Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Majestic Words


Handwritten First Draft of King James Bible discovered.  Previously I've written about a book called God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson about the making of the KJV, which I thought was excellent.  In this article about this new discovery, the author Ed Simon recalls something I had forgotten:

The King James companies worked at integrating the orientations of these two editions, but they also had the profound literary example of William Tyndale, who finished the first complete English translation of the New Testament (an accomplishment which led to his execution in 1536). A literary genius whose influence on the language is arguably second only to Shakespeare’s, Tyndale lent the King James translators such phrases as “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “my brother’s keeper,” “it came to pass,” “the salt of the earth,” “the signs of the times”—and perhaps most sublimely, “let there be light,” among many others. 

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