Proclaimer Blog
KJV colour (i.e. trivia)
If you're planning a talk on the King James Version or an evangelistic event like the one that Andy outlined yesterday, then it can be useful to have some trivia up your sleeve to lighten the load or illustrate things or just provide a little colour. Here are my top KJV trivia moments from David Daniell's The Bible in English.
- The 'Authorized Version' as it is sometimes known (AV) is not authorized at all. In fact, the only two English Bible versions to have this official title were the Great Bible from the time of King Henry and the Bishops Bible from the time of Queen Elizabeth. It's a title that was first used in the 19th Century (1824, according to the OED) as a way to give credibility to the KJV translation.
- The King (James I of England, James VI of Scotland) had nothing to do with the translation, as it sometimes apocryphally reported. He was a notable scholar in himself (he translated a metrical version of thirty of the psalms), but aside from 'keeping an eye' on the project, the translation was not his, just dedicated to him – hence its name.
- For some unknown reason, every Bible quote in the preface to the new KJV was taken from the Geneva Bible, not the KJV. Scholars have no idea why this is – the best guess is that the Geneva Bible was so ingrained in the public consciousness that no one noticed!
- Not all the language is archaic (though some, as Daniell explains, is deliberately so). The translators were not afraid to introduce relatively new words, such as 'contentment' and even to invent completely new words. The KJV is the first place the word 'amazement' (1 Peter 3.6) is ever used in print.
- Because of its age, some of the language can be a bit, well, earthy. Most of us would blush to read out the word that is used where modern translators would use the word urinate…I'll leave you to find the references, if you must.
- The KJV is essentially a revision of Tyndale shaped by other contemporary translations. Computer analysis has shown that 83% of the New Testament text and 76% of the Old Testament text is Tyndale's. That is remarkable given that Tyndale was a lone worker, essentially an outlaw, working over 100 years before the King James translators and with many, many fewer resources at his command.