For a while now folks have been updating the Bible one way or another. Making the language accessible should make the ideas accessible, the thinking goes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But for sheer beauty of prose, nothing matches the four hundred year old King James Bible. Assembled over the space of seven years by a committee over four dozen, somehow it managed to become a cornerstone of our literature.
Charles McGrath of the NY Times writes,
"There must have been disputes — shouting; table pounding; high-ruffed, black-gowned clergymen folding their arms and stomping out of the room — but there is no record of them. And the finished text shows none of the PowerPoint insipidness we associate with committee-speak or with later group translations like the 1961 New English Bible, which T.S. Eliot said did not even rise to 'dignified mediocrity.' Far from bland, the King James Bible is one of the great masterpieces of English prose."
Read the full article at Why the King James Bible Endures.
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