Re: OT: The KJV Bible (was: Help with Greek was Re: Babel Text in

At 5:23 pm -0500 13/3/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
>> I am told that the KJV does not differ greatly from the Tyndale
>> translations (New Testament 1525 -revised 1534 & 1535; Pentateuch 1530; the
>> Book of Jonah, 1531; 'Epistles of the Old Testament', 1534), which
>> essentially fixed the language of all subsequent English until the 20th
>> cent.
>
>Well, it's hard to say: the KJV is usually presented (including by me)
>in a modernized orthography, whereas Tyndale's is not.
True - indeed, it's probably impossible to find a modern edition of the KJV
in the original spelling.  While the KJV, the Douai-Rheims and those
portions of the Great Bible that are excerpted in the Anglican 'Book of
Common Prayer' have for the last couple of centuries been published in the
post-Johnsonian spelling, the other versions have not.  If we were to read
them in their original spelling, the differences would be less great.

>> But my thesis is that the KJV was not an attempt to give a translation of
>> the Greek & Hebrew scriptures in contemporary English of the early 17th
>> century, but was rather a revision of editions whose language & style had
>> already been set in the early 16th century.
>
>We violently agree, then.
And not for the first time  :)

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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