#104 Tyndale and the King James Bible

As a Christian, I’ve experienced distress and amusement at the battles that rage among other Christians over the King James Bible (see King James Only and responses ). At our next Book Club, we’ll be discussing “In the beginning; the story of the King James Bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture” by Alister E. McGrath (New York: Doubleday, 2001). As usual, I’ve left it to the final week to read, so have divided it into equal parts and am trying to discipline myself to read (I’m a slow reader). Much of the information is not new, particularly the influence on the English language because a few years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed “The story of English.”

Peggy, the leader of December’s meeting sent 3 pages of discussion points for us to consider ahead of time, and I noticed this interesting aside (I’ve added the links) :

“There is a group called the Tyndale Society which promotes the works of William Tyndale. The founder of the Society is David Daniell, who has issued Tyndale's New Testament and Old Testament translations unaltered except for modern spelling. He and members of his society think that the credit for the accurate and memorable phrasing of the KJV should really belong to Tyndale. According to their analysis, 83.7 % of the KJV New Testament comes from Tyndale; 2.4% from Coverdale, 2.2% from the Great Bible, 4.7% from the Geneva Bible, 2.2% from the Bishops' Bible, 1.9 % from the Rheims Bible, and only 2.8% is original to the King James. Of the Old Testament books that Tyndale translated (Genesis to Chronicles), 75.7% of the KJV comes from Tyndale, 6.1% from Coverdale, 9.6% from the Geneva Bible, and 8.7% is original to the KJV.

Daniell writes: "Astonishment is still voiced that the dignitaries who prepared the 1611 Authorized Version for King James spoke so often with one voice--apparently miraculously. Of course they did: the voice (never acknowledged by them) was Tyndale's." Furthermore, Daniell maintains that many of the changes that were made in Tyndale's translation by the KJV were inferior to Tyndale's in that the KJV smoothed off the freshness; made it more Latinized than English; were less true to the Greek or Hebrew sense; and made it more formal, majestic, and to remove it from the people and promote Anglican church hierarchy. We do not have the materials to debate Daniell's claims, but I bring it to your attention, and I will give some of his examples.”

I do not doubt that the KJV committee could have used Tyndale’s translation, nor that God could have used this for his own purposes to get his word out to the world through a political power that he used for that purpose. Oh, that the 3,000+ translations into English would just be read and believed. Click here for chronology.