The King James Bible, 400th Anniversary

Tommy Wasserman has posted some information at Evangelical Textual Criticism about events taking place next year around the 400th anniversary of the completion of the King James Bible (1611-2011). There is no doubt that the King James Bible has profoundly shaped the English language. What should also not be forgotten is the debt that the King James translators owe to the earlier translation work of William Tyndale.

David Daniell states in the opening paragraph of his biography of William Tyndale (William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale Nota Bene): "William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorised Version of 1611, so often praised for unlikely corporate inspiration, took over Tyndale's work. Nine-tenths of the Authorised Version's New Testament is Tyndale's. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament, which is as far as he was able to get before he was executed in Brussels in 1536."

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