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Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know whether or not the language of the king James bible was typical of early 17th century English?

I heard that the translators use archaic expressions no longer commonly used in 1604 for stylistic reasons.

Compare it with Tyndale’s translation from about eighty years earlier (normalising the spelling of both), and, where they vary, Tyndale’s is normally the easier to read and understand. Tyndale intended that the ploughboy could understand the Scripture, while the KJV was “appointed to be read in Churches”.

(Most of the time they do not differ substantially, as the KJV drew most heavily from Tyndale’s translation.)

IIRC Tyndale was burned at the stake for his efforts.

Strangled to death and then burned, apparently.

For those not familiar with the period, Tyndale was executed during the reign of Henry VIII, while England was still at least nominally a Catholic nation (Henry's relationship with Catholicism is complicated). At that time Catholicism was opposed to translations of the Bible into local languages and translation was a politically and theologically charged issue. In this case, Tyndale translated certain terms in such a way as to undermine various Catholic principles and doctrines. For example using the term Congregation, implying the Bible was referring in certain passages to the Christian community as a whole, instead of the term Church which was associated specifically with the institutions of Catholicism.

King James was a protestant ruling about 70 years later, so had no problem with an English language translation, and in fact this was an opportunity to cement the basic language of protestant Biblical interpretation in the minds of the English people.

>>> King James was a protestant ruling about 70 years later I think it was people's doubts about his protestantism that led him to commission the bible - James' mother was Mary Queen of Scots, a catholic who was executed for a supposed plot to depose his predecessor Elizabeth I.

You can understand why, the meaning of the NT goes pretty hard against established religion as it cuts priests out of the loop entirely. It also has a very strong, communist/shared wealth message.

If you're rich or powerful and don't believe it would be anathema. Letting just anyone read that ...

There's also a whole lot of "give unto Cesar what is Cesar's," and some "come on guys, don't start the Jewish-Roman wars, they're going to be a bad idea." I don't see why rich people should be bothered by that.

However, for contrast, consider also John 11:47–53; the leaders both political (chief priests) and religious (Pharisees) were considering Jesus and his teachings to threaten the relatively stable situation they had with the Romans—that was a key reason they claimed in why they sought his death.

There's no comparison in the degree, but Manning, Assange, and Snowden are perhaps recent examples of radical who argued that individuals should be able to read the raw source text used to justify the structure of society (not to mention wars in the M.E.).

Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-ri...

By way of comparison, the translation occurred entirely during Shakespeare's adulthood. Othello and Macbeth are thought to be written in the early years of the translation.

Shakespeare certainly had different linguistic goals and ideals, but they make for a nice contrast.

The KJV does consciously use phrasings which were on their way out in several places. The most notable is hefty use of the singular second-person (thou), which was in decline at the time (somewhat akin to `whom' in modern speech); this was done to distinguish where the original texts used singular or plural second-person.

Thou was still widely used in some regions of the UK in the 80s. Not sure about those areas now.

Yes, it took a number of phrases from previous English translations.

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