Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Chapter and verse ...

... IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SOUND | More Intelligent Life. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When it appeared, moreover, it was already familiar, in the sense that it borrowed freely from William Tyndale’s great translation of a century before. Deliberately, and with commendable modesty, the members of King James’s translation committees said they did not seek “to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better”. What exactly they borrowed and where they improved is a detective job for scholars, not for this piece. So where it mentions “translators” Tyndale is included among them, the original and probably the best; for this book still breathes him, as much as them.

It also borrowed from the Douay-Rheims version.

1 comment:

  1. In the event more historical context is wnated there is a great book (now available on Kindle etc.) called God's secretaries, the making of the King James Bible, tht brings forth the many political, religous etc. threads that went into the making of the KJV Bible.

    ntertestingly, like scholary research seems to have shown w/r/t the New and Old tTestament, much of the Bible in whatever version (includign the Septuagint) a;; seems to have been the work of more than one person...

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