Indeed, it is as British politician, historian, and writer, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 - 59), said: “[This] English Bible [is] a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”
Owing to a mix of factors, King James I convened a conference at Hampton Court in 1604, where the decision was made to commission an entirely new translation, to take into account more available manuscripts and increased scholarship over the years. Since it derived its authority from the king, it would be known as the Authorised Version.
The king approved a body of 54 scholars (seven did not make it to the end), divided into six committees. The work took off fully in 1607, with a first draft out by 1609. Redrafted the following year, it was finally completed for publication on May 2, 1611.
Ever since, no translation has commanded attention as the King James Version (popularly known as the KJV) Bible. Further, no other has enjoyed patronage as much as the King James Bible.
Not many people know that the KJV is 400 years old this year; even fewer of the 1.5 billion speakers and users of English worldwide care to ever acknowledge its impact on the language. It stands to ponder that not a few English translations of other holy books, although done much after it, have a propensity to get rendered in the old-fashioned phraseology of the King James Bible.
To quote the Encyclopaedia Encarta, “The outstanding prose works of the Renaissance are not so numerous as those of later ages, but the great translation of the Bible, called the King James Bible, or Authorized Version...is significant because it was the culmination of two centuries of effort to produce the best English translation of the original texts, and also because its vocabulary, imagery, and rhythms have influenced writers of English in all lands ever since.
“The KJV of 1611 became an enduring work in an age when religion mattered to almost everyone in a way that is difficult to appreciate today. It influenced their lives, their attitudes, their actions – from the highest in the land to the lowliest man or woman.
“It had an enormous effect on peoples’ lives. Its language and terminology may seem archaic today but it was the everyday parlance of ordinary people and its language became entwined into English literature over many generations, not just in England but wherever the Bible was carried into what has become the English-speaking world today.”
There is no gainsaying the fact that the King James Bible has shaped the English language like nothing else before or after it. Its passages have been the portions (and sometimes even potions) that have kept political and religious fervour going.
From the adulatory addiction of the ‘KJV-only’ reactionary movement within Christendom, to the nonetheless appreciative avant-garde preachers and teachers of the Bible who are also open to the slew of new successor translations of the Good Book, the King James Bible evokes something close to reverence.
It has come down imbued with a larger-than-life image – a mirror that pans back-and-forth between our origins in the misty past and our moorings in the clamorous present.
Much of the phraseology that undergirds the English language has come down to us from the first day of the King James Bible. Examples abound: ‘A thorn in the flesh’; ‘Labour of love’; ‘Physician, heal thyself’; ‘The apple of my eye’; ‘Widow’s mite’; ‘A thorn in the flesh’; ‘In the twinkling of an eye’; ‘New wine in old wineskin’, and ‘Thy brother’s keeper’.
We can relate to the words of US President Ronald Reagan: “It is my understanding that the Bible...has been the bestselling book in the entire history of printing.” Yet activities to make an important milestone as the 400th anniversary of the watershed event of the issuing of the KJV remain scant and far in between, particularly in Africa.
It would not be out of place to stage many such events as one planned but not much publicised: the series of commemorative events planned by the West African Theological Seminary (WATS) and the Bible Society of Nigeria (BSN), as conferences and exhibitions, across Nigeria in June and November, and in select capitals in West Africa in September.
In an era of phenomenal mass failure in English examinations in Nigeria, at all levels really, a throwback to the roots of the language as codified in the King James Bible, as lessons drawn out of the rigour of its development, should prove worthwhile as a radical solution to the malaise.
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