunday newspaper in 1999. She goes on to write about the Bible's influential "lapidary cadences", expressions such as "the blind leading the blind" and "eat, drink and be merry", and to assert that: "No book has had a more profound and lasting influence on religious life, the history and the culture, the institutions and the language of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world than has the King James Bible."
It's a well-worn line of argument. I have many times written similar pieces myself. ' And Melvyn Bragg got so carried away recently that he, rather oddly, described the King James Bible (KJB) as the DNA of English. But as the 400th anniversary of the KJB –...
Dr. Steven J. Lawson | 3/12/2018
